Dear Wes,
Will you ever go bald? Do you worry about it? Do you worry that people won’t want to work with bald Wes Anderson, that they’ll see balding as a sign of antiquatedness, that your career might be divided between the haired and hairless eras?
I worry about it, but then again I worry about almost everything.
A wise man would grow out his hair and have a wig made of it, or a couple of different wigs to simulate different haircuts. Don’t even say a wise man wouldn’t care. Wisdom does not obliterate vanity.
Tomorrow I will go back to the zoo to watch the jaguar cubs. The zookeepers handle all of the animals they don’t plan to release into the wild. This way the animals are easier to care for if they need medical treatment or if their exhibit gets moved. The mother jaguar has gone through this process, but she is not really tamed. She would kill a zookeeper if she ever got a chance. The keeper told me so. The jaguar mother licks her cubs often and lets them play with her tail.
But let’s bring this back to balding. Jaguars don’t go bald. I don’t know if any other species balds. People say that man is the only animal that anticipates his own death. If that’s the case then balding is a bit like anticipation, the hair evacuating the body so the man won’t have to go all at once. Imagine a mountain of hair at heaven’s gate, his own head’s worth awaiting each man on his arrival. Imagine naughty angels diving into the mountain like children into an enormous leaf pile, scattering the hair, mixing it all up, leaving all heaven’s new entrants to settle for patchy and multi-hued new hair, hair they’d likely shave off in preference for a clean and familiar-sheened dome.
Did you ever try to Google Map the way from your house to heaven? It tried to send me to a shop for fancy deserts. Wherever you live it might be different, just like different religions have different conceptions of the afterlife, but I bet a lot of the time you’ll wind up getting directions to a pricy bakery.
Until again,
Ben
