HAIR-DO YOU DO: After a long layoff the only way for me to break the seal on this blog, so to speak, is to just start writing and see what comes out.

I went for a haircut this morning, distinguished perhaps most of all by the fact that it wasn't much of a haircut. For the past several years I've been wearing my hair very, very short -- triple-zero blades on the sides and finger-length on top -- and before that I wore a shaved head (wore!) for about four years, which I clippered down myself once/week and then razored smooth in the shower. So today when I went to Sheila, I was like, well, hold on a second there, let's just clean up the thatch up there and set it up for growth, you know? I told her take the ends off, more or less, shape the frizzies into something topiary-like, but mostly just leave it alone.

I've had hair periods in my life actually. I remember from like zero to about seventeen my hair was basically medium-length and straight, albeit with a quick perm-detour in seventh-grade when I was inspired by Mike Ditka (dude, *everybody* was doing it) and some of my black friends at school to go with an unnatural "natural." And I mean it was a rush, a cross-cultural buzz to carry a pick in my back pocket. That was about the same time my friend Scott Bowling (the blackest white kid at school, really) introduced me to parachute pants and Giorgio Brutini pointy-shoes. We listened to Zapp on WDAO ("White Days Are Over") and we did our best to learn line-dances with turns and twirls and funky backsteps and shit. Lordy. And then we moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Won't you take me to...preppytown! I'll tell ya, my parachute pants were not winning me a spot at the cool-kids lunch table in that town. Faster than you can say makeover my new friends were helping me pick out plaids and polos and busting down by billowing backthatch of mullet-tude, saving the day for me.

But alas, I was talking about hair periods. Straightish, with the permed and mulleted variations tossed in, from about zero to 17 or so. Then I began to notice that, left untended after a shower, the top of my head actually had something of a wave to it, a curly flourish that was friggin' perfect for teasing up into a Thompson Twins tuft (made all the more dramatic by shaving the sides high and tight). And that's where my college nickname, one of 'em, came from, the Human Hedge. I had this big old hair-stack on top, spilling down toward my big forehead like a Seuss character, all through college (granted, there was that brief flattop era) and even up until my wedding around the age of 26. Rest assured, I look like an extra from the movie VALLEY GIRL in my wedding shots, sort of Lyle Lovett in a bad rental tux with a floral cummerbund. Lovely.

When the billowing new wave 'do started to suffer from hairline recession, well, I pretty much just went apeshit and shaved my head one night, drunk, on my wife's 30th birthday. It's a funny story, but too long for now. And for about four years I kept the cue-ball look, Mr. Clean plus a paunch, I hate to admit. Somewhere five or so years ago I actually got my butt back into some shape (all of me, really) and, at the same time, let some hair grow in. And I figured out this high-and-tight, cleaned-up look I've been sporting, sort of Bruce Willis meets OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN. Somewhere along the way I discovered the goatee, an ingenious way to look thinner and make shaving take less time.

Where I sit right now, in addition to being off the schneid on Blind Camel for '06, is with a slightly fluffy, almost "Chia" look, the transition point between my manicured, quasi-military look of the past five years and the follicular folly that is to come. Stay frickin' tuned. Makes for gripping blogging, I can assure you.