Cancer Journal #55 Nov 2

 One final thing I do to fight cancer,  My last haircut was around Christmas, 2020.  I've gone "bushy headed" as I heard that someone has called me.  I'm following what's called the "Sampson Method", a European Cancer Therapy.       Just kidding.  Not about the long hair but its effect on cancer ( Although, if you google "Sampson" and "Cancer" together you get 6,600,000 hits so there might be something there).

I got a lot of hair on my head.  I feel the back of my head and it feels like luxuriant abundance.  Feels good. No luxuriant abundance on the top of my head but that's OK.  Fact is, I got too much hair--an unusual complaint for a man my age.  

Why don't I get it cut?  I could and I may.  Right now I feel like the male version of the little old lady wearing a purple dress with a pink scarf and a red beret.  Her personality is in full bloom if not her good judgement. She figures, "I can so 'phuff' I just will."

I see myself in the mirror, I think I look like Richard Simmons. the exercise guy who looks kind of silly to my thinking.  Prancing around in leotards.  Not quite what I'm going for.  I tell people that, I get a hoot of laughter that sounds like recognition and agreement before they say, "No, no.  You don't look like him."  I believe the initial reaction.*

A friend says I look like Jerry Rubin.  I'm sure he means Abby Hoffman.  The algorithm on my wife's phone thinks I look like Jerry Garcia.  I think I lack his eyes of injured vulnerability which in later years had an overlay of world weary but still--pretty smart smartphone.

Another friend whose politics are left wing reports that the FBI has designated me as a "Person of Interest" because I won the SDS good hair contest.  That, by itself. is reason not to get a haircut.  I'm tickled that in this alternate world, the SDS's mission has so trivialized as to run a good hair contest.  I'm tickled at the thought of my entering and winning such a contest.  And then the FBI finding that winning that contest should make me a "Person of Interest", a term carrying such harmless sounding menace.  Did you ever see the movie, "Burn After Reading"?  Reminds me of that.   

So I'll keep my hair, at least for a while.  Who knows, maybe it's warding off cancer.


*I've also looked in the mirror and seen William Kunstler, 1960s trial attorney to the New Left stars.   An improvement on Richmond Simmons I suppose but not a big one.  The man was pleased with himself in a way I found unpalatable.  I sensed that he had the mistaken idea that he had been granted enlightened insights not vouchsafed to the rest of us.   He must have had something going for him in the courtroom and lawyers don't have to be likeable to be effective but he wasn't what was good about the 1960's so far as I'm concerned.

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