CRIMPIN'

Not that I've ever been very good at telling people how one thing is like another in order to get my point across, but let me try, to let you know how surprised I was. It was a true everyday shocking surprise, like when you get a glass of water and someone's used the hot water before you and the water you drink when you're expecting a nice cold thirst-quencher is actually lukewarm and this, for some reason, is so disgusting. Or when you've put down a can of softdrink for a while at a party and come back to it later and you think it's fuller than it is and when you go to pick it up your hand sort of flies into the air because you're adjusting for the weight when really it's quite light, because either you've had more of it than you thought or someone else has come along and drunk some, which is more often the case, because I mean you can usually remember how much of a can of softdrink you've got through, can't you.

My hair came out crimped. This was the surprise. The fact I had been walking around the centre of town for almost three hours with kinky-arse hair and no one had even told me. Remember how you're always told that you should do stuff to other people that you'd want them to do to you? Well, if I saw someone walking around town with hair that had so obviously been mistakenly curled (and it was so obvious they had no idea) I would go straight up to them and tell them. I mean, I'm not the most confident or forward person in the world, but I'd tell them.

So anyway, it was when I was waiting for a pedestrian crossing to go when a bus went past, quite slowly, around the corner and I caught a glimpse of this weird afro-type harido on this guy and then I realised that guy was actually me and I freaked out. My hands went up there, to my hair I mean, and they felt a sort of felty fuzz. I had to run back, even though the light had gone green, and I stared at myself in the reflection of the shiny wall of a bank. I looked ridiculous. A forty-dollar haircut. I mean. Come on.