The Haircut

This afternoon I asked my wife to cut my hair while I was wearing my hat.

She said, “you’re wearing a hat.”

“I know I’m wearing a hat”, I said. “It’s my hat,” I said, “I can do whatever I like with it. I chose the hat myself, I bought it with my own money. No one can tell me what to do with my hat.”

My wife said, “I’m not telling you what to do with your hat, you can do anything you damn well please with your hat, but I can’t cut your hair while you’re wearing your hat.”

“I’m really disappointed,” I said to my wife. “I thought you could do anything. I believed in you to the point of believing you could cut my hair while I was wearing a hat. I guess my belief in you was misplaced.”

“You always get this way after you go crab fishing,” my wife said, shaking her head. “Even your hat starts to act strange.”

Before taking off my hat so that my wife could cut my hair, seeing the perfect logic of her assertion that my hair couldn’t be cut unless my hat was removed, I considered the crab I’d caught that very morning (while my barber was still asleep, mind you): that the crab had approached its death with aplomb, staying alive for the last possible moment despite the odds against it, and was the closest I’d ever come to seeing God on earth, the crab being headless, having no need of a hat or a haircut.

Pacifica Municipal Pier, December 6, 2021, 5:15 am