BALD AND FREE — HOW CAN THAT BE? (subtitle: The Bald And The Beautiful)

Nothing makes a woman feel as old as watching the bald spot increase on the top of her husband’s head. –Helen Rowland

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Oct. 7 is BALD AND FREE DAY, but personally, I’m not sure what one has to do with the other. I’m mostly bald, all right, but how free is a married man like me? Of course, I’m just kidding — my wife lets me out of my cage for an hour a week, even though I keep getting balder….and making her feel older. Maybe I shouldn’t be using that hour to get a haircut.

HEADLONG RETREAT

As the years go by, my barber
Takes less and less time with my hair
Which only serves to remind me
That there’s less and less of it there.

To be sure, I’m not the only one whose predicament may become a hair-raising experience:

That gave me a headache just watching it. If only I could trust the dubious ads that involve spending my moo-lah to get to the root of the problem, I might risk springing for mo-hair….but snake oil aside, there must be a less painful way to restore a Lost Hairy zone:

Hmm. I wonder whether that great humanit-hairian, Donald Trump, would mind parting with some of his spare hair if I could dig up some skullduggery by his political opponents? For example, much corruption has been reported in the Caribbean nation of Hairti — and it’s surely a lock that all of the Democratic Presidential contenders are involved. All I’d have to do is send my nosey friend, Fruity Giuliani, there on behalf of our Pres with a quid pro-boscis that the Pres of Hairti can’t ignore.

On second thought, if Agent Orange went to my head, my wife might think I’m losing it along with my hair. I might as well keep to my cage, skip my weekly trip to the clip joint, and try to console myself that, after all is said and done….

Now, if I can only convince my wife.

DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD

What would you do without your head? Well, you might become a candidate for President of the United Horsemen of Sleepy Hollow….or President of the United States of America. Just the thought of the latter naturally points to the strange case of one Donald Trump, a septuagenarian who appears to have a head — but every word emanating from said head makes it apparent that it isn’t a real head, but a cartoon head, with real drawing power.

Now, it’s possible that Sir Donald, of House of Orange fame, was born with an ordinary human head (hard to picture, but possible). If so, it seems obvious that at some point he irretrievably lost it (perhaps in a naval exercise, or maybe it was told “You’re fired!” when he was an ANT (Apprentice Narcissistic Tycoon). Of course, it would never do for someone of his stature to appear headless (not great for the image), so no doubt he struck a great deal with a great cartoonist to draw a big replacement head on his shoulders that would not only be the envy of every bird seeking a nesting site, but would look great and inspire many tweets in the bargain.

Needless to say, the cartoonist succeeded in creating an artistic wonder, notwithstanding the fact that every time the head said something, it made its bear-er look like an ass. Of course, that’s not the cartoonist’s fault, but Sir Donald blamed him anyway, because that’s what winners do to losers (of everything but heads). Naturally, Sir Donald’s followers drank it up, because everything he says goes down like Dr. Trump’s Original Snake Oil, ‘still-made’ right here in the good old U.S. of A. by Mexican aliens, and guaranteed great for the constitution, for soothing fear, and curing everything that aliens you.

And so, my fellow Americans, the choice is queer (heterosexually speaking). The time is now. Or is it the choice is now and the times are queer? Anyway, if your mind (assuming you haven’t lost your head reading this post) was undecided as to who or whom to vote for at the start of this treatise, I trust that is no longer a problem.

This has been a public service announcement brought to you as a public service. I thank you.

P.S. Thanks also to Wayne Hogan for providing the cartoon which provided the idea for this post. If his name sounds vaguely familiar, another great Wayne’s world classic appears on the cover of my book SEX SCELLS, which I seem to recall a few of you buying under duress way back when (and of which I just happen to have some leftover copies, in case anyone’s interested).

GERTRUDE STEIN LOOKS FOR DONALD TRUMP

In 1934 Gertrude Stein was on a book tour of her native America after 30 years living abroad in Paris. After arriving in San Francisco, she decided to take a ferry across the bay to Oakland to visit her childhood farm and the house she grew up in on 13th Avenue, but when she got there, she found the farm gone and the house razed. She wrote:

….there was no there there…. Ah, Thirteenth Avenue was the same it was shabby and overgrown…. Not of course the house, the house the big house and the big garden and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge naturally were not there any longer existing, what was the use…

You may think it strange, but the words “there was no there there” conjured up a fantasy-picture, a vision in my mind, of an imaginary scene wherein a latter-day Gertrude Stein went looking for Donald Trump decades after they had been childhood friends, only to find that the boy she’d known had not merely been raised but razed, and there was no there there….

If you’ve ever given much thought to why people turn out as they do, perhaps the above whimsy may not seem so strange after all. Obviously, we’re not all destined to become men and women of unbounded fulfillment (however that may be defined), but was Stein looking for a man grown so full of himself, so far removed from there, what was the use? How does a man who would be king — or at least President — become almost a caricature, a pretender, if you will, to the prone, meaning those prone to embrace simple answers to complex issues/prone to settle for simplistic bombast over substance? His bandwagon may have many jumpers-on, but, to quote Warren Buffet, A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

Humor and satire being my preferred manner of dealing with the theater of the absurd, I seldom write seriously about politics/politicians….but, with The Donald, seriously:  Where is the substance? Is there a there there?

In the end, it matters not, Trump deriders. You’ve heard of snake oil. Deal with it!