The problem I create (as per)
I’ve been cutting my own hair since the pandemic, back when do-it-yourself-ing was a fresh and almost life giving novelty. We were fermenting our own kombuchas! Cobbling our own boots! When the lockdowns at long last lifted, self-snipping proved a cost and time effective way of avoiding excruciating small talk with hairdressers—one of my genuine biggest fears.
I’d say I do a passable job. Other strong voices in my life who know who they are have told me I leave ‘little to be desired’ around the ears. On the very few occasions in the last three years when someone has said to my face that my haircut is bad—perhaps expelled as a, ‘Jesus, what happened to your hair?’—I simply rub chipotle in my eyes and say, ‘The hairdresser butchered me, I’m a monster!’ No person can hear this without softening and apologising and saying some variation on the phrase ‘Oh. No. It’s not that bad.’
What a sucker. Not only have I dodged their bullet, I’ve also stolen their sympathies. Next, I steal their wallet.
Cut to my birthday, just passed. Time for a chop. Usually, I listen to music or a podcast or my own terrifying thoughts, but for a birthday treat I watch some cricket highlights on my phone. Mistake number one. Mistake number two turns out to be the ageing process, since for the first time in my whole life, literally on the actual day of my 26th birthday, I am experiencing acid reflux—symptoms of which apparently include mortal dread, self-involved nihilism, and, oh yeah, thick scalding acid erupting from my guts.
A combination of mistake numbers one and two precipitate mistake number three, a.k.a. The Big One. I’m so distracted that I put the humming electric razor to my temple without first attaching the 9mm clipper guard. It zhuzhes up my head with almost no resistance. Curious. My eyes are fixed on the cricket and only peripherally aware of how much hair I just sliced off, but something doesn’t feel right. Not to brag, but I have a powerful, intuitive kind of “spidey sense” that kicks in just after I’ve done something dumb. The spidey sense is tingling now. By this I mean that the area near my temple is literally tingling, it’s almost in fact cold, because this is the first time since I was an actual baby that there has been zero hair here. Ruh-roh.
Adding salt to my scalping is the realisation that it’s almost impossible to see the side of my head without the use of handheld mirrors. Based on the information above, does this strike you as the kind of operation that involves handheld mirrors? Since I am not a bird, to get vision of the side of my head I sort of have to sneak up on it with my peripheral vision—to look without looking. From what I can just barely glean in the corner of my eyes, the damage is restricted to the exact width of the razor blade, maybe 3 cm across, running from the ear to the cusp of my side part. I hadn’t started right at the edge so there’s a fraught little tuft of hair—vaguely reminiscent of a demilitarised zone—between my temple and the raw flesh I’ve just carved into my skull. I laugh. It’s a weird and freaky and pretty unconvincing laugh, and it’s followed by a wave of panic that makes me raze the tuft as well.
This is what I look like at the end of it.
Solutions I consider
The simplest path is the buzz. It is also the most annihilating and scary since my head is a weird shape, big in the wrong places. Like a motorcycle helmet. A day will come when the buzz is an unassailable hereditary reality, but until then we need to keep as much hair on as much of my head for as long as we can.
Okay so what about a homemade “fade”—with patience and creative flair, with a steady hand and all of the various clipper attachments, I might be able to blend my sins away. Like how a sunset’s reds and oranges melt beautifully into the dusk. I just don’t think I have the machinery. Let alone the guts. At least right now I’ve “quarantined” my skinheadedeness to the temple, and I don’t want to risk making it worse just to maybe make it better.
Okay so what about a bit of movie magic. I could get a texta, some make up, and use some trademark pizazz to create a believable surgical head wound. If anyone asks what happened, I could just hoarsely whisper ‘Biopsy’ in a grim and foreboding way that deters further questions. Not bad?
I have enough wisdom—I am, after all, recently fully 26—to calmly finish the rest of the haircut without doing anything rash. As I chop, I think of all of the many fibs I might be able to tell to explain away the monstrosity.
Lies I come up with
‘There was a fire at the hairdresser,’ has real X-Factor but admittedly a few holes. Such as, what, every hairdresser in Sydney caught fire as well?
‘It’s a hot new hairstyle called the Ghastly Chunk, I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it?’ This one has legs. Especially if I can find some time to photoshop a chunk out of Beckham, Pattinson, Elba, et al.
‘My dermatologist thought he could see a cancerous mole under there but it turned out to just be a pimple,’ is vaguely plausible if delivered with the right mix of livid and sheepish. A hard balance to strike. Plus it’s probably going to lead to follow up questions. We don’t want them.
‘I’m trialling a new eucalyptus-based shampoo and was attacked by a manic, rabid possum,’ is the weakest of the bunch.
‘My housemate is training to be a hairdresser and it’s their lifelong dream so I kept the fuck up and even said I thought it looked “cool” and “rather becoming in certain lights” to protect their feelings,’ is an absolute surefire slam dunk, I think.
Cosmic truths I discover
My lack of decision about what to do ultimately becomes a decision. Some of my best decisions happen in this way. I keep the ghastly chunk.
I learned that either people don’t look at or care about you as much as you think they do, or, they’ll lie to your face to protect your feelings. This is a very liberating realisation. A real win-win. I think it’ll serve me well in 2024.
Merry Christmas
Literally the first cogent thought I had after the shaving mishap was, ‘This is going to make good content for my blog.’ I see this as both alarming and, in a way, a kind of superpower.
When strange, annoying, and/or humiliating things happen to me, especially by my own hand, I find myself sickeningly buoyed by the fact that another week of blog posts have just written themselves. I’ve enjoyed this year of All My Eggs—and I hope that you have enjoyed some of the stories also. In case you missed any emails, these were my favourites from the year.
This Was Meant to Stay There (III) - a trip to Las Vegas.
“This is the Strip. It is immediately hypnotic. It glitters in the sun but it properly glitters at night, because everything has two and a half more neon lightbulbs than it would need in any other city. Las Vegas is a weird concept. It is, essentially, one dead-straight 6.8 kilometres of road in the middle of an arid dust bowl. Caesar’s Palace is so far beyond palatial, with its six colossal greco-roman marble towers, that it’s an empire unto itself—its 1966 inauguration ceremony reportedly achieved ‘the largest order of caviar ever placed by a private organisation.’
Aargh - a short and sweet poem from the high seas.
Sea salt sprays off of waves so high / My leg is a peg and I can’t find my eye.
Blistered and blustered, a slave to the weather / Hard to make friends when you bury your treasure.
Battle Scars - a story about all my cuts and bruises
“I try to do the professional chef, finger safety, knuckle curling thing for the thicker fresh produce—your carrots, your broccolinis—but spring onion is a different beast. It is the root vegetable equivalent of one of those inflatable tube guys at a car dealership. Any given bunch will be a goofy mix of long firm strands, floppy stragglers, gnarled stems, and basically I don’t know how to pin the sucker down in a cuttable formation without exposing the tips of my fingers to a sharp, silver blade.”
And if you’re still reading, thank you so much for spending any amount of your valuable time on my stories. In this hypomanic digital madhouse we call a society, in this golden age of Tik Tok and television and smart fridges, I think the greatest gift we can give each other is our attention. Thank you for yours. I really, really appreciate it.
I’ll be trying to post something small on the last day of every month in 2024. I hope to see you then.
Have a wonderful holiday season.
You have proved that the old expression " the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut is one week" is true.
Great work Gus!
Loved it!!!