Wednesday, June 15, 2016

A Hairy Horror Story

The last Stephen King book I ever read was Pet Sematary. It was good--King is an excellent craftsman and possesses a well of inspiration that never runs dry--but that book finally creeped me out to the point that I couldn't handle him anymore.

In case you've never read it, Pet Sematary is about a family that relocates from Chicago to Ludlow, Maine. At the edge of this small town, children have created a pet cemetery (but the little darlings can't spell, thus the typo title) out of haunted ground and childish yearning. If you bury your pet there, it comes back to life. Unfortunately, the resurrected pets are not really the same--they tend to smell bad and be psychos.

When the protagonist's two-year-old son is run over by a speeding truck, although he knows it's unwise, he buries the boy's body in the pet cemetery. What comes back is a tiny, earth-scented serial killer.

A few years ago, I noticed my hair was thinning. I was wearing it shoulder length, and you could see through the bottom few inches. I knew this was a possibility--my mother's hair was so thin you could see her scalp--but you never really think those pesky family genes are going to land on your genome until they do.

After watching my hair continue to fall out for another year or so, I bought a supply of Rogaine and began applying it daily, per the package directions. It runs about $10/month and takes 10 minurtes a day. I'm plenty vain enough for both of those.

About 4 months went by before I started seeing any results. After that, it grew, like the rest of my hair, at about 1/2 inch a month. So, if your hair is six inches long (i.e. short), it will take another year for it to grow out. If it's a foot long from the root, as mine is, it will take two years. I'm about halfway there.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I noticed that the new hair that's coming in is not the same texture as the hair I lost. It appears to be a lot more pourous, which means that if it's humid (and Dayton, Ohio is the humidity capital of the Midwest) it frizzes.

It looks a lot like that cat's on the cover of King's book, actually.

I've tried creme rinse, Argan Oil treatments and industrial strength hair spray. Nothing helps. As I was fiddling with it yesterday in preparation for a party at the neighbors', I suddenly realized it was Pet Sematary hair.

It came back from the dead, but it's never going to be the same.


2 comments:

  1. Only you can associate grey hair with Pet Sematary. Haha!
    That book freaked me out, too. I won't ever re-read it, that's for sure. But I keep reading his books. None of the others have ever scared me as much as Pet Sematary.

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  2. I read it long ago and I thought it was creepy too! But I still read the whole book.
    So Rogaine worked for you! I guess you have to take the good with the bad...sometimes frizz is in:)

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