A year ago: Styracosaurus

Something about constant, low-grade pain must make my creative juices flow, because the post I wrote a year ago about my first day with dreadlocks is a really entertaining read.

Don't let the smile fool you.

After I warmed [the wax] and worked it in, Robin took the blow dryer to it so it would melt andreally get in there. The heat was enough on my inflamed scalp to make me gnash my teeth and rend my clothing, which is why I'm glad I was wearing a high-quality sweater from L.L. Bean, for it was quite resistant to rending.

In amongst the colorful language I used to complain about how much my scalp hurt, there is an interesting insight:  on Day One, my locks were about three inches long, and the first inch (at the base) wasn't locked.

Down locks are happier

One year later, my locks are 5-7 inches long, and the first inch or two isn't locked.  When I compare the nature and nurture sides, the length is about the same, but natural locks have a longer unlocked base -- they're the ones hovering at about two inches.  I don't think it's logical to believe that wax makes the difference, and I stopped experimenting with root flipping before I started this test, so that's not it, either.  I believe the bands I have used at the base of the locks (which also make it harder to measure how much is unlocked, so I focused on those locks without them at the moment) are helping the bases lock faster.

I kind of miss looking like a spiky dinosaur, but I don't think I could afford enough wax to make that happen again.  Maybe armature wire?

A year ago: is my hair long enough?

My hair was free to roam.

A year ago today, I was fretting over my hair.  I'd made up my mind that I was going to lock it, but I wasn't sure if it was long enough yet.  My patience being what it is, I didn't want to wait.  I rationalized moving fast:

The main advantage of locking the hair when it's shorter is that it will take less time for my dreadful friends to help me.  The backcombing process can take six hours for 18 inches of hair, and is painful and tiring.

One year later, I know I wrote those words, but oh, I did not understand the meaning of "painful and tiring" when I posted that passage.  Nope, not by a long shot.

I daresay the locks have grown some.

My worries were for naught -- my locks have endured, despite the short hair we started with, and the controversial waxing, crocheting, and all the other hoo-hah that's been going into my nature-vs-nurture test.

And my hair has grown longer, too, but what I not sure 100% sure of is how much more they've locked in the past 50 weeks.  Living with them day after day makes it harder to notice change, and I'm not really sure how to measure it.

My friend Amanda Catherine, who hadn't seen me in a couple of months, just told me that my locks are lookin' fine, so that was a nice boost.  (I'll have her reason for dreadlocks posted here as soon as I can get her to hold still long enough to tell me about it.)

One thing I'm positive about is that I hate the length of my hair this April.  To much volume for a hat, not enough length to tie it back.  Of course, the milestone that everyone with locked hair looks forward to is being able to use a lock to tie back the rest of the hair.  At the base of my neck, my longest locks are about three inches, so that's going to be awhile.  Some people have told me that it's easier to shave the back of the neck than to get that hair to lock, but it's steady as she goes.

State of the Locks

We got a little excited with the stuffing . . .

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.

Poolside manner

Hot day, high humidity, recent swim in pool

The heat skyrocketed this past weekend, so I decided to throw caution to the winds and test my locks in a chlorinated pool.  I'd been warned off by two experienced lockists (one of whom told me that the chlorine would actually unlock my hair), so it took hundred-degree temperatures for me to risk it.  I finally realized in my delirium that the worst that could happen is that my experiment would be prematurely ended; I half hoped to see my hair all floating away just to have something really interesting to report.

So into the breach I went, to the local pool, and I immersed myself in the cooling 97-degree water (yes, it really was that hot).  I swam for the better part of an hour, got out, dried off, went home, and then returned in the early evening to do it again.  It felt wonderful.

My hair seemed none the worse for wear.  The first picture was a day after the pool event, and the second is from this morning, a couple of days after that.  The difference in craziness I can attribute to the fact that it was cool enough for me to fall asleep with my took on last night.  That hat does wonders for keeping my hair under control.  Probably the best lock-control mechanism I've found yet.

The fact that I spend so much time trying to keep these low-maintenance masses under control makes it clear that I'm doing this wrong.  Anyone who seriously will have their lives impacted by a thick lock of hair sticking out from the scalp at a sharp angle probably isn't going to have a low-key time with dreadlocks.

Merely hot day, low humidity, took training

So I guess I do have something to report:  this hair is forcing me to work a lot harder on a decent appearance than I ever have before, and is a whole lot less forgiving than a short haircut or shaven head would be.

