The world's best hairdresser: Miriam, a 40-something Colombian immigrant, now a U.S. citizen, who learned how to cut hair by practicing every weekend on her family members back home--8 siblings and God knows how many cousins. We found each other by accident my 1L year of law school. After the first haircut in October, I went to no one else. Miriam was a true craftswoman. It took her 50% longer to cut my hair than other stylists, but when she finished it was perfect. It's not easy to make my hair look handsome, but she did it. Miriam cut my hair each month of that year, until one day in late May I stopped in the salon on Broadway and she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. She'd talked in the past about attending secretarial school at Gateway Community College, so I figured she'd made good on her plan.
My 2L year, I got by on free haircuts from a friend. The price decline was great, but the quality also took a correlative dip. Not that this mattered much. As my mother and sisters can attest, I've never paid a great deal of heed to hair care. My college roommate once described me as "a cross between Michael Jackson and a broccoli stalk." A hit; a palpable hit. It stung, but only because it was a fair point, at least so far as my head was concerned: since puberty my hair has usually been a steel wool mess.
All good things must come to an end, including my free-clipping friend, who moved away from New Haven last summer. When I returned for my 3L year I knew I'd have to start fresh with the worst of both worlds--so-so haircuts that I actually had to pay for.
A few weeks into September and a few days out from official Chia-Pet sponsorship, I had a couple hours to spare for errands. So I took a walk down Wall Street looking for a barber. I stepped into the first one I saw and who should I behold but Miriam. She recognized me immediately. "Same haircut?" she asked me when I sat down. Same haircut, I said.
At one point in our conversation that followed, I made a weak joke about how the soft, yellow-blond hair of my childhood had transformed into this bland and wiry tangle. What Miriam said next caught me by surprise. "But it is beautiful," she said, pinching a tuft between her fingers. "It is ash."
Ash. I'd never heard someone call my hair ash before. "It is what the people, they ask for their highlights," said Miriam. And just like that, for the first time in my life, I saw the beauty in my own hair. It is ash, a subtle, complex beauty; a coat of many colors really, but with all distinctions honed within the tight spectrum of ice-white to bronze. What a gift, to see one's own hair with affection for the first time.
The end of the story is that Miriam convinced me, in what must be a minor miracle, to order a $25 bottle of shampoo. This is equal to the total amount of money I have spent on shampoo in the past five years combined. Beauty, though.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Old Rugged
I saw his billboard--www.VaticanHidesPedophiles.com--and drank it in. He saw me, and I saw that he saw, and we locked eyes. His twinkled like Kris Kringle. He wasn't irate; he was exuberant, rather like a convert. He shuffled forward and reached over two rows of passengers to hand me his pamphlet, a cut-and-copied sheet railing against the moral imbecility of Pope Benedict and all the progress haters in the Vatican. I drank this in, just like his sign, just like his face. I absorbed it. I drank.
The only butterflies came when I gave him a cross of blessing. By then, though, he was on the other side of a window and I was on the platform. It was a moment of perfect indeterminacy: he was looking down when I began the cross; the train rolled forward; my hand slid across the horizontal space toward the third nail; his neck creaked up; by the time his eyes could have possibly followed I was turned, taking my own way. And he passed beyond me.
Godspeed.
.
The only butterflies came when I gave him a cross of blessing. By then, though, he was on the other side of a window and I was on the platform. It was a moment of perfect indeterminacy: he was looking down when I began the cross; the train rolled forward; my hand slid across the horizontal space toward the third nail; his neck creaked up; by the time his eyes could have possibly followed I was turned, taking my own way. And he passed beyond me.
Godspeed.
.
Friday, July 11, 2008
On Venice Beach
The ocean is like my breath; except that it will go on longer.
If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.
The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.
But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.
Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.
As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.
If I hadn’t been told head of time that Venice Beach was something special, I wouldn’t have known it was special. The shops, bars, and motels lining Washington Boulevard all have a trapped feeling about them, like they were supposed to be quaint and cared for, like a small chestnut heirloom piece, but instead were discarded too soon, and so acquired the dust and nicks that make them look cheap. Strewn among the garbage of billboards and littered straws, they feel too deeply filed away in the immense warehouse of Los Angeles to ever be remembered and polished and restored again.
The beach, the actual Venice Beach, is hedged in by rock piles on either side that circumscribe how much of the ocean’s eternity the beachgoing public is allotted. Looking north along the shoreline, over the rock pile, mountains crowd in along the bend of what must be a beautiful natural harbor. The air, however, is so mixed with fumes that the green mountains have a spectral aspect that makes them seem much farther away than they are. They are ghosts in mid-day light, and the only passable route to their country, you sense, is not by walking the beach—there will be too many sharp and unnatural things sticking out of the sand, crowding you into private fence lines—but by the new natural way of the automobile. Duck into a small space, take safe passage through the hot pastel asphalt wasteland, and emerge onto another previously meted slice of sand meeting eternity.
