| Strange
musings from the bakery:
Goodbye,
old friend, I'll see you on the other side
By David Baker
April 18, 2008 | This whole week,
I haven't really felt right. I've been lacking something,
some umph, maybe.
I finally pinpointed the problem
-- my lack of beard.
Last Sunday night I decided to rid
my face of the beard, and I lived this week in a state
of clean shavenness -- something I hadn't done in over
six months. It was a terrible decision.
Maybe it's the guilt that welled
up in me as I watched all the tiny red stubble softly
land in the sink, detached and alone, without a home
on my face. Or it could be a carryover of the unsettled
feeling in my stomach as I rinsed all the stubble that
once made up my beard down the drain, a single tear
accompanying my beard to the depths of the Logan sewer
system.
The whole week I've been living with
the sad truth that I knowingly abandoned my beard. I
turned my back on it. I sent it down the drain like
I was Moses' mother, hoping someone would pick it out
of the reeds and raise it to it's full, bushy potential.
Many nights have I lay awake, battling
some form of separation anxiety -- and not even having
a beard to stroke to calm me down.
The lack of a beard made me feel
weak, like Sampson without his hair -- like Bonds without
his HGH. I had less confidence, and less of a longing
to conquer the apartments around mine with brute force
and comically large battle axes.
Without the beard, I saw my face
for what it was: Weird-looking at best, especially my
chin. That thing is much more awful than I ever remember
it being. All these wrinkles and an ass-shape that only
Bruce Campbell can pull off. It's bad.
With the chin, I knew my plan for
removing my furry face scarf was undermined from the
very beginning. You see, I shaved the beard to see if
it would make a difference in my love life -- as a sacrificial
offering to the great god of sexual precipitation to
bring rain to my drought-ridden coital landscape. It
didn't work. The gods are fickle.
I know what you're saying, "Just
grow a new beard, dumb ass."
To be honest, it hurts a little bit
that you had to stoop to name calling, and I'm the only
one allowed to swear in this space, so please watch
your language next time. And you're wrong. WRONG. What
most clean-shaven people -- this included females not
currently working as bearded ladies -- don't understand
is that each beard is it's own living thing and has
it's own unique characteristics, personality, if you
will. Every beard I grow is like a child that presents
different challenges, successes, failures. So, you can
never get that particular beard back -- it's gone forever.
The areas of patchiness, the weak, wispy mustache, the
ability to get bushy along the chin line and nowhere
else ...
Sorry, you'll have to excuse me for
a second while I gather myself.
For now, I need to focus on the positives
of a new beard -- the one I'm growing as fast as I can
to cover up my ass-with-cellulite chin. I can look forward
to seeing it mature from a sandpaper roughness to a
softer, more strokeable length. To see it fill in and
turn most of the bottom half of my face a red-orange
color. Until it finally reaches maturity, and starts
scaring off little children, old women and protective
mothers.
I can only hope that by shaving the
last beard, the new one will come back more brilliant,
full and unabashedly macho.
The other thing most people don't
realize about beards is they're kind of like a model
for Darwinist thought -- only the strongest survive.
With each shave, those parts of the beard that are too
weak to come back are replaced with more vibrant, viral,
iron-like parts, until eventually, all the parts of
the beard are so strong they can protect your face from
sandstorms, lightning, errant fists or can act as a
blast shield if you somehow find yourself in a "Star
Wars" movie.
I'm just waiting for the day my beard
also adapts past the point of being shaved -- with the
strength and superior intelligence the survival of the
fittest facial hair model fosters -- and wages war against
my razor, doing what any superpower does, launch a preemptive
attack against its perceived enemies.
I just hope my beard never turns
on me.
DM
DM |
