Sargon and Thalassa

 

Letter to a Dear Friend

Reminiscing Incessantly

I have an old photo album with photos on the sticky board covered in clingy plastic. I’ve been removing them and scanning so I can throw the photos in a plastic bin and ditch the bulky albums.

Sounds simple enough but it’s quite unnerving to deal with everything that foams up from my brain.  Some of them I knew were taken on a trip to Finland when I was 18 but I forgot the specifics. After peeling off the photo I noticed the handwriting of my Finnish friend on the back. He took the pictures, and wrote what and where they were taken. One taken of me was inside a Lutheran church. I had no idea where until I read the backside. I was able to find it on Google Maps and it was in Seinajoki and the church interior has hardly changed at all since 1978.

What I find completely unbelievable is seeing myself at 18. (Or 20. Or even 25. Or 38.)
And this is just going to get worse, ain’t it!

I try to put myself back to the moment the photo was taken and wonder if I could have possibly conceived that I might be scanning this photo into my computer in 44 years and marvelling at how young I looked. They answer is obviously no.  How weird this all is.

Now I know why my mom would sometimes pull a little wood carving out of a drawer and tell me the story. It was a loose wooden ball (the ball would roll move around) inside a wooden cage and carved by hand by some boy in her class when she was about nine.
She protected that thing for almost 90 years! Part of me wanted to have her buried with it but somewhere along the way she must have given it to her Mississippi niece for safekeeping.

Whatever works. It’s a decision for the dying. The baggage is all the same.

Chag Pesach sameach

 

How long will I wish to be 41?

Going forward...

High hair pressure

I have to be one of the most obsessive people on the planet whether it’s concerning home design, fashion, organisation, functionality, or hair. Especially hair. And since I mentioned hair I might as well go on a rant.

I have spent the last 2 or 3 years growing my hair. I get a slight trim every two months or so but overall the growth has steadily been getting longer. Back at the end of July I finally decided to try another Keratin treatment to straighten out a lot of the curl and kink. 

I did this in September 2017 and was very happy with it for months. For 72 hours you can’t get your hair wet and it is outrageously straight during that time. Then after an initial rinse it curls again but they’re softer and looser and my hair becomes more wavy. After the 2017 session I would dry my hair wearing a beanie, which took about 6 hours, and then my hair was very much to my liking.  Sometimes it would straighten out considerably just from sleeping on it.

Something was different after this recent treatment. My hair is a lot longer now than it was in 2017. It was absurdly long during the 72 hours before I could rinse it. I decided that I would probably be happier if it was closer to the length it was two years ago.

Then I rinsed it. I have not been happy. What changed?

Sometimes it behaves exactly like it did before the Keratin treatment which of course causes me to wonder why I wasted the money. The hair is longer but I can’t attribute that to the cause. Women with even longer hair get the treatment and maintain perfectly straight hair with some effort I’m sure.

My hunch is a combo of things are the issue: length, products, and techniques. I’m using a completely different line of hair products now. I did try the flat iron — something I do not believe I was doing two years ago because I always feel like I’m damaging my hair, so I’m very reluctant to do it. But in a fit of desperation this time, I tried it and the results were horrendous. My hair looked dry, crispy and was not hanging straight at all. It was flaring out to the sides which gave me pyramid hair. I had to immediately wet it and go back to a natural curly look.

Since then I have been trying to decide the next steps. Do I cut it? Do I just let it hang curly and forget the $275 I spent trying to make it straighter?

These are difficult questions. The shorter I go the more insistent I am on straighter hair. In my opinion some of the worst haircuts I have ever had were short hair. I don’t mind shorter sides and in the back but I really need length on top because I like versatility.  Apparently I never made this clear to my stylist a few years ago when I was going shorter because she cut it short all over. The result was rather Julius Ceasaresque which is almost as hideous as the Mark Zuckerberg giving testimony before the US senate-look. I cannot go there. On the other hand, whatever I have ever said to a stylist about the look I want makes me wonder if they go momentarily deaf as soon as my mouth starts moving.

