The coffee is becoming less and less effective at helping me work. I had two large cups today, and it didn't make me feel like packing all the stuff in the bathroom. Instead, it made me become obsessive, and I sat there surfing the net all afternoon looking at photographs of people with long hair and balding men. I searched for all different combinations of search terms. (However, good news, I did FINALLY do some more packing, and I got most of the bathroom stuff into boxes. But most of the day was spent surfing the web.)
I looked at a blog: http://www.baldingcelebrities.com/2010/06/terry-nutkins.html . Terry Nutkins is another person with the long balding hair that I am advocating. I think he looks great. I always must add that I wish men would grow long, full beards and mustaches, and I feel that long hair without a beard, or with a short beard or partial beard, looks unbalanced and incomplete to me, similar to the way that a deliberately cut mullet looks unbalanced. After saying that I also have to say that it doesn't count if you belong to an ethnic group that isn't able to grow beards. I only mean, grow them if you can.
I must explain the 'small but devoted cult following' rationale. Imagine that you are selling a product. Only a tiny number of people want this product. However, they can't get it anywhere else. Hardly anyone produces it. The buyers will happily pay a high price to get this special item that is so hard to find. So, is it worthwhile to sell that item, even though only a small minority of people are demanding it? Or is it only worthwhile to sell stuff that EVERYONE wants? Is it ever worthwhile to sell something that a tiny number of people desperately want and are willing to pay a high price for?
I say the answer is yes. That is the situation for men with long hair. An unknown number of women either strongly love long hair on men, or else are neutral about it and don't care one way or the other, or else they're only pretending to like short hair because they believe everyone else likes it and so they are obligated to like it too. Then, there are the rest of the women, who sincerely mean it when they say that they like short hair. For whatever reason, that's what they like, and they're not changing their minds about it. But that other minority really likes long hair on men. Those women exist.
Those women, like myself, cannot find what they want, and are desperate to find it. Speaking for myself, I know that I will tolerate other 'imperfections,' such as baldness on top, if they grow the rest of their hair long and also grow a long beard and mustache.
Hair is there to be petted and stroked. You run your fingers through it and over it. It is there to sparkle in the sunlight and to show all of its different contrasting colors. Hair has several different textures and colors depending on where it is. Some men have multicolored beards and beards with stripes and other interesting things. Those are not bad, those are good. Variation is interesting.
So if you grow long hair, you have an advantage over other men, in a way, even if you are partly bald. The short-haired men have to compete against a huge number of other short-haired men to attract women who like short-haired men. They are competing against a majority of people who are all doing exactly the same thing. As a result, they have to develop some other strength in order to be better than all those millions of other men.
But if they grow their hair long, then they have something unusual that all those other men don't have. They no longer have to compete against a million other men exactly like themselves. When they grow their hair long, they make themselves into a small, highly desirable, desperately sought-after minority. Suddenly, the men-to-women ratio changes. A tiny number of long-haired men are now being pursued by a huge number of women who are desperate to find these men and can't get them anywhere else.
I don't have numbers to prove this, but I am certain that the number of women demanding long-haired men is much higher than the number of men who actually have long hair. It is a high ratio of women to men in this situation. That's my opinion.
However, internet polls might not show this, because the outspoken women who express strong emotions and strong opinions tend to be the same types of women who harshly judge everybody who doesn't conform to the mainstream norms. They feel confident about loudly expressing their mainstream opinions, while the long hair lovers quietly keep their opinions to themselves and don't bother answering polls or commenting on websites and photos.
Long hair lovers are frustrated and have often given up hope on getting what they want, as I myself have done, because they have had a lifetime of experience with trying to ask men to grow their hair long, and being ignored or defied by those men. They know from experience that they cannot get what they want, and so they don't even bother expressing their opinions loudly on web pages and photos. So internet polls don't show these people. That is me speaking from personal experience.
Now that I am growing natural dreadlocks and now that I have learned about how dreadlocks work, I have to modify some of my statements. I always say that long hair is there to be petted and stroked. However, you can't really pet and stroke dreadlocks the same way you can long loose hair. You can't run your fingers through them in the same way. So, are there any advantages to dreadlocks?
I used to believe that dreadlocks always resulted from somebody doing horrible things to their hair and damaging it. But now that I am growing them myself, I understand that new, matted hair grows from the roots underneath an existing mat, because the roots cannot change their position and untangle themselves, so they continue to grow in the matted, interlocking position. That is the reason why a dreadlock continues to grow even though you aren't doing anything to it.
The natural way to start this process is to completely stop using any shampoo, conditioner, or other products on your hair, and to stop brushing it. The hair will stick together because of the oils that your scalp produces. Once the hair starts to stick together in strings, it will naturally start matting underneath the sticky strings, and it will continue to grow that way by itself, without any damage or teasing or crocheting or backcombing or wax or anything else.
