I’m not sure what I’m gonna do but I don’t think I can get another haircut.

The place that was once known as the barbershop has become a hipster clubhouse packed to the gills with Millennials seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

You see, Millennials don’t have jobs and don’t go to college. I’ll admit, I was at a loss as to exactly how they did spend their time, but now I know, they get their haircut – every day! And this has transformed the entire concept of getting a haircut. Now it’s like a total scene, man, with a constant crowd of guys named Chad and barbers with Rumpelstiltskin beards trying to be rock stars and, well, old angry dudes like me don’t seem to fit. And since this Millennial/Hipster Haircutting Hootenanny has overrun the national barbering landscape the same way the Mongols overran the continent of Asia, I guess I’m fucked.

The barber doesn’t need to be some kind of holy confessional but neither should it be some douchebag fashion show or a fuckin’ brofest for every tattooed vegan in a fifty-mile radius. It’s a sorry state of affairs and since I’m not sure if I can ever get a haircut again, I’ll admit that I’ve been looking at wigs online … figuring my hair is gonna get pretty long and I’ll need some sort of disguise.

♦

I assume that most men by now have experienced the Millennial/Hipster Haircutting Hootenanny (M/HHH), but still, maybe I should explain.

The place that held-up your old barbershop at gunpoint and turned the simple haircut into a stage play for the unemployed has seven barber’s chairs and maybe twenty wooden “waiting chairs” up against the wall. The barbers are fucking identical, the Seven Little Dwarfs of beauty college. They are almost universally in their twenties, have beards long enough to groom with a hairbrush and are tattooed – full sleeves, necks, backs, heads, legs – in a way that indicates that there must be some sort of competition.

In a different time and place, these barbers would have been okay dudes, they may have even been considered intelligent, but in 2018 they take on the general self-absorbed slothfulness of their generation.

Every haircut other than the one you and I would get takes, on average, fifty-one minutes. There’s no sense of urgency, rather, the barbers consider themselves “on stage” and the kids in the chairs are validated just by being here. The longer they’re in the chair the cooler they become (so they think) and they imagine they are participants in some grand movement that is important to society. Where you and I see something you just want to be fuckin’ done with, the Millennial, always in search of a person or group that can tell him what he stands for, sees a “club” he desperately wants to belong to.

When you and I get a haircut and the barber asks, “What are we doing today?” We simply reply, “Shorter all the way around.” Duh!

But when the Millennial hits the chair, he pulls out a dozen photos he ripped out of magazines and the conversation goes something like …

“So what are we doing today?”
“Okay, so on the left side I want my head shaved so that you can see the skin, and then on the right side I want you to start at my temple and create a kind of arch that decreases approximately three centimeters per square inch as you move from front to back, oh, here, I brought a picture …”
“So how do want the back?”
“Oh, okay so, I want the back to look like a big rig has skidded across the back of my neck with all eighteen wheels, you know what I mean? Oh, I have a picture of that too … And when you’re done on the sides I need you to stop because I want to see how much hair I have left on the top … ”

The place is first-come, first-serve and they only accept cash which is how it should be except when one of the bearded actors barks out, “Okay, who’s next?” eight guys always stand up … “Were you next? Was I next? What time did you get here? I really think I was next. Wanna flip a coin?” Amateur hour.

Sometimes it’s a guy’s turn but he only wants a certain barber so he’ll stand up and say, “No, no, I’m waiting for Bashful” or “I’m waiting for Doc.” The guy that will only get his haircut by one “special” dude is the same guy who was sitting there playing with his Barbies while he was waiting.

Sometimes there’s music, sometimes there’s a movie on the big screen that only guys named Chad would ever watch. No one gets a basic “boys” haircut; no one shows up who doesn’t have body art or an iPhone or a hairstyle that your dad would have approved of. It’s a parallel universe. There’s still hair on the floor but it seems that what has been cut away the most is the simplicity of the American barbershop.

So let’s recap.

1. Since an entire generation of men now consider getting a haircut to be a hobby and insist on doing it several times a week, a normal guy can’t get a haircut.
2. Bearded and tattooed hipsters are becoming barbers in record numbers because they have the misperception that it’s “performance art,” the same thing as being an actor or an opera singer. This means a trip to the “barber” will last longer than a lot of people’s marriages.
3. What was once a simple act now requires a commitment of at least half a day, enduring a not inconsequential amount of awkwardness and personal humiliation and spending time with a group of people who seem to be forming some sort of cult and believe the hair follicle is the Deity.

Would it all be worth it if the hipsters offered me a Tootsie Pop or a square of Bazooka when the cut was complete? Maybe, I mean every man has his price, but I think that if getting a haircut now requires that you pack a lunch and venture into sketchy foreign lands then getting a haircut is officially on the endangered species list.

A lot of people my age are about to become “the long-haired freaky people” we were warned about.

Photo credit: vhines200 on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-ND