Every Man, Woman, And Child Should Grow A Beard At Least Once In Their Lifetime

Beards are natural. They invigorate. They teach. Hieroglyphics found near the Fertile Crescent suggest that an ancient human’s beard was regarded as a minor deity, and being in its presence could elevate one to what the Hindus would later go on to call Samadhi; the Buddhists, Nirvana; the Japanese, Bushido. The first guy to cut off his beard was branded as a heretic, smeared with animal lard, and sent into the jungle to first be licked, and then ripped apart by ravenous hordes of savage beasts, as was tradition at the time.

Everyone had beards back then. I look around today, and see so much face-skin it makes me sick. If I’ve learned anything the past few years, it is this—every time a new generation emerges, the old guard will talk ceaselessly, if you don’t tell them to shut up, about how things were better in their day. If we follow codger logic, then naturally the best time of all was when the first humans roamed—bearded, beautiful, and gloriously flocculent.

You literally have to do nothing to raise a beard. So go ahead, give it a whirl.

Beard Man Begins

I look out my window at night. I see a disgusting mosaic of depravity in the streets below. The effluvium of crime threads its way through the community I know and love. Police can’t be trusted. No government agency can. That’s why I send all my mail through the Trystero. Sometimes, an ol’ fashioned vigilante has to put his or her foot down and extinguish all the riff-raff. Beard Man is that vigilante. But do not compare him to Batman. In fact, he is the absolute antithesis of Batman — where Bruce Wayne is a billionaire hiding behind a synthetic mask, Beard Man is poor, and he grew his mask. Here is the first installment of what looks to be a riveting series (it’s easier to read if you click on it):

With A Great Beard Comes Great Responsibility

“Right now, we’ve got freedom and responsibility. It’s a very groovy time.” -Austin Powers

Thick. Lustrous. Gingery. Stupendous. Fantastic. Sprawling. Authoritative. Finer than the pelt of a Colorado marmot. These are just a few of the words that have been used by me to describe my beard. Finer compliments are rarely dished out, and I’m very flattered to have been on the receiving end of them. Recently, an adjective was added to the growing list of accolades — great.

And I didn’t even come up with that one.

A few weeks ago as I walked into line at Cub Foods, the cashier, so taken in by the beauty present before her, knowingly eschewed corporate policy by failing to offer the standard “Hello” and instead said, “Wow, that’s a GREAT beard.” Had a manager been within earshot, this blatant display of off-script dialogue could have gotten her fi-yad.

She even went on to say that it was better than her own husband’s. Men, imagine if you were working at Cub Foods as a cashier and said to some girl, “Hey, nice boobs. Those are better than my wife’s!” You’d be roasted like a suckling pig if your spouse ever found out. And the same goes for women. So you can imagine how truly great this beard must be for a woman to take such a calculated risk, in addition to swimming upstream against the powers-that-be of the mighty Cub Foods employee training videos.

I realize now I have a great responsiblity before me. It is within in my power to become what the Mexicans call a sancho. Dealing with ravenous hordes of women, married or not, openly throwing themselves at me is standard operating procedure. Often, there’s just no time to check the ring finger. Do I want to be a home-wrecker? I don’t know. That’s why this brand new epoch is so exciting and confusing. It’s a very groovy time.

A Guy With A Beard Sits Here And Talks About The Four Laws Of Thermodynamics

Ah yes, the four laws of thermodynamics. Can’t live without ’em. And if you can, that means you live in an alternate dimension, and I would like to shake your hand, if you even have one. But what exactly are the four laws of thermodynamics? How to they apply to your life? Allow me to explain in the following post. As a side note, I haven’t shaved since Halloween, and I’ve noticed that everything is better with a beard. So I used beard analogies to make everything easily understandable.

*To begin, the first law of thermodynamics is actually the zeroth law. How there can be a zeroth law? That’s this whole other thing that goes into like philosophy and math and logic and other esoterica that this guy with a beard is going to have to research, and maybe someday explain.

Here it is, the zeroth (first) law of thermodynamics:

“If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, then they are by law in thermal equilibrium with each other.”

Interesting.

Imagine that there’s a man with a beard – thick and commanding, like the picture that would be next to “beard” in the dictionary. The thought of a scarf has never crossed his mind. He goes to a circus, and is appalled to see that the devious carnies claim to have in their midst a “bearded woman.” He sees her in her cage, but all she’s got is that weak peach-fuzz all over her face that most (but not all) women just wax off. “THAT’S NO BEARD!!!,” the man with the real beard yells as he throws the gnarled remains of his Pronto Pup at her cage. Looks like those two beards will never achieve equilibrium with each other.

But wait. Let’s go to the dictionary.

Beard – noun \beerd\ – the collection of hair that grows on the chin, cheeks, and neck of human beings.

Two very different beards – one a high-water mark in the world of facial hair, one weak and controversial. Opposite ends of the spectrum. Yet, they are both hair growing on the chin, cheeks, and neck of a human. Therefore, the two systems (man beard and woman beard), are in flocculent equilibrium with a third system (the definition of a beard), thus by law equilibriumizing them with each other.

