Bizarre night at the Bookstore, although this one ended semi-well. Long story short, coming around a bookshelf, I walked into the middle of a customer screaming at one of my coworkers, “Michael Jackson is not dead! Farrah Fawcett is! Stop spreading rumors!” No doubt, he went home, turned on CNN, and became convinced that we’d somehow convinced Anderson Cooper to broadcast a fake story (because some of our customers are just that stupid).

Well, except it isn’t a rumor: the King of Pop is dead and gone.

Gotta be honest here: I don’t care. Obviously, I feel sympathy for his family and loved ones, but Michael Jackson’s death is not going to result in my curled up in a ball on my bed playing all his albums over and over while I cry into my pillow. I think there are only two musicians that I’ll miss when they’re dead, one is John Williams, and the other is Freddie Mercury, and too bad for Mr. Mercury, I didn’t realize Queen was my favorite band of all time until he was long since buried.

As far as Michael Jackson, his death largely didn’t affect me — well, except in the case that as soon as the story found wide exposure, the phones started ringing off the hook from customers looking for copies of his CDs. If you happen to know the Bookstore I work at, and you were hoping to stop in for one of his CDs tomorrow, don’t bother: we didn’t have many, and what we didn’t sell tonight is on reserve (and, no, no Thriller).

On the ride home, I checked Twitter. There were a lot of tweets about Michael Jackson (and an odd rumor claiming Jeff Goldblum had died). While most were very affectionate about the man’s music, a few made crude jokes (not that I’m criticizing, I joked with my boss that Jackson had probably been choked to death by a child he was “playing” with) and referenced the assorted controversies which surrounded the latter portion of his life.

So, here’s how I feel: I think that Michael Jackson was probably, objectively, a fantastic musician who left an indelible mark on music and pop culture. That said, no amount of artistic brilliance allows a person the license to break the law, and while he was never convicted, the rumors and accusations surrounding his private life cannot easily be dismissed. That said, I feel a great amount of sorrow for Michael — pressed into stardom at the age of 11, did he really ever have the chance to be just a kid? And when he had all the money a person could ever want, were his actions indicative of a pedophile, or a lonely man looking for the childhood he never had? It doesn’t matter, when it comes to molesting children, motivation should only be important in understanding how to break the cycle (if such a cycle exists, where pedophile creates pedophile ad naseum).

I feel sorry for Michael Jackson. He was clearly a man with demons, and I hope he rests in peace free of them.

True story: two weeks ago, a dude with a thick Scottish accent came up to me on his way out of the Bookstore and asked if I knew where a barber was. I mention he had a thick Scottish accent because I thought he was looking for Barbar — y’know, the elephant? And I was going to point him to the Zoo, because that’s the only place in DC I think we actually have elephants (asides from the stuffed one in Natural History), but he tried again, and this time I thought he was looking for the bathroom, but on the third try, I got it — and, seriously?

You’re asking a bald guy where a barber is?

Because barbers cut hair, and bald people don’t have hair.

Granted, my (usually but not always) smooth-as-a-baby’s-ass head is part nature, part choice. Bald dude at a blogger happy hour at The Reef two weeks ago remarked on it this way: “I choose not to decorate my head with hair.” And hair really is a pain in the ass (especially if, like me, you actually have a hairy ass — sweaty ass hair? No fun).

Last fall, aware that I was losing quite a bit of hair on the top of my head, I began cutting my hair very close: like, imagine a skin-tight buzz cut. Like that. Shortly thereafter, I just began shaving my head altogether. For me, the decision was pretty easy: I am losing my hair, hence, I will embrace my baldness.

Men in my family have a history of hair loss. My grandfather was completely bald by the time he was twenty-five (or so I understand, I wasn’t actually around to see this). I’d been aware that my hair was thinning for quite some time — particularly when I cut my hair very short (as I would tend to do in the summer), people would tease me about a receding hair line.

Really, though, it was a guy on the shuttle who pushed me over the edge to deciding to shave my head. I don’t know his name, I’ve never heard him speak. We both board the bus at the same Metro station, and we get off at the same stop for office buildings across the street from each other. He looks to be my age (early 30s), and his hair is thick and spiky.

Let me clarify: his hair looks thick and spiky. Then he gets close and you see the truth: his hair is thick … on the sides. His hair is spiky … on the top, where he styles his hair to stand up, apparently in the belief that vertical hair equals quantity of hair. And this is perhaps true in the sense that the male ego is a fragile thing which sees what it wants reflected back in the mirror. As a disinterested observer, however, what I could see was that his hair is noticeably thinner on the top of his head, like, to the point where spiking his hair actually draws more attention to his pattern baldness.

