The haircut
Today I’m getting a short haircut. It’s been near or at 100 every day for a week, and working in that heat (with a Code Orange ozone alert every day) has been beating me down some. I’ll be 57 in November; and on the hot days I feel like I’m financially bunkered down in a 30-year-old’s job with pretty low pay.
Funny thing is, if this position doesn’t disappear in the coming storm, I’ll be counted one of the lucky ones. And as jobs go, this is a good job (aside from low pay, I can go to the dentist now and pay only 20%). It is not overly repetitious. It requires a certain amount of creative and collective thought; and my three co-workers are intelligent, interesting, and compaionable.
I work in a job that actually abates the waste of development: deconstruction. Last week, we rescued tons of hardwood lumber from the landfill.
I haul materials from the deconstruction sites in a deisel F-650 with a dumpable flatbed. Filling it up two days ago cost nearly $300. I don’t even leave the (resale) store with it unless I know I can haul a minimum of $1000 in materials (we all cram into one utility pickup when the big truck stays put). I figured out that I am spending $40 a week just to drive to and from work… so I work almost three hours a week just to get to work; and I drive five hours a week in commute-time… so that’s eight hours a week, when there are no auto repairs or maintenance, that gets burnt up as car-time… on a job that requires two vehicles and two trailers and one skid-steer machine just to happen.
This is called a “green” job. It is, in fact, a greener job than using a hydraulic excavator to crunch the whole house into pieces small enough to haul away to a landfill. But when I realize that the principalities and powers do not think about practical priorities — like reserving the remaining processed petroleum for specific uses that are directed at redesigning the built environment to ensure that future generations don’t suffer for the accumulated stupidities of those same principalities and powers — I realize that what makes sense and what makes sense to The Market only converge briefly before the iatrogeneic logics of “progress” take over.
“Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.”
Bigger irony. The most common reason people hire us instead of the big excavator is that they have decided to replace a perfectly sound and often expensive home with a bigger, more expensive home. We work for a charitable organization, so the recovered materials can be claimed as tax deductions… offsetting our fee. We take longer, obviously, than the Big Machines, so there has to be some incentive… that, and a certain conscience balm.
We depend — market logic here — on development to abate the waste of development.
But if it’s going to be done anyway, better that we take it apart and rescue materials, right? Two contradictory things can be true at the same time. Ten contradictory things can be true at the same time. It’s exhausting to think about it.
Scary, too, if you pay attention to the arcane details of our period and you’ve lost confidence in the comfort-cooing of “experts” who are there to reassure us that we are in a cyclic, even small, downturn… like riding over a small swell in our boat. Don’t look up at the horizon though.
Under those dark clouds is a lot of water, and under all that water, there is a very unstable tectonic plate. Moreover, our boat is made of layers of newspaper and glue, tacked over a chicken-wire frame.
So what can I do. It’s been 100 degrees. I’m in debt.
I’m havng my hair cut short.
Miraculix:
I can relate Stan.
When the spouse and I bolted the states in late 2002, bound for her ancestral farm and the act of renovation — as well as helping her aging parents live out their waning years in relative grace — I stopped sporting “conservative camouflage” (read: clipper cut) and stopped cutting it entirely.
Spent the next four years “doing battle” with a handicapped uncle, as I emptied his “playground” of thirty years worth of accumulated junk, in which he’d had nearly five years alone to really muck it up something fierce. You wouldn’t believe the nylon twine & baling wire constructions I survived.
When the time came to actually start putting to practice what I’d been reading about stone masonry for historic buildings (c.1751), my nearly five-year-old tail suddenly became a liability. For nearly a month, each day I struggled to wash away the stubborn grey dust was one day closer to…
…the clippers. And short it will stay, though definitely not regulation, until I’m through with the building. The wife and all my rock and roll friends miss it, as do I now and again, rather like an amputee with a ghost limb. And that’s the thing about hair: it grows back.
Happy shearing!
10 June 2008, 8:25 amMichael Anderson:
I’ve clipped my own hair for quite a few years now (3/4″ butch guard on a clipper every month or so), and I find it satisfying for a number of reasons. First, it is absolutely ridiculous to PAY someone $12-15 to do exactly the same thing I can do for free, and with practice, as well. I know those folks don’t make a lot of money doing what they do (like me), but I just can’t in good conscience support Corporatist Tonsorial Imperatives…since I have to support it some ways just to stay alive. No hair dryer needed, also—a step in the energy-saving direction.
