I was looking at a photo from 1990 the other day. It would have been taken about a year after the birth of my daughter. Some friends and I went hiking in the local mountains for the weekend, and I was standing at the top of a peak looking like a wild man. I was wearing this bizzare tee shirt with a hole in it from an acid burn, and I had a beer in one hand and picture of my daughter in the other. I was about 40 pounds lighter and my hair was shoulder length and very thick and curly.

I realized looking at the picture that I will probably never get to have my hair look like that again. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when everyone wore it like that way. When I started interviewing for summer positions in law school though, the locks had to come off, and when I found my first job, they had to stay off. Attorneys just aren't allowed to wear their hair looking like they belong in a heavy metal rock band. Chances are my hair will have succumbed to male pattern baldness and turned grey before I have the freedom to let it grow that long again.

After living in this area for all but seven years of my life, I finally discovered a good barber just last year. This guy is fantastic. He spends half an hour giving me a $9.00 hair cut, and when he is done, my hair looks as good as it going to get. Not a strand too long or too short, everything laying perfect. Part of being a barber is being able to chat with the clients and this guy is perhaps the worst I have seen at that. He is a first generation Italian and I can barely make out a work he says. His main interests are baseball and NASCAR so even when I can understand him we don't have much to talk about. But damn can he cut hair.

So yesterday I got it trimmed and it looks pretty good. It is slicked straight back from my head. I had court today, and I'm wearing my favorite suit. The jacket and pants are a jet black that almost matches my hair and contrasts well with my pale skin. The shirt is a maroon red, a couple of shades darker than the red of my full lips, and it makes their color seem brighter. My tie is black and red with a small amount of gold. The gold matches the color of my rectangular, wire rim glasses. Above the top of my black, polished shores my socks are black with faint red and gold spots. My fingernails are neating trimmed, the ink stains from today's writing have been scrubbed off, and my face is as smooth as a baby's bottom. There are a few scratches on the backs of my hands and a slight red mark on my face where I missed shaving, but otherwise I look about as good as I am going to get.

If anyone can claim to have Malkovian blood it would be me, but tonight I'm hoping the mad side is sufficiently masked by a lawyerly veneer of Giovanni.

Here's my quote for the day: From Robert Reed's 'An Exaltation of Larks' (1995)

"Lust and curiosity are honorable, ancient qualities. Trust itself may be older. Even the first asexual cells were built of trust: DNA and proteins and lipids struggling together for simple survival. Trust is easy, Jesse realizes. All it takes are words and persistance and he coaxes those girls out of their jeans, then their panties, and pulls apart their warm shaved legs, and with a sense of ceremony, he kneels, laying his mouth of each of the trusting pussies, drinking in the rich old salts of a Cambrian sea."

Back in my teens, I remember learning that the ratio salt content of our cells (considerably lower than our Ocean's current level) is the same as would have been found in the Oceans eons ago when we emerged onto dry land. While the coaxing countless women out of their clothes isn't anything I aspire to (despite my amazing sperm), the way this passage ties sex into our evolutionary past gives me the shivers. It makes me conscious of how, even as a pure physical act devoid of love or caring, sex is a powerful, primal act with roots stretching back to the warm oceans where life originated.