Some days I just don't have the luxury to allow my head to look completely insane, so I'm finding myself coming up with shortcuts to save the day when the hair is bad.  Like washing it hard and putting it away wet.  A good, hot shower or bath will get my hair down where I want it, so if I'm in a pinch I'll wring them out and then shove them under the took for awhile.  It works even better if there's some wax in the locks, softened by the water.  (The "tame" picture here was achieved without any wax, though).  When I do that, I still need to get the hat off and allow the locks to dry so something horrible doesn't happen in there.  Did I mention that mildew is a deal-breaker?

Maybe at some point down the line I'll be able to just let the hair do whatever the hell it wants, and see how that feels.  This year, though, I'm just going to have to fight with it sometimes.

Sorry I'm late, I was doing my hair

Self-portrait experiment number 37

The myth that dreadlocks are low-maintenance has been debunked in my mind.  Well, it's probably safer to say that dreadlocks are like political campaigns:  you can put into them as much time and energy as you want to.

The other night I was late for a party because, for the first time in my life, I was held up doing my hair.

Are you kidding me?

I had a collision of priorities, namely:

1. Wash my hair
2. Wax my hair

It may seem simple enough to do both, but it can be screwed up.  I'd put off waxing for an extra week so my wife could focus more on blunting the tips (she felt she had the technique down, but wanted more time to have it on lockdown), so wax was on my mind.  Moreso it was hot and humid and a good waxing makes for a more party-ready appearance.

The washing, like the waxing, could have been put off a day without it being disastrous.  I'm more likely to err on the side of caution when it comes to hygiene, though, particularly since this is my first summer with matted coils of hair on my head.

So I showered, and washed my hair, and only then did I realize that I didn't have the time to let the locks air-dry.  I got busy blow-drying the hell out of them, but this was no time to be forced to master patience!  I hadn't budgeted for that extra time.

After wringing, toweling, shaking, and hot-air drying for longer than I wanted to I gave up with the locks damp, and set to waxing.  I'd have to blow-dry them again anyway.

Waxing dry locks isn't just a good idea - it's damned near the law of physics.  The wax slid off moist hair until I mashed on far more than is good for them, and my next round of blow drying was difficult because the wet hair held the heat, and burned the hell out of scalp whenever I pointed the dryer at any spot for more than about three seconds.

I moved the dryer around a lot, softening but not melting the wax.  My wife noticed, and forced me back into the bathroom where she all but held me down and gave me a stern drying so that I wouldn't look like I was wearing candles on my head.

I think the blisters should be healed any day now.

Say goodbye to bobbi pins

Dreadlocks can be sensible and fashionable

Maybe I should file this as one of my reasons for dreadlocks . . . or just under silly hair tricks.

I like wearing my hat to bed on cool nights - it's an old Boy Scout trick to keep warm.  It's nowhere near the bitter cold of even three or four months ago, but even as June turns to July it's cool enough that I won't wear shorts after the sun sets, and I definitely prefer a blanket.  I don't like how my hat falls off in the middle of the night, leaving me to cast about bleary-eyed for my security took in the morning
Guess I solved that problem.

I can't say I have a clue how easy it's going to be to take it off again once the sun comes up.  This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship, or a terrible idea that I'll laugh about  . . . once I forget how much it sucked.

Time will tell.

But officer, I said . . .

I had a police encounter recently that I believe was negatively impacted by my locks.

First, a few words about my relationship with, and opinion of, police in general.  I like knowing that there are people who are willing to do very dangerous things to keep other people safe from crime.  It's an important role of government:  protecting the minority (in this case, potential crime victims) from the predations of others.  I have a rapport with a number of local officers, and I respect the work they do.  When it's possible, I enjoy watching their operations because I don't have any training in police procedure, and I find it pretty interesting.

On the other hand, police are trained to push the envelope, encouraging people to give up their rights.  It's legal, and many people out of ignorance do so on a regular basis.  Another reason I like to observe the police is because I want to understand better how, and how often, they get people to yield their rights to things like silence and protection from search and seizure.

So I observe police activity when it's convenient, both for my personal curiosity and because I'm a journalist.  I know people who observe and record police activity in the hope of catching cops doing something wrong, and there are people who contrive to create situations to make police look bad.  I don't have an agenda, other than to observe what's going on.

