THE BOOGEYMAN CHECKS HIS CLOSET FOR CHUCK NORRIS: If you haven't yet seen the "Top Thirty Facts About Chuck Norris," you've gotta check 'em out. High, high comedy. One of my favorites: "Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits."

GOOD ADVICES: A good pal just reminded me of something I already knew: To be a writer, write.

Sort of like, to be a vegetarian, eat vegetables. To be a meditator, sit your ass down. Etc.

'NOTHER HAIR FLASHBACK: Here's more of the mid-college "new wave" look, as forwarded to me from an old friend. I think I look a bit like a lady. Oh, well. 

WHAT'S ALREADY STICKING IN MY CRAW IN '06: I wake up thinking, "I want to be a writer." Some mornings, or more likely some nights after wine, that thought twists into, "I am a writer."

Of course I'm not.

I proudly told one of my sisters-in-law that one of the great things about me is I know what I'm good at, and I know what I suck at. I have a healthy sense of shame, I told her, a filter that allows me to "know better" before I run out (into the marketplace, the town square, the public space) and embarass myself. I have a real and functioning governor on my own idiocy. Keeps me from making a fool of myself. And she pointed out, in so many words, that that same governor is what stands between me and really taking a chance, putting myself out there in a way that I might fall, might fly, might feel really and fully alive.

Doorway to greatness? Governor's minding it. Why bother?

Clearly I've grown older, and with age and experience I've grown more reasonable and responsible. Heck, look how nice my hair looks now!

:-)

And yet...as I've grown I've had to shed a layer of skin (along with all the hair). I used to think that "skin" was just the shadow part of me that was reckless and selfish. No big whoop. Farewell and such.

Now I wonder if maybe there weren't some strands of my soul wrapped up in what I stepped out of .

Wow. Talk about a "Happy New Year" post! Off to the soul-searching races in '06!

MORE HAIR, LESS WEIGHT: Eventually I lost some weight and grew some hair. This is pretty much how I've looked, plus or minus a few pounds a quarter-inch of hair or so, for the past five years. 

CURBING HIS FABULOUSNESS: Larry David on BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Hilarious.

CLIPPED: During my music biz days I just shaved it all off, boho-style. I was also a bit fat. 

KOOKY CONSULTANT: Here's my look when I got the gig at Andersen Consulting, which was also right around when I got hitched. The hedge is back! 

COLLEGE GRAD: Thankfully by graduation the hedge had been trimmed back to youthful respectability, with a touch of flair. 

COLLEGE RAD: By the time I got to college I smoked cigarettes, braided and colored my hair, and had completely lost my mind. 

THE MANY MOODS OF MY MANE: Okay, so here are some haircut shots...


First, here's me in seventh grade, sporting the basic straight-hair look, medium length. 

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.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING OF LATE: Seems like I've spent most of my writing energy on other people's blogs of late, writing comments and advice and whatnot. I am the king of unsolicited guidance...

I've been especially entertained and engaged by the writing on The Phone Rang and Infidelity Bites. On the first, a whimsical man channels his inner child *and* his wise old man while dealing with the aftermath of his wife's infidelity. On the second, a very grounded-sounding woman alternates between her inner lawyer and her magnanimous lover, sifting through the rubble after her husband's infidelity. I read both regularly, and I can't help myself from weighing in on their complementary plights, perhaps far too often.

I also make regular visits to Do Over, The Least of My Worries, Nobody Knows It, and Just Procrastinating. (They feature, respectively: more post-infidelity blues; child-rearing and self-actualization blues; still more post-infidelity blues; and light musing about most anything.)

Finally, I've enjoyed keeping up on my brother and his wife, on their dual (and every once in a while, dueling) blogs. He writes Mission From Dog; she hammers out Phaneromania.

For whatever reason, I've spent far less time on the political blogs of late, although I do still go for a fairly regular dose of Andrew Sullivan.

When I'm really bored, I dig into Perez Hilton, perhaps my faoorite guilty pleasure of '06.

So what are y'all reading, when you have the chance?

TOP SECRET SKUNK: You gotta love this.

Also, this will be fun: Laurel, Mom...where do you think his nickname comes from? What do you think it means?

MY TWO CENTS ON TOOKIE: I'm against the death penalty. I believe in the sanctity of life, that a society must make laws and endorse practices that celebrate and embrace and protect life, even the life of a murderer. That said, if we're going to have a death penalty (which, again, I'm against), it certainly seems like Tookie Williams is the kind of guy that should receive it.

