Our hairy new reality

We’re living in strange times.

During the past few weeks, I’ve found myself doing things I never thought I would need to do. I’ve embarked on a couple (unsuccessful) toilet paper safaris. I’ve eaten a dusty can of lobster bisque that’s been hiding in a corner of my cupboard since Reagan was president. I’ve explained to my pre-school aged grandchildren that no, they can’t come for a visit, but I’ll be sure to attend their college graduations assuming it’s safe by then.

I’ve had lovely chats with most of my creditors, few of whom seem to believe a man who eats lobster bisque needs more lenient payment arrangements.

My little bar band, which has provided a sizeable chunk of my annual income for the past 45 years, now has no place to perform and no audience to perform for should a venue suddenly materialize.

Despite all this, I’m still better off than a lot of folks. Overnight it seems, we’re all living on Walton’s Mountain with John-Boy, Mary Ellen and everybody else who used to say “g’night” at the end of every episode. It’s only a matter of time before we’re eating possum stew and buying eggs from the mercantile one egg at a time. On credit.

I dunno. Maybe it won’t come to that. But along with all the other unusual coronavirus activities I’ve been taking part in lately, yesterday I cut my own hair. That can’t be a good sign.

I didn’t want to cut my own hair. I never have before; never even considered it.

When I was a kid, my mom (a former beautician) cut it for me. Even after I’d grown, gotten married and had kids of my own, I’d sometimes be able to talk her into breaking out the scissors on a Sunday afternoon to give me a free trim.

But she’s been gone a while now and even were she still here, I wouldn’t want to risk exposing her to any potential cooties just to ensure my coiffure looked pretty.

So there I was, scissors in my right hand, clippers in my left, staring at my big, dumb face in the mirror and wondering whether I dared go through with it.

On the one hand, I’m married, so it doesn’t matter whether I look good. On that same hand, nobody’s likely to see me in person for a while other than the checkout person at the grocery and even that’s not a sure bet, long-term. Also, I’m old and really, when did it become a thing that a guy my age had to look anything other than surly?

Grandpa Walton wasn’t cute. Neither was Woody Guthrie, Herbert Hoover, Huey Long or most other old dudes from the Depression era. John Steinbeck and Hemmingway were ruggedly handsome, but if you look carefully at those old photos it’s obvious neither of them had a clue as to where to find a talented barber.

So why should I have to look good? Answer: I don’t.

So I started in on my hair, trying to emulate the moves I’ve seen stylists perform in the mirror for decades. They make it look so easy, right? Lift a little hair, snip, snip, comb, clip, snip, lift a little more, snip a little more. Ask if you have any “big plans” for the weekend. Pretend to listen to your answer. Snip some more.

Next thing you know, you’re leaving the styling salon twenty bucks lighter with your ears lowered and the tan line on the back of your neck on full display.

It’s such an integral part of American life that you don’t even think about it. Until it’s gone and you’re standing there with scissors in your hand while muttering a prayer to Furfullson, the Norse god of ponytails and braided beards.

The humorous ending to this column would be to report I now look like an extra in a “Mad Max” movie. But I don’t. It turns out some of my mother’s skill with the scissors made its way into my DNA after all.

My first attempt at self-trimming was a rousing success. I look the same as always. Not great, but at least as good as John-Boy.

G’night, Mary Ellen.

Greatness is at last within my grasp

This could be it! I think the art world finally is ready for me. After long years searching for a medium which might adequately express the artistic wonderfulness bottled up within my angst-ridden soul, I believe I have at last found it.

See, years ago, I really believed I was going to be an artist. I tried watercolors, oils, acrylics. At my best, I was lousy, but I tried. Then I took a stab at sculpting. No one ever mistook my work for, say, Michelangelo’s. Even wood carving left me with nothing but slices put in and chunks taken out of my hands.

Despite my best efforts, all my paintings looked like they started life as a series of numbers on a dollar store canvas.

Honestly, I no longer remember what so attracted me to the art world. I probably thought it would help me find a girl. This is likely, since, for many years the hope of finding a girl was the only reason I got out of bed each morning. 

Whatever the reason, I worked hard at developing any nascent talent I might possess. Over time I managed to work my way up from lousy to mediocre. Considering where I’d started, mediocre seemed acceptable.

Eventually, I even managed to land a real “art” job creating book covers and album jackets for a religious book publisher. (If you’ve ever wondered why the cover art on so many religious books is terrible, now you know.)

I gave up the artistic life the day the religious book house fired me. A few years later they went out of business, but I refuse to accept responsibility for that.

So it has been decades since I tried creating any art beyond mowing my lawn in a criss-cross pattern. However, it now looks like my hour may be coming ‘round at last. 

There’s a new art movement afoot, one dedicated to a medium with which I am imminently familiar, one that could at last allow me to tap into the deep, meaningful emotions churning within me. Both of them.

I’m speaking, of course, of back hair.

I promise I’m not making this up. There are as we speak artists carving portraits and landscapes into the backs of furry guys. They even have a calendar for sale.

Now, it’s true I’ve never actually crafted in back fur. That said, I walk around each day with a canvas to die for! Within the furry forest sprouting on my back (shoulders, chest — pretty much any area unfamiliar with a razor’s touch) lies an untapped Mona Lisa, Starry Night, Whistler’s Mother.

All I need to get started is an electric clipper, a stick to duct tape it to, and a mirror in which to monitor my progress. It’ll take practice, sure, but at the rate my body hair grows I’ll have an entirely new canvas every couple weeks.

