Thank you, Bruce

I don’t remember my first haircut.  Who does?  I’m sure, having many times witnessed the trauma of children enduring their first coif, that my parents took me to a local barber shop sat me on the booster seat and tried to comfort me against this most egregious violation of personal dignity ever.  And I’m sure there efforts were unsuccessful.

My earliest memories related to personal hair grooming are of my father shearing my tresses with a whirring clipper like a shepherd collecting wool from his flock.  In the early days of my school career I sported a butch.  This was not problematic as around 1960 the butch was considered a manly styling choice; not as cool as a crew cut but better than a Poindexter.  Now I’m sure, knowing the philosophy by which my father steered his life, that his choice was not based on some appeal to fashion chic.  No, he calculated the savings he would realize by buying a cheap trimmer and amortizing its cost over the number of haircuts I would need until I got a job and could pay for my own trips to the barber.  The choice of style was driven solely by the ease and speed by which the results could be achieved.  Sometimes, on a crisp autumn evening, I’ll flash back to the family garage, my father’s homemade workbench stool and the smell of gas fumes emanating from the Buick.

After completing my fifth-grade studies, we moved to a larger home which meant I would be attending a new school.  During my first haircut at the new location, I broached the subject of letting my hair grow out to a less juvenile length.  After all, I was going to be eleven years old when the new school term started and my class would be populated by girls who had not yet formed the impression that I was a hopeless geek.  I don’t know whether he had compassion for my plea or just figured such a change would allow him more time to hide behind the daily newspaper, but he acquiesced and so began my relationship with Al the local barber, who was quite the eloquent conversationalist compared to Al (my father).  I learned that it was not necessary for one to remain completely motionless, including movement of the lips, for one to receive a precision, quality trim.  And so I was introduced to the business man’s special; razor tapered on the back and sides, off of the ears, parted on the left, gooped in place with Brylcreem.  For the next seven years, Al was my date every other week.  He wisely dissuaded me from a Beatle cut.  He deftly redirected my desire to wear bangs like Mr. Spock.

Upon graduation from High School (Go Monarchs!) and the liberation afforded by personal ownership of one’s first car, I left Al in favor of the discount haircuts offered by the Exchange Barber Shop on board 32^nd St. Naval Station.  As my father had been a career sailor (twenty-years) all dependent services were extended to me until I reached the age of twenty-three.  With the price of gas seemingly static at about thirty cents per gallon, it was more economic to drive the fifteen miles to the base and save about a dollar (over fifty percent) on the price of the haircut.  I reasoned that know I was paying for my own haircuts, I could exercise some control over the style (not the only example of my proclivity to totally misread the tea leaves of reason).  I would go to great lengths describing to the base barbers (it seemed I never got the same one twice) exactly how I wanted my hair to look; a little longer, hair over the ears, blocked in back, parted in the middle.  They would go to work and low and behold, when finished, I would have the business man’s special; razor tapered on the back and sides, off of the ears, parted on the left, gooped in place with Brylcreem.  My hair looked suspiciously just like a regulation Navy cut.  I am so thankful my father had not joined the Marine Corps.  Or maybe it was a communication problem born of my lack of skill with the Tagalog dialect.

Sometime during my first year of college (the first time) I just stopped getting my hair cut.  Over the next several months my tresses grew to cover my ears, fall over my collar and eventually touch my shoulders, almost.  I was in style.  When I returned to campus for my second year, I looked like a college student.  I do not believe this added to the level of confidence felt by my faculty advisor when I was elected to the position of President of the Criminology Club.  The atmosphere in the Criminology Department was a bit more staid than that of the general student population.  Though he said nothing, I could tell he was relieved when I showed up for the second meeting of the semester in a cut more befitting the office.  By this time, I had abandoned the base barbers and returned to Al.  He was a nice guy and, generational differences notwithstanding, we had a rapport; business man’s special; razor tapered on the back and sides, off of the ears, parted on the left, gooped in place with Brylcreem.

