Friday, May 30, 2008

I Need a Haircut

Honestly, I like my hair long. I think it suits my features better than when it's kept short. Plus, despite Kim's protests, there are certain behavioral signs that she also prefers it longer. My only problem is that once I have it to the point where it is now, a glorified shag really, the ends are as dead as the careers of Milli Vanilli about ten minutes after the discovery of their lip syncing. Even their singing for reporters at a press conference couldn't save them. Perhaps it had something to do with the quality of their prior work, but I have to admit that I enjoyed their fake musical stylings, but then I was only ten when the CD started skipping at their infamous MTV Music Awards outing with the ironic repetition of "Girl you know it's true." It's ironic because they were obviously faking it. Actually, the skipping section never said true, so I guess it's more a case of mechanical conscience than irony.

As an important aside, I refuse to defend my taste in music at ten. I was a kid and hadn't grown into the richly sophisticated aural tastes I have now. I'll admit that I'd sit in a room with Hank playing Super Mario Kart underneath a poster of New Kids on the Block while I made Mario jump his kart to the beat of Kris Kross's "Jump". I'm comfortable with my youthful bad tastes in music.

But that tangent does nothing to really explain why I need a haircut, except to serve as a really elaborate simile for my dead ends. They haven't started splitting yet, but I do keep finding individual hairs with tiny knots tied about a centimeter from the end of the hair. Healthy hair won't stay in a knot, so this is obviously not healthy hair. It also baffled me how the hair gets tied into little knots like this. I worry sometimes that it's the work of little pixie-like people living in the clutter under my bed. Who am I to say that by cutting my hair and removing these tiny knots that I'm not destroying the written historical record of a newly literate, as yet undiscovered humanoid species of tiny people living under my bed? By cutting my hair could I end up much like Bishop Diego de Landa Calderón, despised for his destruction of almost every Mayan manuscript in existence during his happy-happy-funtime conversion of the Maya Indians to Catholicism? I wouldn't even have Landa's saving grace of leaving behind a flawed work of my own to help future archaeologists and linguists decipher the remnants of writing I left untouched. This could be a cultural disaster.

After all, is it the pixie people's fault that they used a very temporary resource as if it were permanent? Perhaps their lives move at a much more rapid rate than ours and they pass through a lifetime in months instead of years. The current generation in power would have grown up in a time when I never cut my hair and there was the only occasional loss to the natural disaster of breakage. Some pixie-people scientists may have warned of the nearly imperceptible thinning near the hairline of my forehead, but the average pixie-person would have thought nothing of this because of science's past misinterpretations of data, such as the healthfulness of flea eggs, and gone own supporting their elites in using my hair to record their history and works of fiction. After all, there's no reason for them to see my hair as anything other than a permanent resource that will always be there, much like the Easter Islanders saw the trees on their island not long before their cultural success caused them to overrun their resources and end up stranded on an island that could no longer support their population, or much in the same way that we currently see oil as a permanent resource even as we're told by reliable sources that we'll very likely see its end as a general power source in our lifetime. Honestly, I'm glad that gas prices are sky rocketing. I'm hoping it'll create more public desire for alternative fuel vehicles so that the auto industry doesn't keep dragging it's feet until it's too late not to cause a major economic hiccup in the future as they have to rush to make up for lost time. But that has nothing to do with my pixie people.

I know I'll cut my hair, but I have no way to contact these tiny Homos. I'm assuming they're in the Homo genus just like us and habilis, but that could be just my homocentrism coming through. Maybe this is some sort of advanced insect culture. Perhaps a species of dust mite that gained consciousness and higher intellect through centuries of natural selection for particularly intelligent and thoughtful dust mites.

And when I cut my hair next week, I'll set them back a thousand years.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I say strike first, strike hard. Not only do you need a hair cut, you need to shave every inch of your body.

At the rate these creatures are evolving, it won't be long before they realize exactly how much superior their technology is to our own. Furthermore, considering their inherent dependence on our melons, they'll have no choice but to enslave our race in order to continue the propagation of their species.

Clearly, our only choice is a first strike... genocide. You need to annihilate their entire culture before you doom us all!

In other words, get a hair cut, hippie.

Courtney said...

I'm going to go out on a limb and declare this your strangest post yet. And that's saying something.

Jacob said...

Justins: I understand your logic, but I have low self-esteem and tend to think my own welfare as being less important than the existence of unique cultures.

Courtney: I prefer to think of this one as inspired. I woke up thinking about it and rushed downstairs to pound out the idea into form. I take offense unless you're one of those people who admire strange instead of disdain it.

Chris said...

I can't get enough of the tales of tiny pixie people.

Your only humane option, as I see it, is to study the knot patterns and quickly learn their language. Then carefully communicate with them (by tying knots of your own, of course) to warn them of the impending haircut. It will be up to them to devise a new method of recording their writings, hopefully not involving any part of your body this time.

It seems I am the dove to justins, the hawk.

Mickey said...

I admire strange.

Courtney said...

If you don't already know that I admire strange, you don't know me at all.