I’m no renaissance man and I’ve never tried to be. Hell, I had to look up how to spell renaissance so I’m not one to look to for advice on becoming a better person. But still, I realize, and I may have mentioned this before, that there comes a time in a man’s life where he realizes he’ll never play guitar in a band. (Unless of course, he actually does play guitar in a band).
So, knowing you’ll never have a job where random women throw their knickers at you, you have to readjust your mid-life bar. That is, you have to latch onto something that you think you may have a reasonable chance of achieving before you grow so old as to forget it all.
You want to be able to do something; to leave your mark; to have something to chat about while sipping your food and waiting for the spades tournament. At the very least, you want to do something that will annoy people now – while you can still enjoy being disruptive.
I believe I have found such a thing.
Of course, I can’t actually start doing it yet because of military rules which prohibit such things, but next year I think I may give it a shot. It will probably take a year or two before I can decide if it’s something I really want to commit myself too, but it meets all the pre-requisites I’ve set out for myself…
1. It has to be something obscenely easy and paradoxically difficult to achieve in a pure sense.
2. It has to be something that takes a long time – like baseball.
3. It needs to have no underlying value or point – again, like baseball.
4. It needs to be one of those things that my children, as they start to reach puberty, will walk away from in disgust if any of their friends takes even the slightest interest in.
5. It needs to be something I’m physically capable of doing.
6. It needs to be something I can do without sweating severely, or without injuring a major moving body part.
7. It would be best if I could do it sleeping.
I’ve decided, in short, to grow a beard.
Not just any little scrub beard or one of those silly beat-poet goatees that the coffee slurping crowd seem to favor, but a proper, full-blown, prize-winning beard.
It meets all the criteria listed above and there is a competitive element to it – and if you think I’m crazy, obviously you’ve been spending too much time using the internet to look at your facebook profile, because there's an entire culture in America dedicated to beards.
In fact, there is a World Beard and Moustache Championships. Yes, “world”. We’re not talking county fair stuff; we’re talking, carry in the red, white and blue, play the national anthem and line up the endorsement deals world championships.
Now, the timing on this is really excellent, because the 2011 championships are being held in Lancaster Pennsylvania this week – on Oct. 8. And the governing body of this group has already set up the 2015 championships to be held in Austria. The real Austria, in Europe, not some little town in Idaho or something.
This year’s event will be judged by Miss Pennsylvania; a former member of the Superbowl Champion (2009 version) Steelers – Justin Hartwig, who himself sports a rather mundane and conventional set of whiskers - and an as yet unnamed player from the Philadelphia Eagles. There are real beard-guy judges as well, and you need to check out there website because I cannot adequately describe judge Willi Chevalier. If you click on only one random link that you read this week, click on that or the Beard Team USA homepage.
This is not follicle fundamentals, but big time hirsute haberdashery we’re talking about. The guys who compete in this make Grizzly Adams look like Mr. Clean. And best of all, for a clean-shave guy like me, it really only takes time, imagination, two opposing chromosomes and the little bit of the genetic goodness that allows you to grow facial hair.
Time I’ll have when I leave big blue; chromosomes I can prove by presenting you with my offspring; and genetics…well, we’ll have to wait and see, but the three day stubble I currently sport provides a tantalizing glimpse at dreams that could be.
And as I get ready to start training next year, I’m going to hold off on those guitar lessons. No sense learning an instrument when I’d only just get my beard caught in the strings.
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