The barber's cruel prank

Today I saw I man who looked utterly normal except for one thing. He was stocky, neither tall nor short, and he wore a conservative green button-down tucked into clean blue jeans. His glasses were of a sensible style and the face they rode upon was stolid, wide, and unremarkable. What was remarkable was his hair: he had the conventional close cut favored by regular guys who are just beginning to go bald, but there was a two-inch strip missing from it. From his forehead to the back of his neck, that hair had been shorn away, leaving him with a kind of reverse-mohawk. Compounding the strangeness, this ribbon of bare scalp wasn’t even centered on his head–it was a few centimeters to the side.

Now, from my time as a hospital employee, I know what pre-surgery shave jobs look like. This wasn’t one of them. This could only have been one thing: a bizarre personal decision or an angry barber. One swipe of the electric razor and all of a sudden complete strangers are writing about you on their webpages, wondering what you could have said to provoke such a thing. However, if this was the look he was going for, this gentleman is obviously an eccentric to be reckoned with. It’s easy to get an outré hair-style, after all, but combining an outré hair-style with a resolute suburban-Republican whitebread vibe takes some courage.

My money is on the pissed-off barber, though.