Reason #3: discipline

Discipline:  it's needed for dreadlocks as well as for drills

Why am I getting dreadlocks?  Because it requires discipline.  Not all methods do, but I'm working on my hair every single day.

There is no other similar period of time in my life when I paid this much attention to my head.  Even when I was shaving it bald, I only attended to my duties every three or four days.

Each day there are tasks I must perform to keep my hair on course:

• Palmrolling to compress the locks
• Adjusting rubber bands
• Clockwise rubbing to form new knots

I also have to form dread balls out of hairs which are between the locks and shove them inside (something I'm still not very good at), and there's a whole process to getting the loose hairs on the dreads themselves pulled in and lookin' trim.

Anyone who sets out to make professional-looking dreadlocks is going to learn discipline, or they will never succeed.

Lean clean dreadlock machine

Five weeks and two days

Do dreadlocks smell bad?  I had one friend of mine tell me that they do in his experience.  Every girl he's dated who wore locks had some kind of funky odor, he told me, at least if they were of any length.

I asked another friend, who'd dated a woman with five-year locks, and he said that he didn't notice any odd smell.  This is a guy that wants to puke if he even looks at food which has gone bad, so I trust his sensitivity.

So some dreadlocks smell and others don't.  I think it has to do with moisture and dirt.

A fellow in town here told me that the last time he cut off his dreads (he's on his second or third set) they had some kind of mysterious fluid inside that he likened to engine lubricant.  Yum.

Mind you, this is the same guy that told me his method for getting dreads was, "Have violent nightmares, lots of sex on your back on the dirt, don't wash your hair, and don't brush."

Dirt can help hair lock.  So can wax.  Either one, in abundance, can keep the dreads from fully drying.  That leads to mildew and odor.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it - dreadlocks are smelly and dirty if you're a smelly and dirty person - in fact, it amplifies those factors.

Only time will tell if I'm right, but if my wife kicks me out of bed these things are probably done.

Reason #2: Laziness

For most people, this is a terrible reason.  I have never paid more attention to my hair than I have since I started locking it.  I believe that eventually this reason will bear fruit, but I'm a long way off.  Mind you, part of the reason I kept my head shaved for three years was also laziness; I could roll out of bed and not think twice about my hair.  The shaving every three days got old eventually.

Someone who is willing to use the neglect method (which is exactly what it sounds like) will see the benefits of laziness much sooner than I will.

28 days later

Dreeeeeeaaaaaaaaads . . .

Please forgive the zombie reference, but zombies are sweet.

"You're the last person I would have thought would get dreadlocks," said one friend last week.

"Can I touch them?" asked another yesterday.

"I have never understood why white people would want dreadlocks," commented a third on Facebook.

That last comment prompted me to start posting my reasons for dreadlocks, because for me it's not cut and dried.  In fact, some of the reasons are even a bit contradictory.  People are complicated that way.

Here's some bad news: I lost my bag yesterday (or it was stolen, haven't figured out which yet), and with it my camera.  I don't know how fully I will be able to document my hair's journey now.

That journey is going to start back into the world of fiber arts now.  I take a week off waxing and start taking the clockwise rubbing and the dread balling seriously.  Then I start back in with the wax to compress the new knots I've made.  Wax on, wax off.

Reason # 1: Go green with dreadlocks

Why am I getting dreadlocks?  One reason to go green.  Dreads retain the hair after it's shed by the follicle, keeping it with me unless and until I cut it off.  Here's a few ways this reduces my carbon footprint:

• Reduced time sweeping up hair, which tends to draw dust together.
• Fewer dust allergens means fewer allergy medication prescriptions.
• Less hair in drain = less Drano and longer lifespan for the plumbing.
• Don't need to vacuum as often, which means less electricity and less wear-and-tear on the carpet or rug.

Promises made, promises broken

Three weeks, three days in, and there are a couple of things that I've backpedaled on.

• Waxing.  I had been thinking about cutting out the wax in my locks, but I changed my mind.  There were a few factors that swayed me.
1. I started a program, so I should follow through.  The wax controversy gave me pause, but my hair's making progress.
2. I'm getting feedback suggesting that it's locking up fast, so apparently I'm doing something right.
3. I spoke to a local business owner who used to have locks, and he used wax as well.
• Outing.  I was consider giving a talk to my business networking group which would tie together my writing and my hair, but I didn't think my locks were quite ready for prime time, and I opted to talk about poison ivy instead. When I make the shift in their consciousness from "the business writer who always wears a hat" to "that guy with dreads," I don't want them to take away ideas like messy, wacky, or disheveled.  It's important that I project a professional appearance with dreadlocks, so I want to let them settle in a bit.

I think these are acceptable shifts in strategy. What's wonderful is that I can always change gears again . . . my hair's not going anywhere, and the process is slow enough that I can mold my coif like a bonsai kitten.  My hair is locking up fast enough that I have abandoned my stocking shower cap; although I've got plenty of loose hairs and a couple of locks which are kinda meh, there is definitely improvement every day.  The progress is enough to keep me on the program, but not so fast that I want to start dangling them in every face I encounter.

Of course, I live in a small, strange town.  I now know of not one, but two elected officials who have put a single lock into their hair.  The lock acceptance rate in the rest of the world may vary.

No pictures today.  Instead I will close with a fun little montage video of the day of backcombing.  Have fun!

Great balls of dread!

It may not look like much, but this dread ball is huge.