My curl pattern in the back is tight and hard to manage. On the top and sides it will often straighten effortlessly depending on products I’m using and weather. So there’s that problem: it’s like having two entirely different hair types on one head.

Leaving it long and curly is an option. As long as it just hangs it’s fine. Unfortunately there are issues. Sometimes it hangs but there are incredibly frizzy bits. Sometimes it looks clumpy and frizzy. And in the back it simply looks like an unruly wad of untameable shit.

Oh, I forgot to mention I’m that guy who has no patience for spending more than 5 minutes getting his hair right. The beanie drying method takes 6 hours but I’m not actually doing anything so that’s better than spending 20 minutes with a flat iron, blow dryer, or brush, in some utterly futile attempt to control this mane.

I am very picky about my hair and i’m not sure what the words are that I should use to describe how I want my hair to look. Smooth. Compact. Neat. I’m not sure. I like messy, I like bed hair, I like unruly, but it has to be controlled. There can be no roundness to my hair. No pyramid looks. No flaring. No clumps. No wiry frizz. And nothing that looks like I glued a mass of Spaghetti-Os on my head.

On my computer is a photo album labelled “Hair.” As you might guess, it contains many photos of hair I like as well as hair I detest. How hard can it be to get my hair looking even remotely like the group of photos I like as opposed to the group I classify as “NO” and I even added text to those photos with a blunt “NO” to make it very clear. 

I’ve probably looked at 50,000 photos of guys. Shit, that’s enough to turn a man gay. One thing is constant about these photos I have saved — the guys are about 16 years old on average. Perhaps that’s part of my problem. Am I miserable because I can’t get my hair to look like them or am I miserable because I won’t look like them even if I do succeed with my hair?

Feeling somewhat embarrassed for failing to take this into consideration, I have been searching “hairstyles for older men,” “hairstyles for older men with long hair.” etc. 

Fuck that shit. I’ve never been so disgusted in my life.

One thing is certain. I am not looking for a current trendy haircut. I’ve searched those as well. “50 Best Men’s Haircuts for 2019 (or 2018, or 2017)..it doesn’t matter. It is so rare if I see one I like. I’m not shaving the sides of my head and piling up this shit that’s left on top of my head like some tower. I’m not having anything carved or etched into the short hairs behind or over my ears.  And I’m not growing a goddamn hipster beard that collects little bits of avocado toast.

This is bullshit. I am so pissed.

I feel like I am no closer to a decision about length — short or long — than I was a week ago. And I have an appointment with my stylist in six days. I’m dragging out all kinds of products and I’ll try various combinations of things between now and the appointment day in the quest for some hair revelation.

Whatever I decide, I probably need to do this in small steps. I can always go back and get more cut. It’s not so easy to add it back once I go too far. The conversation with my stylist is sure to be an interesting one. When we start talking about how much to cut, I will need to be clear, such as, “are you talking about cutting 3 straight inches or 3 curly inches?”  It’s important to be clear and specific.

I’ll try to make this as easy and straightforward as possible. I will go in armed with a dozen or so pictures of male models, none of them over the age of 18, who all have absolutely perfect hair, and perfect facial construction, and perfect skin, perfect pouty lips, gorgeous teeth and without a single blemish anywhere. 

“Make me look like one of these. I don’t care which one.”

How fucking hard can that be if she has 12 or 15 to choose from?

I have only a blog

This is a strange stage of my life. When I first started setting up a social media account over a decade ago I thought it represented a huge improvement for humanity, or at least those who were fortunate enough to have access to it. Facebook was probably one of the more exciting things I had witnessed in the technology age. Being able to keep in close contact with friends was astounding and the ease with which one could add other acquaintances as contacts was equally exciting.

The honeymoon lasted a year or two before dilemmas presented themselves. Did I really want everyone I knew to see what was going on in my life? What about work colleagues? And friends of friends? And the occasional person who was not friends of anyone I knew but suddenly wanted to be friends with me?

