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Drugs

T. Kid's Big Haircut

After years of old white people staring at my weird haircut, I finally decided to chop off my long hair.

Photos by the author

Despite society’s increasingly progressive mindset, regular people continue to freak out over weird haircuts. Since my teen years, I’ve experimented with a variety of weird haircuts, discovering that unconventional hairstyles attract negative attention from strangers, police, security personnel, and pretty much everyone else who doesn’t have a weird haircut. Although I learned this early in life, I continued to rock weird hair until very recently. For years I had hair down to my elbows, which I often kept in a bun on the center of my head—I like to think that I looked like I was balancing a ball. Now the ball is gone, and though I miss it, it’s nice to finally have strangers look at me like I’m a normal person. I had forgotten what this is like. I had rocked a ridiculous haircut for most of my life.

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In eighth grade, I discovered hair bleach and went nuts, bleaching a different pattern onto my fresh buzz cut every week like Dennis Rodman. I quickly learned that weird hair attracts negative attention. Every cop that hassled my friends and me made a point to say something about my hair—a couple of times, it’s what made them stop us in the first place. After I got into trouble one too many times, I dyed my hair black and left it that way until my hair's natural color grew back. When I briefly gave my hair a break, I started experimenting with facial hair. If you keep a beard neat and trimmed, no one will look at you sideways, but if you let that thing go wild, it’s easy to start looking like a maniac. But people didn’t give me weird looks during my beard phase until I stopped cutting my hair. This time cops and old white people weren't the only people giving me dirty looks—everyone looked at me.

People veered their kids away from me when I walked past them on the sidewalk. It didn’t bother me much, so I let my hair continue to grow. One Thanksgiving, my mom told me she hated my Neanderthal look, so I lost the beard. For the next few years, beards came and went, but my hair kept growing, quickly becoming difficult to mange—I had to brush my locks regularly and find the right kind of shampoo, which I didn’t even know existed.

I did what I needed for my hair because it was more a botany project than anything else. I wanted to see how long I could grow my hair before I was over it. For the first couple of years, I never even had a trim. I looked like I had a two-foot mop on my head, so I started keeping it in a bun. Around this time I started writing Weediquette. As my career started shifting towards weed journalism, my hair made me look like Ron Slater from Dazed and Confused—the stereotype of a pothead.

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Coincidentally, this was also the time that people started telling me I look like Chicago Bulls forward-center Joakim Noah. Hundreds of commenters made the comparison, many calling me “the Stoner Joakim Noah.” I would like to refute that by reminding everyone that Joakim Noah is the stoner Joakim Noah.

Anyways, one day I shaved off the sides and back to make my long hair more manageable. The result was the most ridiculous haircut I’ve ever had: a monkish bun that I rocked for nearly a year. Strangers laughed directly at my hair and facetiously told me it looked great. One guy even said, “Dude looks like he has a bird on his head,” when I walked past him in the park.

I retained the haircut when I started editing a clothing company’s website. Using my employee discount, I collected of bunch of clothes, including floral-patterned pants and crewneck sweatshirts decorated with prints of cartoons smoking weed. The job made me pick clothes like a colorblind nine-year-old, but the garish outfits went well with my haircut. If you scanned me from head to toe, you would get to my haircut and be like, “Oh, that explains the rest of the outfit.” I thoroughly enjoyed that era of my life, but it had to end because it’s 90 degrees in New York.

I couldn’t handle my mop of hair any more, so on a recent Sunday morning, I decided to chop the bun off.

I had been awake the entire weekend for no good reason, and in my sleep-deprived state, I possessed enough gusto to finally get a haircut. I went to a local barber who unceremoniously buzzed off my locks while I giggled in the chair. As soon as I arrived home, I basked in the pleasure of showering with short hair. When I went to get dressed, I realized that my entire wardrobe only works with my previous haircut. With normal hair and a trim beard, I look like an insane person when I wear floral-patterned pants and weed sweatshirts. For the foreseeable future, I will face this problem—I’m definitely not going to discard all this wacky shit and get new clothes. No, I’m going to rock weird outfits in public and continue to look like a 30-year-old who mugged a high school kid for his clothes. Feel free to laugh at me if you see me on the street.

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