Went and got a haircut today. I've been feeling a bit like a dirty hippie, and a bit like the middling-shitty ensemble character in every eighties action movie ever: hair slumping down over my ears, dangling dangerously close to the border of Mullet in the back, generally bringing into a shapeless mop of mediocrity and unremarkability on top of my head.

Of course, I hate haircuts. I hate the way it feels like I'm betraying Mark Arm and Kurt Cobain by chopping it classy. I hate having to explain to the invariably hairy-knuckled, halitotic paragon of masculinity shaving me into the haunting image of his dead, drill-sergeant father that, no, I really don't watch football, baseball, or NASCAR. Then they notice I'm wearing a vest and a shawl-collar cardigan, and the rest is a sullen silence while the barber hurries to finish shearing me, lest I should, Incubus-like, drain testosterone from his fingers and leave him with dress sense and empathy.

I really don't like haircuts, is what I'm getting at. 

So when I got a voucher for a free haircut at Supercuts (selling points: five big-screen televisions playing nothing but Sports so you can compulsively Watch Sports, and "stylists who know about guy stuff"), it seemed like the Universe sack-tapping me for a laugh. But I'm broke, and a free haircut is better than what I was going to do to myself with the electric shaver tonight. So. Off I went, cyanide capsule safe in my molar, and a flask of London Sour secreted away in my cardigan (as always there is).

There were, in fact, five screens of sports. But  I didn't really notice them. Once the hot steamed towel face massage, shampoo, and acupressure scalp massage started, I sort of didn't notice much of anything else.

(Except the vibrating massage chair my "Stylist who knew about guy stuff" laid me back in. I noticed that, before I melted into it.) 

It's very seldom that I walk out with exactly what I had in my head coming in, but she knew her stuff: she saw my cowlick and strategized ways to tame it, noticed my natural part and compensated for it, and inferred the products I normally use by feel.

And then--I assume just to melt my mind into my shoes--a neck and shoulder massage. Jesus, is this what haircuts are in this brave new world of ours? Reading the advertisement, I was expecting something more like the barber scene from Full Metal Jacket : something brusque and smelling of stale tobacco, something involving tears and homophobic perjoratives, ending with a firm handshake and a slap on the ass. I've been alternately shaving my head in bathrooms and growing my hair to my shoulders for years, now: is this what barber shops are now? As an amateur journalist, I feel it's my duty to go back next month and find out. Maybe I'll even take a look at one of the TVs, and see if the Buffalo Red Sox are hitting any touchdowns.

--m.