It may surprise you to find out that in my ongoing quest to save a dollar that I've decided to cut out my monthly trips to the hair-cutting shop.

"What?" you're thinking. "He paid for that haircut? I thought he must've forgot to cut off the lawnmower before taking a look under it to see about that rattling noise."

Indeed, that rattling noise was my right ear from the last time I looked under there, but that has nothing to do with my hairstyle - which for the past 24 years of so has been handled by various discount hair-cutting places such as Great Master Coupon Clippers. And, quite frankly, they've done an outstanding job over the years as they've had less and less to work with. There was a time when I'd go in and say, half-jokingly, "Make me look like Brad Pitt." Now, I say hopefully, "How about Don Rickles?"

This trip generally cost me around $14 or so a month once you factored in a tip, such as "Loosey Goosey is a lock in the third race." But it was no longer making sense to keep going to these places and telling them to cut my hair only to have them respond, "Which one?" They were probably being facetious, but I was probably paying about a quarter a hair. And that per-hair rate is rising faster than my cholesterol.

So, in the middle of an aisle at Wal-Mart, I made a split-second decision. Usually when I make a split-second decision at Wal-Mart, I'm deciding something like "Uh, woman. No, man. Definitely man. Maybe." But this time the decision was, "Yes, it's time to go with the home hair-cutting kit for about $30 (or 12 cents per hair).

The biggest factor in the decision, though, was not the per-hair rate, nor whether this could be the device that helps me achieve my dream of looking like a Hollywood star (Ed Asner.) The biggest factor is that I had to trust the person cutting the hair.

Supposedly, you can do this your

self. You run this shaver thingy all over your head with a guard over the blades so that it's idiot-proof. However, over the years, I've managed to repeatedly debunk that whole idiot-proof myth. So, I had to trust my wife to cut my hair.

Problem is, just a couple of nights earlier, we'd had an argument. I don't remember what it was about. The only part I ever remember is that I was wrong. And if I'm ever right, I'm wrong for the way I was right. My hairstyle was at the mercy of whether I was merely wrong or wrong to be right, and I'm not even sure which is the more dangerous scenario.

To make matters even scarier, she made me take off my glasses so that she could cut around my ears - hopefully around my ears. And every newspaper person is so blind that we can barely read our daily communique from The White House as to our stories for the next issue. Then she walks behind me and goes "heh-heh." "Hee-hee" means you've tickled her and "ha-ha" means you've made her laugh hard enough to forget how wrong you are. But "heh-heh" means she's up to something, like maybe you'd better make sure your favorite truck isn't sitting at the bottom of a bauxite mine.

But, apparently her "heh-heh" was facetious, for my hair (each of them) felt normal as I ran my hands fingers through (around) them. And when she let me put my glasses back on, sure enough, I looked like a celebrity at last.

Ed Rickles.

-- Chris Johnson is an independent correspondent whose "Best of Chris Johnson" is now available for Kindle. Follow him at Facebook.com/KudzuKidWriting.