Reason #21: letting go and moving on

One of the things I'm really digging about my reasons for dreadlocks series is the patterns that crop up!  Today's reason is from Dianna, and it's really two, and together they offer something I see a lot of -- which I think is akin to a rite of passage, maybe -- and something new to me, but probably just as common in the world.

Dianna's more mature than I am

First time out, Dianna made what was a big commitment to her:  a full year with dreadlocks.  (Now that I've passed the year mark myself, I wonder if my five-year commitment was biting off more than I can chew.  No . . . but it's still a bit nuts.)  She says it was "an exercise in letting go" of her appearance, so she could "focus on [her] inner beauty" instead.  It actually also "helped me to see my outward natural beauty" after she looked beyond mascara and eyeliner.

After her year was up, Dianna's hair had clumped into some pretty big sections, and her scalp wasn't digging it, so she took 'em out.  Awhile later, she applied that experience to her second set of locks, which are a couple of months older than mine.

This time around, Dianna was specifically looking to mark a transition.  As she told me via Facebook:

My marriage fell apart, my grandmother passed away, and I left behind a masters degree to take to the road. I travel now, and I earn a modest and plain living working various renaissance festivals. Many of us who travel have or have had dreadlocks. I suppose you could say some view them as a rite of passage. For me, perhaps they are just that, and more.

So yeah, I've heard similar stories, and I will probably hear more of both types of reasons in the future.  Now I'm starting to think I should be doing a better job tagging these posts so we can see what types of reasons we've all got.

Feel free to suggest tags in the comments!  Do it generically or, if you're in a super-helpful mood, visit the list of reasons for dreadlocks and suggest them directly on your favorite post!

Reason #20: life transformation

Only her hairdresser knows they're fake

And then there's Donna, who's the first person I've talked to who had fake dreadlocks put into her hair to start things off.

That was the first thing she said, in fact:  "You obviously know that they're fake, right?"  

As it happens, I did not.  Donna's locks are made of synthetic hair, but it's not easy to tell that they're not all her hair if you don't know better.  She's had plenty of people assume that hers are natural.

"I was going more for Matrix than hippie," she said; cybergoth is more her thing.  She's always had lots of colors, ranging from blacks and blondes in the professional world to rainbow hues back in college.  "I thought if I were ever to do dreads, I would put in extensions."

She has hippie friends who call them a travesty, but she just sees her hair as a way to have fun.

For Donna, her hair was a way to signify the major changes in her life.  "I lost my job a year and a half ago, and I had a major transition," she said, which also included losing over a hundred pounds.  "I figured I wanted to have fun, and have fun hair," she said.

"I had this conservative, straight life, and now it's the reverse," she laughed.

A year ago: pondering patience

A year ago I was asking myself the question, "Why do I want dreadlocks?"  I rambled a bit, but my answer came down to one word:  patience.

 Where it starts will be with a desire to learn more patience, which is one of the reasons I admire trees and other plants as much as I do.  Trees can only adapt to the world by using one tool:  slow, methodical growth.  In comparison, blooming flowers and ripening vegetables in the garden seem swift, but gardens themselves are best improved year over year in the long haul.

One year later, I haven't made so much headway on the whole patience thing.  I got tired of using wax, tired of not using wax, and then decided to do both.

Reason #19: always wanted them

Tim is another one who has wanted to lock his hair for awhile.

A year ago: blogging begins

A year and two days ago I launched this blog with my first, tentative reasons for dreadlocks.

I know that there's a good amount of negative stereotyping and perceptions about dreadlocks, mostly because I've shared a lot of those perceptions myself.  People who wear dreadlocks are dirty, aimless people who can't get a job, right?

All the hat I ever needed

Even though I was considering them, I really didn't like looking at locked hair.  I would glance the way people do at naked bodies in a public locker room:  curious, but not wanting to stare.  The staring would have been in part from fascination, but at least a little from revulsion.  Even though I had been thinking about them for quite awhile, my emotional reaction that they must be dirty was still mixing it up with the new, more rational understanding that washing locks is not only possible, but a really good idea.  I definitely had a knee-jerk reaction against locks, so much so that my second post, the following day, chronicled how I wanted to hide my dreadlocks once I had them.