So in this particular case I had noticed an extremely intoxicated young man stumbling around the bar district of my town.  Not too long after that, he found himself passed out against a dumpster, covered in his own vomit.  Someone had the good sense to call 911; the man was probably in very real danger at that point.

When I came upon the scene, two rescue vehicles and two police officers had already responded.  There was ample room for their vehicles, as the man had passed out in the corner of a parking lot.  Most spots were filled, but the emergency responders parked in the aisles, as they are wont to do in such cases.

I maintained myself some twenty feet from the action, taking care not to get into the line of sight between the victim and any of the rescue vehicles.  I don't interfere with police and emergency activity.  I wasn't able to see the victim, but I was more interested in the police, so this didn't trouble me.

Not being able to see much, I was texting a friend from my extremely dumb phone while observing.  The way I held my phone piqued the interest of an officer, who broke away from the scene to approach me.

"He doesn't need to be embarrassed more than he is," he began, "and doesn't need to be recorded.  Why don't you step over there," he said, gesturing to a spot some 30 feet farther away.

"But officer," I began, wishing to explain that I wasn't recording.

"Sir, I asked you nicely," he said in a tone which was anything but.  "Please step over there."

I knew that I wasn't breaking any laws.  I knew that he was implying that he would find one to claim I was breaking from his bearing and tone, should I disobey.  I didn't have an ax to grind, so I obeyed.  But I knew full well that my rights had been violated.

Recently waxed, wild dreadlocks

I later confirmed that, despite my being somewhat well-known in my community, the incident was not driven by personality.  He didn't know who I was, and I didn't choose to push the issue by flashing my press ID or otherwise escalating.

I have found no credible evidence, before or since, that local police target recording of their activities and discourage it.  Some anecdotes, but nothing I can verify.  That being the case, I have a very strong suspicion that my locks altered the officer's perception, and put me on the "cop radar" as a possible problem when he may have otherwise not reached that conclusion.

The hypothesis that dreadlocks impact police encounters in a negative fashion seems a lot more valid to me now.  I had expected that I wouldn't discover anything about this question unless and until I made an error in driving (which, frankly, is bound to happen; I'm not an angel behind the wheel).  To have such an encounter while merely texting near police activity caught me entirely off-guard, but was nevertheless very instructive.

A tangled web

Dreadfully dapper.

Running for office has forced me to step up my look.  My original premise, that writers are largely immune to judgments based on their appearance, is completely the opposite of politics, where votes can be won or lost based on looks alone.

When I attended the Ulster County Republican Convention, one gentleman, upon seeing me wearing my tam, asked if I were perhaps Jamaican.  Now that I've worn the thing, I have to agree that they look a bit ridiculous . . . very poofy and visually distracting.

So I'm stepping up my game.  I've taken off my Groucho glasses, so to speak, by shaving the mustache and replacing the glasses with contacts.  I stepped into Blue Byrd's Haberdashery to get advice on a better hat and, together with a thoughtful customer who told me that the cocoanut weave fedora brings out my eyes, we found one that I think works quite well.

This political game isn't what I had in mind when I began to lock my hair, but I don't doubt that it will draw out the positive and negative perceptions about the style.  I've had no less than three people suggest that I should get rid of them if I'm serious about running for office, but I have a prior commitment to my hair:  five years unless I run into some kind of icky hygiene issue.  I'm willing to serve, but I'm first and foremost a student of life, and I'm going to learn about campaigning in the context of learning about dreadlocks, and I'm just going to have to find ways to convince people to focus on my ideas, rather than my hair.

There's absolutely nothing to be lost by maintaining a professional and classy appearance, though.

Picture this

Top-down self pic, dreadlocks at seven weeks

Getting pictures of my locks is a bit of a pain in the rear.  There are really only two options for getting pictures of oneself, of course:  pointing a camera at your own face, or having someone else them for you.  Pretty simple, I suppose.

Except . . . when I ask someone to take a picture of me, that tend to focus on the back of my head. Call me strange, but I think the front is more my speed.  I understand, there's some interesting stuff going on back there, but I happen to think that endless pics of the back of me 'ead is a bit boring.

Even though I'm locking my hair, the focus of my life (or this blog) isn't having dreaded hair.  Instead, it's about how the dreadlocks impact my life, how they change me and how people see me.

My other alternative, taking them myself, is limiting.  The length of my arm is the biggest factor, because I can't change that.  Clever use of mirrors and better aim definitely help.

Any pics can show you things you can't always see about yourself.  For example, I just found out by looking at this post's image that I have a part in my hair, which I think is pretty funny.

So rather than tell my friends what to take pictures of, I've got a plan that should get me in front of more cameras in general.  Update coming soon.

Tips for tips

The advice keeps coming, and I'm really appreciative.  If nothing else, it's validating my experimentation.

Tame locks are happy locks

One tip I got after lamenting my epic bed head was something I had tried with remarkably good results:  soaking in a hot tub.  It got those bad boys to settle down, and stay settled for days.  I don't think I will need to use wax for cosmetic reasons if a half hour of glorious immersion will do the same thing.

That same friend of mine, who tells me that she studied locking techniques for a year before she began her first set, also suggested aloe for conditioning/taming, spoke highly of tea tree oil, and suggested a semiannual vinegar rinse as well.

This is really good news to me, because my long-term plan is to divest myself of commercial products.  The shampoo I was using prior to locking is just baking soda and water with a little bit of tea tree oil, and the rinse is apple cider vinegar with a drop of vanilla and a cinnamon stick.  I still need to find out if that drop of vanilla in the formula will cause problems, but I think it's only for scent, so I'm fine with dropping it from the recipe.

One of my local locked friends, Amanda Catherine, has really amazing blunt tips on her locks.  She explained that they come from a technique which she'd been taught, but for which she did not have a name:

1. Take a lock near the base and put it between the second and third fingers of your non-dominant hand.  Your palm should be facing away from your scalp.
2. With the fingers of your other hand, grab the lock, leaving less than an inch between the two hands.
3. Use clockwise rubbing against the non-dominant hand, slowly moving that hand away from the scalp, along the length of the lock.
4. Hold the tip between thumb and forefinger, and rub your palm clockwise over it to encourage locking and blunting.

I might try using the Lock Peppa with that technique, since that's what it's for.

Lock maintenance party!

I was also fortunate enough to get an offer of working on my locks, by one master locker and one apprentice.  It's always more uncomfortable to have other people yanking and tugging at your hair, but I gratefully accepted.  It wasn't nearly as agonizing as the six hours of backcombing.

Crisp and clean, and no caffeine

I got a few more compliments on my wife's backcombing skills, and we were able to identify which locks are slower to tighten and which ones are coming along really quickly.  I am really excited about using the latch hook my wife brought home to tighten them all the more.  She didn't think we needed a lock-specific tool; it's great to have a skilled fiber artist in the house if you don't happen to live with someone who is already experienced with dreadlocks.

I also got feedback from some of my friends who hadn't seem me since this adventure began, and I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reactions of these largely traditional, professional people.  I think the fact that I didn't look like my head was exploding had something to do with it . . . I just can't imagine anyone who isn't living on the road thinking I looked remotely decent that day.

Next up:  I've worked out a timeline for what in the hell I'm doing with this hair of mine.  If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and all that, so I'm planning on not planning to fail by failing to plan to plan.

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.

One week in: let's talk about waxing dreads

I can't believe that one week ago today my scalp was in agony as we backcombed the hell out of it.  Where are my locks now?  They're in lots of different places:

One week in, professional and stylin' in one slick package

• some are poofy with a wall of hair around a hollow inside
• others are really narrow, closely-packed little spikes of hair
• a couple of them, shorter ones, are really only sticking together because of the rubber bands

which I would call progress, all in all.  There's a halo of loose hair around every lock, and combined with the sprinklings of salt in my pepper they lack visual definition.  On the other hand, they're staying together better, and when I've worn my hat for awhile they're willing to stay down until I palmroll them.

I've been cautious about overwaxing my dreads, and I realized that what I thought was wax was actually the hair starting to lock up, which is a lot faster than I expected.  (The flipside is that they'll probably take a lot longer to mature than I'm expecting, but we'll see about that.)

Waxing dreadlocks is very controversial, it turns out.  I am waxing my locks, but I don't know enough to say that it's the right thing, or a good thing, or the best thing, or the dread thing.

I just don't have wax on lockdown.

Here's a good example of the argument against using wax:

Man, that screen shot is not flattering, is it?

