An old friend recently messaged me some pics from 1980-something and I was astounded to see myself wearing a mullet. A mullet! What was I thinking? Okay, on some level I recall rocking that most unfortunate of hairdo's but I'd  put it well out of my memory until receiving the dispatch from my friend. When I was out west last summer, the son of a niece was sporting a mullet--apparently they are back in style?--and I wondered why? Just why? I was never, ever mistaken for a fashion victim, and neither, apparently, is my great-nephew, but if I could go back and advise my younger self on one thing, I would say a mullet is not the way to go. Of course, my niece's son is either 10 or 11 so he at least has a good excuse. I, on the other hand, was considerably older when I adopted that look so can come up with no plausible explanation for this breach of etiquette (and good taste) except to say that, inexplicably, I got a lot of mileage out of that mullet--if you get my drift, and I'm sure that you do (I was single at the time)--so maybe that accounts for a lot of it. Besides, now that I think about it, the mullet was nowhere near the worst haircut I've ever had. Nowhere. Near. Mull that over for a mullet. Sorry, moment. 

Speaking of haircuts, I got one today. "Long overdue," Ingrid the Barber muttered as she draped me in a flowing cape and nudged me gently back into her styling chair. Ingrid is just the latest in a very long line of stylists, tonsorial artists and coiffeuses--that's barbers to you and me--to attempt to make something smart out of this unruly mess. Although there's no shortage of hair stylists in Broward County, I can count my successful pairings with them on one hand. And that's over a 20+ year period. Whenever I've happened across that rare performer of scissorly magic, they inevitably wind up moving to a new salon, usually located in another city in a completely different state. That's not always the case, though. One of my favorite stylists simply stopped showing up for work one day and the owner of the shop never did find out what happened to her. Later, somewhere in the same neighborhood, the tres butch barber du jour kept me stylin' and coming back for more until he apparently mistook my zeal for his hair cutting skills for....something else. On one particular day, finding the two of us alone in the shop, he scooted up next to my ear, so close that I could feel his five o'clock shadow creeping across my cheek. And he began to speak--lustily--of devices and desires! Devices! And desires! I was single then so I may have listened to this litany a tad longer than I should have. But the moment he offered to shove an electrified wand up my shvantz after work, my senses returned and our paths diverged, never the twain to meet again. I wish I were making this up because he was a really decent barber but, laws-a-mercy, child! That electrified wand thingy gave me pause. Big pause, the most pregnant of pauses. I didn't think I could let him near my hair again without wondering what he'd do with a curling iron. 

  

In more recent times, I discovered a couple of different guys who did a mean head of hair but soon realized that I could put my great-niece through her first year of college for the amount of money they charged for a haircut, an unfortunate fact that rendered these relationships unsustainable. So, after flipping a coin, I visited Ingrid today and am extremely pleased with the end result. Well, after all, it was $17.00 plus tip so I figured I couldn't go wrong, and even if I did emerge from the chair looking like Kim Jong-un, I could do some sort of combover coverage to disguise the situation until my hair grew back. Luckily, she just cut it all off. Exactly as I instructed. There's a smidge of hair left up front that I can manage with a little butch wax and that's perfect for me, ensconced as I am in the protracted, simmering broth of soggy hell that is Florida's summer. 

Thinking it over, I must confess that I'm thankful to have hair at all, problematic as it often is. It would be so nice if even more were growing on my head and less sprouting from my ears and nose. But membership in one's golden years demands a price, my friend, and that includes hair germinating in the unlikeliest of places even as it jumps ship from others. And so it was, and so shall it ever be.