When I first came to Dickinson, North Dakota in 2011, I got my hair cut once with “Ted the Barber”, Ted Kostelecky, when he was still charging $5 per haircut.  When I came back to Dickinson in 2013, I began getting my hair cut with “Ted the Barber” again, and then he began charging $8 per haircut.

I noticed that when Ted Kostelecky cut my hair, it seemed like if another customer got him talking, Ted would forget what he was doing, and keep cutting, and cutting, and cutting, even though I had told Ted that I just wanted 1/4″ to 1/2″ cut off the length, just a trim.

In 2015 I began getting my hair cut with Matt Ellerkamp and Paul Ellerkamp at the “Big Sky Barber Shop” on the north side of Dickinson.  Matt and Paul were so fully booked with appointments, that you could just about never get a “walk-in” hair cut, you had to make an appointment.

Matt and Paul at the Big Sky Barber Shop were good barbers, but sometimes I wanted to get a haircut without making plans in advance.  When I went to the “Queen City Barber Shop” in downtown Dickinson, there was never, ever anyone waiting for a haircut, and I kind of learned why.

When Luke Simons opened the “Gentlemen’s Barber Shop” on the north side of Dickinson in 2018, I was wary of getting my hair cut by Luke, because I didn’t know that he had been a barber before.  To my surprise, Luke turned out to be a better barber than Matt Ellerkamp and Paul Ellerkamp who had owned the Big Sky Barber Shop.

Unfortunately for me, beginning in 2019, more, and more, and more women began taking their children to the Gentlemen’s Barber Shop.  In my entire 50 year life, I had never seen so many women and children in a barber shop, as in Luke Simons’ Gentlemen’s Barber Shop.

I can finally put it into words now, what I think many of these women were doing by going to the Gentlemen’s Barber Shop, there is actually a term for it, it’s called “Monkey Branching”.  Monkey Branching is when women who are married or are in a relationship with a man, go in search of a higher or more stable income earner, and attempt to “Monkey Branch” to a new man.

“Gentlemen’s Barber Shop” is a misnomer now, it should be called “Luke Simons’ Family Fun Center”, or “Luke Simons’ Women’s Monkey Branching Shop”.  Again, I have never seen so many women and children in barber shop in my life.

I had tried going to Matt and Paul Ellerkamp’s new barber shop, “De Porres House of Barbering”, but a more fitting name for this would be “The Catholic Shop” or the “The Catholic Club”, and I never even got my hair cut there or will ever go back there.

A couple of months ago, I found a barber shop where there are no women and children, just a man cutting hair, paying attention to what he is doing, and not charging a lot of money.  Too bad I can’t tell anyone, lest it get ruined by some whore trying to drag her kids there.

Here is a video explaining my thoughts about this, so that I don’t have to:

If there was a strip bar in Dickinson, I could picture some housewives coming there with their children, and giving their kids $1 bills to stuff in the strippers’ thongs, because men liked to go there to get away from their wives and children.