United We Stand

The title of this post has nothing to do with the actual post, except it's the name of the place I go to. Today, I want to speak on a staple worldwide, but more focused toward my black people. The barbershop is the place to be.

Today, I went to the shop to I needed a cut. Trust me, I was looking like wolfman, for real. Stop laughing. Anyway, as soon as I got there, I realized why I love the shop so much. You learn a great deal from the sights and sounds. You hear the most interesting things coming out of people's mouths. Let me rephrase. You hear things come out of people's mouths that you wouldn't expect them to say or know about. My barber puts 'brother' or ' sister' in front of everyone's name, yet he was having a conversation about aeronautics and the connection to the weather. See what I'm saying? Now, I don't live in the hood by any means, but the only black people I've heard talk about things like that were in college. I was a tad shocked.

It's your regular shop, though. Bootlegs for sale. Talks about sports turning from light to heavy. Old cats schooling the young bloods about women. That was shop jargon. I don't really talk like that. Money issues and celebrity crushes get aired out. The shop is a man's man cave away from the man cave. Women who enter the shop are treated like the men, but the language is cleaned up out of respect. The shop is the only place where you can talk about strippers and relate it back to a religious experience and still be taken seriously. Basically, women, as much as men talk about women going to the hair salon and gossiping, the same goes on at a barbershop. Just, we're gossiping about different things besides the negroes trying to get at our women. Well, we talk about that too. but I just let you in on a secret. I could get ex-communicated from the shop if they knew I wrote this. So shhhhhhh, don't tell nobody!!!!