Retalliation

Dear Thirty-Three-Year-Old-Will,

Thanks plenty for your wonderful, prophetic letter. It’s not every day that people get letters from their future selves. In truth, it sort of freaked me out a little. I was in the middle of popping my zits and resenting my parents for not allowing me to be free when it materialised on my floral bedspread. I almost gouged out an eye, and for a brief moment I even stopped wishing evil on mum and dad.

You have neatly pointed out all my flaws for me. I am so grateful for that since, as you clearly seem to believe, I am a completely blind idiot who is too self-involved to even notice his own pathologies. Please stop me if I use any words you don’t understand, Future Self (I, as you may or may not remember, am an avid reader); I am aware that advanced age rots the brain cells, and obviously yours would be even more decayed due to the direct sun-exposure of your hairless scalp.

To speak plainly Future Self, I am entirely offended and affronted by your patronizing epistle. How dare you assume that you can speak to me in that manner? I can only assume that your regular approach to young people is one of condescension and pop-psych-inspired guile. You alternately berate me (using quite profane language) and encourage me. Is this a strategy that you use when dealing with adolescents? It’s very American, I must say: sort of a good-cop/bad-cop scenario, with the two personalities moulded together in one, substandard, thirty-three year old body. I assume your body is substandard because you mention physical fitness at least twice in your letter. You scathingly speak about my obsessions yet clearly you need to inspect your own value-system vis-á-vis corporeal self-image. Exactly how shallow have you become?

In short, Thirty-Three-Year-Old-Will, I wish to inform you that I whole-heartedly intend to ignore your little letter of “advice”. I am fully fed up of old people telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. I will say this, however: I will never stop giggling.

Please acquire some sort of a life and leave us young people to lead our own. Don't presume to tell me what to do, or who to be.

Regards,
Fifteen-Year-Old-Will

PS: Who’s to say that all the mistakes and mishaps which are happening, and which will happen, with me aren’t what make me into who you are eighteen years into the future?

Hindsight: That Bitch!

Dear Fifteen-Year-Old-Will,

I was looking at some photos of you this evening, and I got to thinking. As teenagers go, you’re okay. You’ve got some issues, but I think all teenagers have those issues. Granted, your preoccupation with being liked is probably above the global average in terms of its obsessiveness and downright level of insanity, but overall you’re not as different as you think you are.

I can see from your photos that there are certain people who are very special to you. From what I can tell, every single one of these people will remain special. There’s perhaps only one of them who will fall by the wayside, but that’s not too big a deal since she’ll spend most of your teenaged years making you feel like shit anyway. Sometimes it’s best just to cut your losses.

I’d like to give you a few pieces of advice, if I may. I know, I know - teenagers never like to listen to advice, they want to make their own mistakes blah blah blah. You don’t need to take this advice, but these are a few things I’ve learned (some of them were quite difficult lessons to learn too). Just hear me out. I know you’re going to make your own decisions and your own mistakes, but there are few things you did well too. Anyway, here goes.

1. Do not, under any circumstances allow yourself to study Accounting, Economics and Law for A’ Levels. You’ll only be doing it because you think it’ll make you money, and you’re not particularly interested in those areas anyway. You’ll get miserable grades and disappoint everyone, most of all yourself (don’t even get me started on how huge a blow to your self-esteem it will be). Instead, I think you should explore the possibility of studying Literature, History, Geography and French. Four subjects may seem like a lot, but you’re a pretty smart guy. Plus, if you’re honest with yourself, these are your strong areas. Don’t discount Art or Photography either. Trust me.

2. Get involved. Don’t be lazy and wait for life to happen to you, because it won’t. I discovered that when I was in my early twenties and boy do I wish I’d known it when I was your age! Get out there and play some sports; it won’t kill you, and you may even enjoy it. Join a drama club. Just do something for fuck sake!

3. Understand two things. First, you have the potential to be a boss writer, but you need to explore it more. Don’t be afraid to publish your stuff, however godawful it may seem. It sucks to discover, in your thirties, that you could’ve spent more time seriously developing your writing rather than assing around, getting drunk and sleeping. Secondly, the stage is your friend. If you ever find yourself living in Jamaica, for whatever reason, get involved in the theatre and STAY THERE. I can’t emphasize this enough. That is where you need to be, and you don’t want to wait until Facebook is invented to realize that all your old friends from UDAS are involved in theatre in a big way, and that you could be right there with them, doing what you truly love. I’m just saying.

