Self-Haircuts and the Pandemic

​I have been giving myself haircuts ever since this pandemic began. I’ve nicked my ears – both of them – a few times, and once my scissors actually went in quite deeply. If I hadn’t had any duct tape around when this happened, I might have surely exsanguinated. I’m tellin’ ya, I came close to cutting my ear off – not that I was trying to be beat out Van Gogh in that department or anything (although I can draw better than he could).

This self-haircut stuff is definitely not advisable. I base this conclusion on not just this recent personal quarantine experience where all of my coifs could be termed ‘hatchet jobs.’ Yeah, it turns out this wasn’t the first time I’ve had a problem. When I was a kid, oh, maybe 7 or 8 years old, my old man decided this one Sunday morning that he’d give me a haircut. Now I had never gotten a haircut from anyone other than a Sicilian and with the Italian crooner music going on in a barber shop, and when I saw my father limbering up his fingers by going snip snip in the air with those large silver blades from my mother’s sewing kit scissors, I was starting to get nervous. Real nervous. And he wasn’t calming me any by directing his cautionary ‘not to worry’s’ directed to my mom alone – not to me! He went even further with his reassurance that he was going to use a bowl. Wasn’t very reassuring to me, but then he repeated to my mom, that she shouldn’t worry because the kid (presumably me) had a hat. He was referring to my Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap. Now I didn’t quite understand what the bowl was for exactly, but my intellectual development at the time was sufficiently adequate to grasp the significance of the hat. And, man, I was shaking. Real nervous. And, of course, do I have to tell ya that I was forced to wear my Dodger hat for several weeks following this atrocity. My head was ravaged. A genuine hatchet job! And I still don’t know what the hell that bowl was all about.

Anyway, my advice to any of you ‘do-it-yourselfers’ in our Ping Pong Parkinson group, is that you let your wife or some other trustworthy person cut your hair for you … and only if you have a Brooklyn Dodger hat. Also, if your Parkinson tremor is not well controlled, I would strongly recommend that you not attempt any self-circumcision at this time, either. Wait until you get vaccinated and then let a pro (who has a just-in-case tourniquet) do it. Lao Du