Scissors and Comb Haircutting

by Bob Ohnstad

Dear reader, the world is built of layers upon layers of strangeness like the petals of the ever-unfolding lotus.

I have been slowly giving myself a haircut, a snip or two at a time over the last few weeks, so when I came across this manual at the library I decided to take it home. I had no idea what I was getting into.

It begins like this: "To introduce myself, I'll begin by explaining how this book came to be. Before August 20, 1978, the thought of writing a book had never seriously crossed my mind. On that day, as I lie in a hospital bed waiting for the results from tests and X-rays, I pondered: What is the best thing I can do with the limited time I have left? Because twenty years before I had a kind of lymph gland cancer that is supposed to recur despite being arrested, I had good reason to expect the worst verdict on my ailing lung.
"I soon learned my illness was pneumonia, but before I was told that, I decided to write a book that makes available the knowledge I've gained during my professional career."

It continues like this:"I subscribe to the view of our human condition given by Thomas Aquinas: we all live in two different worlds at the same time - a spiritual world and a material world...The more you live in the material world, the less you can live in the spiritual world...I want to make it a little easier for my customers to concern themselves with things higher than the hair on their head."

The book is heavily larded with inspirational quotations:
"Make somebody happy today, even if it's yourself." - Anonymous
"If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else." - Dr. Laurence J. Peter
"By virtue of being born to humanity, every human being has a right to the development and fulfullment of their potentialities as a human being." - Ashley Montagu
"UFF DA!" - Norwegian term for burdensome hair
So, in effect, we have this picture of Bob Ohnstad: he is a sweet, benign, thoughtful ageing hippie who has found his niche and is determined to make the world a better place in his own small way. And good for Bob Ohnstad.

But.

The haircuts.

Dear reader, did you, when you were small, ever attend the autumn fair of a rural district in Southern Ontario? You did? Good. Then travel with me back to that time. Walk with me down the midway, past the goldfish slowly dying in their tiny bowls, past the enormous teddy-bears and the mirrors painted with the Harley-Davidson logo, breathing the mingled scents of cotton candy and diesel fuel, clutching your lavender helium balloon, scuffling your little shoes with the scary clowns on them in the soft grey dirt. The year is 1978. The roaring sounds in the near distance are from the revving motors of the cars in the smash-up derby that is just about to begin. Now look up, look way up, at the adults walking by, from the fringes at the bottom of their leather jackets to the studs at the top. They are wearing concert shirts: Def Leppard, you spell out, and April Wine. There is a woman in front of you, pushing a drowsy baby in a little orange stroller, a sticky two-year-old balanced on her meaty hip. She is screaming at a little blond boy whom you recognize as a classmate. "Donny!" she screams, "you get back here!" You crane your neck back to look into her screaming face: red lipstick, blue eyeshadow, two pink streaks of blush across her cheeks like diverging jet trails in the autumn sunset. And the hair. The hair that twists and billows around her face in a menagerie of feathers and rat-tails, that hugs close to her neck and explodes off her forehead like a Trojan helmet, a fluffy, fluffy Trojan helmet made of hair.

And that is the dark secret at the heart of "Scissors and Comb Haircutting". That is the style advocated by Bob Ohnstad as the most conducive to a concern with higher matters, the style that frees the mind from vanity and materialism. Which is why, in the end, no matter how sweet and thoughtful and well-intentioned they may be, the hippies will never prevail. Their theories break down in practice; their strivings for spiritual advancement lead inevitably to material degradation and squalor; they have, dear reader, no style.