BEARDS! The hermit's paradox.

Those of you who know me know that I have a very full beard. Those of you who don't,



now you do.

I haven't always had a beard, but that should go without saying. More specifically, I have not maintained facial hair consistently throughout my adult life. Much like my smoking, it's been an on and off thing, running the gamut between light-use flirtation and full-blown addiction.

Unlike tobacco, I find facial hair to be a largely healthy indulgence. As opposed to whittling away your time taking smoke breaks, all those precious seconds that would have been spent shaving are yours to seize. Hardly causing damage to the lungs, the mustache actually provides an additional protective barrier, filtering air on its way to the nasal entrances. For someone such as myself, for whom smoking is less an oral compulsion and more of a hand thing, beard-stroking can be a valuable weaning tool for the potential quitter.

But enough about smoking, and enough with the generalities. There are many good reasons to grow a beard, some of them universal, but the one I'd like to discuss is rooted in very specific personal preferences (perhaps even eccentricities, but I'll leave that delineation up to Preferred Readers).

I am not a particularly social human, comparatively speaking. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm at all antisocial, but given a certain natural shyness, an extremely poor ability to remember people's names, and a waning need for companionship, I wouldn't exactly call myself a butterfly, either. It hasn't always been this way, but nowadays, my Leonine desire for attention is pretty heavily tempered, I value my alone time, and I maintain a privacy of thought and emotion that I'm mostly comfortable with. Conversely, you may say that I can be a little distant and self-absorbed. Anyway you look at it, these are personality traits that an Enormous Beard compliments quite nicely.

Culturally, Enormous Beards often signify a particular kind of stubborn individualism:









Though its inherent physical warmth prevents an Enormous Beard from being truly intimidating, its loner undertones are nonetheless ever-present. Unfortunately, I find a phenomenon that grows more and more common with each passing day is becoming difficult to ignore, and that phenomenon is Beard as Topic for Conversation. For example, today, I was writing up a special order for a customer. We were unable to make it through this brief transaction without him asking if I'd ever seen any videos like this:



It's impossible to ignore the fact that my beard is a constant Topic of Conversation, amongst both friends and strangers. Sometimes it is convenient. When asked what I've been up to, instead of having to make any of my actual activities sound productive and exciting, I can simply respond with, "Aw, y'know, beard farming." Sometimes it can be heartwarming, like when an older customer with a Thelonious sorta thing going on expresses his glowing approval. Sometimes it can test the limits of my patience, as in the case of small-minded asshats asking me if I'm an Orthodox Jew (tattoos, dude) or proclaiming me "Jesus Christ!" as I ride down the Drag. (I mean, really. Maybe I'd understand this kind of behavior in Toledo, but this is fucking Austin.) Conversation About My Enormous Beard can be many things, but it is never, ever in accordance with the Hermetic Values of My Enormous Beard.

Much like an albatross, it is its own albatross. Like a favorite hide-and-go-seek tree, a beard can only serve its masking functions for so long. Its utility in hiding from others inevitably negates itself, as everybody soon realizes it's the first place to go looking for you. Perhaps Conversations Regarding Enormous Beard serve as a sort of secondary force field, maintaining a solid buffer with their perfect superficiality, but as soon as the discussion turns to motives, or Projections for the Future of Enormous Beard, or any Non-Beard Topic, the jig is up. The solitude of beardedness consumes itself.