But the miraculous thing—and the reason why your heart can still receive enough whist to write—is that eternity does seep in. The seagulls and shells are the first signs. They were not placed here. They were born here. They will die here; and the ocean will draw them out into itself, into its center far out beyond these noxious cotton-candy fumes that cling to this little thumbprint on the shore called Los Angeles. Out there where no country is seen, the ocean will caress their carcasses and flexible bird bones and sink them down deep into itself. They will be forgotten then; but they will not be lost.
Turning back upward toward the beach, back to the landscape of so many lost things, I saw a man who I did not recognize as a man at first. I was told there would be weird Californians on Venice Beach, but most of the people I saw were surfers flopping about and elbowing for more space in the tide waters, women whose tattooed hips and bellies bulged out of their bikinis, or middle-aged androgynes in sunglass-and-earbud helmets power jogging on the wet-pack. This man was unique. His face was invisible behind a tangled veil of charms, fishhook ornaments and Indian dreamcatchers, hanging from the brim of his hat. He stood completely still, and might have been doing so since the late 1960s, since the long gray hair that lay down his back was so ratty it seemed to have grown moss. The rest of him was covered in dark green and black canvas material that looked more like a broken-down tent than actual clothing.
As I passed by him, I considered stopping to pose the question, “who are you?” Instead, I carried on back to my hotel, satisfied at least that there are unexplored patches of eternity even further up, in, and among.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Itsy Bitsy Ideas
In the shower yesterday, I reached for my washcloth, hanging from the curtain rail, like usual. On the underside of the yellow terry cloth was a small brown spider, which, startled, I swiped away. The spider landed at the bottom of the tub, clearly wounded by the blow and the fall. He or she squirmed and kicked six remaining operable legs wildly in a panicked tarantella. As an act of second-order mercy, I directed some of the shower stream toward the spider, who was caught in a miniature eddy, struggled, weakly this time, for a few more seconds and then floated dead, like a speck of dirt, down toward the drain.
I’ve killed a lot of bugs this summer. Living in a basement apartment, they come out readily through all the cracks and spaces one finds in an old and sub-ideal house. Watching the spider struggle yesterday, I relived a familiar sentiment: a pinch of pity followed closely by a dusting of guilt. In almost every case this summer, however, I’ve swiped away this feeling with an idea as swift and deadly certain as my hand; namely, that an insect or arachnid, while possessing a “soul” in some Aristotelian sense of the word, is in no part constituted of an immortal, rational soul.
Correct ideas matter. I wield my belief about the nature of bug souls like a flyswatter. Without it, I would be compelled to act differently; I’d be resuscitating spiders and performing capture-and-release operations on pill bugs. Or, I’d ignore my qualms, and over time that dusting of guilt would settle, layer upon layer, obscuring and eventually encrusting my conscience. But between slavery to absurd compulsion and moral autoanesthesia lies the freedom of reason. I’m quite sure that not all of my intuitions are correct—there are simply too many contradictory influences out there, which have molded me, even beyond my knowing, for me to take the “just believe in yourself” message seriously—but I’m also quite sure that in developing the habit of ignoring my scruples, I would be neglecting to exercise one of my most important human faculties—and duties—at the risk of one day discovering that I had no conscience, not even a less-than-true-north conscience, at all.
Incorrect ideas matter, too. It I were wrong about the moral status of my spider victim (I don’t think I am, but if I were) my flyswatter of an idea would actually be more of a bloody knife. Not to belabor the point with obvious historical examples, but plenty of people have been convinced by wrong ideas and put them into practice with horrific consequences.
How to tell the difference? What reason helps us sort through reasons? Well, for one thing, “ye shall know a tree by its fruit.” Ideas whose implications are self-defeating, death-bringing, are not the ideas with which I care to ally myself. I also tend to trust the older ideas before the novel ones, which, given how long we’ve been swatting mosquitoes and kicking anthills, is bad news for the bugs.
I’ve killed a lot of bugs this summer. Living in a basement apartment, they come out readily through all the cracks and spaces one finds in an old and sub-ideal house. Watching the spider struggle yesterday, I relived a familiar sentiment: a pinch of pity followed closely by a dusting of guilt. In almost every case this summer, however, I’ve swiped away this feeling with an idea as swift and deadly certain as my hand; namely, that an insect or arachnid, while possessing a “soul” in some Aristotelian sense of the word, is in no part constituted of an immortal, rational soul.
Correct ideas matter. I wield my belief about the nature of bug souls like a flyswatter. Without it, I would be compelled to act differently; I’d be resuscitating spiders and performing capture-and-release operations on pill bugs. Or, I’d ignore my qualms, and over time that dusting of guilt would settle, layer upon layer, obscuring and eventually encrusting my conscience. But between slavery to absurd compulsion and moral autoanesthesia lies the freedom of reason. I’m quite sure that not all of my intuitions are correct—there are simply too many contradictory influences out there, which have molded me, even beyond my knowing, for me to take the “just believe in yourself” message seriously—but I’m also quite sure that in developing the habit of ignoring my scruples, I would be neglecting to exercise one of my most important human faculties—and duties—at the risk of one day discovering that I had no conscience, not even a less-than-true-north conscience, at all.
Incorrect ideas matter, too. It I were wrong about the moral status of my spider victim (I don’t think I am, but if I were) my flyswatter of an idea would actually be more of a bloody knife. Not to belabor the point with obvious historical examples, but plenty of people have been convinced by wrong ideas and put them into practice with horrific consequences.
How to tell the difference? What reason helps us sort through reasons? Well, for one thing, “ye shall know a tree by its fruit.” Ideas whose implications are self-defeating, death-bringing, are not the ideas with which I care to ally myself. I also tend to trust the older ideas before the novel ones, which, given how long we’ve been swatting mosquitoes and kicking anthills, is bad news for the bugs.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Returning Home on a Wednesday Evening
Before I even take off my suit—the sky! The sky! The sky!
It is gray and gold, darkening as the evening draws on. If I look straight up into the gauze, I see a patch of evening blue, rimmed with gold hanging above. There are gods and spirits there. There is so much there.
I have thought too often of late about what is on the ground. I have stopped to smell the roses on my way to work. I have looked for the beauty in my weedy overgrown lawn. I have rested upon my fondness for the hard-beaten grime of the sidewalks. I have not looked at the sky.
Love of the near and gritty is one thing. But the sky! The sky! The sky! To step into a small propeller plane and lift—be lifted. To bob and weave and spear through the space, so much empty, substantial space. Cool and gray and blue space—and gold resting on top, like the smile of your favorite just as she’s falling asleep.
Enough of this ground. Put me on a plane, a jumbo jet—instead of loving small things, I’ll love the way big things look small.
It is gray and gold, darkening as the evening draws on. If I look straight up into the gauze, I see a patch of evening blue, rimmed with gold hanging above. There are gods and spirits there. There is so much there.
I have thought too often of late about what is on the ground. I have stopped to smell the roses on my way to work. I have looked for the beauty in my weedy overgrown lawn. I have rested upon my fondness for the hard-beaten grime of the sidewalks. I have not looked at the sky.
Love of the near and gritty is one thing. But the sky! The sky! The sky! To step into a small propeller plane and lift—be lifted. To bob and weave and spear through the space, so much empty, substantial space. Cool and gray and blue space—and gold resting on top, like the smile of your favorite just as she’s falling asleep.
Enough of this ground. Put me on a plane, a jumbo jet—instead of loving small things, I’ll love the way big things look small.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Next to Godliness
My first day with my feet under me in the city, and I spent the better part of it embracing a toilet. But for good reason, I think.
Saturday, when I arrived, and Sunday, when I exhaled over mass and coffee and my favorite used bookstore were not real days in Washington, DC. They were still days of the in-between. I was still a newly-arrived, though a third-time returner and a happy one at that.
But Monday, Memorial Day, a big full day of being in the city lay ahead of me with as much freedom to use it as I could want. The plan was to enjoy a mid-morning jog, followed by an early lunch, and some leisure reading at the local coffee shop. This plan was derailed by a potato chip.
I saw said chip on my way out the door, running shoes laced and at the ready. I stooped to pick it up and throw it away, when the thought came to me: "I wonder when was the last time this floor was swept." Out came the broom. Under the table, behind the refrigerator, around the corner and down the hall to...the bathroom. The bathroom. I checked under the sink and found a bottle of Clorox spray, almost completely full. I looked at the shower--and then looked away again.
Three hours later, I had finished scrubbing every last object and crevasse, down to the plunger itself, and I could ask the question: why?
"Nesting" is the obvious answer, but that merely sticks a succinct label on my actions without explaining them. Here is what I think was going on: I live in a basement apartment with two other twenty-something men and in a situation like this inertia will lead you very quickly into a pigsty. The odds of keeping a place like this clean and smelling nice are stacked against you from the outset. Your choice is to either relent and force yourself to ignore the mess until you decide that you really can live amidst the hair and dirt and old soggy newspapers, or you can fight the looming forces of disorder, knowing they will renew their encroachment within a day. The image is of the old Norse gods staving off the giants and trolls for as long as they can, until their inevitable doom, or, without getting too grandiose, God separating the dark face with a ray of light.
There is something heroic about cleaning one's house. Disorder of any sort can be coped with either by anesthesia, numbing yourself, usually by giving yourself over to other distraction (which is a species of internal disorder), or by excision. The latter is less pleasant and will have to be done time and time again, but over time you find the task less painful and overwhelming.
It's rather like the choice between confession and secrecy.
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