Throughout the remainder of my Community College career and into my short career in law enforcement, I maintained my hair to uniform standards.  After my departure from the Sheriff’s Office, I generally let my hair grow a bit longer and was lucky enough to be involved with women who would scissors trim my hair for me.  That is until I encountered The Woman!  It is amazing what compromises to our principles we will make for love.  She introduced me to a barber of her choice (I believe “hair stylist” is the appropriate moniker) and was paying some outrageous price for the privilege of meeting my eventual ex-wife’s standards.  This was the late seventies, and while I never embraced the disco culture, styled locks was the mode-o-day.

As college graduation approached (the second time) my concerns turned to landing a lucrative job.  I had the hair stylist shorten things up a bit to make me presentable for the accounting profession.  I don’t think it worked.  When I finally did land a job in my chosen field of endeavor, me and the (soon to be ex-) wife relocated to Los Angeles.  At first, I continued to patronize my San Diego stylist whenever I would return home to visit friends and family.  But after the inevitable (and I am willing to accept all responsibility) separation, I turned to Super Cuts.  And there I stayed for several years.

With the advance of society, so it went that hair styles throughout the 80s and 90s tended to shorten.  Then, with the advent of the 21^st Century, the bad boy trend of purposely mussed hair became all the rage (and seems to remain so… Comb your firggin’ hair!).  I couldn’t stand it.  My logical approach to all things would not allow me to accept the paradox of spending so much time and money on a haircut intended to give the impression that absolutely no time and money had been involved in its evolution.  By this time, my own hair was thinning noticeably.  I could no longer pull off the gentleman’s business cut, parted on the side.  The part now started half-way up my skull.

All considered I do fall on the lucky, if not blessed, side of the masculine hair-loss conundrum.  I have inherited my father’s hair.  Now this confused me somewhat because, I was raised to believe the myth that a man receives his hair gene from his mother.  And my mother’s brothers were all Bozo bald; all eight of them.  To a man they used the side-to-side comb over.  Holiday get-togethers resembled a Turtle Wax convention. My father, while his hair thinned considerably over his lifetime, did not develop male pattern baldness.  But he was still slave to his vanity and would let the hair on the top of his head grow long and comb it straight back to cover his scalp.  My fervent belief that misdirection is tantamount to self-delusion would not allow me to follow either path.

With retirement, I eschewed the world of hair salons and began to patronize barbers again.  I had one that would share his most intimate opinions on how to please a woman; our relationship did not last long.  Next was the pretty Mexican woman who was always enthusiastic to see me, even though I could only catch about half of her heavily accented discourse.  But alas, the owner of her shop retired to Minnesota (Minnesota, really?) and she had to relocate to a shop in Oceanside.  She was worth a thirty-minute drive, but not ninety.

So I stumbled into a shop in Valley Center and met my current barber, Tami.  And in the duration of our commercial relationship, she has taken me from a “two” to a “quarter” (you guys with short hair know what I mean).  That’s right; I’m back where I started in the old garage.  And I love it.  You can’t imagine the money I save of shampoo!  When I camp, I no longer feel there is a greasy beaver in residence on my head.  My hair is never mussed.  Rubbing the stubble with my palm makes me feel happy.  And I owe it all to the baby-boomer who made it cool to be bald.

  Thank you, Bruce Willis, for illuminating our path with the sheen from your chrome dome.

The Tao of Robert Duvall

The other day I was sitting outside Starbucks, drinking coffee and reading a book about Teddy Roosevelt.  Wait a minute, don’t give up yet.  This post is not about Teddy Roosevelt.  It is not about Starbucks.  It is about that singularly interesting subject, me.  Yeah, I thought that would pique your interest.  Now back to the story.

