The sun is out this morning in that slanted, impotent way that says winter is knocking on the door.  Still, it’s a beautiful brown and yellow morning, a goose bumps on the bare arms kind of morning, a morning when I can’t decide whether to sit inside and focus on work or go for a walk before winter stops knocking and bursts in.  The “I” that sits between these opposing voices in my head decides to compromise, which is a polite way of admitting to cowardice, the unwillingness to face my multiple selves and make a decision.  I drove to the store, did my shopping for dinner, picked up the laundry, and strolled to the barbershop, thereby mollifying the voice that demands productivity while providing some relief to the voice that craves beauty.  I got outside, and I did chores.

            While shopping, I bumped into my barber, a tall rounded guy with a handlebar mustache and receding hairline, the kind of guy who inserts the word “buddy” into virtually every sentence, like, “Getting the shopping done there buddy?”  He’s a good guy, and he’s been my barber for fifteen years.  I still don’t know his name, and he doesn’t know mine.  We understand the limits of our relationship, and, I think he likes it that way.  

            I climb up into the old-fashion barber’s chair, the massive thing on a swivel with the flat metal footrest, and wait for him to say, “So, how you want it, buddy?”  I suppose for people with a full head of hair there are multiple answers to that question.  In my situation, that is not the case.  I really have only one option, a buzz cut.  The only choice is the guard to use.  For the past ten years it’s been the same, a number two.  I am pretty confident my barber knows exactly what I will say, but he genuinely waits until I say it before reaching for either his scissors – a device that has absolutely no use in my case – or his buzz cutter.  I think there must be a confidential barber’s code of conduct never to assume anything about a head of hair, or in my case the lack thereof.  “I’ll take a number two and buzz it.”  Playing along is my way of letting him know I appreciate his fine manners. 

            His shop, squeezed between a restaurant and laundry, across the street from the QFC, has been in the same location for decades.  His father started the business. Father and son look exactly alike except the father – God love him – is completely bald.  His father used to be my barber until he retired and started painting.  Several of his works hang on the wall.  He was a better barber than a painter, although I am no art critic.  The only other item on the wall is a quote.  It says: “God only made so many perfect heads.  The rest he covered with hair.” 

            I sit in the barber chair by the big plate glass window looking out onto the sidewalk.  The other barber chair, the one his dad used, sits next to me like the empty chair at the dinner table reserved for the Holy Spirit.  The television hanging in the corner of the room is tuned to an “Avengers” episode.  I mistook the show for an old Star Trek episode, but my barber corrected me.  “No, buddy, that’s not Star Trek.  That’s the Avengers.”  Somehow, and I don’t recall if I encouraged this or it just happened, my barber, while buzzing my head, a process that takes approximately fifteen minutes, explained to me the plot of the program.  On screen, as he is explaining things, is a mutant, somewhat humanoid, green-skinned creature pointing a laser gun at a sleeping, fully human man dressed in what I mistakenly thought was a uniform of a member of Star Fleet Command.  The green humanoid is apparently experiencing a moment of existential crisis as he wrestles with whether or not to obliterate the human.  He doesn’t.

            “No, buddy.  They aren’t even in the Alpha Zone.  They got hit by a ray.  They’re 60,000 light years away in the Delta Zone.  They would have to travel at Warp Ten for ten years to make it back.  They can’t do that.  It would use up their dilithium crystals.”  He pauses to go gently with the razor around my ears.  “Plus, buddy, they’d have to stop for food somewhere along the way.” 

            I don’t know how to respond to this not only because I have only a vague sense of what he is talking about, but because he is so matter of fact, like he’s talking about restoring one of his vintage cars, that I start experiencing a wrinkle in my personal time-space continuum.  The next thing I hear, and I don’t know how much I did not hear before tuning back in, my barber is saying, “…because the Romulans and Vulcans are related, buddy, but the Vulcans decided to be all peaceful and shit.”

            The number two razor switches off, my barber spins the chair around so I can see his handiwork in the mirror, and I nod in a dazed and confused way that he accepts as my good to go.  Twenty-one dollars later I am back on the sidewalk trying to remember both what planet I am on and where I parked. 

            I’ve always known that a barbershop is to guys what the bathroom in a luxury hotel must be to a group of women.  It’s a sanctuary, a place of free association.  The rules of physics and logic don’t have to apply.  For at least the length of time it takes to buzz my head, Spock and Kirk are real, and one can ponder the philosophical implications of being stranded 60,000 light years from home.  Things said inside a barbershop are funny precisely because we are aware of how absurd they are, and, at the same time, how much fun it is to pretend the absurd is the real.  Where would they stop on that 60,000 light year voyage to get food?

            In exactly the opposite way, absurd things said outside a barbershop are not so funny.  Listening to Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani or Lindsey Graham or Mitch McConnell feels like one of those conversations that should be taking place in a barbershop, but isn’t.  When men dismiss an unequivocal abuse of power as if it were idle chitchat at a cocktail party, there is no humor in their absurdity, only madness, a kind of madness that makes everyone uncomfortable because none of us knows where it leads.