Haircuts used to be my single biggest guilty pleasure. I never would have admitted it because I would have then been called upon to explain why. The truth is I used to be a handsome man. This is pure vanity but I do have something approximating empirical proof. A few years ago I was trying to convince my roommates (more than a decade younger than me) that when I was their age I had very long hair. They refused to accept my word for it and demanded photographic evidence. I tried to explain to them they were referring to an era they did not understand - when photographs were made exclusively by exposing a material coated in a "film" of silver nitrate (or something) to light for a very short period of time and the only way to see the resulting image was by having it "printed" by shining a light through the exposed and chemically treated film onto another chemically coated medium. They refused to be put off. When I found an image of myself with long hair I produced it triumphantly, "How dare you doubt my word!" but before she could help herself one of my roommates exclaimed, "Oh Sean, what happened to you?!? You use to be so pretty!" The answer, I suppose, was twenty years happened.
In the interests of full disclosure, I was only pretty from the neck up and then only from certain (very specific) angles and under (very specific) lighting conditions. I have a head like a concrete block. A friend once drew a caricature of me by sketching a concrete block like shape (standing on the thin end), rounding the corners very slightly, and adding a nose. It was surprisingly convincing. I'm not pretty at all now. If I grew my beard (and had someone to sculpt it on a daily basis) I would look a lot like Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. Still, people would only notice the resemblance if I dressed like I belonged on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.
Getting a haircut used to be fun. I would wait until I was so scruffy my friends started looking at me funny and then go sit in the chair, have that piece of paper wrapped around my neck, the sheet spread over me and stare into the mirror while the slovenly, unkempt me disappeared and was replaced by a fresh new me.
Now trips to the barber are a sophisticated way of measuring just how middle-aged I am. I don't remember the first time a barber had to trim my eyebrows. The men in my family have pronounced eyebrows so I didn't think much of it. I do remember the first time a barber had to trim my ears. If started off as a quick buzz with the trimmers. These days it involves, scissors, trimmers, and a straight-razor. Not less than four minutes per ear. I timed it. He also used the straight-razor on my forehead and the bridge of my nose - both of those were firsts.
I don't mind the big events that tell me I am, like everyone else, aging. I read somewhere a man is an adult the first time he goes a week without masturbating and doesn't notice. That was a long time ago. My brother once posited you are not an adult as long as you consider "getting drunk" a thing to do, in and of itself, without provocation or social justification. Well, I don't drink anymore so that one doesn't apply. Women (for whom the social and psychological consequences of aging are so much more severe than men) have that dreaded moment someone calls them "Ma'am" for the first time. Men go from "kid" to "Mister" and it doesn't really mean much.
Maybe the big events have just been kinder to me than to others. I don't know. It is the little, cumulative events that force me into contemplations of my own mortality. Like a barber trying to trim my nose hair with a straight-razor. Still, why it should bother me is something of a mystery.
I already know I'm middle aged. I have gotten used to my friends from high school posting pictures of their kids on Facebook. I'm getting used to people I went to architecture school posting pictures of their weddings. It doesn't bother me - except in that it takes up valuable space that could otherwise be used for interesting links to the collected detritus of the internet. I suppose it's a form of grieving - for something I can no longer enjoy. And the vision of the future it suggests, when I've made the transition from "not pretty" to "old and hairy" is difficult to avoid and impossible to enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment