There I am, walking with Emma June and Robert before dawn. The sun hasn’t yet risen, though according to Hemingway, it will.

And yet, what’s this? A shadow. 

How can there be a shadow without a sun? A grand mystery, one for the ages.

Simply, it turned out. 

Street lamps, still on, casting light from behind. Mystery solved. Or so I thought.

What wasn’t solved was the man in that shadow.

Not the face, exactly—just the shape of it. Something looked different. I usually have a round, boyish face - a baby face, people used to say, but in that shadow was no baby. 

In that shadow, I saw angles. Sharp, 90 degree angles. My face was boxy, like a six-pack turned vertical. Frankenstein-like, if you will. 

I had the shadow of Frankenstein.

No, I had the shadow of the monster of Frankenstein. The monster was never named - Frankenstein was the doctor who created him.

So who was I? Frankenstein or his doctor? Neither.

I was me, but with a haircut. 

two days prior

Two days prior, Lauren gave me a haircut. She’s cut my hair since the mid-10s which has, according to my back of the envelope (napkin? mystery) math, has saved us between $1760 and $3780 depending on cost of cut, percentage of tip, and whatever the hell ‘inflation’ is. 

Sure, it’d saved us money, but at what cost? 

Not much honestly. Lauren went to grad school for makeup and wig design and is really good at haircuts. She’s literally spent over 100 hours hand stitching a film-lace wig for an actress whose name rhymes with Helma Sayak. 

She asks me the same thing every time: “What do you want?” And I always say the same thing: short on the sides, long on the top. Last time, she went all the way and we did a ‘very european’ look that Lauren said looked ‘really cool.’ 

It was perfect. I felt great and people started to notice, by which I mean I stared at everyone on the street to see if they stared back at me and my haircut and so many people stared back at me this time it was undeniable.

That was last time. 

This time, not so much. This time, we had an audience. Our three year old son has never had a haircut (besides a teeny bangs trim that I’m not sure he knew about), so this was meant to be a demonstration that haircuts did not hurt and were real fun actually. 

We asked Wilder what he wanted my hair to be like and he said “idontknow” and “green.” 

I have to imagine this threw Lauren off. She panicked and cut my hair into a bonafide mullet. I looked like a 13-year-old baseball player.

But not just any mullet. Lauren cut it too short on the back of my head and left a little long patch at the back of my neck which she said, “gave off more of a "1960s flipped bob" vibe, not one of the cool mullets the kids are doing these days, but a vintage, cringy mullet.” 

a few nights later, date night. 

We eat chips and salsa and bathe in the luxurious freedom of not having kids around. Laur gets tacos - great. I get a salad - it’s fine. 

Afterwards, we take a leisurely stroll across the shopping center’s perimeter. The haircut comes up. I tell Lauren I sorta love it. 

She says she wishes she did a few things differently.

I say what do you mean it’s a mullet. 

She goes let me show you and she takes a photo. 

She shows me the photo. 

Gobsmacked. I am gobsmacked. 

For what I saw staring back at me was perhaps the first instance in recorded history of a balding mullet. 

A failing, receding business in the front, 

A “party” in the back, 

and a dying crop field in the middle. 

A wasteland that’d make you go ‘wait, this is how you get to the party? I don’t even feel like i’m in the right building.’

i wasn’t born yesterday

That’s the problem - I was born a while ago. My hair is “thinning.” I have “male ‘pattern’ baldness.” I’ve tried “Rogaine” and the “vitamins” that make your nails grow like a witch. 

They even worked. Sort of. I just had to look in the mirror at certain angles and often ask Lauren, sometimes mid-hair cut, if I was balding. She’d say “no” and we’d both know she was lying but that’s love, baby! 

The truth was hardest to avoid at the grocery store. I’m in self-checkout, doing the usual—scanning, bagging, typing in ‘4011’ for bananas from memory, the whole thing. 

Then, beep beep beep! The screen flashes, and there I am, caught in 480p: a grainy overhead video that shows me scanning the blackberries too quickly and, what’s this, atop my head, a half-finished crop circle that aliens had decided wasn’t worth finishing. The shame of waiting for the attendant, always busy with some other idiot, to come over and look at the video and, out of pity, scan me through.  

i started a new therapy thing recently

After the first session, we determined my big intention was to integrate the various parts of me – the goofy idiot, the serious guy, the dad, the child, the manic, the depressive. 

The business, the party. 

Perhaps it is here in this Bermuda’s triangle of no hair’s land where such integration happens, where you are neither bald nor hairful but something else entirely, a weird mix of selves that might simply be called a mystery.

Mysteries are everywhere.  

Like why is it that I have enough hair on my back and chest to fill that balding patch six times over? Why can’t some of that hair (thick, strong, youthful) meander it’s way back up to the patch and make a life for itself? 

Or how, after seeing my shadow, when I walked for an hour with EJ and Robert, I decided to take off my shoes and walk barefoot to connect with the earth or something but then put them back on a mere three feet before stepping over a dead animal.

Or if we’re supposed to call the monster “Frankenstein” or simply “the monster?”

Both, because we are all both, and me?

I’m just a dude with a mullet-bob: business, party, and all the beautiful horrors in between. 

hair transplants are expensive though i hear much cheaper if you travel to mexico or one of the lesser known european countries

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comments?

1. are you bald or balding what’s that like?

2. lauren i know you want to add some comments about how you warned me you weren’t liable for issues so plz chime in

5. what’s a mystery you are trying to solve? have solved? realized you can’t solve?

6. how’s your hair these days?

8. we gotta ban the self checkout cameras yea?