Yul Brynner's Got Nothing on Me

I shaved my head last nite. Yep, swear to God. I shaved it down to a mere stubble. For all intense and purposes I'm bald. Not really, I do have some hair on my head but not much. The funny thing is I'm not sure why I did it.

I know I was extremely sick and tired of the length of my hair. It was unruly and was forcing me to take way too much time in the shower. You see time in the shower as a stay at home dad is critical. If a dad spends too much time in the shower the climbing monkeys known as my children will find their way into cabinets and what not and by the time the shower is over my children are knee deep in candy, cookies, bug spray you name it. The shower for a stay at home dad can only last three minutes....tops. I don't even take the time to put a robe on. Get out of the shower, brush the hair, rub on some deodorant and race naked into the kitchen to see how far they have gotten. If I can exclude the brushing the hair part it makes it that much shorter. You may think this little amount of time is minuscule and therefore meaningless. But in reality(and believe me this is my reality), it can be the difference between a mere effort to reach the box of cereal on top of the refrigerator to actually retrieving it and spewing it all over the living room floor sharing mouthfuls with your sibling and the friggin dog! Nothing ruins a shower more than exiting the bathroom to a living room full of messy, mess, mess, messy mess!

Sometimes I can't even believe the things I write. All the trials and tribulations I have been through in my life have brought me to this....I actually care about the house getting trashed. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Life is a bitch. Sometimes she's a nasty one too.

Back to my head.

I think I just needed a change. If you think about the generations and eras that have come and gone. Hair is a really weird gauge for it all. It says something about time.

The fifty's had the duck-tail and the greased down look. The sixty's started the grow it long stage. The seventies had the side burns from hell. The eighty's was the big hair era for the woman. The ninety's was the era of the mullet. Man, I had a sweet one! But the 2000's or whatever we're calling it doesn't seem to show anything significant when it comes to hair. If anything it has fallen back to retro styles.

I have always been one who rolls the way I roll. I have never truly had the in-style hair for the era I was living. I have always been either behind the times or ahead of the times. But it was always what I wanted to have my hair to look like not what everyone else looked like.

Today I am bald.

Maybe I am making a statement. Maybe I'm just looking for attention(there's a stretch). Or maybe I need a quicker shower. I really don't know. I do know that being a stay at home dad can sink you into a rut so bad you search exhaustingly to find a way out of it. Sometimes it's the little things that bring you back up.

Hey, it's just hair.

For now and the next few weeks my head will look like my friend Rick's head. The only difference is that mine will grow back!