Tanning Season

We are on spring break, which means one thing – the beginning of tanning season. Baseball coach tanning season, that is. The baseball coach tan is a very unique look. It’s a lot like the traditional farmer’s tan look, only the baseball coach adds in tan legs from the knees to the socks. The upper half of the tan remains the same – tan arms to the shirt sleeves and tan face, ears, and neck, with a starkly-contrasted white forehead. It’s a special look.

For us bald baseball coaches and farmers, the look gets extra special, since the stark whiteness covers the entire upper head area as well. And depending on the league’s hat style choice, the look can get even more refined with the tan sideways D shape, or semicircle, in the middle of the back of the head, caused by the snapback hat gap. It can get to the point where your wife starts requesting that you just wear your baseball hat to church.

“God won’t mind, honey. Your head looks like a kindergarten paint and stencil project without it.”

(Side note: “Snapback Hat Gap” would be a great name for a rock band.)

This year our baseball league has thrown me a headwear curveball, sticking with the snapback, so my ultra-tan semicircle will remain, but going with a mesh back cap for this season. I’m not thrilled. An amazing amount of heat enters and escapes your body through the top of your head, and you can’t fully appreciate that fact until you lose your hair.

It has been a wet winter here in Northern California, and the few practices and games we’ve been able to squeak in between rainstorms have been rather cold-weather affairs. I have been freezing in my new mesh hat. Conversely, I know when it’s a hundred degrees out there at the end of May I’m going to be dying of heat stroke. Plus, when the sun does come out, now I’m going to end up keeping the front half of my head stark white, while tanning the back half through the mesh around the deep red semicircular burn, with the tan/white line of demarcation going straight across the North Pole of my head from ear to ear. My wife may eventually just not want to be seen with me anymore.

All concerning head tan issues aside, what is actually concerning me is my legs. My sock tan lines have always been even starker than my hat lines, because my feet rarely ever see the light of day. My feet are so white they’re almost see-through, yet my shins are out in the sun almost year-round. It literally looks like I’m wearing white socks when I’m barefoot.

It’s not the tan lines that are the issue, however. It’s the hairlines. Back when I had a real job and went to an office, I used to wear tall socks every day. My shins went bald years ago. I always attributed this disappearance of hair to the socks. It has been quite a while now since I made the transition to full-time writer/author/stay-at-home dad, and so naturally, it has been quite a while now since I have worn pants.

The standard uniform for the California home office professional is shorts. At least, I assume it is. I haven’t actually asked any of the other ones, but it just kind of has to be, right? Most of them probably go with flip flops, too, but I have old man arthritis in my big toes, so I have old man orthopedic inserts for my shoes that are not conducive to flip flops. I am stuck with shoes, so when I made the transition to an all-shorts existence I also made the transition to ankle socks. So for a very long time now, my shins have not seen a sock.

I naturally assumed I would see some hair regrowth on them, but the opposite seems to be the case. The mid-shin hair timberline has actually moved up to an elevation higher than my tallest real job socks ever were, and now I have lost the hair on the back of my calves, as well. It has become very apparent that socks had no part in the balding of my lower legs.

If my head started going bald around the same time as my shins did, and both my head and my lower legs are only getting smoother, only one conclusion can be reached: I am going bald from the top and the bottom of my body simultaneously. That is very disconcerting.

The balding of my head and lower legs has taken quite a long while. If this truly is a totally converging baldness, how long will it take? Or is this more of a hair migration? I have certainly noticed an increase in hair growth on my neck, shoulders, and upper back. And don’t get me started on my eyebrows and nose. In the first thirty years of my life I probably spent a sum total of three minutes tending to my eyebrows and nose hair. These days it’s a constant battle to keep them from taking over my face like an unchecked jungle.

And my ears! I have found some hairs growing on and out of my ears in the past few years that make me wonder if I’ve been exposed to excessive radiation.

So which is it? Am I slowly going to go bald until I only have a small patch of body hair somewhere around my belly button and the rest of me looks like a seal, or is all my hair just relocating itself, and I’m destined to look like a chimpanzee with a bald head and bald legs and Brillo pads for eyebrows?

