found this in my bag tonight and felt a little feeling
For many years I cut my own hair. I was cheap and didn’t want to pay someone else to do it, and thus my hair, cut by me, was atrociously bad . . . but you almost couldn’t tell because I have so much hair. Still, even if no one else could tell, I was certainly paralyzingly aware of how godawful it was. Thing is, I was not bad at cutting it, I just always got impatient and lazy halfway through and fucked up the layering. With a little clay or pomade, you couldn’t detect this.
However: one spring, a long time ago now, I realized I really liked a g-g-girl who lived up in Portland. I decided enough was enough, and that if I was going to go visit her there, I needed a proper haircut so she wouldn’t mistake me for a vagrant and run away screaming.
I found a woman in Berkeley named Lisa Eve . . . she was a vegan bodybuilder who drove a BMW and owned her own salon. I remember the first time I went in, I asked her if she could give me a “vampire Elvis” haircut, and she did it perfectly based on those two words. And meanwhile, her dog Sunny (rest in peace, angel) was seated on my lap while Lisa Eve told me about taking acid at some music festival and falling in love with a guy who, all due respect to him (she showed me a picture), was not at all in her league.
Lisa Eve cut my hair for years and years, always with Sunny on my lap, and always telling me about some deadbeat she was into (and her asking my advice on what to do about him) . . . I loved it. Even when she closed her salon, I’d still go to her house to get my haircut. She’s that good!
Now she tells me she got engaged and lives in Las Vegas, and that if I’m ever in town, she’ll cut my hair and, as an added bonus, I can crash with her. I will definitely do this at some point. Unfortunately, I only have six days left before I fly back to Berlin, so I’m stuck with this Spirit Halloween wig on my head until I can find someone who in Europe won’t even be half as good as Lisa to liberate me from it. Ugh!
I desperately need this again in order to look human:
. . . that’s from July 2022, just after I’d gotten out of a Bad Relationship and was preparing to leave the United States for Germany. That’s also from a few days before I joined Bex and her band on the West Coast leg of their tour from the Bay Area down to LA . . . ahh. Man, that was such a good time. Also, my hair looked great:
Aw :,)
Anyway . . . it’s four in the morning and fifteen degrees below freezing outside, so I guess I’m going to crawl inside my sleeping bag with my dumb hair and fall asleep dreaming about a good haircut and, to be quite honest, a person I miss a lot . . .
☆彡
. . . am I bragging about how many incredible friends I have who have spoken to me on the phone in the last week so I wouldn’t feel alone here in Virginia? Yes!! I’m so lucky. If the only true currency is friendship (it is), then I am the richest man I know……,…
(Family names removed to protect the innocent~ lol)
emma and i have been doing this for years lol
Putting on my Grandpa Hat, I address the kind readers of my website:
I remember driving to Lonesome Road with my first girlfriend nearly 20 years ago now . . . we parked nearby and lay in the back of my Cherokee listening to music while it rained outside. Dude, it was so cool . . .
Ever since then, I always end up alone on Lonesome Road again by accident and feel the FULL OF WEIGHT OF TIME crush down upon me. Naturally, embarrassingly, I’ll also be listening to music I would have been listening to back then. As everyone knows, when you return to your hometown, especially under a dark and humid constellation as I have, you essentially devolve into a primitive life form that has the emotional maturity of a termite. Oops!!
on emma’s fridge
I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but I’m a bit of a badass. Yes, I have a heart of gold and am a perfect precious angel whom everyone loves, but I also have no respect for authority and live by my own set of rules few could understand. The cops have never been able to catch me because I’m just too fast for them.
And so it was that yesterday I went to a beloved grocery store chain and saw these two gingerbread men who, having no alternative, were staring up and smiling happily upon me. I observed that one of them even had little stars for buttons. I felt a primal compulsion to take them both and so I did, plucking them from their tray with a little square of parchment paper. I then walked around the store with no intention of buying anything, all the while eating these two gingerbread men in full view of the public and the good Lord above. So brazen was my crime that I became immune to the fear of any mortal punishment.
Once satiated, I crumpled up the paper and tossed it in a trashcan. I cruised out of the store with the confidence of a man a hundred feet tall before suddenly realizing, with some dismay, that I now had the rest of my life to worry about again . . .
