The Challenge is Gone

Usually when I go to write something in this here blog thing, I have to focus all of my will on making it even remotely interesting. There needs to be colorful metaphors, rambling asides, and exciting misadventures just to get people to stop by.

But today, the challenge is gone, because this story is so straight-up bizarre, there's no need for anything but the facts.

FACTS:

• My hair looks like crap. Too long on the sides, way too flat on top, I look like a Muppet.
• I've been meaning to get it cut for about a week now, but I keep forgetting and rote-memory driving home from work every day.
• Yesterday I got out of work wicked late, so when I got to the place I usually go to, it was closed and I had to look around for a different place.
• I find this tiny little salon wedged in a corner of the shopping center I'm at. The windows are very dark. There are red Christmas light strings just randomly hanging down from the ceiling in front of the windows. It looks pretty closed, but there is a "Welcome Open" sign in the door.

OPINIONS:

• I walk in [despite my grave misgivings] and poke around. This absolutely insane looking old woman, who's hair is a cross between The Bride of Frankenstine and Condoleza Rice and then spray painted silver, pops up from behind the counter and asks if I am there 'for the haircuts.'
• I reluctantly say yes. She grabs my arm in a death grip, steers me to the nearest chair, drapes a towel over my shoulders, and proceeds to start attacking my hair with a pair of scissors. And attacking is the only way to describe it - it's like my hair has done her wrong and she is carefully circling it and occasionally striking at it like a cobra.
• All the while, she keeps up a most impressive broken English monologue, mostly concerning how she likes my hair. Her thought process gets stuck on the word 'luscious' and she starts repeating it over and over like a record skipping. Luscious, luscious, luscious...

INSANITIES:

• I am very very frightened.
• She finishes the sides [I guess] and sort of rounds off the edges on my neck and around my ears. "Now, now now, the top!" She starting rubbing my scalp really hard with the handle of her scissors.
• I do not run screaming from the building. [This is a mistake in hindsight.]
• After about three cuts, she begins her monologue anew. I will try to recreate it here from memory: "You, you, your hair. I like this. This, this hair, it is good. Good good, like like like like like [I'm not even kidding, the 'like's went on for a good two minutes] like like I should not be cutting this hair, it it it, it is lovely. You know what what what I will do? I I I I I I am going to only cut this first half. I am texturizing [the word texturizing has never sounded more menacing, ever] this this top part, here here here right here [a particularly vicious strike with the scissors accompanies each 'here' and then I am nearly impaled through the head on the 'right here'] and and and I will cut it no more. It is perrrfect the way it is." [just to note, she never once stopped jabbing at my hair with the scissors the entire time the monologue was going on.]
• "AND AND AND [wild gestures with the scissors as she whips the towel off of my shoulders] I will only charge you half the price, because because you only had HALF of a haircut.
• I feel as though I have witnessed some sort of experimental avant garde art installment, wherein I was an unwitting prop. I keep expecting her to take a bow.
• But nothing of the sort happens, I run from the store only ten dollars lighter, and the cut really isn't that bad. Sort of a little chunky on top, and a little longer than I like. But since I got to keep my life as part of the deal, I'm pretty okay with the whole thing.

I knew I should have just gone with the bald.