The first (really the second) law of thermodynamics:

“Energy can be transformed, that is, changed from one form to another. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.”

Interesting, again.

Go back a few months, and imagine again the man with the beard from the zeroth law parable. Only now it’s months earlier, and he doesn’t have a beard. He has only recently decided to stop shaving for a while. In the coming weeks, hair appears, from seemingly nowhere, on his face. Was this hair (hair = energy in this example) created from nothing? As a person with a beard knows, it seems as though your face just spews the stuff out from nowhere. Get ready to have your socks rocked off. The hair (energy) isn’t being magically created out of nothing. The bearded man’s face makes it out of other stuff that already exists in his body (proteins, I think), that came from other stuff, that came from other stuff, and on, and on, and on (who knows where the original “stuff” came from). And when he shaves it off, it will be transformed into something else, possibly a merkin.

The second law of thermodynamics:

“In time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical possibility eventually equalize in an isolated physical system.”

Very simplified, heat flows from hot to cold.

Back to the man with the beard. It is the present day again, and he has his full, glorious beard. He’s working the late shift at White Castle, and some hair falls out of his beard onto a delicious slider that is cooking on the grill. He sets that one aside, telling himself that he’ll pick the hair off in a moment. He later eats it, forgetting to pick the hair out. Afterwards he realizes that he didn’t even taste the hair. This is because the heat from the meat flowed into the hair, equalizing their temperatures. The numerous chemicals present in a White Castle hamburger were absorbed by the hair, giving it flavor, therefore equalizing in that area as well. This is why it is estimated that the average American ingests about three to seven pounds of hair per year from eating in public restaurants. Nobody even knows it’s there! Hell, half of an average White Castle burger alone is probably hair. All the employees there are just so hip to the laws of thermodynamics that they can get away with it.

The third (fourth) law of thermodynamics:

It is impossible to cool a system to absolute zero (for A-muhr’icans, that’s -459.67 °F, for Celsiites, -273.15 °C, and for whoever uses the Kelvin scale, 0 K).

Let’s say the man with the beard is locked in a freezer – the coldest freezer EVER conceived by man. Actually, I don’t really know how to explain this. The closer something gets to absolute zero, the less energy it has available to get colder, I think. Similar to trying to reach the speed of light, like E=mc². To go faster, the mass has to exponentially increase in proportion to the energy or something like that. Ergo, it can’t really happen.

*There’s a good chance most of this is wrong.

Don’t Shave December

I know everyone out there is concerned with what is happening in, on, and around my face these days. Here’s the scoop: No Shave November was such a raging success that the fun is being prolonged indefinitely into what we are calling Don’t Shave December. From a fiscal standpoint, this makes a great deal of sense. I’m saving money on shaving cream, and I’m saving time (time is money) by not shaving. The ever-thickening mass of hair on my face is stopping heat from escaping my body and eliminating the need to purchase a scarf as we descend into the cold winter months. This beard is basically made out of money. And dreams.

Beard Culture

In my never-ending quest to become an eccentric billionaire, or at least a weird millionaire, I have recently been conducting what will eventually go down in history as “The Fantastic Ex-Beardi-ment of 2011.” As Tony Robbins once said, “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results.” A truly heady quote from the man with some of the biggest teeth in showbiz. So obviously, I have begun emulating people who are disgustingly rich. I already copied Oprah and started a book club. That was just the first tributary that will inevitably feed the river of unfathomable wealth that I am seeking. Remember when Conan O’Brien got paid like 30 million dollars to leave NBC? Well, he has a beard, doesn’t he? So I’m copying him and growing a beard. Along the way, I’ve learned some very valuable things about myself, and what it truly means to be a person with a beard. And also, some very useless information. Read:

-Pogonology is the study of beards.

-My beard’s name is Agnes and it’s awesome and I love it.

-Now, when I stroke my chin while in deep contemplation, there is actually something there for me to run my fingers through.

-I don’t have a true “manly” beard – it doesn’t grow in very thick, so it looks like someone glued Barbie hair to my face. And if that weren’t embarrassing enough, the sorry excuse for beard hair is orange.

-My belief that I have always been a shining beacon of brunette perfection has been scrambled – the orange beard hair brings to light that I am in fact a closet “ginger.” It is a new, weird, confusing wrinkle in my existence that is difficult for me to stomach. But that is my cross to bear.

-A few days ago, while examination of Agnes was taking place in the bathroom mirror, I found residue from a previous meal of macaroni and cheese clinging to a few fibers of my flocculent growth. You are probably thinking to yourself “That’s gross.” Yes, it is gross, but it signals an important phase in the life of my beard. It is now long enough to snag rogue particles that hover around its “fly zone.”

-This beard actually makes me look like a pubescent Swedish boy so I’m going to go cut it off.

Here’s the Blong (Blog Song) of the day. Tapes ‘n Tapes – Badaboom.