My hair is psychic.
I realize this is a startling announcement. I didn’t believe it myself, at first. There’s just no other way to explain what my hair has been doing for years on end.
Of course, this is my hair we’re talking about, so it’s not doing useful psychic stuff. I’m sure other people have psychic hair that is genuinely helpful – their hair warns them of impending danger, or points out the best time to invest in the stock market, or tells them ahead of time that betting $500 on the Patriots to cover the spread in Super Bowl XLII is a monumentally stupid thing to do.
My hair doesn’t do any of this important stuff. Then again, it doesn’t really have any suitable role models handy, because it’s attached to me. I seriously doubt I have any useful appendages on my body anywhere. It’s just not how I’m made. I conducted a survey recently, in which 20 people who had just been on a six-month, round-the-world cruise with me in a thirty-foot rowboat were asked to sum up their impressions of me in a single word. Their number-one response was “Who?”
So while it would be nice for my psychic hair to predict the future, or find lost pets, or lunge out and grab bad guys like Medusa’s in the Marvel Comics (and if you got that reference, congratulations! You’re now entered in the drawing to win the coveted Geek of the Week award), it doesn’t do any of that stuff. No, my hair’s psychic ability is more mundane: It knows when it’s about to be cut.
I don’t know how your hair behaves, but mine usually goes through three stages, depending on its length. Right after it gets cut, it’s all angry and frustrated, so it tends to not style properly. And it doesn’t matter what hairstyle I have, either. In the past 30 years, I’ve had a massive number (2) of different hairstyles. My hair will act up no matter how I style it.
It’ll stick out its tongue on one side of my head one day, and then it’ll pout and pooch out its lip near my forehead another day. After about a week of these little temper tantrums, it settles down, and I have a couple of weeks of decent-looking (for me, anyway) hair. Then it gets lazy, and complacent, and figures since it’s on top of my body, it’s running the whole show, so it doesn’t try as hard any more. It starts dangling itself over my ears, or not trying as hard to look nice when I get ready in the morning. The laziness and apathy is eerily reminiscent of the fall of the Roman Empire, when the Caesars got so fed up with their hair that they started shaving the tops of their heads and created one of the dumbest hairstyles in history. I put up with it for a few days, and then it gets too much to bear, and I decide it needs to be cut again.
And this is when my hair displays its psychic ability. I don’t say anything at all to my hair about planning to get another haircut. (In fact, I rarely communicate with my hair at all. I may be boring, but I’m not CRAZY.) My hair has no indication whatsoever that I’m gonna get it whacked back down to size. And yet, using its psychic ability, my hair KNOWS it’s about to be cut, and it starts to behave again in a futile effort to stave off the inevitable.
Where before it would dangle down over the tops of my ears, now suddenly it’ll tuck itself behind the ear. Where before it would look like a mop styled with a blender on top of my head, now it looks almost similar to the hair of the guys in the magazines my wife hides under the bed and thinks I don’t know about. Where before it would take me upwards of 45 seconds to style before walking out the door, now it coifs itself perfectly once I finish toweling it dry after my shower. And it does all this without me even saying a word. All I have to do is THINK the word “haircut,” and suddenly I’ve got lovey-dovey Care Bear hair snuggling on my scalp, trying its best to make nice.
In the past, I’ve succumbed to this charade. I’ve put off getting a haircut, because suddenly my hair was looking nice again. I didn’t understand that my hair was just being selfish and controlling. I didn’t realize I was enabling its behavior by giving in. And after a couple of days of looking nice, it would go right back to the slovenly look, lounging around on my head, taking no pride whatsoever in its appearance, insolently doing whatever it wanted. Oh, my hair played me for an idiot for YEARS.
Now, though, I’ve learned. I know its tricks. I know how its little psychic mind works. And it may not realize it, but my hair IS going to help me.
I’m gonna enter my hair in the James Randi Paranormal Challenge. Once its psychic abilities are proven beyond a doubt (as they will be), I’ll be rich.
