Time For A Cut

I dispute the idea that things, time in particular, speed up as you get older.
Actually, what happens is that you slow down and everything else remains fairly constant – even in a so-called Information Age – so that relative to where you stand, the pace appears to quicken.
It’s an applied aspect of Newtonian physics. I remember a series of well-intentioned science teachers trying to explain Time in a similar manner, how things are perceived differently depending on where (or when?) you’re standing: at a fixed point in space (‘till the brighter bulbs at the front of the class sussed out the quandary that posed); from aboard a craft moving at variable velocities along a random path; or whilst sitting in a tavern with a cold pitcher of Molson watching Hockey Night In Canada on the CBC with your buddies on a planet spinning through the void on a predictable journey about a stellar body.
‘Course, my understanding of these things was troublesome at best. Despite attempts too numerous to mention to interest me in science and arithmetic, my mental mathematical development effectively ended with those bland tales of trains leaving stations in different cities at different speeds heading for the same destination.
These problems I solved, eagerly, by imaging the drunk, red-nosed CPR switcher asleep in his snow-bound shack, propane heater cranked to high, failing to change the tracks at the right hour, setting off a chain reaction that lead inevitably to the two trains colliding somewhere in the heart of the Big City killing all aboard – including characters who looked a lot like those math and science teachers, neighborhood goons and the fat Greek depanneur-owner with the hairy mole on the left side of her mouth and flesh-colored, ankle-high nylons who made life miserable for nimble-fingered, impecunious adolescents with a taste for Mars bars and chocolate chunks. We went to Blue Windows instead and repaid the gaunt, French-Canadian owner’s friendliness by robbing him blind, and pasting the pages of his selection of porn magazines together with the remnants of melted Caramilk bars… always wondered what the guys who bought those magazines thought when they got ‘em home to discover the pages around Miss October kinda glued together.
He was a great guy even though his teeth were pretty gross. Me and John Duggan used to go down there, age eight or nine, and buy a copy of Penthouse and a couple packs of smokes (Players, unfiltered if memory serves) for his Dad. The clerk looked at us kinda funny, but when John said they were for his father, and here’s five bucks, he’d pack ‘em up for the walk back up Rue Notre Dame de Grace.
I always worried that he’d catch me thieving and think I was a bad kid. We didn’t care about the ethics of shoplifting. We were kids. Every kid lifts stuff, its like a genetic thing. I just didn’t want him to tell me to stay out because Blue Windows (it had blue windows) was one of the places I could heat up (and read comics for free) while delivering the afternoon paper. That’ s no small attraction when it’s minus 20, 4:30 in the afternoon and you’ve gotta go back and deal with Radu, that vile, loud-mouthed depot manager, and pick-up the second half of a 60-paper run, a Wednesday maybe when the Montreal Star classifieds were fat, a dozen inserts had to be stuffed and the newsprint ran to 180 pages.
He never figured it out though and one day at Blue Windows there was another French guy behind the counter. A short time later the place was renovated, the chocolate bar stand was moved atop the cashier’s counter and the days of unlimited gob-stoppers came to an end.
All of which is a long way from the haircut I got today at the little salon down the lane from my house, but there’s a reason for the segue. ‘Cause my hair grows like a weed – if my hair were a mollusk it’d be a freakin’ Zebra Mussel – and there’s no real explanation for it because as we all now know, things only appear to speed up as we age.
It’s not like I feed it magic tonics or imbue it with special petroleum products or even work out, but for speed, 500cc world champ Valentino Rossi and ski-droid Herman (Da Herminator) Maier ain’t got nothing on my hair. We’re talking about sitting back and watching the hair grow. We’re talking freakin’ Rapunzella is definitely in the house.
And no, my head is not shrinking.
I’ve gotten in the habit of going for the ‘ol Number 1, the GI look, appropriate given my navy Seal training – I too like to snooze on flat rocks when I’m not checking out the tusks on babe in the corner of belly-bopping by concession stands.
Until recently I thought the whole No. I thing was a special code distributed to the International Brotherhood of Barbers or something. I figured they did the special head-shaving session at the same time the guys learned the secret barber’s handshake. I say this because it doesn’t matter where you go, what country your in, everyone knows what a No. 1 is.
In a sense, it’s the great equalizer, Utopian even. Whether it’s a guy with a pair of scissors, a lawn chair and a mirror nailed into a tree in a Central Jakarta park full of (not at all inviting) concrete children’s slides or a Chez Michel’s kinda-place where there’s a cover charge, a dress-code and an ATM, cutters have one thing in common: no matter what you want done, regardless of how much you pay or whether you bring a picture in to show the him/her/himher, the cutter/Hair Lifestyle Consultant will do exactly what they want to do and there’s basically nothing you can do about it.
And so, my affection for Number 1. Or, as was the case today, Number 2. It’s basically a head shave and how can you possibly mess up a head shave? Imagine my disappointment when I learned during my last visit that the number designation actually referred to the size of the universal attachments barbers slip onto their clippers.
Damn, another colorful conspiracy theory bites the dust. I do look fabulous, mind.