My five-year mission: to explore strange new hairstyles, to seek out ways to keep locks neat and clean, to boldly go where no man has gone before with dreadlocks.
I didn't want to talk about it - in public, anyway - until I knew if it was just a scare or not.
I think I'm safe now.
Friends of mine, parent and child, stopped in to see me one day. I had my trusty little hat on (I've been spelling it "took," but I'm told it's actually spelled "tuque," which looks silly to me). The child, a boy of about ten or eleven, took (ah, that explains the spelling) the tuque off my head and put it on his own, and then returned it. I thought nothing of it.
Three days later, I learned that there was a bit of lice problem in that household.
Lice like dreadlocks. There's plenty of room from them to do their thing, a thing that involves laying eggs (nits) on hair follicles and making scalps itch as they eat skin cells (hopefully dead ones). Normal lice shampoo can't be used safely on locked hair, because the stuff would have to stay on the head a lot longer and its toxic nature could harm the host.
So if you want to rid a head of locks of its lice, you're going to have to cut them, or spend a lot of hours with your head wrapped in plastic bags while various substances (like vinegar) kills the buggers. And, since the nits are so tough, you'll have to do it again in a week to ten days after they hatch.
Lice removal is no fun when you've got dreadlocks.
I spent a lot of time peering closely at my hair, looking for the nits which are tiny little black specks, white once they hatch. I worried every time I had an itch. I have read a lot of information about what to do if I had them, and pondered if I wouldn't just give up and cut them off to avoid the hard work of preserving the locks while destroying the unwanted guests.
It was a . . . . lousy thing to have on my mind, but I'm over it. I didn't get them. But yikes, what a psychological smack it was to have to consider it.
What with an unexpected snow storm followed immediately by Halloween, I remembered to wear a costume but I forgot that my locks had a milestone - six months! Election Day (and being a "dreaded Republican" candidate myself) has also slowed down my writing, but it's time for a state of the locks address.
My hair is definitely longer than it was at the end of April. Some days it's also a helluva lot fluffier. It's still short enough that I find myself with the occasional stick-straight-out-from-my-scalp lock when I wake up in the morning . . . but that's assuming that this will actually happen less often as they get longer. That assumption is only based on what I've seen on other heads.
Longer and fluffier locks!
What my locks all have is a portion that's tight, and doesn't need any help to stay that way. There's a certain amount of looseness near the base of all of them, and a good amount of the tips are giving me problems, but I don't have a single lock that is completely in shambles.
I haven't been using any products in at least a couple of months . . . no rubber bands, no wax, nothing designed to make them tangle faster or hold together while they do it. As I mentioned before, I may go back to using some wax. My wife thinks that some of the locks need to be rebackcombed, but that goes against everything I have researched and I'm resistant to the idea . . . pending an experienced source that agrees with her and a sudden desire to feel that pain again.
Some of my locks are only a third locked, with such a long tail that I can't just pull the loose hairs in and let it go with that. A few of them still have rubber bands in them; I can feel them inside and I don't know how much they're doing to help maintain lock integrity. A few of them are solid from stem to stern.
It's still about patience, I get that. We (my wife and I) pull loose hairs in, and some of them fall back out. The fluffy pieces need to be palmrolled regularly, something that I believe (based on the progress with and without) would be more effective with wax. My hair seems to benefit from its judicious use. In locked form the hair is still much too short to be pulled back, and so keeping it looking somewhat neat can be out of reach on some days.
It's all about patience, and some days I'm just not very patient. I want to know what these things will look like once there's no more corona of flyaway hair, once I don't have any locks I can shove a finger through, once the hairs have gotten used to living in colonies instead of as individuals.
I've survived my first summer. The heat wasn't that bad and the locks weren't that long, so it probably wasn't much of a test. I don't know what this winter will bring, but the challenge of drying my hair properly will shift into a different gear for sure over the next six months.
I don't think that locks are terrible, and I know that mine are more appealing to the eye than many I've seen. I still want the process to speed up, and I still know that you can't always get what you want.
