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song of the scissors
Wednesday, August 27 2003
Gretchen obtained a full rainbow of Sharpie markers from Walmart today. I had no idea that Sharpie they made them in so many colors - it was like an indelible take on the made-for-fetishizing Pentel concept. I wonder if any economics professors have yet cited the Sharpie marker and the blank CD as a contemporary example of "complementary goods" - a pair of goods in which the demand for one increases as the demand for the other increases. Perhaps nobody could have predicted the huge increase in demand for Sharpie markers that would come with the advent of CD burning - but is there any other product suitable for quickly labeling your pirated music collection?
Gretchen also obtained an extremely high quality pair of scissors. Snipping things with them felt like slicing butter with a red hot knife. The only thing that would have been better would have been a hinged pair of light sabers. Late in the afternoon those scissors sang out to me in one of those moments when I had the potential to do anything. What I did do was cut my hair - I mean radically cut my hair. I went out in the front yard, stood in the unmowed grass, and went crazy. I was a little alarmed by how much of the hair was grey. Later I went and looked at myself in the mirror and I decided I looked significantly older than I did the last time my hair was this short, circa January 1996. I really did look every one of those thirty five years.
There was still hair left when I was done, but it was all pretty short. I've been tempted to shave my head on more than one occasion, but I don't think Gretchen would approve. Not that we have much German-Jewish tension in our household, but I don't think it would be helpful if I went and made myself look like a Nazi.
Gretchen came home in the evening and did a double-take on the hair. She also said she could see evidence of nascent male-pattern baldness, a revelation that bothered me more than I expected it to. I preferred to think that in the imprecise frenzy of the haircut, I'd a cut a little too close to the scalp on top of my head. After all, there was also some patchy baldness in front of my left ear, and that had nothing to do with the follicle-withering effects of testosterone.
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