Maintaining all of this soon became something of an annoyance tinged with unnecessary guilt. Even people with hundreds of “friends” were often quick to notice if you removed them from your friend list. Then I started noticing when people began to remove me from their lists. I actually asked someone once and was told that I “posted too much.”  I believe that was the nicest way they could phrase it when in fact they were probably put off by my subject matter — my propensity to write every twisted thought while holding very little back, swear words and all.

The posts of others were starting to annoy me as well. The memes and games were fun at the outset but eventually everyone was doing it and the result was 300 people all posting that stuff as well as news links, cutesy links, music videos, and occasionally some original personal content with the latter seeming to be the best use of the platform, in my opinion.

The trend continued. Things got more political and soon it was obvious what a diverse group of people were using this, and that many were within my friend list. There were disagreements, debates, confrontations, and some instances of ugliness. By the time we were well into the Obama Administration I’d had my fill of people on the far right side of the spectrum and I had to purge. I thought if I could rid my page of them, leaving only those with rational political beliefs, things would be better.

However, the news sharing was all still there. Not only was it too much, but the comments on people’s links were often infuriating if they happened to have a lot of far-right friends, and it seems most everyone did.

To sum up my feelings here I can say if I went to a party with 300 people and almost everyone was talking about and arguing politics, and 30 of those people were avid vocal Trump supporters, I’d have to exit the building quickly. 

It wasn’t just the politics chewing away at my last nerve. Religion was taking a severe toll on me. Every bit of bad news whether on a personal level, or a national tragedy, was peppered with the canned “thoughts and prayers.”

Back to the social media platforms themselves, I’ve always been annoyed by the personal data collection tactics, the adverts (which are sometimes so explicit they’re showing you products that you were browsing on other sites just a few hours earlier), and the stockpiling of profits by these corporations which we are feeding. I never thought of data mining as a deal breaker although I didn’t like the tactic. I do understand they are in this for profits and the primary sources of income are advertising and selling data. It is the price you pay for a free service. But after witnessing all the political antics to influence elections, and the economic impact of these social media giants in the cities where they are based rendering them unaffordable for all but the elites, and the mergers of social media platforms in an effort to control an environment, I started to despise all of this.

For a decade or so I have maintained two Facebook accounts, Twitter and Instagram. My satisfaction level has largely been in continuous and often steep decline. I ceased posting to either Facebook account in 2017 although I was still active on it via comments on the posts of others. I was active on Twitter until I became fed up with sharing a platform with that orange shithole in the Oval Office. Instagram I enjoyed the most because it seemed to be more artistic and less political, at least with the group of people I followed. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much interaction with people and I started to question why I was bothering with any of this.  After 10 years I was feeling everything starting to unravel. 

Then I fucking snapped.

After a spontaneously acrimonious exchange with some fuckwad I didn’t even know on a friend’s Facebook post, I decided it was time. I disabled both Facebook accounts. I had already disabled Twitter a month or two ago. And in a final fit of rage to completely extricate myself from this social media cesspool of human degradation, I completely deleted my Instagram account.

This has happened before, but usually just one platform would get disabled for a few days before I returned. I have never shut off the entire lot of them.

At first I thought it would be nice to take a break for 2-3 days, and decide how best to make these work for me, if there is even a way to do that. Once I realised I had deleted rather than disabled Instagram, and that to return would require a new account, and finding all the connections again, I started to feel a strange sense of liberation.

The first few nights were odd as I would grab my iPad from habit and look at the social media icons which were linked to nothing. I didn’t know what to do with my hands!

Honestly, I have no regrets. There are moments in the day when I think of reconnecting, and then I read a news story about Zuckerberg and I feel completely reinforced in my desire to stay off.

It has been two weeks I think and I’m doing far better than I expected. There were people I followed on Twitter and Instagram as well as Facebook, and sometimes I feel a little sad about that. Then I realise it was only me following them. There was no reciprocity nor any relationship. In their daily lives they do not know I even exist. And I feel a bit more grounded when I acknowledge that fact.

Another irony in all this is that I have a few friends who have never had a social media account. I used to think that was strange. I could never quite understand how the hell they could function without one.

I do not know if or when I shall return or in what capacity. 

It does not really matter right now.

Brun humour