MIDDLE AGE AND EMBRACING THE SUCK

Yesterday I went to my barber, Olivia, for my tri-weekly haircut. I estimate the hair I have was perhaps a half-inch long at the most, but it was too much: a few swipes of the electric razor later, it was nothing but stubble. Marine recruits have more hair. Before I left, I decided to come back not in three but two weeks: I don't want even that barely half inch. Just Kojack me.

To anyone who knew me in college, the idea of me rocking a nearly bald dome would be beyond belief. I was famous for my luxurious head of hair, which I modeled after James Dean and Mickey Rourke and Luke Perry, and infamous for my vanity about it. My college dorm-mates laughed at the sight of my "preening bucket" -- the bucket I took to the showers each morning which contained a brush, a blow-drier, gel, mousse, a comb, and God knows what else. I quite enjoyed this mockery. I enjoyed the jokes about me doubling for Vanilla Ice. I was proud of my heavy brown locks and was more than willing to endure some ribbing about it.

I remember the day when it finally sank in that I was losing that hair. I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and I compared the driver's license picture from my final year of college with the one just snapped. It struck me then that I had a lot more forehead. A lot more. I don't mean I was bald. I wasn't even what is generally referring to as balding. I just had...more forehead.

I began to sweat. As ridiculous as it sounds, a good deal of my identity had been invested in those follicles. They were part of my look, which was part of my vanity, which was part of my personality. I went into a state of denial, and after denial eroded in the face of the slowly growing forehead, I engaged in a bitter struggle to find hairstyles that worked. This struggle lasted almost twenty years, and the later half of it was very ugly indeed. Sometimes I'd go a whole year, or more, without a haircut, in hopes of compensating for fewer follicles. (This worked the first time, but never again.) Sometimes I'd rock the classic Caesar cut, which worked wonders until the quarter-sized bald spot on the back of my head grew to fifty-cent-piece, silver dollar, and finally teacup circumference. Sometimes, at the behest of my barber in Burbank, I'd powder the bald spot and grow out the front. Later, I grew out the front for almost two years and slicked it back, which bared yet more forehead but covered the growing desert in the back. I always congratulated myself on the success of these camouflage manuevers until I realized, usually through photography, that I was fooling no one but myself.

Not too long ago, I marched into the barber shop I've been utilizing here in York for several years, and told my cutter to let fly with those clippers. Just buzz the whole goddamn dome. I believe the number I selected was a No. 2. This looked pretty good to me, but it grew back all too quickly -- the central irony of baldness is that the hair you have grows like weeds -- so I returned and asked for a No. 1.5, and then a No. 1, which is the afformentioned Marine recruit buzz.

I'm like that: I will do everything humanly possible to avoid a decision I don't want to make, but when I finally make it, I run headlong at it like Sgt. Rock at the German lines, yelling "You wanna live forever?" between bursts of Tommy gun fire and hurling hand grenades. I do what folks in the military call "embracing the suck." Embracing the suck, I'm told, consists of not merely accepting that you are in a shitty situation, but opening your arms to it, and even learning how to enjoy it, whether on a philosophical or ironic level. It is, after all, unavoidable, so why bother crying and moaning?

Middle age is a damned strange business. Physically, I don't feel any different now than I did at thirty: I'm actually stronger, more muscular and probably a little more flexible. I've noticed no decline in stamina. Creatively, I'm doing better than ever, so there has been no cognitive decline. It's harder for me to lose weight, for sure, but I can still lose it, as I have documented on these very pages. Sexually I'm not twenty-one anymore, but show me a fifty year old man who is without having a Viagra I.V. The only real decline I can think of has been in terms of the quality of my sleep, but I've found ways to improve even that. And yet, according to the United Nations, old age begins at sixty. For me, that is nine years away. So I'd say you're only as old as you feel...but then I look in the mirror and remember I used to have James Dean hair, and I feel, well, kinda long in the tooth. Kinda gray in the muzzle. Kinda silver in the back. And I say to myself, "This is what it is, and you have to accept it. You have to embrace the suck."

It isn't easy. Not for me, anyway. I want to cry. I want to moan. The vanity of my youth persists in my mind like a poltergeist, and like a poltergeist gives me no rest on the days when a photograph or a video forces me to accept the 25 or 30 year old man I expect to see in the mirror is gone and ain't coming back. This happened to me recently, and at an inopportune time: celebrating the loss of almost fifteen pounds, I was sent nightly news footage of myself at a charity event...and I saw a bald, beefy, tired-looking guy who looked like he needed to lose another ten or fifteen pounds, easily. It was tough to take. I didn't get what I wanted after a lot of hard work. But rather than run to the nearest hair transplant center by way of a plastic surgeon specializing in liposuction, I just took a deep breath, sulked for the rest of the night, and then went back to the grind of shaving an ounce here, and an ounce there...and my head, now every two weeks.

Kierkegaard said that life was lived forward but understood backwards. He was more right than he knew. The more progress I make toward my real life goals, the further I get from my own physical ideal, and more I realize that the old me, the one which is evaporating, sloughing off, flaking away, is not going quietly or easily. I may be embracing the suck, but he is not. This poltergeist ain't getting exorcised quietly. He's gonna smash plates, up-end tables, spill drinks, blow out candles, and knock pictures off the wall. He's gonna crack windows and make thumping noises at three in the morning when all I want to do is sleep. Vanity is a bitch and doesn't want to be dumped. Who knows? Maybe this is a bit of a good thing. Maybe wanting to be young physically forces me to be as young, physically, as a fifty-one year old man can be. But chasing youth is a dangerous business, ultimately futile, and contains a note of tragic absurdity. The line between fighting the good fight and the cost-loss fallacy is fine, and middle-aged men don't always have the clearest or sharpest vision. It is, however, a little easier to see if you shave your head: at least the hair won't get in your eyes.