I was so excited to get a barber. After forty-eight years, it just seemed like it was time. And I found one in my tiny little village, right upstairs in my house.
I walk into the waiting room. All the magazines to flip through. While I am plowing through the pile of mags, I fixate on a Field and Stream on the table between two guys with bad combovers. I am like, “What the hell is THAT doing here???” But…Field and Stream has a certain unexceptionalness in public barber shops. I mean, it wasn’t like a Playboy sitting out there with all its pages stuck together.
Then I notice that there is tv on. While I am flipping through my Highlights magazine. I think, “Holy shit I like this place. Moving pictures in a box, just like they have in the big cities!”
But as I read my nursery rhymes, I notice this harassent Political discussion à la Crossfire or worse, in the box with moving pictures. Kerry is ‘just really’ doing this or that, for the two women in the box.
Even worse, it’s he promises an education for every child hooey shit.
I’m going to write most of my paragraphs with one sentence.
Okay, just imagine you walk into your barber’s, and they are playing James Carville…
So I am thinking, “Hey, jackasses! I am the client. I don’t have to be forced to listen to political programming just to get my hair cut.”
So I get up to chmange the station.
Just as I would in the big city if it was on C-Span or something gross.
And to my sheer unmitigated horror I find out that I don’t know a television from a VCR. These bastards are playing a videotape!
Someone made the voluntary decision to feed a flaky liberal warrior video James Carville thing into the waiting room of a barberb’s orifice.
I tell you I was bent, beside myself, boiling, browned off, bummed out, corybantic, crazed, demented, desperate, enraged, fierce, frantic, frenetic, frenzied, fuming, furious, hacked, hopping mad, incensed, infuriated, insane, irrational, livid, mad, maddened, maniac, rabid, raging, smoking, steamed, unreasonable, vehement, vicious, violent, and wrathful.
And then the barber referred to the presidential campaign while cutting my hair.
Now I don’t think I am on any good basis at all, as far as my rights to not learning how to construct a coherent sentence.
But I think it is not only sleazy, and offensive, but it borders on ethical recklessness.
I would like to do what the American barbing Association thinks of this kind of discriminatory practice.
If that videotape is on again, I will walk out and transfer to another barber.
And give him obscene reasons as to why.
I simply won’t let him get paid a monthly salary by my modelling agency for preaching politics at me.
And for what it is worth, I would be as offended if I walked into a colored barber shop and there was an Al Sharpton photo in the corner. And into ANY business that was cooking barbecue. And would be offended by a speech being read by a politician on tv While-U-Wait.
Thing is, he is a kind of nerdy nice guy. If he more up to my standards of physical appearance and demeanor…maybe there would be a place to go with a discussion. He had the same kind of syrupy nerd air around him as do the people on those shows.
You know, I live with a bunch of liberals. And conservatives. And these uneducated folk, all voters, have more brains and brainpower than the mindless horde who go to the “Reform Party” or the “Green Party” meetings in the next town over, or the other one in the remote village next to mine, or whatever other disjointed clause I can cram in here, and who dominate the radio airwaves with their smooth-talking, poorly reasoned, unintelligent bile.
Give me an apathetic slacker, any day.
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