Rousse

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
 
There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review.
 
There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them.
 
And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler.

There are gingers and there are gingers, and they are few and far between, only about 1-2%  of the population, and we can't really count the male ones, because ginger men mostly look like circus freaks.  If you are lucky enough to like gingers, you should live in either Ireland or Scotland those two countries have the highest percentage of redheads per capita than anywhere else in the world. We don't count the bottled one, because like the pigment they place in their hair to become a ginger, they will fade as quickly as they came. Like a small shooting star, blazing across your sky for the briefest of moments, and only leaving behind a small, slightly dazzling after image upon your pupils.

There is the bold, and brassy redhead, hair burnt orange, and visible from space if you pay enough attention. The ones you see from around a corner, because their hair pushes out an aura in front of them that is almost physical in nature. The ones that laugh just a bit too loudly, and take up just a bit too much attention from their set of admirers to allow you to do anything but dislike them with the intensity of a pulsar. They know they are bold, they know they are brassy, and dare you to do fuck all about it. They usually should be avoided if you value your feelings. However, they do not really steal your soul,they just borrow it for a while, and then return it slightly worse for wear.

There is the deep, burgundy redhead with the eyes that glitter even though they are not gold. The type that make you think of Sunday walks in the park, and even the briefest thought of pushing a stroller along on that walk. The type you want so very much to trust with all the secrets that the brassy redhead would break you apart with, the type that never need to raise their voice in order to be heard. The ones that can just merely with a wave of a hand make you do what they think needs to be done. The solid, sexy type that makes you want to get, and actually keep a job. They will steal your soul, and if you are lucky keep it. If you are unlucky they will steal your soul, shatter it, but do you the small mercy of putting most it back together again before they sail out of your life like the Spanish Armada with much more important things to do.

There is the auburn redhead, which isn't really red at all, but a different shade of brown trying to pass itself off as the genuine article. They usually possess light coloured eyes that are able to share a ton of experiences with you with just a brief glance. They are a poorer cousin of the burgundy redheads, maybe you want to take a Sunday walk with them, but you soon realize the walk has no real destination, and no deeper meaning. It is just a walk. Pleasant enough, and maybe healthy, but eventually you are going to have to turn around and head back from whence you started, and they are unlikely to come with you.  

There is the occasional redhead that can actually tan, and posses darker eyes. Some sort of genetic pot luck that took a little bit of material from blonds, gingers, and brunettes and tried to make it seem natural.  It's not, and that is important to remember redheads shouldn't be dark, it lessens the effect, like putting an under powered engine in a fancy sports car. Generally, these gingers should be avoided, after all if your walking in the garden of ginger delights, then you should go for the real deal, not some cross-breed that lacks the true refinement of a real ginger. They aren't really the soul stealing types these doppelgangers of real gingers. They understand, most of them, their place on the genetic food chain, and only a rare few of them ever really get ideas above their station. You can take them home to mother, but mother isn't going to fully approve.

And just like blondes, there are the showpiece redheads. The ones who's hair is just simply RED, not auburn, not orange, not burgundy or any other shade, but just simply red. They walk into a room and heads that shouldn't turn and stayed turned just a moment too long for their respective dates to be happy about it. They crave attention and usually receive it in spades. They are universally the tall ones, because tall girls are distracting, and tall really RED heads are as fascinating as watching the inner working of a well made Swiss watch tick away the time until you can see them again. Redheads don't go grey, and this type of red head will defy that Swiss watch and all the time it ticks away, and stay as bold as brass for more years that you will be able to remember in your dotage. They are the ones that give all the other redheads the yardstick by which they are defined. They are soul stealing, but you don't mind. In fact, you generally hand over your soul to them lock, stock, and barrel in the (vain) hopes they will be kind. Most of them aren't. They can get souls such as yours by the dozen like a clutch of bananas at the local fresh market. Therefore, which is it extremely difficult to do, they really, and truly should be avoided. Admire them from afar, but admire them nonetheless.

One part of the above post was written by me, and the other part by a pretty famous author. I sent the part written by this author to two different people as an example of, in my opinion, great writing. I did not tell them who had written it when I sent it, just sent it to be read. They both asked me if it was "a new blog post" of mine. It seems they thought that I had written it. At first, I thought it was a lark, a joke to attempt to stroke my ego, but after telling them who had actually written it, they both said that it still sounded like something I would write. I was flattered very much by this, and therefore attempted to write my own view in reply. One is mine, one is Raymond Chandler from "The Long Goodbye." I figure that most people will be able to tell the difference, one is good, one is shite, and we all know which is which.

 M. Chandler's first novel was published when he was 50 years old, an age that I am quickly approaching. Perhaps there is hope for me yet. If I can pass off to at least two people, neither of which are retarded, both of which have opinions that I generally value, then maybe it is time to turn to a blank page, and start filling the hours with something other than empty words, and thoughts.  If only.