So wax will cause problems like mildew, wax will slow the locking process, "you won't have dreads, you'll just have candles on your head."  That last one's funny.  But hey, I didn't know there was a controversy, and I'm learning by living.  In fact I bought my wax from one of the companies named in that video, although I found my information about using wax elsewhere.

In truth, DreadHeadHQ recommends a very minimal amount of wax in dreads.  I don't think I would need another container, because I'm supposed to use it less and less frequently.  I'm cautious about not adding wax if there's any left, so worst case scenario I've been sold something I don't need, and something to remove it with.

The opposition seems to like videos:

It's passionate, but is it accurate?  Some people believe that anything other than neglect isn't "natty" enough, but I'm going for a more controlled, cultured look; bonsai instead of banyan tree.

I'm going to follow the regimen I'm on, which calls for wax in the locks for the first month, reducing after that.  I already own the wax, so it won't cost me money.  If wax really slows down locking, well my hair likes to knot anyway, and it's been pretty well backcombed, so it's just going to take longer.  If it works, though, I will have smooth, tight locks in two or three months under the best of circumstances.

Either way, one week in I'm continuing to take a laissez-hair attitude about my dreadlocks.  At least when I'm home and no one can see them.

More maintenance madness

Profile, dreadlocks two days old

I think there's more wax in there than I realized, because my fingers are slightly tacky from palmrolling, so I only rewaxed three or four dreads.  Overwaxing causes problems, so I'm being very cautious.

Palmrolling is tedious and tiring - keeping the arms up in the air gets old before too long.  It's challenging to make sure I get every lock, so I expect some just won't get rolled as much as others.  I have to learn to adopt a bit of a laissez-hair attitude, after all.

I can still detect moisture in some of the fluffier locks around back, so I imagine that in the winter my hair will become a deadly weapon.

I need to get myself some kind of locking tool to address the halo of looseness around each lock, but I'm hoping that a lot of them will find their way back in on their own.  I already found one lock with a loop of hair coming out; this is to be expected, and having a tool around to pull stuff like that back in should make my life easier.

I'm taking a poll about the dreadlock decision:  would you dread your hair?  Click there and answer with care.

Not tonight, I have to wash my hair

I washed my hair for the first time today.  Twice a week is recommended for new locks, with the suggestion that you can wash more frequently as they tighten up.  My mother washed my hair once a week and I keep to that schedule (unless something makes me grimy), so the question is going to be whether this new hairstyle attracts more dirt.

Am I a bank robber?  Only my hairdresser knows for sure.

I'm not entirely sure I did it right.  I wore a stocking on my head because the locks are still fragile, so the first challenge was getting the damned thing over my head.  When I finally stretched it out enough to fit, I felt like my skull was in a medieval torture device.  I used the dreading shampoo by washing through the stocking, and there was no sudsing at all.  There were suds when I used this shampoo just prior to dreading, so I don't know where they went. Were they sloughed off by the stocking or absorbed by the dreads?

I focused on my scalp, because that's where everything you don't want on your head tends to show up.  I scrubbed as best I could through the nylon, and squished my head around to get the soap in my hair to come out as I rinsed.

The post-shower fluffhead look

Shampooing is definitely dangerous, because with the nylon removed I can tell that there's less wax, and the locks are all much less tight.  Looking at the picture, I think that some of them may have doubled in width.

I don't think I could have done that by taking off the stocking too roughly (think there's a how-to video for that?).  Thinking on it, it's probably because the wax which is helping to compress the hair until it locks was washed out.  I guess that means that I did it right after all.

So the washing means I have to add more wax, based on the approach I'm taking to locking my hair. The debate over whether or not to use wax or not is a really fierce one, believe it or not, and it's worth a post of its own to explain the different positions and how I made my choice.  I've made it, though, and it means that I need to put wax in a lock if I can't detect any in it.  After my hair is completely dry I'll be adding a small amount of dread wax to about half of my locks. I can do it while watching television, but it's probably going to add half an hour to my hair routine on washing day, which is a lot.

The daily routine right now includes checking locks for wax, rewaxing the ones that need it (again, only if I can't feel any wax at all), and palmrolling each of them for thirty seconds, or a minute for the rewaxed locks.  Eventually I will be using wax only every other week, and mature locks have no need of it, so the time requirements drop off.  I won't be washing my hair any less, and with the time requirements I sure as hell hope I don't have to wash it more.