4. I’m fairly certain that the opportunity to pursue your MPhil in Literature will present itself even before your undergraduate years are over. Take it. Take the fucking scholarship, get a job and do it. If you don’t, you’ll more than likely find yourself in your early thirties debating the relative merits of a settled life versus doing a PhD and having to write a damn thesis. Again.

5. Be honest with the people you love. They will love you no matter what. This counts for your friends as much as it does for your family. Those who don’t love you are better off out of your life anyway. The important people will always stick around. Trust me.

6. The zits will not go away until you’re thirty. So stop squeezing the suckers because they’ll turn your pores into craters.

7. Get professional help for the whole hair-pulling thing. I’m almost 100% certain that you don’t want to go bald at twenty-three.

8. Take more chances with people. They won’t bite you, you know. Well, not unless you ask them to (chuckle). What I’m trying to say is that you’ll miss many great potential relationships if you keep so much to yourself and play it safe all the time. Everyone has to face rejection, and locking yourself off from people because you’re afraid of the possibility that they’ll snub you is surely no way to live your life. I, myself, have grown close to several people in my later life, who I knew peripherally in my younger life, and I wish I’d explored friendships with them when I was younger.

9. Watch what you eat, lard-ass. You have the Minors shape – the shape of your mother’s family. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself battling forever against a big belly and skinny limbs. So quit being a hungry-belly glutton and shape up, bitch! Put down the KFC chicken leg that I can see you wolfing down, pick up a goddamned carrot stick and get some muthafuckin’ exercise already! If you develop the habit of swimming every afternoon (you live on the beach after all) you’ll find that it will come as second nature when you’re an adult. Trying to develop these wonderful habits after thirty is extremely difficult since the bad habits are so ingrained.

10. Never, ever puff a cigarette. Ever.

11. Own your insanity. To hell with what people say – you be who you are, because who are is just bloody wonderful. Quit feeling guilty for not being who you think people want you to be. People just want you to be you, so get your whiny ass in gear and join the human race already! Damn teenagers and their damn insecurities.

12. Stop crying so much when you’re alone. It’s not as bad as you think. Everything will be okay in the long run; and even though you feel like you’re the scum of the Earth, that’s just the Church screwing with your head. You’re not bound to believe in the things that you’re told to believe in, especially since those beliefs keep making you feel like you’re going to Hell. You’re not.

13. You know how you like to giggle? Keep that.

Good luck and best wishes,

Thirty-Three-Year-Old-Will

Happy Halloween!

Witch Hazel is one of my favourite Bugs Bunny characters, political incorrectness notwithstanding. ;-)

Grand Family Independence Lunch Celebration

Today marks 30 years of Vincentian independence from British colonial rule. We’ve come so far, and accomplished so much in the last 30 years. To celebrate, my family had a luncheon. Instead of engaging in my usual verbosity, I’ve decided to simply list today’s menu.

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Appetizers:

Nothing. We can’t afford frivolities like quail’s eggs, snails and dainty salads, especially since the introduction of VAT on top of our already aggressive income tax. Tapas are from Spain, (i.e. almost the mother country) so are off limits despite the fact that they are made by people who speak Español (which we love).

Entrees (that’s a French word, and I’m not sure how we feel about them):

British Pig Roasted with a Thick Skin and Stiff Upper Lip (we ate this rather quickly since we wanted to get rid of it as completely as possible; we gave the dogs the bone)

Authentic Vincy Yard Fowl Sans Neck & Spine (easy to catch, kill and defeather)

Friendly Sides:

Turkish/Lebanese/Iranian Hot & Spicy Couscous Salad (because we’re all about the flavours of the Middle East)

Revolutionary Roasted & Basted Patatas Cubana (unfortunately, not harvested using our own tender hands), Sour Cream Optional

Simon Bolivar’s Eggy Empañada de Maíz (on loan)

Free Trade Seasoned Green Banana Souse (we almost forgot these in the fridge, but they made it out in time for us to have them for seconds)

CARICOM Steamed Vegetables (steamed separately and kept apart until the point of ingestion), Heavily Oiled

Ikea Zucchini (because we’re all about cheap substitutes for the real thing)

Wilted Green Salad dressed with Agent Orange (thanks to the developed world for this recipe)

Stuffed Full of Ourselves Mature Politician Stuffing (aged to perfection since youthful politicians tend to be altruistic, innocent and selfless)

Real Thick, Rich American Gravy to Smother All Over Everything Else Thereby Killing Any Authentic Flavours And Giving Everything a Hint of Heinz Tomato Ketchup (nuff said)

Just Desserts:

