Shining, Gleaming, Streaming, Flaxen, Waxen

A long time ago, on a scalp far, far away, there once grew a dense forest of straight blonde hair.

When I was a little kid, the poofed mass of yellow on my head turned near white in the New York summer sunshine. My Mother always would comment how easy it was to spot me if I wandered away from her in a store, or was sitting on stage under the bright lights of a public school band concert. Not long after, the quintessential 1980s hair helmet formed like a protective biosphere when I entered the hygienically self-aware stage of my teen years. Cans of AquaNet and bottles of hair gel fell like spent soldiers as each long, blonde strand was carefully lacquered in place.

I got a bad rap in college for growing a mullet, which really wasn't a mullet, but rather a failed subversive attempt to grow my hair long, like some kind of neo-hippie, proto-grunge granola-age-punk. A lack of commitment to the experiment resulted in an unfortunate hairstyle equaled in unsightly aesthetics only by my inability to match clothing colors and patterns. Who says a gray and purple button-up sweater vest doesn't go with acid-washed, parachute cargo jeans and a pink dress shirt? Pretty much every member of the sighted world.

As we tumbled through early adulthood, marriagehood and parenthood, developing technologies made it easy to avoid hair envy. Nothing quells concerns over a receding hairline better than shared social media pictures of your high school friends sporting scalps more barren and devastated than a clear-cut rain forest. This guy was bald in his twenties, that one in his thirties. By the time I reached forty, I felt like the lone survivor of some horrific folicular pandemic.

Not anymore.

The turn of the century brought with it a desire for streamlined simplicity that included My Lovely Wife buzzing my hair to within a centimeter of its life. (Somehow, I still manage to achieve righteous bedhead.) Every once in a blue moon I get the notion lodged in my brain to try growing my hair out a bit. By "a bit," I mean more than an inch. Right around the time the next buzzing is due, I'll catch myself grabbing the mousse to direct my hair along its long-abandoned part. It looks pretty good, too, if I do say so myself. Then two things happen.

The first is when my hair reaches a certain length and suffers what I call the Bozo Effect. The listless and lazy hair on the very top of my head collapses under its own weight while the hair on either side of my head sticks straight out as far as it can possibly go without leaving the scalp -- an unintentional and pathetically sad Flock of Seagulls impersonation, without the benefit of futuristic music video lighting and underrated guitar playing.

The second thing that happens is I catch an occasional glimpse of what my hair really looks like to others. You see, each morning when coiffing my golden locks in the mirror I'm staring blindly at an optical illusion. Where I see a reasonably handsome head of hair, others see glistening scalp gleaming at them from under a few delicate, wispy strands. One photograph of the top of my head is all it takes to bring me back to reality.

Twenty years ago I told My Lovely Wife if my hair started abandoning me then I would buzz it off. Better fire up the trimmers.

© 2016 Mark Feggeler

Radio Tease

Every now and then a local radio station changes its format. If I'm lucky, it changes from some annoying techno-pop-disco-crap to classic rock. A few weeks ago, I thought I struck radio gold when I found a station that had converted to a format focusing on rock hits from the 80s and 90s.

I hate to date myself, but if The Big Chill were remade today, it would star people my age chugging Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers and dancing around an Ikea-furnished living room to Flock of Seagulls while wearing worn-out "Frankie Says Relax" concert t-shirts and figuring out how to stream Wham and Paula Abdul videos off YouTube.

MTV might have revolutionized the music industry -- and I was one of those kids who excitedly watched it launch with the appropriately titled "Video Killed The Radio Star" -- but it destroyed excellent bands that weren't pretty enough to fit the new mold. Mainstream music in the 80s was all about big hair, spandex, fog machines and orchestrated laser shows, so to find a radio station that pays homage to the acts that actually managed to keep rock alive during the decades of synth drums and choreographed lip-synch concerts is a rare treat.

Besides, I've grown tired of the so-called classic rock stations of North Carolina. They play the same twenty songs over and over again. This one plays Aerosmith every third song. That one plays ACDC every twenty minutes. That other one must think "Freebird" is the only song Lynyrd Skynyrd ever recorded.

It's like most of these stations laid out their schedules ten years ago and haven't deviated from them since. The only time you might hear more than one song from any band's catalog is on the horribly hackneyed two-fer-Tuesdays. Talk about innovative programming. I'm pretty sure Dick Clark came up with that idea eight years before radio was invented.

So, after years of relying on my iPod for music I like, I was driving to the grocery store and searching for a little agreeable music when I paused on a station long enough to hear the guy say "rock hits of the eighties and nineties." Sure enough, they played several songs in a row that took me back to my younger days. I hastily programmed the station into preset number four on the van radio.

Over the next few days, I would dial up the station to take fleeting sentimental journeys through my teens and early twenties while toodling around town. It all seemed so perfect. Then the cracks appeared in the ice.

By the third or fourth day, I realized I was hearing "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits for the third or fourth time. And wasn't that the second time they played Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town" since this morning? That song doesn't even match their format! Just because The BusBoys covered it for the 48 Hours soundtrack in 1982 doesn't change the fact the song is from the 1970s! Don't these people know what they're doing?!

Turns out, they don't. Thank goodness I always keep the iPod charged up and ready to go.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler