How I choose to wear my hair is a personal matter and I’ll thank you to mind your business.

If you look at the photo above this column, you will see the famed flattop in action. It looks like somebody used a slide rule to cut it. The angles are perfect. You could balance a case of beer on my head and it would not fall off.

Touch it. You know you want to.

The sideburns? Elvis Presley would be envious if he were not allegedly dead. The King never had burns that fell in so obediently along the cheek bones.

To look at that photo and that haircut, you might get the idea that I’m fresh back from basic training. We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day! Maybe I’m a cop or a prison guard.

But the ‘do is misleading. I sleep until noon every day and have no real discipline in my life. You can set me up with a firearm if you want to and order me to guard a hill. But brother, I’ll fall asleep 10 minutes into the assignment and your unit will be overrun.

Seriously, look away from the flattop. It lies.

Don’t get the wrong idea here, people. I’m not one of you girls who spends 23 hours of every day thinking about hair and how it can be styled with fabulous new gels. My ambition has always been to have hair that doesn’t need to be touched, combed or even looked at. I get out of the shower, shake myself dry like a dog, and I’m good to go. I don’t even have to look in the mirror.

It’s a good thing, too, because I’m not pretty.

But hear me out. Your hair is perhaps the very first thing that identifies who you are and what you stand for when you approach strangers in the world. Wear your hair shaved down to nothing, they will see you as a person of discipline or possibly a recently released prison inmate.

Wear your hair long and ornate, they will think you a rock star or a poet. Go with dreadlocks, and there you are: a free thinker with artistic proclivities who can’t afford shampoo.

Get yourself a perm, and man, even those strangers will laugh at you. Because brother, a boy should not get a perm.

So, I’m thinking about changing my look. I envision long hair grown wild and a fly-away beard. The elder of the tribe. The half-mad novelist with only fleeting moments of lucidity. That look that says “this person might be a brilliant author, or he might be the type who gets into loud arguments with pigeons in the park.”

I like to think I’m a little of both.

But here’s the thing. When I was a teenager, I tried for the rock star look. I imagined great waves of hair that would drive the girls wild and establish me once and for all as one cool puppy with a long streak of rebellion. Jim Morrison blown back as a junior high kid with a skateboard.

But genetics foiled me. My hair doesn’t grow long, it grows tall. Instead of falling in great cascades of shimmering coolness, it grows up and out in utter defiance of gravity. Instead of taking on the appearance of The Lizard King, I looked like something that would appear if Mark Twain and Albert Einstein got together and somehow had a kid.

Don’t make me show you the photographs.

But now I’m older and suffering an identity crisis. Who the hell am I, anyway? Am I some nine-to-fiver grinding it out day after day to bulk up that 401(k)? Am I a responsible adult who concerns himself with things like home equity?

Or am I a man of deep passion who lives on the dangerous precipice of creativity, defying convention like the long-haired heroes who came before?

You need only to glance at the photo above to find your answer. I am a weenie with a hair style that is perfectly average and safe. No boldness or bravado about it.

And so now I’m considering the idea of trying again, of letting my head and face grow long, to serve up a more accurate representation of my wildness. And all I need is one double-dog dare from one of you people.

Because I’ll do it, you know. Just dare me and I’ll do it.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can double-dog dare him at [email protected].