Rejected Banana Crumble (because we have a lot of bananas lying around these days; it’s not like anyone’s buying them up or anything)

Imported Melon Fruit Salad (bland, but expensive, colourful and prestigious)

Frisko® Vanilla Ice Cream

Bar Menu:

Tap Water (the safest in the world, but definitely tapped)

Pepsi and/or Coke (duh)

Coke Light (because we had 2 diabetics and slim ting me at the fete; plus using actual sugar as a sweetener is so 200 years ago)

Hairoun Mixers (for Granny, the quintessential patriot)

Chilly Chilean Wine (brand unimportant since all we need is generic alcohol to kill the pain)

Some Beer That Fell Off the Back of a Truck in Canouan/Mustique/Any of the Grenadines That Plays Host to the Rich and Famous

1 Dented Can of Hairoun Gold (left over from Carnival)

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Tomorrow morning I look forward to my independence indigestion.

And now, for your enjoyment and entertainment, an audio clip of 3-year-old Lila reciting the pledge of St. Vincent & the Grenadines. She only made one mistake!

Happy Independence SVG!

My Reactionary Irrationality Regarding Hair

Some wounds need to be licked

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts about hair, and the debate about black women’s hair. Well, when I say I’ve been reading A LOT of posts, what I mean is that I’ve read two posts, but these two posts are by women who are very close to me, so that counts as a lot right? The debate about whether to wear her hair natural or processed is one of the oldest, most politically charged debates in the (post 1960’s?) history of black women. Remember the whole Joan Andrea Hutchinson debacle several years ago in Jamaica (in short, she was a television news presenter who wore a natural hair style and was widely criticized by the Jamaican public for looking unprofessional)?

Blah Bloh Blog, the unofficial slackness supervisor of the West Indian Twitter Army (#WITArmy) blogged about the good hair/bad hair dichotomy the other day (or re-blogged rather – she actually re-posted something that someone else re-posted from somewhere… or something. Re-blogging can be confusing at times. I blame sites like Twitter, tumblr and posterous for this new, potentially bewildering Internet craze). At the end of her re-blogging, she asked a question of Caribbean women: “do we really identify with our hair the way this article [i.e. the one she re-blogged] & [its] comments seem to suggest?”

Empath, my spirit sister and potential vigilante extraordinaire, blogged about her own hair, perceptions people have of it and some random Tyra Banks idiocy. Let’s try to get a handle on Empath here. I feel like we need to. Empath is relevant. She doesn’t really hold with trivialities and unimportant bullshit. This is not to say that she has no sense of humour; it’s just that she actually cares about stuff, and cares about things that matter. She worries about the state of the country, the escalating crime levels, the dirty politics, and the ineffective health care of SVG. She sees the importance in taking a stance on the style of her hair. And she has great hair. Empath’s hair is like Medusa’s snakes, without the creepiness. Her locks are long, sinuous, thick, uniform and tinted ever so slightly burgundy by the sun. Sometimes, I have unrealistic yet scary thoughts of her locks strangling her in sleep. Oh yeah, she likes comic books and graphic novels. She REALLY likes comic books and graphic novels. Like really (this is irrelevant, but intriguing to me).

Empath in her vigilante/crime-fighting costume; designed by me, inspired by various comic book hero(ine)s

Tonight I am fighting back against all the hair talk. Tonight, (or today, depending on when I decide to post this) I am here to say: ENOUGH! Stop the fuzzy insanity! There are people out there – poor, unfortunate people – who have (and this is the gods’ own truth) ABSOLUTELY NO HAIR WHATSOEVER! You people are arguing and discussing and theorizing and intellectualizing and bemoaning and whatever else, but what about the rest of us? What about those of us who have to scratch at our scalps to try to inveigle the tiniest bit of hair into revealing itself like a hostage emerging from a cave in the middle of a desert somewhere?

I began losing my hair at the tender age of 23. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I used to have a weird sort of OCD thing that started when I was 12. I would sit and twirl my hair around my fingers, getting it well knotted, then I’d yank it out. By the root. So I spent a lot of time as an adolescent with a bald patch right in the front of my head. I was, needless to say, the subject of much scorn and ridicule since I also had a terminally ingrown toenail that forced me to wear sandals all the time. I was a sandal-wearing, bald-patch-sporting, braces-flaunting adolescent. It was not pretty. Eventually I stopped though (with the hair pulling I mean), and my hair became my crowning glory (clichés be damned). By my final year of UWI, I had long, curly, golden-brown-blonde-reddish locks.

