Column: Not Quite Nietzsche; Losing hair, losing sleep, can dignity be far behind?
Every morning, I wake up with a certain zeal about the new day.
This excitement generally stays with me as I crawl out of bed, pour myself a bowl of cereal and attend to my other morning duties. It isn’t until I prepare to shower that I look in the mirror and realize I’m balding.
If you’ve never had this experience, let me assure that it all but saps one of the will to live.
Things could be worse. I’m not completely bald – just really, really thin on top. I have plenty of hair on the sides and back of my head, but I’m afraid that worries me even more.
I have yet to meet a girl who finds the horseshoe look sexy. And if I did find one, I’m not sure that I could trust her judgment in other areas.
As cliché as it sounds, I never thought it would be me.
I always had plenty of hair and my teenaged self mercilessly laughed at the follicly challenged around me.
My grandfather had plenty of hair and we all know that hair loss is inherited from the mother’s father. I believed that, too.
Then I found enough of my hair in the shower drain to clothe a moderately sized puppy.
Once I finally got up the courage to talk about it, I discovered an entire subculture built around hair loss. There are special shampoos, treatments, techniques and groups designed to stem off hair loss.
Collectively, this group is called late-night television.
After “South Park” and “Cheaters,” there runs a string of infomercials whose sole aim is to exploit the hairless among us. And, after watching the virile, hairy guys of “Cheaters,” it’s pretty easy to be exploited.
So far as I can tell, the feelings associated with male-pattern baldness are the closest thing this side of the fence has to post-partum depression.
In both cases, we’ve lost something important, and the loss is only made more tragic by our knowing that, in 18 years, the hair and the kids will be completely gone.
And while I’m sure there’s a lucrative market for my memoir titled “The Yeti in Me: One Man’s Journey from Hair Loss to Self Realization,” I realize that it is the same old story: What does it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? Or, in my case, what does it profit a man if he enters the Oprah Book Club hall of fame but loses his hair?
Look at James Frey. Those widow’s peaks are trouble.
This is a lot to chew on every morning. And so I buy expensive, hair-growing shampoo, practice the gentlest scalp-scrubbing techniques and am on a first-name basis with the local spray-on hair rep.
I religiously check my hair at every mirror I come across, just to ensure that I haven’t lost any hair during the day to the wind or to birds looking for stray nest-building materials.
The whole process is a mantra of action that, though mostly ineffective, makes me feel like I’m doing something.
And if I’ve learned anything from my hair loss, it is that something is always and undeniably better than nothing.
Zach Pendleton is a junior in English. Comments and condolences can be sent to
zpendleton@cc.usu.edu.