your father's moustache

It’s peculiar. At the time I thought that that long hair discrimination law was so important, that the right to have long hair was something our founding fathers had fought and died for. Anymore I think what a stupid idea. I guess I thought it was a sort of equal rights thing for hippies, although of course somebody who wasn’t a hippie could grow their hair long, and a hippie could decide to try out a crewcut for awhile.

Or could they? I’m not so sure. There was no card a hippie could carry to prove he was one, and there was no Bureau of Hipdom that decided who was and who wasn’t. There was an air force base not far from Champaign and at night the Air Men would come to town to pick up college girls. Sometimes they would wander into our hippie enclave and then they would pull out their California driver’s licenses which would show them with the long hair they had before they had joined the air force, so that we would know that they were hippies who were temporarily in the air force.

The Greeks had this thing for young boys. When you were a young boy you were expected to take up with some older guy and he would kind of be like your godfather, and then when you became older you would pick up a young boy. You would also have a wife who would bear your children, but I think the boy would be your true love because the Greeks thought women were too stupid to have any real relationship with. I think this was pretty common in the mideast at the time. The Romans were notoriously free in their morality. The only thing they wanted you to do was pretend to respect their gods, and of course, never to rebel. The Jews were the puritans of the ancient world, and hence Christianity kept that aspect, and made prudes of us all.

I don’t know about the cavemen cutting their hair, how would they do that? Well I suppose they had sharpened rocks, but that doesn’t sound pleasant. And there must have been a time before they invented sharp rocks, what did they do then? Those tribes they used to come across that were still living in the stone age, I think they had long hair, but not like going all the way down to their butt. Maybe it just gets tattered running around in the forest. There are Supercut schools. Why don’t they found a university to study these things?

I like the story about the guy who drew on his moustache. I’d think the sergeant would kind of chuckle and admire the guy’s cleverness, but then I expect I don’t know sergeants very well.

One of us hippies worked in a grocery store and they made him stay shorn and shaved. He grew a little moustache, just as a way of showing a little rebellion, but when they noticed it, they made him shave it off. There was a black guy who had been working there for years and had a moustache all that time, and just to be fair they made him shave his off too. Our friend felt terrible because if he hadn’t tried to grow his, they never would have made the black guy shave.

I’ve heard that a lot of black guys have some kind of skin condition that is aggravated by shaving, and that was a reason sometimes they didn’t make them shave. Mexicans are the guys who always have moustaches. A Mexican guy I worked with confided to me once that he wasn’t crazy about his moustache, but all the other Mexicans had them, and if he shaved his off, he would feel a little like a traitor.