on the wall

For your amusement or edification, I present to you this photograph of my sister, climbing ... something. "Machine World Traverse in Tuolumne," the photo caption says, though I'm at a loss to know what that means, exactly. Rocks, sister, gravity -- at any rate, someone submitted the photograph to a gallery on rockclimbing.com.

I would like to take a moment to assure everybody that my sister does not, no matter what the photograph suggests, have a mullet. I am aware that there is a wrinkle in her hair that, to a suspicious mind, implies she is afflicted with that unfortunate haircut which sadists across the rural backwaters think is de rigueur for titillating fashion delight. My opinion on the mullet is it is a red flag, if you will, a secular indicator of the type of personality that would -- under more hysterical influences -- function (if that is the word) as an acceptable suicide bomber. The self-destructive tendencies are much the same, though certainly less final in the mulletman; he has, after all, the option of walking into a reputable barber whose name does not begin with "Big" and end with "Bob."

And yet, mulletman doesn't. I can only imagine what sorts of exotic, erotic orgies the deluded man imagines is in store for him on the other side of mulletdom, because at some point he must have made a conscious choice. I am quite confident that these fantasies remain fundamentally fictional ... although I admit to having seen women with mullets from time to time.

It leads one to wonder if perhaps there isn't some Mullet Xanadu in which Mullets come together in the throes of passion, aliens in a strange and desolate land who have met at last another stranded, sympathetic brother of the same bizarre race. There, perhaps, Mullet Mommies and Mullet Daddies breed together the next generation of their kind, Mullet Babies, who are sent forth from their Mullet Eden to spread their Gospel of Mulletdom until some wandering soul is saved and brought into the fold, raised through the power of the Word until he, too, can touch the face of Barber Big Billy Bo Bob---

...I seem to have gotten somewhat distracted. My main point was that my sister does not have a mullet. The crinkle in her hair is actually from an erstwhile ponytail, which -- as is obvious in the picture -- has been removed. One of the peculiar traits of aggressively straight Asian hair is that it can eventually learn to take a kink. Just not useful ones.

What this implies about aggressively straight Asians, I leave to your imagination.

Here Endeth the Lesson.