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Published:
1/19/04

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Elastic Hair

By H.G. Miller

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but I have elastic in my hair right now.

After spending the better part of an hour sorting through bottles of hair gels, creams, waxes and mousses, this is what I ended up with: A little blue bottle promising to provide superb hold and “psychedelic” shine.

Now, I haven’t unleashed this upon the general public yet, but I’m assuming that when one eyes my gooey locks, they will be overcome with a sensation similar to that of an LSD trip. At the very least, for the price I paid for this stuff, they’d better feel like they had some bad mushrooms.

You see, for the better part of a year now, I’ve been dumping discount gel into my hair in order to create some semblance of a hairstyle. Granted, the “frizzy fro” look may have worked for Clay Aiken, but that cat can sing, and me… well, I do a fantastic Layne Staley impersonation, but he’s dead and so is my career as a karaoke artist.

I’d like to say that I have experimented with several brands of hair gel in order to find that certain “hold” level that will propel me to wealth and fame, but I really just grab whatever has the sale sticker next to it.

Since I just finished squeezing out the last of my extra 25% of Citri-Shine (yes, the power of oranges… in your hair… and I bought it…), I decided that I might try to do something a little wild with my looks. Namely, spend more than the three bucks I normally do on some styling gel.

I’m not quite ready to dump forty dollars on a “good” haircut, so I’m still slumming it at the Super Cuts next to the liquor store. Honestly, though, I kind of enjoy spending a few hours with howling Mexican kids waiting for the next available hairdresser to ask me, “what number?” and then proceed to shear my head like the last sheep before sunset.

So, I trekked it on over to the beauty store and began to wade through the many brands of hair care products displayed within.

Knowing that I’m a novice at this, I decided to ask one of the girls working there for some help. Unfortunately, I was wearing my dad’s complimentary windbreaker from the 1984 AT&T Regional Leader’s Conference in Miami, Florida. While I enjoy the jacket’s lightweight protection from Los Angeles’s harsh winter conditions (sixty degrees and cloudy, egads), it has not aged well, so I think the girl thought I was a homeless person.

Needless to say, she was less than receptive to my stumbling advance (okay, I might have been a little hung over when I went shopping, but that’s another story for another time), but I was able to clear my head and convince the security guard to let me look around, as long as I promised to buy something.

I quickly became confused. Was I looking for a wax or a gel? Would a mousse provide me the hold I wanted, or should I lean towards one of the men’s styling creams in the sophisticated round tins? Why did every single product in the store seem to do the EXACT SAME THING!!!!!

Is there a manual somewhere that explains the difference between extreme styling and cutting-edge hold? I had an idea that I wanted my hair to look somewhat like the guy on that one TV show with all the hot chicks and the cool music for their promos, which are always on during the football game. Where was the bottle for that?

At any rate, I finally settled on this blue bottle that boasted “Elastic Style” for cutting-edge individuals such as myself. I always thought elastic was that stringy rubber thread that kept my sweatpants from falling down, but apparently they’ve figured out how to liquefy the stuff and charge exorbitant amounts of money to suckers like me who have no idea how to maintain extreme hold through normal conventions.

And now, it’s in my hair. My head has the kind of psychedelic shine that exemplifies a successful individual. It’s way better than that regular shine the rest of the world gets. Take that, Clay Aiken!