A drunken Whaler rambles on

Or maybe she doesn't. I wouldn't know because, like so many girls, she colors her hair. Which makes her a liar.

The girl I used to love had long, straight, dirty blonde hair with even blonder highlights. I don't know if she colored her hair. She never told me, and I never asked. But deep down, I suspect she colored it because I think she was a liar too. And even if she wasn't, she was other things that were almost as bad. She was less than forthcoming. She was less than curious. And she didn't have the spine to say the things that needed to be said. Besides her appearance, she had one wonderful feature that in hindsight wasn't enough: she told fascinating stories. But I wonder now if most of them were lies. It wouldn't surprise me. They were that good.

The girl I loved before her had short, straight, chestnut hair, which I encouraged her to let grow until it was medium length. I know with certainty that she colored her hair because she told me so. I never caught her lying to me, but I know that she lied to other people of importance in her life, and I know that she encouraged me to lie to people of importance in mine. That she would ask me to do these things is a betrayal of my soul. People shouldn't ask me to lie to people I love. Lying through somebody else is lying by transitive property. She's a liar for asking me to lie for her.

The girl I loved before her had long, brown, wavy hair. Again I don't know if she colored it because she never told me. She might have, I guess, though she and I dated several years ago, and I don't think as many women colored their hair back then as do now. Whatever she did to it took hours. I've never met a girl who fought so hard to subjugate her hair. She was a control freak like her mother, who'd whipped her dad "into shape" and broken his spirit in the process. I think she was looking for a man to treat as harshly, someone whose nature, like her hair, she could tame and contain and eventually change altogether. Her hair looked fine enough when finally finished, but I felt sorry for it. It was dead below the surface.

The girl I loved before her had long, straight, platinum hair. It should have been obvious to anyone with a pair of proper eyes that she colored it. I don't know if she was a liar. We didn't date very long before I left her to date another girl who also colored her hair. But I know that she was confused. She didn't seem to know who she was. I saw her a couple of years ago after she'd let her hair return to its natural strawberry blonde. I was happy for her that she'd embraced who she is.

The good thing is that I don't really think I loved any of these girls. I think I just thought I loved them because they were decent to me and interested and pretty. I think I could have thought I loved a tree if it had known how to twirl its hair with its finger over dinner and then later fall asleep in the nook below my clavicle. I think I could have loved a tree a lot, and it never would have lied to me.

I love my family and friends and my dog, Winston, who died five years ago. I love food and football, and I love bicycles even though I haven't ridden one in years. I love being drunk and being asleep, and I love lying in bed only half asleep. I love dulcimers and harmonicas and fiddles and banjos, and I love songs that incorporate all four. I love scrimshaw and harpoons and boats and the ocean and anything that swims below its surface. I love hope and I love honesty, and some day I hope to find someone who loves me and a lot of what I love. And I hope she won't lie about it if she doesn't. I'll study her hair when I meet her.