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We're a little late this week but I can promise the wait will be worth it. This gave me chills. I?
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We're a little late this week but I can promise the wait will be worth it. This gave me chills. I’m losing my hair. It’s a bitch. It’s a cobweb on a no-moon night. It’s a dog from hell. I tell myself that because God or the universe gave me a well-shaped skull and a reasonable-looking face, the thinning was simply a trade-off. Perhaps this is just my way of making me feel better about my situation (I do, after all, know plenty of men who are damn good-looking with a forest sitting atop their heads). But, that’s neither here nor there. Due to this thinning, I like to keep my hair close to my skull, which involves me taking a pair of clippers to it once a week. However, when I’m traveling, I will generally find a local barbershop because 1). it feels good to be groomed 2). these places ooze the culture of a neighborhood. For the past few days, I've been in Chicago, celebrating Robert Lucas's birthday. He's one of my best friends and [a damn good writer](. Anyway, sometime yesterday I caught my reflection in the mirror –– which, contrary to what [my Instagram]( might suggest, I try not to do too often –– and I had a “holy shit†moment as I laid eyes on the chaotic state of my hair and my beard. I immediately set out on a hunt to find a barber and eventually settled on a shop in the heart of Wicker Park. It had large windows, white-washed walls, exposed concrete floors and "decor" in the form of several badass-looking motorcycles parked in the shop's corners. Once inside, I shook hands with the barber, a middle-eastern man in his mid-fifties whose name I can't remember for the life of me. (I’m dreadful with names so for the remainder of this piece I’m just going to call him “the barber†or “he†or “him†or what have you.) So, I shake hands with this barber I tell him I want my head shaved close, my beard tightened up and my neck good and trimmed. He picks up the clippers and the two of us fall into conversation... He’s Iranian. The hair on his face and his head are very grey and one can look at him and safely assume that he is better looking now at fifty-something than he ever was in his twenties and thirties. (We hate these people unless we are these people.) Midway through the haircut, he pulls out a gold-plated cup with Arabic etched to its sides in gorgeous spirals and he pours me a shot of whiskey. I take it and it burns my tongue and my throat on the way down, before warming my insides Once warm, I ask him where he learned to cut hair. He tells me it was in prison. He laughs. I laugh because he laughs. Then he revises his answer. He tells me that he fought in Iran for eight years, got captured in Desert Storm and became a prisoner of war for a year and a half, where he began cutting the other prisoner’s hair to pass the time. His clippers were a tiny pair of scissors you might find in a first-aid kit. He said for the first month or so, he would have these massive, leaky blisters on this thumb and forefinger from all the snipping and cutting and shaping with these tiny scissors. When he moved to the United States, he brought his scissors and he’s been cutting hair ever since. Before the war, he told me that he worked in a metal factory and loved working on motorcycles and vehicles in his spare time. Now, when he’s not cutting hair, he builds bikes from the ground up. As he’s telling me all of this, he’s running the comb along my jaws whilst slicing away at my beard at an alarming pace and grace. I ask him what was his role in the army. "I killed people," he said, "I’m glad I don’t have to anymore." It was here where I looked into his eyes which were looking at me through the mirror. There was kindness in them. But, there was also something lurking beneath their deep gorgeous blue, something terrifying, something that made a man like me not question his story, something that made a man like me wonder for how many, the blue I was staring at in that moment, once upon a time, meant death. Cheers, Cole. [Speaking of Instagram.]( Support the Sticky Notes Newsletter. [Sticky Notes]( runs on caffeine, ambition, a voracious reading schedule and a whole lot of writing. It also costs me hundreds of dollars (and hours) every single month to keep up with. While I will never charge you (or anyone) to be subscribed to Sticky Notes, if you'd like to support me and what I'm doing here, you can pick up one of the goodies I sell down below.... [Snow Cones]( my copywriting guide. [$100k]( my freelance guide. [One Minute, Please?]( my first book of poetry and prose. [Quarantine Dreams]( my second book of poetry and prose. [After Her]( my third and latest book of poetry and prose. [Chasing Hemingway]( my "paid" newsletter. [Bottoms up.]( Believe in yourself like François Sagan. Back in 1956, The Paris Review interviewed François Sagan. For those unfamiliar with her, she was a bit of a protege once upon a time, releasing her very first book at the age of eighteen, a book called Bonjour Tristesse that would go on to gain international recognition. She was cocky, a bit cold, very matter of fact and not at all lacking in self-belief. One of the questions the interviewer asked Sagan was... “To what extent do you recognize your limits and maintain a check on your ambitions?†Here was Sagan's answer... “Well, that is a pretty disagreeable question, isn’t it? I recognize limitations in the sense that I’ve read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. That’s the best answer, I think. Aside from that I don’t think of limiting myself.†[*drops mic*]( 33 things Nora Ephron wished she'd known (if she were doing it all again). Towards the very end of Nora Ephron’s book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, she writes down a couple dozen things she’d wished she known if she were doing it all again. *Nora Ephron is typing now* - People have only one way to be.
- Buy, don’t rent.
- Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.
- Don’t cover a couch with anything that isn’t more or less beige.
- Don’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it on in the store. - You can’t be friends with people who call after 11 p.m. - Block everyone on your instant mail. - The world’s greatest babysitter burns out after two and a half years. - You never know. - The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money. - The plane is not going to crash. - Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic about at the age of forty-five. - At the age of fifty-five, you will get a saggy roll just above your waist, even if you are painfully thin. - This saggy roll above your waist will be especially visible from the back and will force you to reevaluate half the clothes in your closet, especially the white shirts. - Write everything down. - Keep a journal. - Take more pictures. [Read the rest of the list here.]( James M. Cain on royally fucking up in love. James M. Cain, the author behind the coveted crime noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, reads at the same kind of pace as Elmore Leonard but has these pockets of beauty that remind me of Charles Bukowski. Here are a few lines Cain wrote from the perspective of the main character, Frank, describing the lips of the woman that would eventually become his lover... *Cain is typing now* “Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.†That’s very Bukowski-esk. Speaking from my own experience, I’ve found the line between love and loathing to be as fine and as delicate as angel hair. I suppose this is a truth for Cain and his characters too because, towards the end of the novel, their love turns tumultuous before finally going south entirely. Once it has died, here’s an excerpt from the woman with the very mashable lips recognizing what they had and had lost… *Mashable lips woman is typing now* “It makes it even, but look at us now. We were up on a mountain. We were up so high, Frank. We had it all, out there, that night. I didn’t know I could feel anything like that. And we kissed and sealed it so it would be there forever, no matter what happened. We had more than any two people in the world. And then we fell down. First you, and then me. Yes, it makes it even. We’re down here together. But we’re not up high anymore. Our beautiful mountain is gone.†That’s so pretty it’ll break your heart. But, I digress. [Ring. Ring.]( P.S. If this newsletter made you weak in the knees, you can share it with the world by selecting one of the four icons down below... [Send it.]( [Send it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Share it.]( [Share it.]( [Post it.]( [Post it.]( Copyright © 2021 Honey Copy, All rights reserved.
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