It's the Circle of Life ...

reflections, originally uploaded by pr9000.

I'm about due for a haircut; I got one a few weeks ago in Hattiesburg -- good haircut; strong haircut -- and I didn't get it cut short enough. Now I'm ready, a full two weeks earlier than normal.

I got my hair from my maternal grandfather, Fid (well, I inherited the gene, not his hair, because that'd be kind of weird). It's super thick, lots of volume, and grows at such a rate that I'm personally keeping the local Super Cuts in business.

My hair goes through four stages after a haircut:

(1) The "my head looks too large" period – in which my desire to save $15 trumps my desire to look normal, and I order the Biff Tannen. I always get the urge to say, as I'm walking out the door, "Let's make like a tree and get out of here."

(2) The "Newscaster" period – in which I get out of the shower, shake my head just so, and boom! I've got Ken Brockman hair. This is the best period of the cycle.

(3) The "Bill Clinton" period – in which my hair goes from looking normal to looking like something from Bubba, circa 1993. I'm not coloring my hair to match my audience, though. It's getting gray naturally.

(4) The "It Hurts to Wear a Baseball Hat" period – by this point, the hair so long and so dense that I can't put a hat on without getting a tiny headache. Maybe it's the fact that my current preferred baseball hat says "Pittsburgh Pirates" on it. Either way, I wake up and I look like Marge Simpson.

When I get to this point, I head down to the local cuttery and start the process anew. I think Sigourney Weaver could get Discovery to do a "Planet Earth" about my follicles ... nothing as dramatic as this, which is easily the coolest shark footage ever.