When I can't be bothered, it looks like this.

One year later, I look at dreadlocks.  I talk to people about them, asking their reasons for dreadlocks (and please, do send in your reason if you've got one).  It's a conversation starter, and it doesn't feel awkward to me anymore.

One year later, my hat can still fit all of my hair, but not without it looking like I have a beastly occipital bone tumor. While pulling it back right now makes me look like a mangy chicken, a ponytail holder working with my hat pulls off something of a round head profile.

This post is the beginning of a new, regular feature for this blog, called one year later.  In each post, instead of simply talking about myself, I will talk about how I was talking about myself a year ago, and then talk about how differently I talk about myself now than I did then.  I hope that this feature will allow me to create new, self-absorbed content with a minimum of effort, while avoiding a metaphysical feedback loop which could eliminate all traces of me from the space-time continuum.

Luckily for you, my reader, if I fail you will never have read any of this in the first place.

Reason # 18: Low maintenance

YouTuber rockemknotty responds to my question,"What's your reason for dreadlocks?"



Submit your reason for dreadlocks to be featured here!

Reason #17: no other choice

AnnMarie doesn't have dreadlocks anymore, but if you want to check 'em out, they're the ones that I used to create the header image for this blog.

They were this big!

"I didn't really have a choice," she told me.  Her reason for dreadlocks is that somebody started giving them to her and she just decided to go with it.

"The first one was really, really big," AnnMarie recalled.  In the picture here she's demonstrating where a helpful person with busy fingers got the process started, and with how much hair.  It was a big enough chunk that she thought it would be easier to let 'em lock than to try to take it out, which she figured would involve lots of hair loss.

It was at a Rainbow Gathering that she went ahead with it.  "I decided to try to do one lock a day," she said, but "there was a lot of hair," so she and her friends had a lot more work to do than could have been finished on that schedule.

Five years later AnnMarie lost her locks, and this past summer she loaned those locks to me for my blog.  Check out her first attempt at making them into a hat in this dreadlocks vlog -- she's since successfully turned them into a cool knit hat!

Reason #16: spirit

Jason dreamed of dreadlocks from a young age.  "I always pictured myself with dreadlocks," he said.  "When I was a kid I used to draw myself with dreadlocks in a bandanna."  

Drawing in positive energy through dreadlocks.

He doesn't say that those childhood drawings were his reason for dreadlocks, though.  I think that his reason for dreadlocks was also the reason that Jason drew himself with them when he was a youngster.  I'm calling his reason "spirit," because he talked a lot about the spiritual energy associated with dreadlocks.  Here's what he told me he believes:

• Jamaicans people wear locks because it makes it easier for God to reach down and pick them up to bring them into Heaven.
• They are the mark of the snakes around Shiva's neck, and represent fearlessness.
• They are antennas which draw in positive energy from the universe.

And yeah, he's wearing the bandanna, too.

It didn't occur to me to ask Jason about his method, which I think is kinda interesting too, but if I get that info from him down the road I'll come along and post it up and link to it from here.

Be sure to let me know your reason for dreadlocks if you want to be featured here!

Reason #15: chef hats

Josh used to have the most perfect afro that I have ever set eyes upon.  It was carefully sculpted into a gentle, bulging ellipsoid.  Other than when I used to watch Mod Squad episodes as a kid, I have never had any exposure to a badass afro like Josh's.

"I wanted to wear a chef's hat." --Josh

There was a lot of pushback from his friends when he finally went ahead and got his fro locked.  Facebook was abuzz with reactions of shock and horror.  I had one person tell me, "When he turns his head quickly, I can still see the afro."

So what's Josh's reason for dreadlocks?

"I wanted to be able to wear a chef's hat," he said.  He's studying in a culinary program, and as awesome as his afro was, there is not a toque made that he could put on top without it looking ridiculous. I can't imagine how it would even work, personally: would he shove his afro up the tube, or embed that hat a few inches deep in the hair, or bobby-pin it to death on top? And how much taller than a normal human would that make him, anyway?

