Black Russian Kahula
Today I saw sacks of coffee beans with titles enough to keep me in blog entries until about March of next year. Not that I want to infringe on the proprietor's coffee right. So, sorry folks, there won't BE any Rum Butter Spicy entries.

You know what I hated when I was a boy?

I hated getting a haircut. Short back and sides shit me.

I wouldn't like to try now, with a welterwaung of competing theories and ideas jockeying for position in my grey matter, to guess why this fairly painless procedure attracted such infantile opprobrium. Maybe I was nicked; my ears needed some circumnavigation.
And short back and sides do nicely profile one's ears. There's literally no way of hiding the fact that your ears stick out, short of wearing headgear.
Or maybe (if you accept Jung's notion of archetypes) I was just being a child of the sixties. Literally.

Now I probably feared the dentist more. But it was precisely this awareness of just how many sharp objects there were that kept me from making a fuss. True, the barber had scissors and razors but he wasn't supposed to use them on anyone.

The further disadvantage that barbers have is that their difficult customers stay upright and there's nothing stopping them from screaming and thrashing around. Of course this makes the actual haircut hard to execute. In my case,that was the plan.

My aversion to haircuts lead to two distinct bad hair phases, ironically enough:

High school. Nowadays children of the same age sport a gamut of hairstyles. Sometimes the same kid may go through a crazy spin cycle of haystacks and bobcuts. But then you had to have it long. And the hostel administration and parents decided that that meant shoulderlength. I compounded this noncommittal middleground wretchedness with a middle parting and hair brushed OVER MY EARS.
I must have thought that would solve both problems. My ears would vanish and I'd be cool. It didn't turn out that way, needless to say. Something that resembled a moptop split in half was going about the whole thing the wrong way.

Early twenties. I decided after the horror of high school was over (and the disappointment of unemployment about to descend) that I just wouldn't go to the hairdresser. Fuck it if it was that traumatic. But instead of growing long my hair grew outward tufted. When I did finally relent and abandon this barf-faunt hairdo, the person cutting my hair went above and beyond the call that day. And told me so.

Postscript: I did eventually grow my hair long and kept it in a ponytail for most of that time. When this started looking too grizzly, I cut it and have been happily going to a cheapo barber in George Street ever since.