Ch-ch-ch-changes, part 2: cower in place 42

My friend Elizabeth revealed to me some arcane wisdom that has been passed down from father to child in her family for generations: that the hair on an adult human body may change color, length, or distribution pattern, but the total amount remains constant throughout life. So far, at least, I can personally vouch for the accuracy of that observation.

For months now I have passed the long hours engaged in that pastime so popular among those of a particular age and culture in this country: making fun of people on TV who don’t take the coronavirus pandemic and protective measures seriously enough, or who are serious but just get it all wrong.

You know the people I’m talking about—those who cover their mouth but not their nose with their face mask, or vice versa; those who wear a mask into the grocery store but take it off to sneeze; and those who not only don’t wear a mask at all, but give you dirty looks if you do, as if you wearing a mask was somehow infringing on their right to catch covid.

It’s a wonderful game, the kind that othering was invented for: it’s lots of laughs, but only as long as the people you are making fun of are others, people in some category to which you yourself do not belong. The fun and games ended for me recently, when I realized that I was in that category.

I learned in Hazardous Waste training decades ago that a face respirator didn’t protect you from those toxic fumes if you tried to wear it over a beard. Though I haven’t trucked in HW for many years, I still always knew this truism, somewhere in the back of my mind. It has niggled at me all summer, but only broke through the surface tension to my waking mind a week or so ago. “Gee, I wonder if my beard is interfering with my face mask’s ability to filter the air I’m breathing?”

A quick test by holding my mask’s edges tight with my hands revealed the awful truth: because of my vanity and laziness (I hate shaving), I had basically been wearing a placebo on my face all year! Time to shave that sucker so my mask can do its job!

Despite the fact that if I didn’t shave I was going to die, I was hesitant. “What if I look silly?” My beard was pretty short, so maybe it would be all right. To see how I’d look, I decided to Photoshop a selfie and take the beard out, or at least the parts around my jaws where the face mask was gallantly trying and failing to seal the aerosol germs out.

Well, that’s not so bad! A casual observer might not notice any change at all (luckily my beard turned white years ago, and blends in with the natural Scandinavian pallor of my cheeks). I’m going do it!

There is another truism, knowledge passed down through the generations in my family, and known I suspect by all men with beards who have reached their third age: there is a point in one’s life when shaving a man’s beard no longer makes him look younger. Instead, it makes him look older. And not in the good way.

There’s no way to know in advance when this gaunt milestone will be reached, even with the technological miracle of Photoshop. But anyone with a beard to shave off will immediately know if he has passed that milestone since the last time he was cleanshaven.

I have.

Well, nothing to do for it but to mail-order some bigger masks designed to cover more of the face (I should have thought of that first!), and start letting the beard grow back in the newly-safe areas. Fortunately, I’m quarantined so the number of people I will shock with my newly haggard visage until the beard comes back will be small. And it doesn’t include you, gentle reader—every horror story writer knows the most terrifying parts of a story are those left to the imagination.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of my head…

…the hair on the rest of my head has continued to repartition itself, always observing the law of conservation of hair mass (see above). The number of strands continued to decrease, while the fact that I hadn’t gotten them cut since the pandemic started meant that the average length of each strand was considerably longer now than at the outset of our national trial.

I wonder if it’s long enough yet for… a ponytail‽ Not one of those sissy Eurosexual man-buns, but a real he-man coonskin-cap ponytail!

I remember back in, oh, maybe the 80s, I was fascinated by a number of movies that came out where the protagonist sported a ponytail. If I remember right, in each movie, the guy was somehow more than human, or at least other-than-human. The movies symbolized this by each guys’ man-tress, and when the time came for him to discover or reveal his humanity, the ponytail came down. Let’s see, what were those movies?

One of them, I think, was a Steven Seagal action flick where he played a cook on a train or a boat that was hijacked by villians. He turned out, of course, to be secretly a ninja or a Navy SEAL or something like that, and handily kicked bad guy butt while never messing up his do.

Another movie of the time that I liked a lot better (and remember better) was The Fisher King, starring Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams. It was a sometimes funny but mostly poignant movie about trauma and loss. Jeff Bridges was this shock jock who presented a macho coolness (and a ponytail) to hide his pain and guilt over an awful crime. Robin Williams played a mentally ill man who finally gets Jeff to let his hair down.

But my favorite man-ponytail movie of the era, the one that got me thinking at the time that maybe I should sport one, was the hilarious if amoral Witches of Eastwick, starring the one and only Jack “Heeere’s Johnny!” Nicholson playing, as he puts it at one point, “just your average horny devil”. There’s a priceless vignette in it, only a second or two long, where he’s preening in front of a mirror while holding a hand mirror in each hand, trying to triangulate a line-of-sight to admire his own little pipsqueak ponytail. The movie’s not for the faint of heart at a few points, but I found it a real hoot. And an inspiration!

So anyway, I tried, and yes, my hair is long enough for a ponytail now, but just barely. Here’s me in a tableau vivant of my favorite scene from the Witches of Eastwick:

Watch out, Willie Nelson!

Thanks,
Dorn
12/13/2020