Bartender says: hey we don't serve robots and the robot says no but someday you will
Bad hair day. The moisture in the air, getting right in there, infusing in the shaft of my hair, like some shampoo commercial with the accompanying diagram, and the end result has me looking pretty fucking insane. People will come up to me later, asking if everything’s alright, because I’m looking really frazzled today, and they won’t realize, all the while, that it’s just the hair. I come out in opposition to specific seasons, because it messes with my aesthetic. There are places on the planet where I just could not live because of the weather, entire continents which are just not conducive to my way of being. It’s kind of a familial thing. My sister, as a teen, had the same hair-managing issues. You could find her, her neck craned in some impossible yoga position, ironing her hair on the ironing board. What are you doing? People would want to know. And the answer, of course, was really simple: trying not to look insane.

Some dude I used to work with last summer had the same problem. An awesome mane of frizzy hair, did he sport. One day, he came in and it was gone. “What happened to your hair?” we asked him. “I don’t really attach any real importance to hair,” he said. And it seemed like a pretty reasonable idea. In lieu of the humid weather, it just seemed to make even more sense.

It doesn’t matter if my hair is long or short; I tend to represent insanity anyway. And whether the result of having sisters or the actual weather, I’ve tried all the products: the shoe polish tins of grease coife, the sprays and gels, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing that I can put through there, and then walk into a tepid wind, having me right back the way it started. It’s totally crazy. It’s as though the ideas in my head have coalesced, and have made their way out in mangled tendrils. There’s no hiding it. There’s no way.

Complaining about this same thing to a friend one time, he listened intently to my lengthy diatribe. (These are the things I talk about, it seems, which just might have something to do with my fledgling alienation from others). Finishing with the part about how I have to wear a hat around half the time, in what is, apparently, the only way of disguising my hair-like manifestation of crazy, he revealed to me the following wisdom: “At least you’ve got something to complain about,” before removing his own hat, revealing the glowering bald dome I had evidently forgotten about during my speech. There are always people, it seems, whose complaining would be even more validated than your own. Try asking my ex-coworker about the importance of hair in the absence of it, and see what all he has to say about that. I really should just shut up, I guess, and acquiesce— move to Florida, and embrace the afro. It’s all part of my ten point program of optimism, where I look at my qualitatively bad situation, and from another point of view, imagine how it could be that much worse. Which I guess it could be.

The summer is almost here, the warm moisture-carrying winds have arrived, and they are ushering in an entirely new landscape of tonsorial wildness. You can see it on the nightly news, the weatherman pointing at the maps, and wildly gesticulating at the air mass in wayward motioning of the hands. There’s no escape, things are warming, and you cannot run. Already, I can feel the matted down hairs on my head reaching toward the sky. There’s no hiding. There’s no covering up. It’s going to be nuts. It always is.