Monday, February 17, 2025
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Splitting hairs

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“We’re all born bald, baby.”
— American actor Telly Savalas (1922-1994)

Pay no attention to the picture.
Like a lot of men, I’ve been dealing with a hairy situation. Or, truth be told, I’ve been dealing with a less-than-hairy situation. Less hairs by the year, month, week and day that is.
Yes, genetics has caught up with me and is busy logging the hairs on my head. Male pattern baldness clearly cut a wide swath of the back of my head, and is now busy selectively logging the top of my head. When I look in the mirror, I increasingly see more skin and less hair, my scalp increasingly reflecting the lumens from the vanity lights above.
As the 1986 Timbuck 3 song goes, “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.” Or at least get dimmer light bulbs for the bathroom. Maybe just perpetually use the nightlight.
Those in the know at healthline.com say that the average human head has about 100,000 hairs, with a similar number of hair follicles, which translates to around 800-1,290 hairs per square inch. For my color hair, it’s around 110,000 — or at least it was. Nowadays, not so much.
Cracking open the Holy Bible, it’s noted in Matthew 10 that “even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
Which, when the Lord gets to ciphering the hairs on my head, it’s getting to be pretty simple math these days. Not down to the Jethro Bodine “naughts” yet, but it’s getting close.
That being said, I’m not alone. By age fifty, it’s reported that 85% of men will experience male pattern baldness.
Genetics has not been in my favor on either side of the family tree. Bald men abound. My DNA-hardwired journey toward baldness has been a couple decades in the making.
Once living in blissful ignorance, I first became aware of the growing male pattern baldness on the back of my head back in my community theater acting days when I lived in Ohio.
I was playing the lead in a murder mystery comedy whodunnit, and while I was lying still on the stage as the murder victim, the back of my head to the audience, the Columbo-esque police detective character was kneeling beside me making verbal notes of observations as he wrote them in his notebook, when he went hilariously off-script improv on opening night and referenced my male pattern baldness, bringing down the house in peals of laughter. All of which made the corpse laugh, which is bad form, except in a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants comedy. Needless to say, the male pattern baldness reference reappeared nightly for the run of the show, with the corpse laughing every night.
Thespian pursuits of entertaining audiences aside, admittedly I was personally self-conscious for years about my growing baldness and made a procession of headgear a perpetual personal trademark, alternating between baseball hats, Stormy Kromers, and fire helmets, depending on the situation at hand.
Eventually, along came COVID to speed up the process and throw any remaining self-consciousness out the door. Evidently, I’m one of the 20% of those who gets COVID hair shedding, telogen effluvium, every time Miz ‘Rona signs my dance card. Only mine isn’t temporary — it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
The only place hair seems to grow well at all now, like weeds, is my ears. And well, also my eyebrows, where the unruly hairs grow in wild twists and turns and eventually have me looking like a big-browed hoot owl.
And that’s when I know it’s time to go in for a trim.
Going to the barber over the last several years, I always walk in wondering if this is the trip where I have the last remaining remnants of my hair shaved off en masse, taking a no muss, no fuss page from my dad, father-in-law and brother-in-law, who have all taken the plunge.
As one T-shirt I saw recently read, “Bald is beautiful. God only made so many perfect heads. The others are covered with hair.”
So inspired, maybe this next trip to the barber is the one where I finally take the plunge.
Eric Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.

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