An Existential Life

He wore his hair close-cropped to his head; the gray was concentrated in the sideburns, which he neither kept too long or too short, and just right at the temples.

It was a sweet, silver-colored gray. His father, who was still alive and now dating, had a full head of silver hair – as silky and flowing as mercury – that was as distinguished a color as the silverback gorilla at the zoo. Hairstylists a third his age clamored to cut and shape his mane every three weeks.

Of course, he would lose his hair, in the end.

His mother, who also was still alive, but living in Bar Harbor, Fla., was born of a man who lost every follicle of his reddish-blond hair as a young man. And he knew that the baldness gene comes not from the paterfamilias, but his mother’s side. And that the bald he will become will be the waxy head kind of bald, with a tight, sculpture-garden weave of hair a half-inch to the top of his left ear around the crown of his head to one-quarter above the right ear. He thinks that this will not be a good look, and has started to wear hats in public. 

He does not grow his beard anymore in the winter months; it now comes in white and feeble-looking, like the men who play chess at the YMCA and bitch about the tepid coffee served in little Styrofoam cups, with powdered creamer, imitation sugar in pink packets and cheery-red stir-sticks.

He opts for the under-chin goatee, what the French would call a “petite goatee” or “chin scruff” sported by skate punks and certain, pimple-faced grocery baggers.

On him, he thought, it looks regal, more like Freud and less like the greasy grocery clerk, who still can’t seem to tell the difference between paper and plastic, even though you bring your own African-weave, Earth-friendly cotton handbag to the store as a show of consciousness and shit.

That’s OK. He’s trying to “fit in.” Be part of what he hopes is a global community, in an “it takes a village” moment. Hey, it’s an ethos. 

The bagger neither smiles, nor nods, nor acknowledges his existence – in so much as in philosopher Franz Brentano’s view of life, you know, logic, for logic’s sake. Or, more succinct, he is part of the existential quantifier, which asserts the existence of some object with certain properties. 

He is a man. He is wise.

He is a wise man.

Secretly, however, he yearns to be an existentialist.

He wants nothing more than to create his own meaning, his own essence of life.

And skip the absurd.