By the time I moved back to SVG, I was able to encourage the growth of dread locks. Unfortunately for me, my locks were not the fashionable, salon locks that we see everywhere today. No rented dreads for me. No, I had big, wutliss locks. Bongo-knatty we call them here. In fact, I sort of really only had one massive lock on the back of my head, and a few satellite locks that flocked around it as if worshipping it’s size and density. I did not purposely twist my hair to create these locks. I just stopped brushing or combing it. What the hell was I thinking?

I attribute my hair loss to the afore-mentioned dread lock (singular). It was so heavy it pulled on the roots of my hair, so I cut it. I cut it just in time for j’ouvert, then I bleached it and dyed it orange. That was the beginning of the end. I went from the guy with the gorgeous hair to this:

Me; a self-portrait without head hair, but with facial and uber-masculine chest hair.

As the artist’s rendering of me (above) clearly shows, I am now completely glabrous. A couple of weeks ago, one of my students actually put his fist on my head (I was seated, taking the register) and polished my scalp in an attempt to see his reflection. He made squeaking noises. I was horrified.

There have been many theories put forward by scientists and old wives as to why men go bald. Scientists say it has to do with a surplus of testosterone (extra-manly men tend to go bald). This accounts for the proliferation of men (like me) who are bald ONLY above the cheek. Everything under the pate is hirsute and pelt-like. My own hair growth, for example, extends from my eyebrows down to my toes. I actually have hair growing on my toe-knuckles (whatever they’re called). This scientific theory holds no water because Robert, my best bud, is even hairier than I am (if you can believe that) AND has a full head of thick, soft hair. The bastard. Plus, you can’t get more manly and gruff than him.

The old wives say various things. One of them says that baldness is inherited from the mother; the other says that it is inherited from the father. Below is a picture of my parents:

My parents (an impression). This is actually three bastardized "symbols" from Adobe Illustrator. I changed the clothes and hair/beard. Plus my father never drinks martinis - substitute that (in your head) with a beer. The dog looked funny so I included it.

Notice the most important thing here: neither of these people is bald. They both have wonderful, perhaps even superlative hair. So mash down that lie (a Jamaican PM used to say this, but I can’t remember which one).

My uncle Paul, Mum’s brother, is the only bald family member of whom I am currently aware (apart from my brother, whose hair-loss is as severe as mine, and started at around the same age). Uncle Paul used to do the comb-over until his daughters, Paula and Lisa, convinced him that the fashion is to shave your head clean in order to avoid teasing one or two wisps of floaty hair from one side of your scalp to the other, thereby looking like an idiot who is going bald. Uncle Paul now looks like Mahatma Gandhi, sans dhoti (but not sans other clothing… thankfully).

Uncle Paul? No, Silly! It's Mahatma Gandhi (sans dhoti).

I want to speak about one other bald comrade of mine. Cristobel has a rare disease that has caused her hair to fall out. I think it started some time in her fourth or final year of secondary school, and no one has ever adequately been able to tell her why. So anyway, she is my bald, bootylicious beeyatch and we have great fun making fun of people with hair. I can’t imagine her ever arguing with someone about the sociological implications of a straightening iron versus prickly pear and dread wax.

People who haven’t gone bald don’t know what it’s like. Voluntarily shaving your head for fashion is not the same as going bald genetically. I wish I had the luxury of being able to shave my head, secure in the knowledge that several weeks later I’d have a full head of hair once more. Doubtless, Cristobel wishes she didn’t have to wear that damned head wrap everywhere she goes in order to avoid the malefic stares of Joe Public and his wife, Malicia. As a misguided pretense at having hair, Uncle Paul spent years doing the comb over.

We miss our hair. We miss combing it, we miss washing it, we miss styling it. We miss going to the hair dresser, personal stylist, barber, lawn guy, our mother and saying: “just a little off the top, Scotty… and don’t skimp on the brilliantine!” I’d say we miss cleaning out our drains, but I don’t miss that since I really do have THAT much body hair that I still have to do it. I can’t speak for Cristobel in this regard.

So please, the next time you feel like clambering up onto your fleecy soapbox to pontificate about the socio-political status of your mane – about the historical bases for keeping your hair either natural or unnatural – remember us, the follicly challenged. Think about our plight. You know the old saying about complaining about your shoes until you meet a man who has none? Well we baldies fit into the category of the man with no shoes. We have no hair, and we did not choose this state of being. We have nothing to celebrate or argue over. What we have are shiny, squeaky, mirror-like scalps. We’re bald, we’re bare, we’ll never get used to it.

Dread By Design