a parting delight

The author has been experimenting with how he dresses his hair. Whereas he used to comb it over without part, he now parts it on the left-hand side. His favorite hairstyle – which he calls the fade of the recession, or the recession's fade – consists of a malleable tuft at the top and front of the head that fades quickly down the sides and back, where it is closely cropped. (For examples, see here for two men from the 1930s and here for Tom Hardy in the movie Lawless.) Since he has been cutting his own hair this way for nearly fifteen years, the author has decided to name his hairstyle the recession's fade, mostly because it resembles hairstyles sported by individuals who lived through the Great Depression. As a person living through the Great Recession, he can only hope to chase away our enduring economic blues by affecting a bold and brash hairstyle, just as his predecessors conquered their troubles by heaving into the shifting winds of Fortune with wide smiles, strong backs, and daring coiffures.

The looks he gets from people fuel his mirth and keep a smile in his mouth. His meek and unadventurous fellow Americans cannot get enough of his audacity – they stare and point, laugh and mock, looking at him and his slicked-down locks as if he were a sulfur-breathing alien from distant Blaxon-7. Add to this an Abraham Lincoln style chin-beard and neatly cropped mouth-whiskers, and people all but lose their minds. They can't figure out if he is a hipster, a lunatic, a Civil War reenactor, or merely a tragically-lost Amish bloke. On some level, he does not mind being the brunt of their jokes, or the focus of their attentions, but he wonders sometimes why they spend time thinking and talking about him instead of opening their own minds, strengthening their own bodies, and cultivating their own unique sense of style and dress. Another of his unusual habits is to ride bicycle properly, with his shoulders pulled away from the ears, his head erect and scanning, his back straight, and his buttocks planted firmly on the seat. He rides this way so as to isolate the workout to the lower extremities, to keep his head on a swivel, and because riding in any other way is plain foolishness.

An avid cyclist and amateur barber since his early teens, the author's knowledge of the power of hairstyling grew during a recent airing of Radio Lab. The hosts of the show discussed with compelling brilliance the symmetry in our cells, in our thoughts, and in the rest of the universe, but the author nearly fell off his chain when they began speaking about the effect that parting one's hair can have on how one is viewed by other people. Things suddenly made sense – the looks and gazes, the random smiles from passing women, kindness and warmth being thrust upon him because of a simple change in how he combed his hair. If parting is the sweetest sorrow, he shall stick with his current hairstyle until the Recession fades, bearing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune for as long as circumstance demands.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