WHO ASKED ME ABOUT THE OSCARS? Look, I'm usually terrifically shy about expressing my opinions...but the subject of who hosts the Academy Awards is simply too juicy for me to leave alone. I must be heard.

Apparently it won't be Chris Rock. Fine. I think he's overrated, and his stint last year wasn't particularly funny. (I know I'm in the minority when I say that David Letterman was, for me, by far the funniest host since Johnny Carson. Loved him.)

According to this article, the candidates look to be: Steve Martin, Jay Leno, Whoopi Goldberg, and Conan O'Brien.

C'mon. There's only one person in that list who deserves consideration.

Steve Martin's career over the past ten years has been an embarassment. That CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN franchise is actually beyond embarassing. Horrifying. And that thing with Queen Latifah? Steve is out.

Jay Leno? Not funny. Not. Funny. Not even a little bit. Sure, he seems like a nice guy. But. He. Is. Not. Funny. The word 'painful' comes to mind, actually.

Whoopi? The most loathsome possibility of all. Big fat overrated sanctimonious loudmouth who must be the luckiet person alive. Host? Nost.

So...it's Conan. I mean, I'd watch that. (I'd at least Tivo it.) I'm counting the days 'til Conan takes over the Leno debacle. Let's give the carrot-topped nutball a shot at primetime.

Here's hoping he gets the gig and does running gags about Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.

TAKES AFTER HIS GRANDFATHER: We got like a zillion gallons of snow dumped on us last night, as you no doubt know, given the horrible tragedy at one of our airports.

Anyway, after my no-shit three-hour-plus commute home last night, I had a fun exchange with CJ while watching a TV show on Disney World:

"Daddy, where is Disney World?"

"It's in Florida."

"Is it summer in Florida?"

"It's always summer in Florida."

"Can we go to Florida right now?"

"No, we can't. It's far away from Chicago."

"Daddy, I don't like Chicago anymore."

WHO LOVES KANYE? KANYE! It's offical: Kanye West is an arrogant twit. As evidence I give you Kanye's comments about the upcoming Grammy awards, plucked from a recent MTV interview:

"If I don't win Album of the Year, I'm gonna really have a problem with that," said West. "I can never talk myself out of [winning], you know why? Because I put in the work. I don't care if I jumped up and down right now on the couch like Tom Cruise. I don't care what I do, I don't care how much I stunt — you can never take away from the amount of work I put into it. So I don't wanna hear all of that politically correct stuff. You put the camera in front of me, I'm gonna tell you like this. I worked hard to get here. I put my love, I put my heart, I put my money [into Late Registration]. I'm $600,000 in the hole right now on that album and you tell me about being politically incorrect?

He goes on to suggest that the song "Gold Digger" -- the one where Jayme Foxx yells "tell me, mama" using a retarded accent -- is the clear-cut song of the year.

What the fuck is he talking about?

First off, who cares who wins the Grammy, any Grammy? Since when has the Grammy ever been a true measure of merit? Next, can he really believe that his work -- the product and the effort that went into it -- so far exceeds everyone else's that awarding him Album of the Year should be a foregone conclusion?

Is it just me, or is this guy so far up his own shorts that he's hanging from his uvula?

Given all the hype, I've tried repeatedly to find even one Kanye song that appeals to me. No dice. Uck. Sucks. Sucks. He's a lame performer, a mediocre MC, and a boor. Rumor has it he's a good producer, but if that's the case I wish he'd just park his ignorant ass behind the board and shut the fuck up.

THE WORD POTBOILER COMES TO MIND: Just finished BLACK, a none-too-literary but fairly enjoyable debut novel by former FBI Hostage Rescue Team member Christopher Whitcomb. Lots of fun, breezy, etc., but unfortunately stuck with a stupid, tie-up-all-loose-ends-cheaply ending. Was totally planning on reading WHITE, the sequel, until about the last 15 pages or so. We'll see. Will definitely wait for the paperback. In the meantime, to cleanse my literary palate, am contemplating picking up the new Coetzee. (His DISGRACE is one of my fave books of all time.)

SAY HI TO HELMULLET MANIA: Please don't forget to visit my other site. I'm convinced I'm doing some of my best work there.