Memo To Hair Guy Staff

Hair Guy Writers' Meeting, June 2008

From: Truman Capps (the Hair Guy)

To: Staff writers for Hair Guy (Bizarro Hemingway, Robo Faulkner, Zombie Fitzgerald, Toni “The Hammer” Morrison, Truman Clones 1-4)

Subject: Possible content adjustment?

Hey gang,

First of all, I’d just like to tell you that you’re doing a fabulous job. I imagine it’s not easy cranking out two updates a week, but you guys deliver, time and again. Looking at some of the stuff you’re writing, I can’t believe I used to do all that myself, back before the rigors of maintaining the Hair Guy brand name took up so much of my time. Point is, I’m damn glad I hired you. You’ve all shown remarkable growth, both in your writing style and in your ability to overcome the crippling genetic defects caused by the highly illegal and dangerous Brazillian cloning operation that created you (I’m looking at you, Truman Clones 1 and 3 – reading your work, sometimes I forget that you’ve got feet growing out of your shoulders). So before I say anything else, I want all of you to take a minute and pat yourselves on the back. Truman Clone 2, I understand that the flippers make the act of patting somewhat difficult, so instead, maybe just rub your flippers together. Until further notice, that’ll just be your own special way to pat yourself on the back.

Now that the backs have been appropriately patted and the flippers well and truly rubbed, I figure we should talk some business. Let me start by saying that I hate coming down here to tell you guys how to write the blog. I mean, hey, I used to write this stuff myself, and it was hard, and back then nothing would have chapped my caboose more than some astonishingly successful internet celebrity coming along and telling me how to do my job. You guys are the writers, and your job is to write the blog for me; I’m the name on the blog, and my job is to manage the considerable cult of personality that has sprung up around that follicle Xanadu otherwise known as my hair. This system has worked well for us for a good long time. Remember all the posts on the comment page where people told me I was hilarious? Or all those people who’d say, “Oh, and your blog last night was pretty okay” at the end of a conversation? Or the half dozen or so raving fans at Sprague High School? Those were the fruits of our labor: Sweet, delicious attention, all for me, and nobody else.

However, those were the good times; our salad days, as the culinarily gifted might put it. Back then, Hair Guy was wildly popular. It was insane. No, I’m serious – I would literally just sit there looking at the hit counter and say, “Wow. This must be what it’s like to be insane.” Hell, who can forget those days, just a few short months ago, when we’d clock in at, like, 90 hits on update days! Do you guys remember when you wrote that thing about Cosmopolitan and we got something like 100 hits in one day? That was just… I mean, eat your heart out, Huffington Post! Y’know? And then I bought you guys that keg to celebrate, and Poe 2.0 had a little too much, and then he said he was cool to drive home, and…

Well, okay, maybe that’s our problem. Maybe we got a little too cocky. We got too big too fast. It was like the roaring 20s (are you with me, Zombie Fitzgerald?) – we were steppin’ large and laughin’ easy, but then out of nowhere the bubble bursts. In the 20s it was the stock market or some lame crap like that, and for us it was the cops calling at 4:00 AM to tell me that a drunken cyborg poet had just wrapped his Honda around a tree and that he wasn’t going to pull through.

The saddest thing about that whole mess is that Poe 2.0 will never be able to realize his dream of finding out what love is.

We can all agree that things have gone downhill since then. Sure, the quality has been the same, but our readership has been steadily decreasing. And hey, I’d love to blame it all on losing Poe 2.0, because between his poetry and his attempts to destroy humanity he generated a lot of publicity that eventually made it back to the blog. But it’s not just that. For some reason, even though we’re keeping up the high quality content, we’re getting fewer and fewer hits every week. Fewer and fewer people that want to read about my delusions of grandeur as a Milkshake Technician or my open letters to various celebrities and government agencies. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I think that stuff relating to me is about the most interesting stuff in the world, and ordinarily I’d say that anyone who doesn’t share in that opinion is probably too stupid to read in the first place, but… Well, we got 60 hits on the day of the last update, and about 25 of them were people who’d Googled terms like “Hair tips for guys” or “Guy hair color” or “Hairy guys”. Something has got to change.

We need to market ourselves to a hipper and younger audience. I’ve got some pretty interesting ideas on my end – for example, I might rename the blog Baseball Cap Turned Backwards Guy, because I hear that sort of shit is really popular with the kids these days. Thing is, if I’m going to change our image, the content is going to have to change with it. So I’m going to need you guys to start writing about more interesting things – yes I know, more interesting than me, is that even possible? I’m going to push you guys further than you’ve ever been pushed before. So I want you all to start thinking about topics that would really pull the readers in – real juicy stuff, stuff that jumps right off the Internet and gets all up in people’s bidness. I was thinking that maybe we should start doing more pictures in the updates – everybody likes pictures, right? And maybe the pictures should be of boobs, regardless of what the update is about. Like, it could be an update about the Magna Carta, but we could just spruce it up with boob pictures. That being said, maybe we should do a regular update where it’s just talking about boobs the whole time.* Like, Wednesdays. We’d call them Boobnesdays. I dunno, it’s just an idea, but I think it’d look great on a T-shirt.

*If any of you think this is tacky, you can go right ahead and quit. It’s a scientifically proven fact that boobs create instant publicity – this isn’t chauvinism, it’s advertising that capitalizes on chauvinism, which I’m pretty sure is OK. If you’re squeamish or awkward about this, just get over it; keep in mind that you all spent a good deal of time with boobs in your infancy (except for the Truman Clones – you guys only nursed at the cold, unfeeling teat of Science).

Now, some of you might be resistant to the thought of seemingly “cheapening” this blog by adding gimmicks to draw in readers. Admittedly, I was too, at first. I mean, it makes you start to wonder why I’m even doing this in the first place. Here at Hair Guy are we writing for the readers, or are we writing for ourselves? The proper answer, the one that I always fantasize about giving if I get interviewed by Rolling Stone or, better yet, NPR, is that I only do this blog thing to please myself, and the fact that other people like to watch me please myself is just a happy accident. But that’s simply not the case – as much as I enjoy doing what I do, the fact is that having an audience makes it that much more exciting. There’s the pressure to put on a good show lest you let everyone down; it’s exhilarating and it’s high pressure and it’s a wonderful excuse to use heroin. We’ve had a taste of the spotlight on those 100 hit days – it’s a good feeling, and I’m hooked, and I’m willing to do anything to get that feeling back, as heroin sure as hell isn’t doing the trick.

Frankly, if I were only doing this for my own benefit, I would never have got a blog in the first place – I’d just write all this crap myself and then save it on my computer. But no; deep down, it’s really about making people laugh, and I want to make more people laugh. So while you’re thinking about ways to make this blog popular, keep our nonstop quest for humor in mind. Don’t be afraid to try new, different, or even absurd sorts of updates – eventually we’ll find something that’ll catch on, and before we know it we’ll be riding high again.

Just remember Poe 2.0, and learn from his mistakes.

Sincerely yours,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps would like to remind you that Hair Guy Take Your Daughter To Work Day is next Friday.