Short: Back And Sides, And Top

This weekend will include such varied activities as watering the plants, getting a little family exercise, and shaving my head. Regular visitors to this page will recognize this trend. The routine stuff, and the seasonal shearing of my skull. It is not a  decision I entered into lightly. Initially it was a solution to the length of the hair on the sides of my head, brought on by sheer laziness. I would take it all off every six months, just to avoid the "Doc Brown" look. After a couple of years I figured out that six months was just enough time to perfect the Doc Brown look before returning to the clean slate, so I decided to move to a more seasonal approach. At the equinoxes and solstices, every three months, I would shave my head. This made it much more a maintenance issue rather than one of style.
Style has never been at the forefront of my search for a proper haircut. I remember the diagram from the barber shop I went to as a kid with my father:  the forward brush, the Ivy League, the flattop, the flattop with fenders. It was all too much for me to take in. I ended up with the haircut that was precisely as good as I was willing to sit still for. At that time, I was fully aware of the eventual fate of the hair on top of my head. I watched my father get the same haircut for a dozen years. The only thing that changed was the length and relative bushiness of his sideburns. There wasn't much but the occasional wild hair on the top to fuss with.
Still, there were a few years after I graduated from college when I thought that the style of my hair could be the thing that kept me from getting where I wanted to be in life. Board rooms. Bed rooms. That sort of thing. That's what took me to SuperCuts. Rather than seek out a barber with whom I could have an ongoing relationship over decades, as my father had done, I chose to go the corporate route and put my follicles in the hands of some girl named Brandi, or Cindee. It was a lateral move to what I had been doing throughout college, which was to wait until I found a girl who noticed my shaggy appearance and offered to "clean it up a little." That's how I made through college without ever paying for a haircut, unless you count the price of the beer that I offered them before and after the experience. Brandi and Cindee wanted to be paid. And tipped. I can't say that I found anything particularly super about the cuts they gave me compared to the drunk girls, but I had hopes.
Soon, however, gravity and age had done their work, and my scalp was on a par with my father's in terms of room to let. That's when I began to consider the shave.
And so, as Autumn approaches, I wave goodbye to my most recent attempts at growing hair from my skull. I would have thought that after all these years of trying to discourage it, that they might just give up completely. Time to push the reset button.