A little playlist I cooked up after reflecting on the words in this blog post. The music journalist in me just refuses to die.

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I cut my hair yesterday. Shaved my face clean, too. I’m of two minds about it.

First things first: it goes against every instinct I’ve learned grace à la musique that has affected me most in this life. As much as I love modern electronic, specifically the strain of garage, house and bass music that has arrived from the United Kingdom, it’s the lessons from the counterculture-era rockers and singer-songwriters that have stuck with me since adolescent days.

No apologies to David Crosby, though.

That would just be a juvenile display of hero worship. An admittance that my behavior is beholden to artists who haven’t the foggiest idea that I exist. But it’d be equally a lie to say his self-admitted juvenile lyrics go unconsidered whenever I cut my hair and shave clean. Changing your face is perhaps the most striking among but a few commonly accepted methods men have to express their emotions.

And after a certain point, two-years deep of unemployment finally terminated, I had to ask myself why I was carrying around an unkempt headmop and a barbiche that varied between Van Dyke and vagabond. Was this a choice to let my freak flag fly, or just an artifact of life spent wondering where relief would come from?

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To be clear, I do not see anything wrong with living on the dole. Regardless if actively trying to lift oneself out of it. For some, it will take only a few weeks to raise the standard and pull themselves up it. For others, it might never happen. In both cases, the initial reaction is pre-conditioned and the response is learned from a political reality that values people only insofar as they are willing to contribute to an economic lottery that increasingly benefits a select group of uber-wealthy speculators and venture capitalists.

(Clay’s Note: Alright Ben Guevara, let’s dial it back a bit.)

No judgment can be levied against the bottom of society until one faces the same predicament.

For my part, I vacillated between self-starting determination and a learned impotence. For large swathes of time, I mired in the despair of not being able to find work that suited me, much less a living from my writing, highlighted by the panicked assumption that my ever-widening gap between employed positions was rendering me ever the more unemployable. Forget the idea that the descent into the vallon was made willingly with the idea that something better lay on the other ridge,

This era of malaise entailed a paranoia punctuated by spells of lucidity wherein the wherewithal was found to try again, to apply myself to jobs, blogs, to anything really, that could distract me from the shadow of the precipice I had yet to climb.

And in all of that time, the shit on my face continued to grow and the act of cutting and shaving transformed from tasks of self-care into acts of desperation. A manner of avoiding the matter that I was depressed, anxious and angry. That I was falling every deeper into a ravine despite my attempts to paw and claw for a toehold of a wall slick.

So was this time any different?

It feels so. At the very least, the surrounding conditions are different; gainful employment, a recent transformative experience, a renewed joie de vivre from the blog, and a newfound ambition to publish poetry and write novels. These things have all bolstered a sense of self that had been heavily predicated upon being a skilled but amateur fire performer. Someone with an appetite to learn new techniques and meet new people, but a fear of being known.

I don’t think changing my face really helps with that latter part, as it were, but it was a choice all the same. A choice to reset, to begin again.

Give it a few months. My hair grows back fast, and I intend to let the freak flag fly in other ways in the meantime. And when the moment comes to decide on what to do with the shit on my face, I intend to make a choice for myself, and not because it felt like the only option I had.

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