Drying takes more time, too.  I prefer shorter hair because I can quickly towel it and let it air dry, and that takes longer now.  I also find that my scalp itches while it's drying.  I don't think I will start using a blow dryer, but I can't put a hat on wet dreads so the time factor could force my hand if I have to be somewhere. Especially when they're fluffy like this, I'd prefer to keep them covered in a lot of circumstances.  I'm a journalist, and it would be a distraction if my hair became the story.

Coming soon:  a video from dread day.  I have the link to the Flip video and should have time to figure out how to edit it together soon.

One day in . . .

Today I have bits of hair sticking to a light sheen of wax on my fingertips.  It means that every time I touch my nose I tickle it with some tiny hair, or fiber from my hat or sweater.  There is just enough wax on them to make the surface slightly sticky, accumulated from palmrolling my day-old dreadlocks.

Step 1:  section the hair

Yesterday, Earth Day, was a lot longer than I expected it to be, and completely exhausting.  My good wife set to sectioning my hair at about 1 in the afternoon, and we finished the final step of blow-drying the newly-waxed locks after eight.  We did have breaks for meals and such, but all told it was a solid six hours worth of work.

I expected it to take less time because my hair is on the short end of the range, but that actually made it take longer, for two reasons:

1. the learning curve was spread over more locks, and
2. there's a lot less hair to lock, so it takes more backcombing to get it together.

To expand, there's always a few "learning dreads" which aren't as tight as they could be, and have to be rebackcombed.  This is already sounding technical, so here's less than two minutes of video on backcombing to explain it:

The example of the ideal dread is all fine and dandy, but keep in mind that the first inch or more of each lock is not tangled, and won't look like that; my locks are all about three inches long each so that gives you about two inches of learning per lock, and those are tough inches since the poof percentage is elevated by the percentage of root hair.  We were three-quarters through my head when my wife said, "I think I'm starting to understand how this works," meaning that her tactile sensitivity to textiles was kicking in.

Agony above,
serenity below

One thing that was exactly as expected was the pain of having that done to every single square inch of my head.  Oh.  My.  God.  Maybe dreadlocks are like tattoos and childbirth (I've experienced the former and heard about the latter) in that you forget how agonizing the process is after you're through it and recall it through the hazy delirium of endorphins, but I don't think so.

The reason why is that I am going to have regular reminders of how much dreading sucked as they mature.  I get to do the palmrolling, and the clockwise rubbing, and the squeezing them dry when they're wet.  None of these things actually hurts much, but my brutalized scalp reacts to my touch the way Tina would to Ike's, and it all comes back to me again day after day.

Don't dread having a cat in your lap.

My friend Amanda Catherine told me that they'd by "spiky," and she wasn't kidding.  When I first saw what they looked like, before I put in any wax, I thought that they were being supported by rubber bands at the bases, but such was not the case.  Poofy, erect stalks covering my head, bringing forth images of electrocution caused by a game of "Truth or Dare" gone wrong.

The waxing took most of another episode to complete (we watched a couple each of "Buffy," "Xena," and "Jack and Bobby," and one of "Sliders" as well).  After I warmed it and worked it in, Robin took the blow dryer to it so it would melt and really get in there. The heat was enough on my inflamed scalp to make me gnash my teeth and rend my clothing, which is why I'm glad I was wearing a high-quality sweater from L.L. Bean, for it was quite resistant to rending.

I tried only briefly to put my beloved took on over this new head of mine before giving up.  The tam fit, but I put it on and removed it gingerly, since the locks are probably even more fragile that most new locks are.  Today I stabilized my locks more, and to my amazement got the took on over my Styracosaurus self.

The stabilization started with putting rubber bands at the base of each lock, in addition to the ones at the tips. This compresses the base just enough that I can get some results from palmrolling, which is the same motion used to make a snake out of clay.  With the wax in there, palmrolling compresses the lock and helps it stay that way as the locks tighten.  My regimen for the next month is going to be daily palmrolling of each lock, and adding a little bit of wax to the locks that don't have any left in them.  I think I already have a couple like that, but I'm paranoid about overwaxing so I'm going to wait a day.

As the sun sets on my hair's first dreadful day, I have a low-grade headache and feel like I'm wearing a constant state of surprise.  I may venture out this evening and see where my hair takes me.  Perhaps tomorrow I'll talk about the mental toll all that pain takes, unless I decide that I'm whining too much.