When I was growing up, my parents had a friend named Gary, a jeweler from Denver. Gary was almost totally bald, and he would visit us in Massachusetts once a year. He would constantly make jokes about his bald head to amuse my brother and me, making a big show of applying sunscreen to his scalp before we went to the beach. He'd have us rub it for luck, and once even let us draw a face up there with a Sharpie.
Today, if you're a balding man with some disposable income, you have to make a choice: Will I be like Gary, admirably self-deprecating and at ease with the completely natural aging process occurring on top of my head? Or will I be desperately vain and narcissistic and try to halt the loss? This essay is about how I chose the latter path and, most of the time, feel pretty damn lame about it.
The worst thing about going bald is not that it indicates aging, or a decline in sexual virility or anything as silly and New Age as that. It's that it's part of the Big Competition. High salary? Add four points. Lame job? Minus one. Big dick? Add two. Going bald? Minus three. Today, the center-front of my hairline remains intact, but the two sides have been ebbing like a beach approaching low tide for nearly a decade.
Read the rest here.
— Will Doig