As I stated, I was reading a book and, as my finely tuned survival skills allow, catching dribs and drabs (mostly drabs… ha, ha, ha) of the conversations of my fellow Starbucks patrons.  My brain began to make sense of a pattern of information… Beatles… Rolling Stones… Eric Clapton; the music of my generation.  I paused my reading to take a look at the fellows with whom I might have something in common and was annoyed to discover a group of old men.  Gentlemen sporting bald heads, gray whiskers, pot bellies and Hawaiian shirts; they should be discussing the Big Band Era, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman.

I sat for a moment, observing these interloping critics and slowly realized… they were wrinkle-sporting members of the baby boom generation… MY G-G-G-eneration!   Somewhere, sometime, probably in the dark of night, my youth had been stolen.  Damn you, Peter Pan… why did you leave me behind?!?!

I checked my mental calendar.  Sure enough, in just about two week’s time, I would be celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of my birth.  What the hell had happened?  There I was, just a blink or two ago, cruising down Main Street (El Cajon, California… there really is a Main St.) in my 1966 Pontiac La Mans and now I was sitting outside a Starbucks in Escondido, California (life has not taken me far, geographically) teetering on the brink of senility in the company of old men with whom I have way too much in common.

Being uncommonly self aware, I should have recognized this epiphany looming on the horizon for some time.  I had sensed I was becoming invisible: Men walk by without assessing your size or condition; younger women no longer notice your glances, or if they do their acknowledgement wears a patina of pathos.  The front sight never comes into focus (shooting reference, tyros).  I’ve been invited to only one party in the past three years.  It is true, I have become an anachronism.

Such realization is accompanied by soul searching.  Who have I become?  I will never again be able to ask myself, “What would James Bond do?” or “How would Sergeant Saunders handle this?”  No, I would have to find a new source of inspiration; someone hampered by the same downgraded abilities with which I am now burdened.  I need a persona I could emulate who is not going so quietly into that good night:  A man who refuses to let his advancing years force compromise on his beliefs and values.

When one is young, one will have plenty of opportunity to correct ones course.  If a role model is a bit rebellious and demonstrates coolness toward authority, it can be blamed on youth and dismissed as a feature of immaturity.  But a wizened man would never display cool behavior.  The serious senior citizen wishes to display confidence born of experience and reason, not teen-aged bravado resulting from insecurity and intellectual dearth.  The wizened man is such because of his life experience.  It is too late to experiment.  He needs to know which way the wind blows and whether to take it face on or turn a deflecting shoulder.

A major challenge in identifying an ersatz role model is the presence of flaws in all human beings.  Vanity, pride, fear of mortality all conspire to direct a man towards compromise.  If we wanted imperfection, we could rely on ourselves.  But it is the fictional character in which we find the unblinking, truly moral hero.  As I search my mental rolodex, (you young smart-phone aficionados should use the contraption to look up rolodex and see what it is) I find one character that I would most like to emulate in my later years, Hub McCann from Secondhand Lions (New Line Cinema-2003) as played by Robert Duvall.  Having lived an active life, I would now eschew the search for trouble, and sit on my front porch waiting for trouble to come looking for me, with my shotgun resting handily on my lap. And this would be the tao:

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money... money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this... that love... true love never dies! Remember that boy... remember that. Doesn't matter if it is true or not, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in... got that?" 

Blah, blah, blah...

Here we are in the doldrums of August and I am hard pressed to find thematic inspiration.  The world, it seems, is disintegrating at our very feet.  Of course, a case may be made that this process began the moment the first of our arboreal ancestors climbed down from his perch above the African savanna and made terra firma his domain.  So rather than deliver the usual eagerly anticipated lesson today’s post will be limited to random thoughts.

We lost a magnificent Hollywood icon this week; someone who was loved by all audiences.  Their contribution to American pop-culture will forever be remembered.  I speak of course of Lauren Bacall.  Oh yeah, some comic named Robin Williams died too.

“You do know how to whistle, don’t you Steve?

  Just put your lips together and blow.”

