It appeared as just another day. Being sort of tired, and just having awakened, I absently combed my hair, preparing for another day of the normal routine. You know, a visit to the coffee house, a bit of reading, a tad of writing, plenty of walking and thinking, with a smidgen or two of dreaming thrown in for good measure, and then finally five or six hours of drudgery at my place of employment. So there I stood, having recently wet my hair, leisurely grooming the morning away while thinking of nonsensical things like reality and consciousness, when I happened to notice something seemed amiss.

“Something is weird,” I proposed in between strokes. “Something is strange.”

That’s when I saw it. Standing amidst a couple of thousand hairs. It grinned right at me, a grimace at once so filled with destiny and malice that I momentarily found myself at a loss. Mocking me with its presence, it was four inches tall, ever so thin, all gray and kinky.

I gasped.

“Only 26, and yet I’ve come - an Emissary of Death! I am the first, but soon there will be millions of us all over your head and throughout your beard!” it shouted while tilting this way and that.

“Yes, Shane! I am a gray hair, and I foreshadow your future!”

“Since when do gray hairs talk?” I queried, feeling somehow foolish and somewhat afraid.

The hair casually replied, “Ever since you’ve possessed such a vivid imagination, Shane. Your overactive mind has endowed me with life, and now I breathe, live, and hunt - as any sentient being should!”

With this pronouncement, the gray hair executed a perverse little Irish dance, squirming with pleasure at my dismay. It shuffled across my brow, like a deranged Ed Grimly of hairs, and cha-cha-cha’d all over my scalp. Grabbing an indignant blond-colored hair, the gray devil commenced to Tango. Together they twirled, jumped, dipped and then disco-danced from one ear to the other, shouting with joy ... a strange chant from some eldritch past which sounded something like this:

“Tra la la boom de aye! Y’r head is turning gray! Tra la la boom de aye!”

“Shut up, you foul demon hairs! Shut up! Don’t you have any sympathy?”

’Teehehe, chuckle, chuckle, take it easy, Shane. We’re only having a little fun.”

All of the sudden I had a sickening vision. I could see hundreds of thousands of insane-silver-gray hairs having a party all over my scalp. It was a horrid vision. Some danced, some made passes at the few remaining blond, red, and black hairs ... hanging just above my nose, an especially uncouth gang of the gray demons drank cheap beer, vomited, and engaged themselves in fighting; on my chin, the Beats of the gray hair world read horrid poetry; war monger hairs started battles; hippie hairs protested; fundamentalist hairs talked of the Second Coming and the end of the Head; and in the midst of this chaos, I could see the first gray hair. He possessed a strange and uncanny grin upon his silver face, and while I looked on, he distributed psychedelic drugs to all his gray hair friends while rallying them for yet another round of that “Tra la la boom de aye!”stuff.

“What’s the matter, Shane? You look kinda ill, bud. Tra la la boom de aye!”

I ignored the barbarous hair, and while he sang and danced all over my head, I was thinking. Near the outer fringes of my mind, a plan came into being. Nonchalantly I resumed combing, and engaged the gray hair in polite conversation.

“Sir Gray Hair,” I said, “do you mind if I indulge in a smoke? And by the way, you are quite a dancer.”

“Why not at all, S. Thomas. Smoke away. And thank you for the compliment. I have friends who are connected to some of the greatest dancers in the world,” the gray hair said, bowing low.

Seizing the moment, I pointed into another room and asked, “Sir Hair, what’s that?”

Just as the hair turned to see what I pointed at, I grabbed it by the follicle and nearly fell over in pain as I found mySelf being judo-whipped onto the sink. I quickly recovered, however, and burst forth with a bone-chilling karate scream. Soon the gray menace and I were Kung Fu fighting across the tiled floor. A strangely surreal scene it must have been: I, a grown man of 26, being flung about by a gray hair less than 6 inches long, while cheesy Karate movie sound effects echoed throughout the room.

In a desperate attempt I lunged at the hair yelling, “Victory is mine! Begone, you foul denizen of aged decline,” my lips somehow out of synch with the words issuing forth from them. But the gray hair swiftly moved aside, fingering its light gray nose at me while laughing insanely and singing, “Tra la la boom de aye!”

This proved to be a fatal mistake on his part, because as he pranced about in evident victory to come, the blond hair he had assaulted not five minutes earlier appeared, pinning the Gray One to my temple. In a flash I acted!

My hand darted forth, snagging the hair and pulling it out by its very roots! It screamed shrilly, trying to squirm free from my angry fingers, but my grip proved to be strong. With cold, calculated intent I pulled a book of matches from my pocket, deftly lighting one with one hand - a trick I had learned some years earlier while suffering a broken collar bone. Then I burned the hair, turning it to am oily shriveled ash. As it burned and twisted away, I could still hear an eerie song echoing in my brain, and now I sometimes hear it late at night when the Moon is shrouded in darkness and normal men sleep.

“Tra la la boom de aye! Tra la la boom de aye!”

Book of Sat - http://www.mr-technical.com/