Month: October 2018

homelessness

Our tenancy was almost up and so my housemate and I began to look for new accommodation to include another person. We had a good thing going but we could make it better, maybe. My requirements would be a big enough space to stow a child a couple times of week, but other than that – loosey goosey baby, loosey goosey.

That said, as the time pressed closer and we still hadn’t found anything, I start to panic. Usually quite a happy-go-lucky optimist, I became emotionally wobbly at one point, which made me realise that I was afraid of something.

Begin a one week countdown until I’m homeless. I need something, a plan at least. I reach out to people for advice and temporary solutions. My new potential housemate says that he could put me up for as long as needed, and could even take on the boy. A beautifully kind gesture, but I still felt uneasy and anxious.

An unusually robotic personality, driven by logic in the same ways as Dr. Spock and Data, he asks why I am so stressed, what is it specifically that is bothering me so much, considering there is now a fix.

I pause for a moment and then begin to verbalise feelings and thoughts that I didn’t know I had, straight from my subconscious: that if I were to be staying at someones house, with all my belongings in tow or in storage, and I didn’t have a date for when I’d have my shit together, I would feel embarrassed. And then to have to bring a child to this home of someone else, I’d be mortified. I would feel like a failure to those around me, but more importantly, a failure to my son.

He looks at me, nods his head and says ‘Yeah, fair enough’ and walks off.

I know he doesn’t mean anything by this – his aim wasn’t to console me, merely to understand, and now he does, leaving me to sit and stew with this confession. Now I am able to acknowledge and better deal with the problems ahead, realising where my anxieties lie, all thanks to my autistic guru and new housemate.

barber

It would take two people complimenting me on my unshaved face to embrace the fact that I would now be actively trying to grow a beard. Granted these people were also young men with stubble of their own, itchy-backed and seeking reciprocity, and technically my employees so they could just be taking the piss, but this was the excuse I needed.

Self-conscious of the empty space that eats into the growth on my cheeks but mostly the one patch under my chin (bothering me enough to write about it at length), I had been told that to fill in these fleshy voids of masculinity I would simply need to go feral and not shave at all. More piss taking perhaps, but in for a penny in for a pound.

Not very flattering images above, but please remember the words of Orson Welles who said that: “part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.” And remember too the words of my 3 Mobile Upgrade Consultant who, when speaking of my Samsung J3 (2016) said “The front camera is 5 megapixels, which means it’s a bad camera”. But enough vanity, and onto this beard that I so keenly need to preen.

I let it grow wild and wiry, poking out in all directions from my face, which is hairy enough as it is. When it gets a bit much I trim away at my neck but leave my cheeks and chin. For some reason it doesn’t look normal. Alas, I am in need of a haircut and so I head to my barbers, whom I now trust deeply. The Turkish chaps here know how to deal with dark hair, trimming below the neck of my t-shirt where others would not, throwing fire at my ears like a fucking exorcism. It feels legit.

When the guy sees my attempt at a beard, he asks what I want done with it. I want to grow it. He gives an avuncular nod and equips himself with a small set of clippers. He hacks away and creates a neckline across my throat, traces it with his finger and says that this is where I need to shave, that it will allow the hair to get some volume and make it less lop-sided on my face. He says all of this in a slightly hushed tone, as though he doesn’t want to embarrass me, which I fully appreciate but it does make the words sting a little. I clearly don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Onto my sideburns, he trims them down to the corner of my jaw and then in another bout of barberly advice leans in and says that I need to keep this part from growing too much, that it won’t gather, it’ll crawl out and “look like pubes”. I feel like a teenager, with this surrogate barber giving advice that will stop me from getting bullied at school.

I leave the barbers enlightened, and keep up the practice – trimming a neckline and keeping the pubes from the corners of my face. In a matter of weeks the patch has vanished. I plan to keep it going until my entire face is covered. Teen Wolf Ahoy.

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