Also, there are five cats living here, or as I now think of them, sketch pads.

It’s only a matter of time before my name stands alongside Picasso and Van Gogh in the annals of art! Mike “Fuzzy” Taylor. Innovator. Artist. Barber.

mtaylor@staffordgroup.com

(616) 548-8273

Getting a haircut was more fun when girly pictures were involved

Brenda cut my hair for nearly 15 years and knew my head the way Bill Clinton knows interns, which is to say, intimately. After a decade-and-a-half she could have probably trimmed my hair in the dark. The place I go to now, it sometimes looks as if they have.

But that’s OK; I don’t stress over a bad haircut. It’s the process of getting my head-fur shortened that bothers me.

When I was a kid, my dad dragged me to a guy named Carl on Grand Rapids’ West Side who for fifty cents would buzz my hair down to a comfortable stubble that lasted a few months between cuts. The cut itself took about 45 seconds and there was no conversation. I was a kid and kid conversation not one of Carl’s priorities. Besides, he had girly centerfolds tacked up around his shop and memorizing those took up most of the mental power I would otherwise have needed to talk about my Little League team.

It wasn’t until years later that I found Brenda; she owned the shop a few blocks from my old house in Lakeview and—at the time—would cut my hair for ten bucks. A huge jump from Carl’s two bits, but still not bad by today’s standards.

As well as Brenda knew my head, she knew my life even better. When she was little more than a kid herself Brenda provided child care for my two progeny, a job known at the time as “baby-sitting.” It was only chance that we both wound up living years later in the same small, northern Michigan town.

Brenda not only knew my kids, she knew the (Former) Lovely Mrs. Taylor, who—it turns out—had been getting her hair cut at Brenda’s shop for some time by the time she first touched scissors to my head. In addition to family, Brenda also knew a lot of the same people I did, a fact of life in any American small town.

We not only had a history, but folks to gossip about. Getting a haircut from Brenda was a chance to catch up on the torrid, tawdry underbelly of my bucolic little hometown; who was doing what to (or with) whom. Brenda was the pre-Facebook Facebook. We rarely ran out of interesting dirt before the haircut was finished.

But Brenda’s an hour away now, which is too far for me to drive just to get my monthly trim. So I’ve been frequenting one of those salon chains with a shop in every neighborhood big enough to merit a McDonald’s. I’ve yet to have the same stylist twice.

The cuts are OK, but I hate trying to make conversation with a stranger; usually a female stranger in her mid-twenties. I have as much in common with these girls as an aardvark has with a Philippine merchant marine. I don’t want to know who Justin Bieber is dating and they couldn’t care less which character I like best on Golden Girls.

So I sit there in uncomfortable silence waiting for the cut to be finished so I can pay my 15 bucks and scram.

I wonder if Carl’s still cutting hair? He’d be about 108 now, but you never know. I wonder if he has any new centerfolds.

Give your iPad or Kindle what it really wants—Mike Taylor’s new eBook, Looking at the Pint Half Full, available at Amazon.com.

The mailman is making me feel older than I want to be

Were it not for the U.S. Postal Service, I wouldn’t mind getting old.

I was never a great beauty and I’m happily married, so I’m not overly concerned about losing my rugged good looks. I’m not thrilled with the prospect of eventually dying, but it doesn’t keep me up nights either. I’m not even resentful that my body no longer performs as it did when I was in my 20’s. In fact, considering the lousy maintenance I’ve put into it, my body’s doing better than it has any right to do.

Like I said, aging wouldn’t bother me, were it not for that blasted mail.

It started a few years ago, just before my 50th birthday. The envelope looked ordinary enough, but contained what was to be the harbinger of all the bad mail to come; an invitation to join the AARP.

AARP, for you kiddies, is the acronym for the American Association of Retired Persons. When I got the invitation, I still considered myself relatively young.

The AARP disagreed with this assessment; according to their experts, I was not even close to young. According to the AARP, I was old. (They used fluffy euphemisms like “golden years” and whatnot, but it all comes down to the same number of facial wrinkles.)

The AARP wanted me to join with millions of other geezers (by paying monthly dues) and reap the wondrous benefits of cheap prescription drugs and discounts on time shares in Florida.

I made up my mind to send an angry letter to the AARP telling them what they could do with their offer, but being old and confused, I never got around to it. I didn’t send them any dues, either, but that hasn’t stopped them from renewing their invitation every couple weeks. They know it’s only a matter of time.

A short while later, the coupons started showing up. Suddenly, inserted amongst the offers for 10 percent off razor blades and feminine hygiene products were coupons for things like hair dye. Hair dye for men.

My hair (miraculously) does not need dye. Not yet. I’m getting a little grey at the temples, but that’s about it. My hair works just fine, thanks.

And of course, there have been numerous offers for free samples of Viagra.

See above response to hair dye offer.

And Rogaine.

I have hair, it’s not too gray. Let the hair thing rest, already! You’re making me paranoid.

Then last week it happened. I knew it would. I got my first offer for a great deal on a “mobility scooter.”

How old do these people think I am? I’m 53, man! I still listen to Korn cranked to the max on the car stereo. I play tennis five days a week and ride a bicycle every day there’s not snow on the ground.

A scooter-mobile may be in my future, but not my immediate future. When (and if) I need one, I will call you. Meanwhile, leave me alone and let me enjoy what few (relatively) young years I have left!

On the other hand, I have noticed my hair seems just a little thinner, right in front there. It could be my imagination, but maybe I should hang on to those Rogaine coupons.

Just in case.


Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.