It’s inconclusive now, but either way, I’m starting to think my weird baseball coach tan lines are the least of my worries.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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Spray on the Glamour

A long time ago when I was up way too late watching TV, I saw an infomercial for spray-on hair. If you had a bald spot, you could simply take the handy aerosol can of hair helper - expertly color-matched to your actual hair - and spray hair back onto the top of your head.

The possibly patented and expertly color-matched hair restoration formula would go to work by attaching to the hair follicles around the bald spot, thickening your existing hair. This would help cover the bald spot, and if the bald spot was too large, the amazing hair restoration formula would simply cover that bald spot all by itself, without needing to cling to and thicken existing actual hairs.

This amazing process would give your hair a natural, full, manly look. Your confidence would be restored, and instantly the world would think you had gone insane, because you just spray-painted the top of your head.

Sadly, spray-on hair only came in black or brown “hair.” Bald blonde guys had to just buy regular beige spray paint at Ace Hardware. The lack of hair color selection is probably why the product didn’t make it to the mainstream. Either that or Rust-oleum was just cheaper. Who knows?

I was reminded of that wonderful and amazingly short-lived product the other day when I read an article about Xtreme Green Grass. This is a company here in Sacramento that will come to your house and spray-paint your lawn. I’m not making that up.

In case you haven’t heard - or you live in another state and just don’t care - California is in a severe drought. We have about nine gallons of water left for the whole state. Those of you in other parts of the country may be thinking, “Ha! Have fun with that, morons.” That is a common (and often warranted) reaction to Californians’ problems, but in this case, just a heads-up; if you enjoy eating fruits, vegetables, rice, or nuts, you’d better start thinking about building a greenhouse and growing them yourself. Colorado can help you with the logistics.

Anyway, since we’re seeing the bottoms of all the lakes here, we’ve been asked to cut back drastically on the outdoor watering. I actually stopped watering my lawn a long time ago – well before the drought. Truth be told, it was because my lawn mower broke, and I was too lazy to fix it. I ended up on the leading edge of the water conservation movement by accident.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse, and watering anything unnecessary has become a bad idea. Not everyone considers their lawn to be unnecessary like I do, however, and some folks here are still watering their lawns regularly. You can all feel free to knock on their doors the next time you need to make a salad.

They just can’t seem to let their green lawns go. I, on the other hand, have embraced my brown, scrubby lawn much the same way I embraced going bald. It’s more convenient. Less maintenance. And I’m not at all concerned with how it looks.

I was already married when I lost my hair, so no problem there; I’m not trying to impress anyone anymore. My wife is stuck with me. Same with the lawn - I already had friends when the drought hit. I’m not trying to impress anyone. If you don’t want to come over to my house because my lawn is brown, I probably didn’t want you to come over in the first place.

Plus, I haven’t had to mow my lawn in over a year. Score another point for water conservation.

As we know, however, not everyone embraces the loss of their hair or their green grass with quite the same level of enthusiasm as I do. So, Xtreme Green Grass was born. The perfect company for those that have given in to the peer-pressure of stopping the sprinklers, but can’t stand to be seen with a brown lawn.

Dave Bartlett, owner of Xtreme Green Grass, and his crackerjack crew will come out to your house and spray-paint your brown lawn green.

Again, I’m not making that up.

Isn’t that bad for the environment? you might ask. Not at all, says Dave. Apparently, the dye is an “all-natural earth pigment,” whatever that is. I’m not sure how you get the color green from dirt, and if he’s using ground-up live plants to color the paint he’s using to color the dying plants, that just seems unsustainable. But, what do I know? Dave is the plant painting expert, here, not me.  

So it’s all-natural. That’s really all we need to know. Dave says it’s not harmful to people or pets, either. Your pets, your guests, and your children can continue to eat your newly-painted lawn as they normally would, without fear of any side effects.

I’m almost sold, Dave, but just like that late night infomercial, I’m still a little skeptical.

I mean, imagining my lawn with a pleasingly-natural, unidentified earth pigment tone of green applied to all the scorched, brittle, brown blades of Tall Fescue is certainly tempting. And while the estimated five hundred-dollar price tag to paint my yard is almost too good to be true, I think my lawn might have the same inherent problem as my head.

I don’t think spray-painting the bald spots is really the fix we’re looking for.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen

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Observing a Deficiency

The other day, I stared at my wife as she walked into the room.

