The oils that naturally keep your head and hair healthy are replaced when you remove them. If you strip away all of the natural oil with shampoo, that wonderfully efficient little machine you live in (your body) responds by pumping out more. It takes a while for it to recognize that not stealing the oil isn’t a one time thing and you’re serious about letting your head do its job. In the transition, about 3-4 weeks, it’s gonna get thick up there as the little pump keeps running at the same high speed.

Washing with water every day I’ve had no trouble. My hair feels thick when I wash it, but it doesn’t smell or feel dirty. Some people worry about that, or experience small amounts of itching, and they resort to a baking soda wash to remove some of the buildup. I’m guessing that this only slows down the process as your head says, “see, see?! I knew you didn’t really mean it! I’m not cutting back the oil supply!”

At the same time… I was fascinated. What would happen? I kept putting it off, wanting to let my head know I was serious. Today I caved in. I had to know. I mixed up a little cup of baking soda and water and brought two half lemons into the shower. I poured the baking soda in my hair first and let it sit for a few minutes. I massaged it in and then rinsed it out. Immediately my hair was twice as light. Terror gripped me. I’d gone too far! Wasted two weeks! It did, however, feel really nice and soft.

The next step is recommended so that your hair doesn’t smell like baking soda, although I’m guessing it’s also because you need the vinegar, an acid, to neutralize the baking soda, a base. I couldn’t find vinegar fast enough so I grabbed a lemon, also very acidic.

Now, here’s the trick with lemons in the shower. It turns out that picking up lemon seeds off of a wet floor is like wresting a greased pig. With your thumbs. They kept creeping closer and closer to the drain but I couldn’t get a hold of the feisty little critters. I finally slid them, ever so carefully, all the way up the shower wall until they hit the soap dish. There was a tiny lip, and my hope was that… if I just barely tipped them over the edge onto my waiting thumb… I could just… and with a yelp of triumph, I popped them off the wall! …and back onto the floor. The third time was the charm and I managed to wrestle them into their original plastic bag.

The comb was the finishing touch. I ran it through my hair briefly and then looked down in horror. There were thick chunks of something coming off of my head! Was it globs of grease? Chunks of skin?! What disgusting or terrifying thing was happening to me?! Then I looked a little closer. And took a taste. Mmmm! Zesty! It was chunks of lemon peel.

And so here I am, smelling zesty and feeling good. My hair feels great. I hope I haven’t backpedaled too far. I’ll keep you updated.

I’ve had some pretty weird hair colors and styles over the years (and have stuck with the dilbus) but I’ve always washed it every day. The thing is, when you’re home with your parents recovering and not leaving the house… suddenly you have time to try whacky new things. The whole “no shampoo” thing has been going on for a while now. The process takes about a month, it seems, before your head stops freaking out and trying to make up for all the oil the shampoo bubble squad was stealing every day. Once it settles down it is, apparently, quite nice and low maintenance. The bonus is that you don’t dump a lot of questionable chemicals onto your head. Even better, for me, it means that my ultralight travel pile gets one bottle lighter!

Of course, no shampoo doesn’t mean I’ll never wash my hair. It just means I’ll do it with water. There are a number of other solutions to use during the transition time, including apple vinegar and baking soda, but I’m sure that’s just for wusses.

So today it begins: 30 days without shampoo. And then..?

Here is a pile of blogged scribblings about other people’s experiences:

Sean Bonner

Sean Bonner update on Boing Boing

Fulfilled Homemaking

Ridiculously Extraordinary Karol Gajda

Free The Animal, although this guy is too willing to be a freak to make this seem mainstream!

Living the Simple Life

Sadly, he died back in April, 2000. Our plans of dancing beside him amidst some kind of bizarre beach party near his place in Hawaii were wrinkled and twisted and now, here we are, with Terence sliding around through the ether somewhere and Steve and I separated by a continent.

Happy New Years Steve and Terence. I’ll find a way to make this up to you guys.

Watch Terence do his thing: (skip video forward to 2:45 where he appears)

I think this is why I’ve never been particularly aggressive about getting other people to hear these songs. Their role is not to entertain, win women, or make cash. Apparently, that’s what my more recent children’s songs are for.

In an interesting shift, I’m finding that as the muse wakes me at four in the morning I’m striking different bargains. I wrestle with her a bit, I have my own demands. I take what she gives me and fight to turn it into something I can make childlike, simple, and fun. Suddenly that angry riff becomes a high energy background to childish excitement. Suddenly that sad finger rolling melody is the old tan curtain behind a storyteller.