I made my first dread ball today, and I'm stoked.  It may look underwhelming in the picture, but this is a big step towards bringing my locks into line and making them behave like the hairy snakes they are. I know, I got some splainin' to do.

When we sectioned and backcombed my hair, every effort was made to get all the hairs into one lock or another.  But . . .

• . . . my hair is pretty short, so some probably slipped out right away.
• . . . the locks started out quite loose, so a few worked their way out.
• . . . my healthy scalp is pushing out new hairs all the time, and a lot of them just don't know about the new hair plan yet.

So there's a lot of hairs just kinda wandering around out there, not sure what's going on because they don't have any little follicle friends pointing them in the right direction.  It's creating a fuzzy little halo, a corona of wispy fibers shooting out from my head, catching the sun as I go through my day.

The way to give these hairs a home is to make a little dread ball, a tangle that I can slip up inside one of the locks so that it all tightens up together.  This is the how-to I'm using:

Since I've been thinking about backing off wax, I've been feeling around for these hairs when I'm tired of palmrolling.  In the video, Jonny says that locating and separating the loose hairs is the difficult part, but I don't have any trouble on that step.  Maybe it's because my hair's still fairly short.

Where I was stuck was making the dread ball itself.  I wasn't serious enough to get out the Lock Peppa mentioned in the video (it came with the kit I ordered, and there's plenty left), but I was annoyed that I couldn't start to catch the hairs together without the stuff.

Credit the dream-state for my success.  As I awoke slowly, I remembered that you have to bend the hair over as you're rolling it, and I tried doing it that way. Before I was fully awake I had the dread ball you see above.

My wife is confident she can get as much action out of a crochet hook as she can from a proprietary loose hair tool, so we're going to pick one up.  If she wasn't already very good with fiber arts and needlework I'd want to get one of the specialized tools, but I'm confident she won't do more harm than good.

Out and about

Fifteen days in, and I found the perfect storm for bringing my young locks out in public again:

• It was a (mostly) sunny day
• There was a rock festival at the local college
• My hair needed a chance to air dry

I just rewaxed most of my locks last night, so palmrolling them into a spiky mace-head was a snap.  If you're going to rock a hairstyle, then rock it well, I say.

Keep on dreadin' in the free world!

I felt good about going out in public, because I appraised my dreads last night and found them to be coming along nicely.  I removed the rubber band at the base of each one, because they had all rolled up away from the scalp and I wanted to reposition them anyway.  As I said, there wasn't any wax in most of them, so I was able to check out how much locking was going on in there.  Most of them have good, strong dreading going on in the vicinity of the rubber band, so moving it up closer to the scalp should only help things along.

The hair has already opened up conversations I hadn't had before.  I ran into a local elected official, who told me that she'd once had dreads herself, and showed me the one lock she'd made a few days ago around the back of her head.  (This isn't the first time I've seen a woman sporting a lock or three back there - I think it's some kind of dread mullet, professional in front, party in the back.)  She's got some amount of skill at backcombing, because the one lock was pretty solid.

She was impressed that I've only had them for fifteen days.  We talked about backcombing (she complimented my wife), about wax (she uses it sometimes, mostly for smoothing when she's dressing up, and didn't know that there's a wax controversy), we talked about clockwise rubbing, and she showed me a dread ball that she'd made.  

Some of those concepts - clockwise rubbing and dread balls in particular - I haven't talked much about because they work best when there's little or no wax in there.

• Clockwise rubbing is used to train new hairs to join the existing locks.  Hair follicles have a cycle of growth, followed by dormancy, after which they push out the old hair and start growing a new one.  The clockwise rubbing at the base of the lock catches these new hairs up in the lock.
• Dread balls are used to capture the loose, flyaway hairs (of which I have many) and grow them into a dread.  The idea is to take a few loose hairs that are nearest to one particular lock, and roll the tips together until they form a tangled knot.  That knot, the dread ball, gets crocheted into the lock.

Based on her assessment, I am considering moving on from the "always have wax in your locks" phase to the "every other week" phase.  That calls for alternating a week of dread balls and clockwise rubbing to form knots with a week of waxing to hold them together as they lock.  I'll reassess next time I wash my hair.

Looking inward: learning from my dreads

So far the biggest change in perception that I've seen around my dreadlocks is my own.  The first time I saw someone with dreads was in college, and I couldn't figure out what was going on with that girl's head. My companion said to me, "I know what she's trying to do, but she's not doing it well."  I didn't hear the word "dreadlocks" for years after that, but I still remember the girl who looked like she had mange.  For a long time that's what I thought dreads were all about, but now I know what mature locks look like, and I appreciate them when I see them.

Mind you, I still find myself avoiding talking to people who have cultivated dreadlocks as part of a look of homelessness.  My reaction to dirty, disheveled people isn't any different than it used to be; I just don't automatically pigeonhole someone for having dreads alone.

I'm still able to keep my locks under my hat, and so far I've only had one day when I let my dreads fly free.  The eyes aren't yet on me.

Bigger still is my desire to use dreadlocks as a metaphor for, well, just about everything.  Locks tighten up as they mature, loose hair gets incorporated, and the overall appearance becomes more organized and pleasing to the eye.  At first it's complete chaos, but over time the hair starts to understand its new role, and gets better at it.  I've seen similar evolutions all around me, for example:

• Businesses
• Gardens
• Children
• Politicians
• Movie directors

Much in the world can be advanced through practice and repetition, but some things just take time.  Wearing these young, short locks on my head makes me think about that a lot.  I think the lessons here are deeper than just patience.