Sometimes A Neckbeard Is Just A Neckbeard

Dreamt last night that I had accidentally shaved my beard off.

The razor just sort of slipped and then one side of the beard was lower than the other, so, to make it even, I had to shave a bit more on the other side, went too far again, etc. Eventually, I just shaved off the whole damned thing.

Well, technically, I dreamt that I shaved off everything save for the mustache and the part on the underside of my jaw, leaving me with a hideous and bushy neckbeard that I, for some reason, didn't remove.

I was forlorn.

When I woke up, it took me a while to realize it hadn't really happened.

My Mustache is My Hijab

How did I come to this, I often ask myself. How did the person I wanted to be diverge so precipitously from the person I actually am? I mean, am I really the sort of person who unironically wears a mustache?

It started, like so many things that turn out tragic, as a joke.

Har-har, shave the beard, leave a mustache tossed on your face like a hairy candy wrapper on a theatre floor.

I thrilled with anticipation at the responses this would engender. I especially liked imagining the abject horror and revulsion a furry caterpillar like growth would inspire in attractive women. They’d crinkle their normally smooth foreheads and ask me ‘why? why ever would you wear a mustache?’ and I’d insouciantly reply that it was ‘for kicks’ or ‘as a lark’ or even ‘to piss off my wife’.

It was supposed to be ridiculous, you see; something funny because of the discomfort it would cause me socially.

Now I don’t know who I am anymore, and neither does my mustache.

To be fair, I did (and do) receive my share of oddball double takes when I stroll into a shop or a restaurant or supermarket, but nothing like the behind-the-hand giggling I’d hoped for.

I eventually squeezed out a patch for the chin and another for just under the mouth, attempting a sort of an Errol Flynn effect, thinking that would seem even less legitimate a choice of facial hair, but to no avail.

Hell, Chiara likes it!

She balked when I recently shaved, telling me that my face sans mustache and friends appeared “puffy.” I then suffered the further indignity of having to grow the whole nonsense from the ground up - no mean feat for someone with blondish facial hair.

So now here I am, a man who wears a mustache.

Don’t call it a goatee - it’s three separate pieces of facial hair. I have some dignity remaining to me.

I’m calling it a D’Artagnan.

I can tell you that I might wear a cape or a porkpie hat and I’d feel less costumey.

I wonder if my upper lip will ever feel the warmth of the sun again, or the coolness of the pillow at night.

My mustache is the hijab of my mouth.

Barbarian Musings

It’s this time of year, when the mercury falls and the thermostat rises, that I often reflect on beards gone by.

The Christmas Beard is the gift I have to give myself every year, but I’ve neglected myself once again. I miss my beard. I should have shaved off the rest of me instead.

There are two sorts of people in the world, of course: people who like beards . . .

And women.

Women in the audience should know a curious thing: wearing a real beard provides almost the exact same sensation as wearing a false beard held on by cosmetic glue. Should any of you ever wish to experience an hour or two of facial hair, simply purchase a kit from your costume shop. You won’t be disappointed. Or you will be. In either event, you will have magnified your knowledge of beards.

Under a beard, one forgets oneself. Or, anyway, one forgets the contours of one’s chin and jaw - which is the same thing.

When you cut away the beard from the rest of you, you reveal mostly regret; a pasty, raw, unfamiliar kind of regret that you’d just as soon cover with bristles.

Oh well.

Don’t shampoo your beard in the shower, imagining that it would benefit form the process as does the longer, softer hair of your scalp. It only makes your beard itch more, I’ve found.

A beard is the scaffolding upon which a mustache is constructed.

A beard is the camouflage that conceals your true purpose. Then, like the sculptor sees in the stone the statue’s final form, you find the final courage to carve the mustache from the hairy medium.

But mustaches are an advanced maneuver and should not be attempted lightly or with much hope of happiness or success. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

It feels weird to brush beards out, away from your face. It hurts, but in the way that chewing on a canker or worrying a hangnail hurts. That is to say: it hurts in the way you cannot quite stop yourself from doing, though you know you will regret it.

It doesn’t really keep you warm, a beard, but it cuts the wind. It denies you the pleasure of a cool pillow on your face. This is a thing you learn to miss.

It gives you something to do when you are thinking about something. Stroking a beard while musing or concentrating is a terrible cliché. Like most terrible clichés, it works.

Everyone should grow a full beard at least once in their life. That so many will not is a kind of tragedy. Beards are to the male experience what childbirth is to the female.

Maybe haircuts would be a better fit there.

In any case, as the narrator in Cheever's The Swimmer had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not throw themselves into pools, so I have an abiding distaste for those who shave every morning. And a special hell is reserved for those who ignore the grain of the ingrowing beard by shaving against it.

You might surprise yourself by growing a beard an entirely different color from the hair on your head.

Also, with a beard, you’ll look better in a baseball cap, but worse in a collared shirt, but better in a crewneck sweater, but worse in a sportcoat. These are the wages of beards.

When you finally do buckle under the pressure from the women in your life and shave your beard away, you will feel a sickly regret and loathe your puffy face and ill-defined cheekbones, not to mention your gullibility and the ease with which you folded under pressure. You’ll want nothing so much as to pluck the hairs one by one from the sink and glue them back to your face.

It will take a while to tan the bottom part of your face. People will notice.