It seems the Arabs and the Israelis are still at it.  It seems the Arabs and the Kurds are still at it.  It seems the Arabs and the Americans are still at it.  It seems the Arabs and the Arabs are still at it.  What perplexes me is why we don’t just leave those poor wanderers alone.  After all, they are only asking for a world-wide religion and a little goat meat.  And they’ve been asking for the goat meat for three thousand years (long before Mohammed and Islam).  You have to give them credit for keeping their eye on the prize.

Are all of you youngins’ out there practicing your Russian?  It’s going to come in handy when you’re fighting to take back the Ukraine.

There are race riots nightly in the suburbs of St. Louis over the death of a teenager at the hands of a police officer.  I wasn’t there and have no insight into what happened or where to place blame.  But I kind of like a philosophy that proposes to quell unrest by the ad hoc distribution of athletic footwear.

This month’s juicy raspberry for political correctness run amok goes to ESPN.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about consider yourself lucky and go back to watching cartoons.  Oh, nice panamas by the way.

New Flash:  This week’s inter-squad practice between the Oakland Raiders and Dallas Cowboys erupted in violence!  Now who could have foreseen that?  On the subject of Cowboy surprises, owner Jerry Jones, 71 year-old billionaire, was photographed groping an attractive woman.  Now what’s the use of working hard enough to amass that kind of wealth if you can’t get a little cuddle now and then?  Maybe if Jerry would spend more time on women and less interfering with his coaching staff, the Cowboys could get into the playoffs.  Okay, maybe not.

I watched a new show on the American Heroes Channel titled Gunslingers that purports to deliver to the faithful the definitive narrative on the classic shootouts of the old west.  My opinion; Billy the Kid is still a sniveling, cowardly murderer and Sheriff Pat Garret did his duty!

If the populations of Honduras, El Salvador et al are migrating to the United States, does that mean we can reduce foreign aid to those countries to offset the cost of social services their refugees will enjoy here?

The clock on the wall in unison with the voices in my head are telling me it’s time for my next dose of the medication, so TTFN.

What Would Popeye Do?

It would be honest of me to say, a great deal of my intellectual development was forged in the furnace of cartoons.  I love animation of all genres.  My first television memories are of The Mickey Mouse Club; watched at my grandparents’ home in Sterling, Colorado when I was three years old. My mother and I were living there while my dad was serving our country in the Western Pacific.  Each afternoon, before American Bandstand (if you don’t know American Bandstand, now would be a good time for you to ask an authority figure to change your diaper), all us wee tykes would gather ‘round the tube to share in the frivolity that was The Mickey Mouse Club.  

Then being too young to appreciate the attributes of (I have been led to understand I was not a breast-fed baby) Annette Funicello, I considered the live action portion of the program just a waste of time.  But if my memory serves, each episode presented two animated shorts which made all of the singing and dancing tolerable.  The cartoons of course were theatrical release short features that accompanied Disney films to movie houses.  While the presentation quality of television did not begin to match that experienced in the local Odeon, it was good enough for this little myopic tot and I didn’t have to sit through two feature length movies (if you are old enough to remember double features, now would be a good time to ask someone in authority to change your Depends) to get my Donald Duck fix.

My next memory of cartoons coincides with our return to San Diego.  Hanna-Barbara ruled the airwaves with mindless drivel like Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear.  What I remember most about these production line offerings is that they afforded no avenue for real cerebral growth.  Once you learned Huck was inevitably going to be trounced by an escaped gorilla and Yogi would never enjoy the epicurean delights that promised to be in the pilfered pic-a-nic basket, you had mastered the course.  Today, if I try to watch any of these “classics” on Boomerang (that’s the Cartoon Network’s retro channel), I usually fall asleep before the first screech of tires or the discordant sound of a guitar being broken over someone’s head; “El Kabong!”

