Time to shock the world tonight

I got a haircut.

I’d been thinking of doing this for several weeks, and last Friday I called up my barber and made an appointment.  I told her I wanted a complete look change, take my hair back from shoulder-blade length to top-of-the-collar, trim the beard lots shorter and shape it more to the contour of my face instead of leaving it as a nineteenth-century spade beard, and what can we do about restyling the front so the thin patches aren’t quite so screamingly obvious?  She dealt with all of that, decided to layer the front a bit so it would fluff up slightly as well as stay out of my face (previously it was prone to trail, to my great annoyance).  She did what I told her, and just what I wanted done.  (This is why she’s one of only two people I’ve trusted to cut my hair since the late 1970s.)

Naturally, I had to take my glasses off to keep them out of the way while she was working, so I could see the general outline of what was going on but not the fine detail.  She finished, I put my black-framed aviators back on, and looked at….

Jerry fuckin’ Garcia.  The momentary resemblance was startling.  With my general build, and the amount of gray I’ve taken on, I looked like the early-Nineties Garcia.  (Later in the evening, with my glasses off and my hair slightly rumpled from a lie-down on the sofa, I exchanged his look for that of Ludwig van Beethoven.)

The Mahatma performs his concerto for medium-sized chainsaw.  Fnord.