The magic now is in taking the learnings themselves, the essence of all of those old spells, and making them simple enough for children to absorb and integrate so that they too can breath them in, laugh them out, and tuck them away for a time when it matches one of their own struggles.

Yes, just like an inoculation through a vaccination, giving them Antibodies.

The problems with this system are obvious. It doesn’t matter that a child is eight years old when it happened; when a child’s parents die the child often takes on a lifetime of guilt, wondering what they did to cause or deserve this. When the seeming impossibility of someone so young being to blame is too much, some systems of belief incorporate a series of former yous that are to blame. (Past lives.) This means that you can feel all of the guilt of having done something terrible without actually having any known history of doing something terrible. At eight years old you’ve already been a brutal dictator who must be punished. In Christianity, there is even the idea that you are “born into sin” and never had a chance to begin with.

My current situation certainly gives me plenty of leverage to get cranky. I came to China fired up to work hard. I pushed myself and trained every day, doing what was “good” in the system that I understood: if you work hard without fail, you will be rewarded. Instead I overdid it and injured my knees so badly that it will now take more than six months to heal. Most of my time in China so far has been spent unable to freely walk and explore.

If I look at this as a punishment, it’s miserable to deal with. I’m being punished for knowledge I didn’t have at the time. It doesn’t seem fair. If I had known that the particular type of pain I was feeling was a clue to stop training for a while instead of pushing on I would be strong and healthy today. But I didn’t know.

Many years ago I also did what I thought was right and invested my money instead of letting it sit in a bank, and if I’d just diversified or pulled it out I’d still have money today. But the younger me didn’t and couldn’t have known these things and so I lost it all.

Now instead of guilt I’d like to introduce another concept, a concept that I’ve also seen used by religious people that are not so extreme. Everything that happens has a result. I can’t walk while I’m in an exciting new country and I don’t have any money left from all of my hard work. Those sound like pretty crappy outcomes. But one of the things that, say, a monotheist might say is that, “all things happen for a reason as part of God’s plan.” Atheists and others sometimes refer to the, “will of the universe” or things, “being as they should be”. This is radically different from looking for blame. In fact, because things happened the way they were supposed to, and always do, there is neither blame nor praise for anything you did to cause it. It just was. In fact, you don’t even have to look for a way it fits into someone else’s plan, be they god or universe. You can find ways it’s offered new opportunities for you or those you love. With this new pair of spectacles to see the world it’s time to reframe the results.

If I hadn’t lost all of my money I might have followed my plan at the time and been quicker to rush out into the world. Having not stayed in Austin I would never have moved into the fantastic Pink Palace and learned and taught so much there. I would never have met so many incredible people who are lifelong friends. I would never have experienced so many incredible loves. I might not have taken a class where I learned the word, “reframe”. You might not be reading this blog post right now, because I might have been traveling and not have started a blog and, even then, if I was still able to train kung fu here I wouldn’t have time to write right now.

So, there you have it. The universe/God/Goddess/the Great Spirt/any way you like it has willed that I write this blog post and that you read it. I have suffered a lot so that you can have this before you. I hope it was worth it!

Addendum

There seems to be some confusion, so to clarify: the last line is a joke. Otherwise it would negate the whole point! Of course it’s worth it, even if it sometimes takes looking from the right angle to see how. It’s something I’ve made a habit, and while I’m not perfect it continually transforms my life “setbacks” into a constant source of amusement and new challenges. As I mentioned in the comments, I wouldn’t even be able to speak Chinese now if I hadn’t been injured and given enough time, let alone met so many fun Chinese students from all over the world!

This is it. After more than twelve years I’m going back to China. After two months of the constant burning stress of unloading a mountain of physical things that make up a life, the last week in LA was crucial. I woke up each day in Eric Peterson’s home by the beach, looking out over the ocean I would soon cross. I watched the sun set each night, traveling before me, warming my new home with a rich glow.
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I needed to recover and reflect and Eric was going through a time of transition and quiet. We biked down the beach each day to strech and move in yoga classes that were continual reminders of our environment. “Now reaching long towards the beach…”

Returning home, Eric made use of his profound new raw food cooking skills to dazzle me with spreads of nut pates, hummus mixes with tiny arrays of carefully placed nuts, bright red slices of cabbage dipping leaves and delightful fractal vegetables. Every morning began with a deep green liquid so vitamin rich and alive that it woke up my spirit and left me light.

We sat with the door open and let the day’s light illuminate our ongoing analysis and contemplation of life and love. I took long walks down the beach using up the last of my cell phone sharing time with some of the beloved people I’d missed in the rapid exit. I sat and watched the ocean caress the beach. I let me mind gently touch and then retreat from memories of my last days in Austin. I allowed tiny glimpses of the sadness and little smiles for the sweet moments and then returned to the ocean, the future, the mysterious, beautiful, huge shifting place before me.

