The Doo Rag of Shame

By Vernon Felton

There is one thing that I never ride without and that’s my doo rag. Yeah, I know how lame, how incredibly pathetic that sounds, but there it is. I love my doo rag, though this is a difficult thing to admit to myself, much less to the world outside my laptop.

Doo rags are the bottom feeders of the fashion world. No one outside of Axl Rose and Marco Pantani has ever looked good in a doo-rag—these are indisputable facts, right up there with gravity making things fall and Star Jones being the anti-christ. And yet I never ride without mine.

As a magazine editor, a lot of odd crap crosses your desk. That’s how this beauty waltzed into my life. It was a gift from the fashion mavens at Trek. As far as doo rags go, it’s a tasteful little number—a vibrant blue nylon tube emblazoned with American flags and the TREK logo. It has that certain, subtle White Trash Wins Lotto-vibe written all over it.

My parents taught me to never look a gift horse in the mouth—there’s something to that. No one has to give you anything. You should be grateful to get anything as a gift, right? Maybe. I’m not so sure the Gift Horse Rule applies when the gift in question is guaranteed to get you your ass kicked. This is certainly the case with my doo rag as it makes my head look like some sort of giant, uncircumsized, Yankee Doodle Dandee phallus. It’s not a good look for me.

So why do I insist on wearing it? Because me and the doo rag are one. I’ll explain.

For starters, I’m bald. It’s not that the doo rag makes me seem any less bald. I’m actually cool with being bald—in fact, I don’t have much choice in the matter since the hair on top of my head went on strike three years ago and has since taken up residence on my ears, back and ass. Being bald means that all the sweat bubbling out of my scalp eventually streams down my forehead and floods my eyes—blinding me at the least opportune, high-speed moments. The doo rag soaks up all that nasty, battery acid-grade perspiration. The rag looks silly, but it’s probably saved my life ten times over. So, thank you. Thank you, Trek..and please keep those doo rags coming.

There was a period in my life, of course, when I wouldn’t have conceded to such practical concerns. In my younger, considerably more hip years, I would have merely blinked back the stinging mixture of sweat and 50 SPF sun block. Sure, I might have been blind as I entered that hairpin turn, at least 15 miles per hour too fast, but I’d have looked good and looking good mattered to me.

Yes, you too can look this cool in a doo rag of your very own.

But here’s the twist…I’ve come to accept that looking good, just isn’t something I’m any good at: there’s a double chin poking up on my horizon; I make a living by writing articles about trends in the recumbent bicycle market; worst yet, I recently paid top dollar for Journey’s Greatest Hits album. In short, somewhere along the line, I’ve become incredibly uncool.

In some cosmic sense, I’m probably destined to wear a doo rag. In fact, my doo rag is probably writing its very own column right now, and in that column my doo rag is complaining to all the socks and jock straps in its dresser drawer world about how degrading it is to be worn by someone as uncool as me.

So there you have it. Me and my doo rag—an unholy union? Yes. Daily acquaintances? You betcha. A perfect match? I’m afraid so.