At least I still have hair

“Oh well a touch of grey, kinda suits you anyway.” -Grateful Dead

It’s appropriate that a song would lead me here. Because it was hearing a song the other day on the radio that made me wonder about why we alter our appearance. The song was pretty good but it had been turned into the audio equivalent of a three dollar whore with every studio effect in the book. With studio trickery you can now make almost anyone sound great or at least better. This song was drenched in reverb, colored up with auto tune and made almost laughably unlistenable in the process. The song which probably would have sounded pretty good naked was made hideous. It would have been better if it was left alone.

And that sort of is my point here. Why do we as a race want to always improve or at least change what mother nature gives us? I will deal just with male vanity here. I have been toying with the idea of getting my hair colored. No I don’t want to go blond, just get a little of the grey out. Maybe I will try to get a real job and I want to look, you know, Younger!

I read this article that said more and more men are starting to color their hair. So many in fact that a whole new line of products “Just for Men” has been devised. As a matter of fact it’s actually called “A Touch of Gray.” The idea being that men don’t want their hair to look dyed but just want to lose most of the grey, leaving just a bit of the look that some call wisdom. One brand of this disguise sold in mens hair salons (whatever happened to barbershops?) called “color camo” has increased its sales to nearly a million treatments a year in less than four years on the market. So I am not alone in this.

And I am sure the results will have to be better than the last time I tried a dye job where my hair turned traffic cone orange. I mean Bozo the clown was jealous. But now after hearing that song on the radio that sounded like it had fishnet stockings on I wonder if I want to mess with the whole deal. I earned all these grey hairs honestly. Although I would love to turn the clock back in some ways I wouldn’t want to lose all that experience for anything or anybody. Some call it “life”, which I am told takes a lifetime to learn how to live. The Deads’ song says “I will get by, I will survive.” I guess that says it all.