And it turns out that maintaining a picture-perfect afro ain't easy -- Josh was spending way more time on his hair that he wanted to be.  He described the process to me, but I'm afraid my eyes just glazed over and I was unable to grasp all the hoops he jumped through daily to make that hair of his seem like it never changed.  I was even recording the conversation, but my phone mysteriously stopped recording before we got to that part.

Eerie.

As for method, Josh got his hair braided and he is planning on just leaving it like that.

Reason #14: art

Tori, hard at work labeling labels. 

Tori wanted dreadlocks from the time she was six years old.  "I was fighting my hair," she told me.  "It was a constant battle of brushing out the tangles."  When she discovered that there was such a thing as dreadlocks, she was enamored.

It was a long time before her dream came true, though.  "I wanted to be in a stable place in my life," she said.  She had her young daughter to think of.  That didn't happen until she secured a job working for a local town, first in the assessor's office and then at the recycling center, where she has taken piles and piles of what seemed to be random crap and organized it into a veritable marketplace of reused materials.

But that's a story for another blog.

The story for this blog is her reason for dreadlocks.

Some of Tori's artsy beads.

"I did it for art," she explained to me.  Sure, not having to comb her hair mattered to Tori, but what really captured her imagination was the artful and pretty things one could do with locks.

Things like putting in decorative beads and bows and strings and things.  Like braiding and tying and dyeing.  Wrapping with wire and doing what inspires.

Tori is fascinated by my nature-vs-nurture dreadlock test, but as a friend and disciple of Soaring Eagle, she is pretty sure she knows how it's going to turn out.  She rattled off a list of ways that wax can ruin locks, and reminded me of how she had wax coming out of hers for over two years after she stopped using the stuff, a tale that I've already recounted here.

Yes, it's crossed my mind to put stuff in my own locks, but no, I am not quite ready to do that.  I don't want beads unnecessarily influencing the development of my locks during this period of testing.  But yes, some of those beads are really pretty!

Reason #13: love (guest reason!)

Beginning with this post, I'm seeking out reasons for dreadlocks from other people who have them.  Honestly, I don't know why I didn't think of it before.  If I get bored of that, I can start asking them their top reason for not wanting locks . . . or ask the same two questions of people who don't have them.  And of course there's no reason why I should exclude people who used to have locked hair, but don't anymore.

Okay, now that I have pretty much ruined any chance of people clicking on this post by giving it a completely boring intro, let's move on.

Today's guest reason for dreadlocks is provided by Justin Holmes.  Justin is on his second set of dreadlocks, and for these he's going pretty damned natural.  "I rip some apart sometimes, or encourage a particularly stubborn one to do something different, but that's about it," he said to me.  Justin declined use of my metal comb ("I think I need something sturdier") and doesn't spend a lot of time paying attention to his hair at all.

Mr. Holmes is a computer programmer extraordinaire and the main force driving the Slash Root Tech Cafe, a storefront business which blends fair-trade coffee, freely-shared live music, and open-source technology into a platform for free thought and free expression.  If that explanation of the business doesn't suit, stop by their shop or just hire them to build you a web site.  You won't be disappointed.

Justin's reason for dreadlocks:  he's single and he says it improves his chances with the ladies.  Given his years of experience (at least four or five the last time he locked up), I have no reason to question him on that score.

Reason #12: kittens

Okay, this is not a reason for everybody.  Kittens like things that dangle, they like things that they can sink their claws into, they like stuff that they can climb.

I should point out that, as adorable as Dawn (pictured) and her brother Dusk are, having a couple of pounds of fluff hanging from one's hair by needle-sharp claws is not everybody's idea of a good time.

Luckily for my kitties, I'm a slightly crazier cat person than some.  So, I can report that having a kitten attack my locks is less painful than having one attack a dangling earring (that was a long time ago, but I still remember it) or jump onto your lap when you're not wearing heavy pants.