Once I started school (coincidently, I don’t believe there was any kind of a communist plot involved), I discovered the genius of Jay Ward.  “Who?” you ask: The creator of Rocky and Bullwinkle; Dudley Do-right; George of the Jungle (“Heh, heh, heh; Chicken ala king!”); Super Chicken; et al. While silly enough to keep a kid entertained, these cartoons were equally appealing to the adult funny bone.  Their second tier of humor could be quite ribald to the tuned ear.  

I would identify the most valuable lessons as: how to be discreetly sarcastic; and the absurdity extant in imminent horrific possibilities; to wit, Boris and Natasha were Eastern Bloc spies plying their terrorist trade during the height of the Cold War!  The one problem with some of the Jay Ward cartoons we their episodic, cliff-hanger style.  When I am lucky enough to run across an airing I am challenged to understand the goings on; another similarity to real life.

I think everyone will agree that the crème-de-le-crème of short subject theatrical cartoons came from Warner Bros. studios.  Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Tweetie Bird, Sylvester: there is just not enough time or paper to complete the list.  Unfortunately, in my early youth, they were only available at the cinema.  But in 1960, ABC aired a weekly, prime-time series, The Bugs Bunny Show, each episode of which featured three selections from their Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes theatrical cartoons.  

Unfortunately for true aficionados, their library did not include offerings from prior to 1949, which had the highest level of artistic and production quality.  I guess when you are six of seven years old, you can’t appreciate the difference.  But if you have the opportunity to screen some of early product from the Leon Schlesinger (producer) era you will find they hold up artistically (story telling, character design) and technically (animation, background, music track) as well as anything produced digitally today.

There were other studios as well:  MGM produced the likes of Barney Bear, Tom and Jerry, Droopy et al: good artwork but repetitive stories.  I remember Woody the Woodpecker from Universal Pictures (Walter Lantz Studios) along with Chilly Willy, Andy Panda and a truckload of other nerve touching animals that taught us being louder than the other guy was the secret to success.  But among all of these studios, perhaps the most culturally significant was Fleischer Studios (renamed Famous Studios, then Paramount Studios) because they gave us Popeye the Sailor.

To be fair, Popeye was not a creation of the animation college, but rather claimed a higher pedigree from the more sophisticated world of print comics.  He was an added character to the long-popular strip, Thimble Theatre created by Elzie Segar (popularly known by just his last name and pronounced for effect as “see-gar”, like a cheap cigar).  In 1933, Fleischer Studios transformed the comic strip into a series of theatrical cartoon shorts released by Paramount Pictures.

What sets Popeye apart from other period cartoons was his deeply engrained sense of right and wrong.  He always conducted his own affairs in an honorable way and expected the same of those around him.  He paid respect when due and demanded the same in return.  His moral philosophy or “Tao” could be summed up in his theme song:

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm one tough Gazookus, which hates all Palookas.

Wot ain't on the up and square.

I biffs 'em and buffs 'em and always out roughs 'em

but none of 'em gets nowhere.

If anyone dares to risk my "Fisk", It's "Boff" an' it's "Wham" un'erstan'?

So keep "Good Be-hav-or", That's your one life saver

With Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

I'm strong to the finich, cause I eats me spinach.

I'm Popeye the Sailor Man.

It is an approach to personal relationships that I adopted at an early stage of my own life.  Fortunately for me, I was built more like Bluto and less like Popeye so I was rarely tested.  But times have changed considerably since the beginning of the Twentieth Century and such strong-armed behavior is no longer tolerated.  The age of enlightenment (somehow attributed to Aquarius) taught us peace is the ultimate goal.  Today society mandates we rely on officialdom to resolve our differences.  We can see by looking at the world around us how effective that approach has been.

While I am now too old and damaged to go around challenging people to do the right, courteous thing I sometimes long for a more self-regulated society and when tried by the ill behavior of others wonder to myself (because these kinds of thoughts are best not shared with the population at large) ,”What would Popeye do?”

And I believe the truth is, he’d do about twenty-five to life.  Unless the script was being written by Oliver Stone, in which case he would probably be doing Wimpy.