I am 57, also, and a musician by trade (jazz, blues, country)….not a lot of money—I have to try and work with as many people as I can, and I use a lot of gas, too (so far the IRS .35 cents a mile still works for me in my 27 mpg Taurus wagon, but all bets are off after 2010 and human civilization comes off Peak Oil and into decline) traveling to gigs as they dry up because people would rather stay home and “cocoon” with their home theater systems; but I’ve done it since I was young, and it keeps my soul alive while having to stare into the demon face of Corporatism.
I wrote to Richard Heinberg a few years ago after reading his book “The Party’s Over”, because he is a amateur violinist, also. I asked him what he thought the post-peak future of music would be. He said “definitely acoustic”. By inference, for the majority of us who are not “big acts” (according to guitarist John Stowell, that is about 5% of all of us who play for a “living”) that will mean small-scale and local. It can be a good thing if work at it. After my first road trip to Nevada in 1973, I knew I didn’t want to be part of that 5%!
Thanks, Stan
10 June 2008, 4:00 pmElaina:
My partner just gave me a modified flat top with a skintight fade in the back that I am loving right now, in the FL heat.
Don’t think prospective employers like the look too much, though, and y’all should just be awful grateful that it looks respectable on you.
26 June 2008, 9:25 amDa Buffalo Amongst Wolves:
Almost cut my hair
Happened just the other day
It was getting kind of long
Could have said it was in my way
But I didn’t and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
…and I feel like I owe it to someone.
–David Crosby
27 June 2008, 4:43 pmMasa:
Hey Stan, Nice point about how the oil is invaluable to the builders of the future. Maybe that’s too conservative for the repubs to promote, too radical for the dems. By the way, I have long hair and I notice no extra ill effects in the heat necessarily. It keeps you from being called a redneck too, aaayyy.
28 June 2008, 12:28 amJJR:
Old habits die hard and I still retain the roughly the same close haircut I did back in my more naively patriotic youth when I attended Texas A&M and was in their Corps of Cadets; or rather, I wear the same haircuts that the Seniors do. My sophomore flat-top never looked quite right, and I became a civilian student in the middle of my sophomore year due to being physically disqualified for my NROTC scholarship due to unwaiverable excessive refractive error in my eyes. Even though my politics have shifted decidedly Left of center, my hairstyle stays the same for purely economic reasons. Plus it makes for good “redneck” camouflage, though when I wear my Birkenstocks I must look like a NARC; My hair is more “police” style than “hardcore military crew-cut”. I had to explain the difference to my local hairstylist (don’t have an old fashioned barber in this town, grrr) and when she was done she remarked, “Wow, you DO look like a cop now”.
RE: the coming economic crisis…I am a librarian at a state university, and even during the last Great Depression most libraries stayed open. It helps that I’m the only professional cataloger here, so I would not be easy to replace. I also worry about how well online union catalogs will continue to function in an era of increasing fossil fuel scarcity. If our campus electricity supply begins to look like downtown Baghdad’s, it would not surprise me if our patrons begin demanding the card catalog back! Fellow library colleagues look at me like I’m crazy when I say this, but I can imagine a future when just keeping the building climate controlled for the health of the books will be a big ticket item of primary consideration, and we won’t be able to afford all the electronic whizzbang that is all the rage in libraries today. I’m not a luddite per se, and I love all those full text databases, too–it’s just that I take a longer view and am very skeptical about the viability of longterm digital storage for archival purposes. Print on paper remains king, in my book (this is also a minority view among contemporary librarians, but still the correct one, I think).
7 July 2008, 11:33 amRandy Morris:
Hey all,
I have to concur with what JJR is saying in relation to libraries. I was in Sacramento this week on a train layover and decided to take my kid down to the public library. To keep a short anecdote short, the book search network went down for about 20 minutes while we were there. Talk about instant nostalgia for the card catalog…was looking for Spengler’s Decline of the West without a clue where to go. I believe that one of the librarians would have been able to help, but they were all obsessing over talking to tech support.
Preview of things to come?
Randy
9 July 2008, 4:08 pmcatlady/speck:
Was Borges’ “Library of Babel” a vision of all the Google pages, Google caches, ever-shifting Wiki entries, and memory-hole pages?
12 July 2008, 12:22 am