THINGS GO A BIT CRAZY...OK, I GO A BIT CRAZY...

My eldest son cuts his own hair. It doesn't look great, but of course it is cheap. I had hoped to get him to cut mine, but he doesn't get home for another week or two, and I have been wanting to cut mine for weeks. I left it long until last weekend because it makes my mother completely crazy when I cut it short, which I always do when I cut it at all. And I thought my coming out to her might be enough for one weekend.

So last night, having failed to cajole my resident son into cutting it for me, I took the Wahl clippers over to my little apartment. My first date. I opened the box and there were all the spacers, from #1 to #8 in a great jumble alongside the clippers themselves.

My eldest uses the #6, which would look great on him if he trimmed the edges with something else, which he doesn't; the result is that he looks like someone whose hair has slipped down over his ears and collar after he finished -- or like someone who cuts his own hair. Fair enough.

I flirted with the #3, which I had taken for a test drive at the barber's in April, getting a very professional edge-trimming at 1 [I think]. Then I remembered that the April haircut had been just long enough to be a pain -- my hair grows in a spiral. It wouldn't stay brushed where I brushed it, but crept back into position so it could make me look like someone who had been caught up in a very small scale hurricane. No, I was going to take the plunge: it was time to go for the #2.

There are several rules about cutting your own hair:

1. Don't do it.

2. If you do do it, have someone else do the back,
because you can't see it, and mirrors only make it worse.

3. Whatever you do, start small; you can't glue it back on.

I paid no attention to any of these. The clippers acquired their own mesmerizing attraction, and I ran the #2 blade this way and that, marveling at the way that the clippers didn't really get to the edges at all, and trying to MAKE them do it. Then I discovered the longer/closer lever, and ran most of the head back under the blades to get things closer. The whole process began to become an end in itself. It was comforting, familiar, like a back-rub.

Now what about the edges... they looked sort of all right, but wouldn't it be nicer if they tapered? So I shucked off the #2 attachment, put my glasses back on and dug around in the box for the #1. Finally found it. I snapped it on, and tried [again] to get the clippers to tackle the back of my neck. I have no idea what it looks like, but I can tell it's weird, because even from the front you could see the little tufts that barbers always go after last with the really close setting -- and they were not looking like edges at all. They looked like... tufts. Hmmm. Then up around the ear.

That worked OK on the left side; the left side actually almost looks like the work of someone who knew what they were doing. But on the right, maybe because I was turning to the left, or working with my right hand on my right temple, it suddenly turned out that I hadn't developed the delicate touch I thought I had developed, and somehow scalped the area around my ear. And it was hard to stop trying this and that as long as I had the #1 on the clippers, so there are lots of little odd bits where I thought: Well, what if I try this? Oh, that wasn't such a good idea. What do I do now? What if I tried this? So not only does it look like I was run over by a lawn mower, but at some point I tried to struggle, and it bit deeper than usual.

Rule #4: Keep it simple. You will regret your experiments,
and while hair does grow back, it also takes time.

Then I thought: your mustache is running away with you. What if you used the clippers on it? But not the #1 or #2. Let's try the #4. Well, the #4 just let the clippers bypass the whiskers, so I tried the #3. Same deal; on to the #2. Finally, some general all-the-same-length clipping, although the prongs of the spacer had to travel a fair distance up my nose to get to the top of what my birth father so delicately termed my crotch-mop. Even that had its holiday aspect: here I am in the bathroom at 10 o'clock at night having a good time shoving the prongs of an electric clipper up my nostrils. Hmmmmm.

Later, I found that while everything might all be the same length, now some of the lower whiskers hung over the lip into biting terrain; I bit them off -- you don't want to have hair interfering with the serious business of eating and drinking, after all. And what I was really contemplating was taking it all off anyway. The mustache had been a sort of gift to my spouse, who thought I looked better with it. So did I whenever I shaved it off. But as soon as it grew in, I changed my mind. Hair in general has that effect on me.

So here I am. The breeze moves though the stubble on the cranial field, and I probably have to worry about sunburn more than I used to, but it feels good. Just don't ask what it looks like. My plan is to ask my eldest to clean up the mess when he gets home...