Probably one of my weirdest habits is spending a lot of time thinking in analogy. When someone tells me something, I can’t help but say, “Oh, sort of like X.”
Sometimes it works better than other times. It’s like using Google Translate. What comes out isn’t always spot on. Sometimes it’s total gibberish. But at the same time, just as with a lot of things people tell me, I can’t begin to understand without at least running things through the translation machine that is metaphor, analogy, or simile. It’s weird. It can be helpful, but it also makes me feel really out of touch. Because truthfully, I don’t understand a lot of the things that make people happy, or at least the things that they’re doing.
This time of year always gets me reflective because people spend a lot of time working on their yards. All the years I spent growing up, my mom spent a lot of time working on her yard. She was composting way before it was cool, and she was digging trenches to make a railroad tie garden border before I could even begin to understand what would possess someone to do such a thing.
I never got the impression that she hated it. I mean, she didn’t like raking the massive amounts of leaves that came every fall. And she left mowing the lawn to us kids. But the gardening, the planting and weeding, that always seemed like a choice to me, and it’s something she still does. I really think she likes doing it. It’s a project, but it’s one that makes her feel good in some way.
Lately there’s been this Hispanic man going to my gym who has the worst haircut I’ve ever seen, beating the previous title holder, also a Hispanic man that goes to my gym. I’m not just saying this to start a new racist stereotype, that middle-aged Hispanic men have the worst haircuts. It’s just…I can’t help it. These are really bad.
The previous winner was a man with a mullet. Which is a classic of bad hair, but this is a mullet unlike any I’ve seen because while the hair is short in the front, the long part goes down past his waist. Business in the front, party in the back, but not a normal party. This is the blowout of the century. The cleanup will be done by a hazmat team and they’ll be using pushbrooms. Hooker bodies will keep the city’s hottest detectives busy for months. This is party on a level that is not even fun anymore so much as it’s time to prove a point.
I thought this man would forever hold the title. Alas, he has been stripped.
This new guy started coming about a week ago. He’s very normal and average looking in every other way. His wife is with him, and she’s also very normal.
But his hair. His fucking hair.
I wish I was better at describing this. The best I can say is that it looks sort of like a wig. Like a hair helmet set atop a man’s head. But poofier. Blow dryed and parted in the middles. Once, in grade school, I bought a Dracula wig that consisted of coarse, plastic-y hair that was repulsive to the touch and would probably scratch glass.
This guy’s hair looks like that Dracula wig raped Farrah fawcett’s hair and they concocted this bizarre, hideous nod to a sewer-dwellers version of 70’s hair.
What’s crazy here isn’t the shittiness of the hair, though. I’m not just here to make fun of the dude’s hair. The thing that really gets me is that he’s put in a large amount of effort to make his hair look like this. I’m 90% sure he’s getting some kind of treatment done. 100% sure he’s blow drying and using product. Every time he comes in, there’s not a hair out of place. Except that all of them are completely in the wrong place to begin with.
What I’m getting at is that he’s doing a ton of work to look like shit. Just like the mullet guy was brushing his glorious mane to look like a crazy person, this guy is busting ass to look like he robbed a Sears mannequin of its wig. It’s one of the funny parts of life because he’s working so hard just to make things awful.
A lot of things lately, to me, are like Hispanic Male Haircuts From My Gym. I see what you’re doing, I recognize the efforts, and part of me admires that you’re sticking to your guns. But so many parts of life are very consumptive of effort and really don’t amount to anything of value. I mean, the legacy these men will leave behind is what? A hard line stance on the timelessness of hairstyles that were not timeless?
So I get my mom working in the garden. I don’t think she has illusions about it being something that lives on as her legacy. I think it makes her feel good today.
And I get the big stuff, the things people are doing because it means something, that someone will really benefit in a direct, big way.
Where I struggle is with the awful haircuts thing. What a waste of a person’s life.
Although…I guess I got to write a whole stupid thing about it. So that’s a start. I’m sure it’s not the intended effect. But fuck it. If I accidentally made a cancer cure while trying to heat a Tombstone pizza, you bet your ass I’d take credit for it.