Hmm… I think something is different… did her neck get longer? No, it’s her hair.  Maybe... Yes, it’s her hair. I think it’s shorter… and possibly blonder.

Uh-oh, she saw me staring at her and now she’s smirking like she knows I see something different, but can’t figure it out… I’d better act fast.

“You did something with your hair,” I mumble. She laughs. “It looks GREAT,” I exclaim, trying to recover.

“It wasn’t today,” she says. “It was two days ago.”

Dammit!

Apparently she had cut about four inches off it, and it was at least three to four shades lighter. (As if I understand the blond shading scale!)

I am the most unobservant person I know. I would be a terrible cop. Actually, I think I would be great at high speed chases, and tackling bad guys, and Taser-ing people, but if the perp got away, my sergeant would probably ask me, “What did he look like?”

“Uh, you know. He was a dude. You know, kinda about this height, sorta thinnish.”

“A dude?”

“Yeah. He was white and had darkish hair. Or maybe he was Mexican. He was either Mexican, or a really tan white guy. Or he could have been Asian.”

“You talked with him for five minutes before he ran, right?”

“Yeah. You know, come to think of it, he kinda looked like a tanner version of my buddy John.”

“OK… Can you describe John?”

“Um, you know. He’s a dude. You know, kinda about this height, sorta thinnish… He was wearing a blue jacket. Or maybe dark grayish. It might not have been a jacket, actually. It might have been a long sleeve shirt…”

I expect that would be about the point where my police career would end.

I think I was just born without the part of the brain responsible for remembering what things look like. And it goes beyond hairstyles and bad guys. You could rearrange all the furniture in my house and I wouldn’t notice until I tried to sit where the chair used to be and hit the floor. And it works for adding and removing familiar things as well. If my wife hangs a new picture on the wall, or removes one that has been there for three years, my brain reacts the same way to that. A month later I will have a vague notion that something is different about that spot on the wall, but I won’t be able to put my finger on it. When she adds things, I have a little bit of an advantage, but when she removes things, I’m almost hopeless. My brain has no stored imagery of what it used to look like at all.

If I came home and my house was painted an entirely different color, I would probably just have a strange notion that something was off, but not what it was. If I did notice that it was a different color, that would be the only thing that I could tell you. It’s different. There is no way I would be able to tell you what color it was before.

I saw a good friend of ours at a gas station a few month ago. I was driving a company car, but it happened to be the exact same make and model as my own car, just gray instead of blue. The first thing she asked me was, “Did you get a new car?” I was amazed by that. She obviously got all of the part of the brain that I am deficient in, because I would be very hard-pressed to tell you what make and model car any of my friends drive, let alone what color they are. They are stored in my head in general categories; Jenna: SUV, Mark: pickup, Bill: small sedan, Jaime: toaster-looking car, etc. As long as they show up in the same class of vehicle, my brain will register no difference at all. The color doesn’t even register with me. I’m not color-blind (although, my wife might argue that point based on some of my clothing choices), I’m just color-impaired.

I think whatever brainpower is responsible for the high level of information gathering and storage required to remember what things look like – the part that I obviously lack -- was re-routed to other functions. I remember events, and text, and speech. I can tell you exactly what someone said years ago, and usually with the same inflection. I remember the lyrics to almost every song I have ever heard, and I know movie lines forward and backward. I am the official keeper of long-ago vacation memories, if someone has a question about what we did or what was said. I just have no idea what color the outside of my house is. Same thing with my wife's hair. I see her every day, and I sleep next to her every night, but if she changes her hair I might notice that it is different, but I would not be able to tell you what it looked like before.

And don’t even get me started on clothes. I am barely aware of what the clothes I own look like. How am I expected to keep track of anyone else’s? Luckily, my wife has learned to live with my deficiencies, for which I am grateful. She just laughs at me when I ask if the jacket that she’s had for six months is new.

She doesn’t laugh when I tell her exactly what she said two years ago, though. I don’t think she likes that very much.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

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Going Bald

I started to lose my hair about six years ago. At this point, I am at least half way to being totally bald. Apparently it is a slow process. That is probably so you will have time to adjust. (My oldest son is six and a half. I don’t think that is a coincidence.)

I really miss my hair, but not why you might think. None of my reservations about going bald have anything to do with vanity. I will not miss my hair for one minute from a looks standpoint. I just never cared about it very much. If you took a look at my school pictures from K through 12, you would see that I never put much time into trying to have cool hair.