This morning we arrived at LAX just in time to slip in under the very plane that was going to carry my guitar and sleepy sleeping self to the next phase of life. It drifted just over our heads and, crossing our path, floated away to prepare itself for me.

As it turned out, he had plenty of time. The thing about air travel is that it’s much like giving birth in that somehow, no matter how many times I do it, I somehow forget the pain and remember only the wriggling wonder that emerges on the other side. Now, as my brain and shoulders go numb from the pain and the waiting as I prepare to fumble through yet another stripping process, I remember. But I also know that it will all be over soon and it will be worth it. A longtime dream has been stirring quietly in my belly, waiting to emerge. Tomorrow I will see it born into the world before me and, smiling, I will reach forward to embrace it.

Even given my four year relationship with Weishi, that time seems so short compared to the lifelong sense of connection it established in me. The craving to return stayed with me ever since, and that journey has been delayed repeatedly over the years for one recurring reason.

The first big documentary film project I worked on was the story of an eccentric Austin songwriter that was shot and killed many years ago protecting an old man from his son. My friend Kevin Triplett started following the story and then built a small team including Mike Nicholson, Chris Ohlsen and myself. We interviewed hundreds of people over the years, traveling from Colorado to Georgia. Four dudes in a little van crossing the country picking up the pieces of a dead man’s story, looking through the tears and laughter and smiles of those who loved and hated him, many of whom were both, trying to get a glimpse of the man known as Blaze Foley.

Every time a relationship ended, it was time to move, and my ties were loose I would swear I was off to China. But this film, this epic project of so many years, kept creeping along. New discoveries. That one more great interview. Just plain getting it edited. At one point, after I had spent months doing early edits, all of the hard drives and computers were stolen and we had to start again from scratch.

Tonight, at 10:20pm at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin Texas, I am going to see the finished film. Exactly two and a half weeks before my flight leaves for China.

Thanks Blaze. It turns out that, now, I can fly.

“Updog.”
“Updog?”
“Yeah what is that?”
“What’s what?”
“You were talking about something called updog.”
“Yeah that guy reeked of it. It was making me crazy how much he smelled like updog.”
“But I want to know what updog is.”

This went on for a while. At last I said something about how I’d seen the huge basket of updog go by earlier and she replied, “yeah but… what’s updog?” It was close enough. I grabbed her and spun her around yelling back, “Yeeeahh! Wassup Dawwwg?!”

So, uh, that’s the joke. And I admit, I love it. There’s a wonderful moment when the other person realizes they’ve laid out the punchline to the joke themselves, and since I’m usually grabbing them in a big hug or giving them the safer high five or handclasp hug as I’m shouting, there’s a minute where they’re momentarily stunned as they realize something has just happened, they caused it, and they’re not sure what it is.

But there’s something even more interesting about this joke. In order for the joke to work, I have to keep avoiding a direct response to their questions, and they have to keep asking until they ask in the right way. This also means that they have to repeatedly admit their ignorance, which reveals a lot about that person and our relationship. Sometimes I’ll go on and on about how I saw this beautiful updog in a church the other day and then this poodle stepped in updog and it got all over my friend’s car until it was bright purple… I’ve had people listen to all of this, nodding sympathetically and saying things like, “uh huh” as though they knew exactly what I meant until it became completely unbearable.

Accepting and revealing my ignorance has been the most essential part of my evolution. At one point I thought about tattooing “I Am Ignorant” on the inside of my right arm, so that everyone would already know and there’d be no point in holding back. Every time my ego gets the better of me and I twitch back a question about something around me, I lose a moment of opportunity to learn. Every time this happens and there is another person involved, every time I nod instead of asking, it’s like another huge bag of cement is added to a stack that I have to move to get back to the first place I didn’t understand. If I tell them I don’t understand now, I have to keep asking my way backwards, revealing with each question how far back I started lying to them, pretending I knew what they were saying.

On the other hand, revealing ignorance does some other wonderful things. I can’t count the number of times I’ve interrupted someone ranting away about some technical process or amazing film to point out that I didn’t know some obscure acronym or actress and had their eyes pop, not with amazement at how stupid I was, but excitement at the opportunity to share what they knew.

I’ve also had people pause, sometimes blush, and point out that they weren’t really sure how that worked either. If I’m feeling gracious, instead of busting them for trying to streamroll me with buzzwords I make the otherwise awkward moment an opportunity for both of us to learn. “Here,” I say, pulling up a laptop, “I’m sure the answer’s online. Let’s look for it on updog.”