When I made this realization, I remembered a comment a coworker had made not long before: “Your hair is noticeably thinning.” And, look, I tended to go months and months without a haircut. And I wondered, “Do people see me having all this hair as a compensation for starting to lose it?” Freed of my own fragile ego in that hairpiphany, it didn’t take me long to go bald.

I think men usually fall into two categories: men who embrace their baldness, and men who refuse to accept it.

Of course, sometimes you get folks like this guy, who at the same happy hour at The Reef, was trying to convince me that he was balding, like to the point where our hands were together combing through his hair* while he tried to identify his supposed bald-spots. So gay. Also, his hair’s like a fucking shag carpet, which is completely disgusting in and of itself (the carpet, not the hair), but really? Dude, chill, you’ve got hair for a good long while (unless you were wearing a wig?). He is clearly category number three: men who have thick luxurious hair, but who know they will lose their hair and just want to get it over with.

Here’s some advice when and if you decide your hair loss (real or imagined) is cause enough for a shaving:

1. Electric trimmers? Y’know, the ones barbers use? They’re good if you’ve got areas of thick hair, but for the detail stuff? For actually getting your scalp smooth? They will not work. If you’ve got male pattern baldness (like me), I used an electric trimmer to clear the bulk of my hair as best as possible, then a razor to clear the stumps. Basically, you want to use something with a blade: actually, use something with multiple blades. I use a four blade disposable razor.

2. Forget mirrors — while they’re good for checking some easily-missed areas (the ears, your forward scalp), use your hands to feel the smoothness of your head.

3. You don’t have to shave your head every night, but you should at a minimum do it every third night. If you shave your head too much, you damage your skin (or so I’m told). If you wait too long, your hair (what little you have left), becomes too thick for the razor and you have to grab an electric razor to trim it down. Also, infrequent head shavings can mean the difference between spending two minutes in the bathroom, and spending twenty.

3A. Wait, did I say at night? Yes, shave your head at night. Y’know how your face feels raw when you shave, and if, say, you sweat that morning on your way to work after shaving it stings? Imagine that sensation all over your head. Ow. Shave, sleep, let yourself heal. You’ll thank yourself on the way to your office on a July morning.

4. If you’ve got a day or two’s worth of stubble on your head, check yourself in the mirror after dressing to ensure you have no random bits of lint holding on for the ride. Seriously, the stubble has the tendency to act like velcro.

*He claims not to remember this, and in fairness I was drinking, so it might’ve been mine and another man’s hands combing through his hair. Also, so gay.

But when people say “it’s a Jeep thing”, you have to understand that by ‘Jeep’ they mean ‘vehicles which maintain the visual and utilitarian heritage of the Willy.‘ And, no, you probably wouldn’t understand, unless you’d owned one.

I did. Owned one, I mean. A ’98 Wrangler, which I lovingly cared for and beat the ever-loving crap out of from 1999 until 2003. Killed upwards of half-a-dozen deer in that thing, too, but I’d just like to point out that they jumped in front of me. Suicide by Jeep. It’s a crying shame.

My coworkers drive me crazy with their Wrangler stories: my boss at the Bookstore owns one, she’s never taken the doors off and admits to not being comfortable taking the windows out. “What happens if I’m driving and it starts raining?” Well, deary, you’ll get wet, but that’s why towels were invented. 66% of the IT staff at the Office owns Jeeps (in fairness, our IT staff is 3 people), and I catch a ride from them as often as possible. My boss at the Indy, good old Gary, had a big nice ’04 Unlimited, which he promptly took off-road in his spacious backyard and banged into trees. “It’s not a Jeep without a dent,” although I don’t think Dawn was so happy he’d taken their kids for the ride.

There are things I miss about owning a Jeep: I miss waving to other Wrangler owners. I miss taking the doors off and the top down on nice (or not so nice) days for a long drive. I miss not caring about whether I’d left the windows down in a freak thunderstorm because, oh yeah, thing’s waterproof and has drain plugs. I miss driving straight for a muddy puddle, or just pulling into a car wash, taking the top down, and hosing out the interior.

There was a guy, up in Towson when I first attended, who had a ’97 or a ’98 Wrangler, dark navy blue, with an ox’s horns bolted to the top of the windshield. I’m not going to say it was cool, but it was totally unforgettable.

And that’s the kind of modification you should do to a Wrangler, because, look, let’s be honest here: Wranglers are not cars. The doors come off. The window folds down. It’s designed to be rained in. When you modify your Wrangler, you should draw attention to the fact that this is a machine designed to, y’know, go over mountains and stuff, not fields of flowers.

Speaking of Wranglers and flowers:

Via Alice’s Wonderland come this horrifying photo of a Wrangler gone very very very wrong.

I’m sorry, but that’s a Wrangler FAIL. At the very least, I hope it’s a stick-shift, because the only reason a person should buy an automatic transmission Wrangler is if they are missing the requisite limbs to operate a manual transmission.