The barbershop is sort of sacred place for men. We want a little pampering and grooming, but it must not look like we want it. Which is why your average barbershop is far less inviting looking that a comparable hair salon, which focuses more on female clientele.

The whole process is very an erotic experience – especially when done with as many fashioned implements as possible, especially straight razors. A good barber will trim and shape my beard, shave my neck and upper cheeks, clip my eyebrows, cut out any longish hairs growing from my ears (yes – I am reaching that age), and finish the back of my neck with a razor. He or she will also, of course, cut my hair.

There was a wonderful barber – a woman – in Pennsville, New Jersey, just across the bridge from Wilmington and Philadelphia. For a pittance (a little as $10) she would do the whole deal. And that included applying a straight razor to my face, which is a sometimes frightening, but also exhilarating experience. Of course, it helped that back then, I was simply getting my head buzzed down to stubble, which was my way of accepting the fact that I was beginning to lose my hair (it seemed more dignified to just run with it than to try to hide it – which I am still at pains to balance).

In the basement of  the Rayburn House Office Building in the U.S. Capitol Complex resides Joe’s the barber. There are actually three barbers there – old Italian Joe, the middle aged black man, and the young Asian man. You would think that Joe would be the best. And indeed, nothing quite completes the image of the barber shop experience like having an old Italian man do the job for you (I would also include old Cuban men and old Puerto Rican men). What that image leaves out, however, is that Joe isn’t terribly concerned about what you think of his work unless you are at least a congressman. The young guy is sweet, but I’d be lying if I said I had complete faith in his skills. No – I would suggest trying to get the black man to do your hair.

Lately, I’ve been bouncing between two places in downtown. One is the quintessential old man’s club. A coterie of aging warhorses come in there for their monthly visits. It’s classic, but I can’t help but feel that I am seen as an interloper in a world of after dinner brandies and camel hair jackets. The other place is Jose’s – but my barber is actually an officious Chinese woman. She’s fast, she’s a completist, and she remembers her customers.

I believe in God. I think I fear God, though maybe not enough. I love God, but maybe not more than I am angry at him. As I contemplate the medical bills piling up, the ever increasing number of medications I am put on after every visit to the doctor, and the simple fact that – at only 36 and owing solely to heredity and biology and not through any action or inaction of my own – some of my internal organs have taken it upon themselves to pack it in. I can’t work like I used to. Even if I could afford it, I can’t go out like I used to – I get too tired and basically need to be home by 9 pm or else my exhaustion and crankiness makes me unbearable.

We are all dying, from the moment we are born we begin to die. My own troubles might (with a transplant or some other procedure and some luck) be reversed. But the fact remains that, for now, we are all dying, but I am dying faster than most.

It has brought my closer to God, but it has not made us more intimate. I has made me crankier towards him.

During noon mass, the sermon focused on Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz), who wrote admirably about the darkness. I was, no doubt, appropriate for my mood, but did not uplift me.

All I can say is, that I am trying. I am reading J.K. Huysman’s later novels about his life after his conversion (though I miss the delicious evil, the sex, and the femme fatales, and the black masses of his earlier works). Tomorrow, I will go to a penitent service and make my confession. I haven’t been in a while, so am going to a church near my work rather than my home parish – I am ashamed to reveal how slack I have been to Father Bill.

My companion is angry, too. She is contemplating a life without me. Or a life with a me who is dehabilitated by illness. Or by the poverty of mounting medical costs and a declining ability to earn the money to pay them off. It is not what she signed up for. And I am sometimes angry with her for feeling that way. No one likes to be weak, to be dependent. To be less than you were just a short time ago.

She also doesn’t like the church. She thought she was attaching herself to a young, atheist intellectual. Not a prematurely weak Catholic. Nominally Buddhist, effectively irreligious, she has not truck with the church’s western version of mysticism. The rituals and requirements seem like mere idolatry to her. And it is not in my nature to prosthelytize, so I find myself unable to properly defend my decision – not in the least because I cannot fully understand it myself. If, as I just stated earlier, I am angry at God, what is the function of keeping to these abstruse and difficult decrees? I feel I can’t explain my anger, but neither can I say that I love without equivocation. So I am silent and weak.

I will receive a number of Christmas whose long term value to myself, in terms of utility, will be manifestly less than the money spent on the present. In other words, I would have been able to get more utility from simply having spent that same money on myself. The same will apply to presents I get for others.

That is because the function of Christmas gifts is primarily moral rather economic.