Get out of my house if you don't CUT THAT HAIR

I have begun cutting my own hair. It makes me happy. It’s fun to do and it’s cheap and a cool use of time, and it’s fraught with never really looking your best．This is probably the best part about it. Imperfection is not the new Saturday here in Japan, and a DIY appearance is not in step with this lock-step culture. Surprisingly, it can really throw people off when you let yourself out of the house looking not perfect. And that’s why I enjoy it so much. It’s just one more little way I have to say, “up yours, Japan,” and since it hurts nothing besides my career and dating options and still throws lots of people off their game and endears me to even more children (who instinctually gravitate towards the slightly messy), then boy, it just tickles me pink. It really does throw some people off to see you looking scruffy and out-of-the-shower messy-headed, and hooray! Hell with ‘em! And hell with you, System! I’m chopshopping my way out!

Now what’s that I hear you say? “But Josh, hair? What a dumb kind of rebellion! That shit’s played out, nigga!” (Or were you saying, “Josh, are you trying to call yourself punk rock? You can’t call yourself punk rock! You’re not! That’s so dumb!”) Yes yes, I know, you’re right about it all (though not about the can’t-call-yourself-punk-rock—to HELL with you people on that one! HELL!). You’re absolutely right: hair and beard counterculture must have peaked in like 1971 and died soon after along with every other good at the birth of disco; and excepting its phoenix-like reincarnation in the punk rock mid-eighties, hair was a played out tune long before John Conner ever floppy-bangsed his way through the early 90’s Hollywood of my childhood. And nowadays hairstyles that are fun for you without being obviously unhygienic are a pretty normalized part of the more sane, more fun norma-culture we seem to be crafting in the cradle of civilization, New York, and across its cousins like Boston, Philly, San Fran, Oberlin, Europe and anywhere else where cool people live (remove any suburbs from your mental picture of what I’m talking about; refer to sane and fun preceding culture, above). The thing is, I don’t live in civilization anymore. Here on Planet Japan it’s, well, a different world. The culture here worships Image so hard it’s like they never saw the end of the Wizard of Oz. And one thing Japan is over-the-top fixated on is Perfect Hair. When it comes to perfect hair Japan is crazy like a crate full of gibbons on a paint mixer. Japan seems to generally operate from two basic MOs (M’sO?): first you’ve got your jawdroppingly-behind-the-times thing, and then you’ve also got your just-inscrutable-and-insane stuff, the connection between them being a bucolic, which is to say, “alike to a cow,” and utter innocence of reasoning or logic with which to approach questions about real world situations. This all comes to something of a Twilight Zone New Year’s Special level of insanity when it comes to the juncture between hair (oh holy retardely insane fixation on perfect hair) and counterculture (which has never, never happened here, and thus has as much shock-value in innocence as it did 50 years ago in America). I am in a land where punk rock never happened. Rock never happened. Imagine our country with no rock? We’d all be glassy eyed robot-people with skinny neckties, 8-8 desk jobs and no rhythm…wait, that sounds eerily familiar. This is where Rod Serling comes in and reveals the truth: That’s the country Josh lives in now! AAAAAHHHHHHHHH! It’s like the America from a future where Rock and Roll never existed! AAAAAHHHHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

So I’m going to rock out a little, like my fathers and mothers before me. I know, how not punk rock does that sound, right? But you know what is punk rock? Not investing everything in your appearance, and getting a kick out of shaking people’s lives up by doing something innocent, creative, off-beat and in-your-face. You know what’s not punk rock? Spending $50 at hair salons every week, sometimes more, to keep up that appearance. Also not on the punk-rock list? Going to work with nothing to do. I seem to have to do that one this week, but I can hate it, and I can protest with a wrankle-the-bosses mohawk and a beard that should be tidied up or shaved off completely, with mustachios out to here. I can protest by looking aggressively not in line and by being really friendly and fuck-the-rules all at the same time: I’m not doing anything wrong here, I only look like it to you people, and shame on you for that. “To hell with everybody” isn’t a great life plan, I know, especially since I do like a lot of people here and want to keep developing my relationships with them, but heck, a rebellious haircut shouldn’t get anyone’s goat, and since it does, and since I find the fact that it does to be contemptible and worth provoking, then, well, to hell with everybody, I’m cutting my hair.