It appears that there was a brief period in the eighties when I actually tried to have a hair style, but unfortunately, like so many other things in the eighties, it was ill-advised. Apparently – and fortunately – it lasted less than a year, because it is captured for posterity in only one of my school pictures. Seventh grade will forever be known as the year of the part down the middle with super-cool feathered bangs. This was the same year that I had braces with headgear, so looking back on it, I was probably trying desperately to compensate for having a stainless steel wire sticking out of my mouth, attached by rubber bands to a “flesh colored” (read: pink) neck strap. That would also explain the rolled up cuffs on my jeans with the black-and-white checkered slip-on Vans with no socks. Trust me, at the time, that seemed to be the height of fashion. But like I said, it was the eighties. Bad choices all the way around.

I either got rid of the headgear, or just got tired of paying attention to my hair, because by the eighth grade photo I was back to short hair. I have kept it short ever since. Up until I went bald, I had never viewed my hair as an asset. I never really thought of it as a liability, either. I think I just never thought much about it at all. It has always been just a line-item on a to-do list. Morning: wash hair. Every two weeks: cut hair. In that regard, my hair is a lot like the front lawn. I don’t give either one much thought; I just water and cut them both on a regular schedule. Like the front lawn, I don’t mind cutting my hair, but past that, I want no other maintenance activities taking up even an extra minute of my time.

So, given that I put my hair in the same category as lawn maintenance, you may be asking yourself, why would he miss it? Seems like it would be a good thing not to have to deal with it anymore. I agree. I was actually pretty excited about the less-maintenance aspect of my hair loss. Until I went outside…

I’m not sure you can fully appreciate this unless you yourself have actually gone bald, but the hair on top of your head is an amazing source of insulation. When I go outside now in the slightest whisper of cold air, I am instantly freezing. If the sun is out and it’s over 65 degrees, I’m burning up. For the first time in my life, I am a wuss. I need a hat at all times.

I was blown away by what a difference having no hair makes on my body temperature. Apparently, it doesn’t take very much hair to keep you insulated, either, since my hair was never over a half-inch long. I guess as long as it’s evenly distributed, length really doesn’t count for too much.

This constant need for a hat has thrown me for a loop. It has introduced a whole new level of planning into my formerly simple life. I used to just go places. Time to go? Let’s see… I’m wearing clothes… OK, I’m ready! Now, when it’s time to go, I have to make decisions. Where are we going? What are we doing? Is it an indoor event? Is there even the remotest possibility that we will be outside, even for a few minutes? Not sure? Better bring a hat just in case.

Now I am forced to find a hat that will “go” with my clothes, or my wife won’t stand next to me. I am forced to choose from a selection of baseball-type caps, since I am not anywhere cool enough to be able to pull off the fedora or the Kangol driver’s cap look, and my cowboy hat always seems a bit much for a backyard barbeque. In hot weather, I always really want to wear one of my wide-brimmed, floppy, “boonie” hats, but they are all some sort of camouflage pattern, so I end up looking like I am there to invade the backyard, not just visit.

You would think the baseball cap would be good enough, but let me tell you, they are not without challenges to the bald man. The adjustable size varieties have the open semi-circle in the back. I found out the hard way that I still need to apply sunscreen to the back of my head to avoid a second-degree half-moon burn. Even if the cap is fitted and does not have the dangerous rear opening, it is still not 100% safe. I have had occasions when I have sat still in the sun for long enough – at a baseball game or an outdoor concert – that I have received six tiny little circular sunburns on the top of my head, through the pin-hole air vents on the top of the cap. Come on!

In the summer time, I just sunscreen my whole head on the weekends. It’s just safer that way.

It is a cruel trick played on the bald man. Whether he cared about his hair when he had it or not, as soon as it’s gone he is forced to accessorize. Coming from a guy who never accessorized anything, and always just had clothes instead of “outfits,” this has been a pretty big adjustment for me. My wife has started to look into online tests for colorblindness, just to make sure I’m not a total idiot. (I think she’s going to be sorely disappointed!)

Well, I’ve got to go. We’ve got a wedding to attend. Honey, which one of these ball caps goes with my suit?

I miss my hair.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


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