Want to make friends with a kitten?  I have a backcomb you can borrow.

Reason #11: intimacy

This reason only works when people stay within each others' hygiene tolerance range, which for me requires clean hair that's free of odors and . . . stuff.

My wife enjoys things like cuddling a bit more than I do.  She's also really, really good at working on my locks.  Not only is she just flat-out better with fiber work than I am, she can actually see what's going on up there, which is a pain for me.

Evenings in front of the television with my head in her lap certainly can't be bad for a marriage.

Reason #10: dreadlocks are the stuff of legend

Locked hair is deeply rooted in in myth and legend.  Did you know that . . .

• . . . the sacred river Ganges flows through Shiva's locks, so that they might regulate it?  The goddess Ganga brings her flow to earth through Shiva's tangled masses of hair, which can also be seen as its flow down the forested slopes of the Himalayas.
• . . . Samson, the Israelite who slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, derived his immense strength from his seven locks of hair?  The Nazirite vow 

Based on how they were depicted, it's reasonable to argue that Kokopelli, Isis, and Medusa wore their hair in locks, as well, which is pretty much what I suspected.  There's even some speculation that Jesus couldn't have wandered in the desert for three years without conditioner and without knotting up.  Clearly they have been respected for their power and mystery for thousands of years, and I can do worse than to carry that kind of tradition on my shoulders.

Reason #9: dreadlocks teach approachability

Dreadlocks, without a doubt, make me more approachable.

Say what?

It's true, but it's counter-intuitive.  At first glance, they're messy, disheveled, and unkempt, particularly when they're first getting started, so I wasn't prepared for them opening doors.

But what I've discovered is that people will talk to me about my locks; they act like a kind of ambassador, allowing people who have some experience with them to start up a conversation.  I don't think it helps me talk to people who have no experience with locks, but that's why I want to keep them neat and professional anyway.

• People who used to have them, like the village board member I ran into one day who told me about how her life was very different back then.
• Or people who are just starting out kinda small and subtle, like the mom I know who put one (just one) in behind her ear.
• Then there's folks I've been introduced to specifically because I have dreadlocks, like the local Republican who had them for twenty years.

I wouldn't have known that any of these people have, or have had, locks had I not had them myself.  (Yep, I used that word five times in one form or another.)  I call that approachable.

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.

Reason #8: the wind in my hair

Once you convince a bunch of strands of hair to cooperate as a single lock, having your hair screwed with by the wind is a thing of the past.  Locks are much heavier than strands, and they just resist those pesky breezes.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't get epic bed head.  But it's one variable which I can declare eliminated from my coiffed experience.

Reason #7: longer, healthier hair

I've never had my hair grow as long as it has since I started my dreadlocks.  Putting them in made the hair a lot shorter, but withing a month it was clear that there was growth, which was not at all what I expected.  Locking and tightening, yes, but lengthening?  Not even.

Seems that all the clockwise rubbing, palmrolling, and waxing has been stimulating my scalp something fierce.  Even my hairwashing is a lot more scalp-intensive, because I kinda scrub between the locks before I wash them.

I guess all this talk about brushing your hair to make it grow has some merit.

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.

Reason #6: accountability

I had someone offer me a hit off a blunt one day, and I declined.

"Let me get this straight," he said to me.  "You get dreadlocks and you don't smoke weed?"

I've been told that dreadlocks can increase offers of drugs.  It's something that's just expected of people with locks.

I can't afford that, because sometimes I'm not the most mindful driver in the world.  If I get pulled over with a natty head, I'm pretty sure that the cop is going to find probable cause to search my vehicle if I can.

That's why dreadlocks make me accountable.

• I need to understand and exercise my rights.
• I need to practice one crime at a time - and realize that having dreadlocks might count at that crime.
• I must be prepared to go the extra mile to appear clean and neat, because the people who think I'm not may have influence over my life.

So please don't be surprised if I don't take a hit off your blunt.  I need to rise above and be something which people don't expect.

I'm accountable to myself.