Clicking on the dog’s tongue takes you to the photographer’s site

Most people think there’s nothing magic about statistics, but I love to experience math that way. Your odds of meeting someone who wants to give you their car because they won’t need it for the next year are exactly zero if you sit at home. I spend, granted, too much time socializing but this means that my social network is large enough that when I need a toaster, the odds are pretty good that I’m connected to someone out there who just realized they have an extra toaster and would love to see it getting use. The odds, to an outsider, look like magic when I speak the words, “I need a toaster” and a new toaster appears on my counter. I call it Mathemagical.

Now it turns out that I’m actually a really shy person. (No, no one else believes that either.) But I learned a trick years ago that helped get me into the good kind of trouble by upping the odds that I’d be near it. I call it “jumping off cliffs”. After a couple of simple recent cliff jumps, small social risks, I suddenly found myself spending five days hugging dozens of women in slow motion as a nonverbal conversation about music.

First, the cliff. When I was in Jr. High School I learned a trick. If I tried to stand in front of a phone, imagine the call I was about to make to a cute girl, and then force my arm to pick up the phone and dial, nothing happened. Nothing happened for a long time and I felt miserable throughout every one of those terrifying minutes. I learned instead to walk away and take on a project or do something else until I’d completely forgotten about the girl and the phone. The moment that thought re-entered my head, the moment I realized I’d forgotten, I immediately threw myself off of a cliff. I grabbed the phone and before I was aware of what was happening, it was ringing and someone was about to answer. I was falling. No time to think about jumping, it had already happened and now I was going to have to respond! Sure, I blundered, said moronic things, pissed people off, and made them laugh. But if I had simply sat at the cliff’s edge absolutely nothing would have happened. And here’s the best part. This type of risk, and almost all social risks, are metaphorical cliffs. No one will die. What’s the worst that can happen compared to that?

A little more than a year ago I went out a cafe to meet an old friend, Margaret Heyn. I should probably have been working, but I don’t get to see her very often now that she lives in San Antonio so I skipped out. She had a friend along and after some chatter they tried to convince me to, again, skip out on even more work and go Tango dancing with them. As it turns out, tango dancing requires a fair bit of patience and has a steep learning curve, especially for leads. I had tried a few times years ago to learn this dance with Margaret and was frustrated. Worse, they weren’t asking me to come to a class. They were asking me to come to a full on dance space full of people moving smoothly and elegantly around a tiny room, step into this densely packed sea of movement with a woman in my arms, and somehow manage to stumble around without tripping her, running into anyone else, falling onto anyone, or generally being the single cause of a complete disaster. I can tell you from experience that, starting out, this is nearly impossible. In a notable night from my past I once lead a woman into having her foot stabbed by a high heel. I helped her limp off of the floor and swore never to dance again.

“We’ll give you a quick lesson in the parking lot”, Marg promised. The cliff loomed. Here was my chance to look like a complete idiot in front of someone I’d just met and potentially injure countless innocent dancers. Social death. I thought about it, made myself stop, and threw myself off. Sarah Stayer, Margaret’s friend that I met that night, won a free month of tango lessons that evening and handed them to me on the spot. We dated for the next year.

A year later I found myself in Chicago and wanting some kind of release. I leapt off of a few more cliffs. I sent messages to a series of people online who mentioned tango and Chicago in their facebook profiles. I drove an hour and a half into the city, to a place I’d never been, to try to dance with total strangers. I was still, essentially, a beginning tango dancer. There I had a fifteen minute conversation with Carolin Colon and Galina Obushinskaya after dancing with them. Each invitation to dance was another little cliff, the dance and conversation happening in free fall.

Months later I decided, against sound financial judgement, to splurge on a tango festival that happened to be in Chicago. I contacted Carolin out of the blue. I hadn’t spoken to her since our fifteen minute interaction months before. She, in turn, took a social risk and immediately offered to have me sleep on her couch.

It turned out that Carolin and her housemate had a cat, so propelled by my sneezes we split for a hotel room at the event, which lead to meeting more people who wanted a place to crash (when the dances ended at 5:00am) and suddenly I found myself in a nice hotel room in Chicago with Carolin, Galina, Viktoriya Pantaleeva and Margaret (who coincidentally happened to come to the same event!) laughing, drinking wine, swapping stories and having the time of our lives. New friends. New experiences.

So start your cliff jumping now. No one will die. And by upping the odds, you just may find yourself in a hot tub full of world renown tango dancers. (Er, that happened later.)

As always, click photos to visit photographer’s site