The Buzz Word

Tim Bass, coordinator of UNCW's Bachelor of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, hopes to get to work on time now that he has to spend less time fussing with his hair.

My long battle with my hair came to a head one recent afternoon in the gym. After working out in a room that has a relative humidity of 390 percent, I looked in the mirror and saw a wiry mass swirling and jutting in all directions, prickly and untamed, like a tumbleweed snagged on a fence.

This has to end, I thought.

Minutes later, in traffic, I made an impulsive lane change and swerved into the parking lot of a hair salon. I headed inside, still wearing my gym clothes, and confronted two stylists.

They talked, and I listened. They talked more. I deliberated. Then I took a seat and did what I’d long fantasized about but was too

hesitant to do: I got a buzz haircut. This came after the stylists repeatedly assured me that, no, I wouldn’t look like a middle-aged Marine recruit, and, no, my face wouldn’t seem fatter.

“Your face isn’t fat,” one told me. “It’s long.”

Great. I’d often thought of myself as a bear with bad hair. Instead, I was a horse with a mangy mane.

Hair changes with age. It grays, of course, the result of lower melanin production. It thins, too – more years bring us less hair, and what remains isn’t as coarse. So we end up with thin, dry, wiry, gray hair. Mine has also shifted from straight to wavy, and now I have thin, dry, wiry, gray, wavy hair.

I don’t think age causes this part, but my hair grows disproportionately. The sides come in faster than the top and back, adorning my noggin with gray bulges around my temples and ears – wings, as the hair professionals say. Some of my former stylists embraced this ridiculous pattern, barely trimming the sides while aggressively cutting the top and back. I paid scalp prices and ended up looking like something from science fiction – a freaky follicle monster.

Frustrated, I started avoiding haircuts. My hair curled at the back corners and tickled my ears. The sides bubbled out more than ever. The top just stayed tumbleweedy. I combed the salons in search of a sympathetic stylist, always telling myself I’d give anybody two chances to get me the right haircut. When they didn’t work miracles, I cut them off, as if my hair were their fault.

So finally I got buzzed. I walked out of that shop feeling – I guess buzzy is the word for it. My hair hasn’t been this short since I was in grade school. Every late summer, right around this time, my parents would march the three of us boys into the barbershop for back-to-school cuts. In those days, a haircut came with a dab of Brylcreem and a block of bubble gum.

I got neither with my buzz. But I did get a lesson. Why attempt to fight the march of time with temporary tools – hair dyes, gels, pastes, trendy cuts from fashion magazines? Why try to offset the inevitable with a sports car or a tattoo or a beard? I’m not cool enough for any of those. I’m just a guy who’s lived long enough to learn that it’s time I embraced my aging hair.

To view more of artist Mark Weber's work, go to www.markweberart.blogspot.com.