Now that I am learning to understand and appreciate natural locks, I have to wonder what it is like to stroke, touch, and handle someone else's hair when they have locks. I can only touch my own hair. Is the hair still interesting and worthwhile to touch and look at, up close? I don't have experience with intimate relationships with anyone who has dreadlocks, and the types of people who grow them usually have the wrong personality types for me. I only have experience with touching and petting long hair on men who did not have dreadlocks.
Locks do have one advantage. They can grow longer than terminal length. Your hair grows for a certain number of years. Then each hair individually stops growing, falls out, and is replaced by a new hair growing from the root. That limits the ultimate length of your hair. This length varies greatly from person to person. For me, terminal length was right around hip length. This is known as 'classic length.' I can never grow hair any longer than that.
However, when hair is locked into a mat, that mat can continue to get longer and longer. When the hairs disconnect at the roots, the rest of the hair remains tangled in the mat. It does not fall off. A new hair will still grow in at the root. The very end of the matted lock might contain hairs that are not even connected to the scalp at all. This allows you to grow a dreadlock longer than your hair's terminal length.
That is what I am in the process of doing right now. I am going to grow my dreadlocks to a very long length. It will take many years, but it is a 'new adventure,' an achievement. I achieved terminal length and could not go any farther. There was nothing more to achieve. There was nothing more to watch the progress of. I like to watch my hair grow. I like to see it changing over time. I like to notice it as the hair passes each 'landmark.' It gives me something to eagerly look forward to as the years go by.
The length of the locks measures my age, just like the concentric growth rings measure the age of a tree. There is no way to lie or cheat. The only way to grow them is to leave them alone for years and years and years. When you look at them, you are looking at decades and decades of time that has passed. It is impossible to instantly get long locks in a single day.
That is the satisfaction of growing long hair. And it requires no effort. It happens automatically as you do nothing. 'Doing nothing' is the only way to achieve long hair! It is the spirit of laissez-faire, non-intervention. It exemplifies your impulse resistance. If you randomly obey impulses to cut your hair, then you will destroy years and years of progress in a couple of seconds. Being able to resist impulses, in order to achieve long-term goals, or 'delaying gratification,' is often described as a manifestation of maturity and adulthood.
So even though I do not yet feel completely secure about my dreadlocks, I am continuing with them, and I am growing more attached to them over time. If I ever change my mind about them, I will comb them out instead of cutting them. It may take months of patient work to comb them out, but a few months is nothing in comparison to the decade that it took to grow hip-length hair. (Granted, that decade was longer than it should have taken, because I was still trimming and cutting the ends of my hair for a long time, and it would have taken fewer years to grow if I had stopped trimming it earlier.)
Accepting my ugliness: I am not the most beautiful person. I am also not the ugliest person. However, now that I know about the Weston Price facial deformities, I feel greatly comforted about my ugliness. I feel a sense of control. When you feel ugly and unattractive, you also feel a lack of control. You didn't choose the body you were born with.
In recent years, I have learned a lot about what causes health problems such as obesity, and I am certain that these things are not your fault - they are almost 100% the result of things that were done to you in the womb and shortly after your birth - and bottle-feeding babies with formula instead of breast milk is the biggest cause of obesity. (I suspect that some vaccines might also cause obesity, by causing permanent damage to the adipose tissue, and possibly by infecting the adipose tissue with live viruses.) It permanently damages your body for life. That is not your fault. It is also not the result of 'genes.'
Therefore, a morbidly obese person is capable of giving birth to healthy, slender children. It's possible that hormones and other problems in that person's body might affect the baby, but this problem will fix itself in a couple of generations, perhaps in the children's children, if everyone breastfeeds and gets proper nutrition and avoids doing any of the other things that I suspect are the causes of obesity. I want to see these things tested; however, I feel confident that they are true to a large degree, after all the reading and observation that I've done over the years. One thing that I am absolutely, 100% certain of: IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT.
(I must also add that using particular drugs will also cause severe obesity, and that is something that you do during adulthood. You lose the weight if you stop using the drugs. When I say that obesity isn't your fault, I'm referring to the type of obesity that happens to people who aren't using any of the drugs that cause obesity.)
And so, people who are ugly or unhealthy or have some problems with their bodies need to feel a sense of control. You are able to control whether or not you cut your hair. Even though you can't control how long it grows, and you can't control the baldness, you can still choose to grow whatever hair remains, to whatever length it will achieve, or longer if you allow it to form natural locks. It is a way of controlling that which you can control.
I am accepting my own ugliness. That is what I am asking men to do when they go bald. They have some kind of vulnerability or imperfection in their physical appearance, and I am asking them to just accept it and continue to grow long hair and beards anyway. I insist that it is still worthwhile.
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