My reflection stared back at me faintly this morning in the large plate glass at the front of the Vonn’s supermarket. My family-oriented lifestyle, shall we say, keeps me on the road constantly these days, and this time I found myself with my long bangs flying all over the place. I wasted little time in procuring a new Ace comb and some hairspray to whip my hair into submission.
As I made sure that no hair was out of place, I was mentally transported to a memory that surprised me: when I was a boy of about ten, one of my prized possessions was a bottle of hairspray. I can remember the simple black and white bottle. Growing up in Louisiana, I wasn’t exactly living the life of luxury, and I rarely asked my parents for anything out of the ordinary. At the barber one day, however, I asked for that bottle.
As a kid, I found the idea of perfectly-behaved hair very alluring. Even in high school, when the wind was blowing hard, my friends would laughingly remark that “every hair was in place”. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I found Devo so cool.
A more troubling thought crossed my mind, and it was coupled with a memory I had from a Stanford reunion I attended with my wife many years ago. One of my closest friends in the world said something to my wife which is probably one of the truest things I’ve ever heard about me: “What Tim likes more than anything else is to be right.” He didn’t say this in a mean way. It was an observation. Yet this fact needles me.
I suspect my desire to be right is aligned perfectly in my deeply troubled personality with the desire for my hair to be perfect. Control. Predictability. Reliability. Certitude. And yet with all these things I crave, I had chosen an avocation inextricably mired in uncertainty, surprises, disappointments, shocks, and the unexpected.
This surely explains my intransigence with respect to the market. I want so badly to apply a giant bottle of spray to it and make it behave. I want every hair in place. I want it to be disciplined and align with my desires. Don’t even bother to tell me it doesn’t work that way. I know that. But I suspect I’ll make it to my death bed with this craving deeply in place.
Maybe this all explains why I’m going out of my mind. Even so, I am losing my sanity with a really, really nice head of hair. At least there’s something I can still control.
