James Johnson:
The winter season is taking its breezy time rolling into Santa Barbara. Though sandals and shorts will be perennial, jackets and scarves will start making guest appearances on some of those freakishly colder nights. And for some of us, or the male half of the population, this invisible frost will also impel us to develop time-honored natural insulators that sprout up like a hairy wildfire.
Beards.
From the fuzzy inceptions of the newly and chronically adolescent to the unruly forests-on-a-face that put Karl Marx to shame, beards dignify what some would call a manifest laziness. But a beard, in its nearly infinite species of growth and cut, is the masculine revenge against the windy diatribe from the winter months. Or maybe it’s just another way to pretend to be manly.
Ever since those haunting days of high school I’ve usually mandated myself to be clean shaven. The rationalization I made was that there was just something slightly eerie the way the bathroom mirror reflected that incipient fuzz that came along after a few days. The way a five-o-clock shadow can just…transform a morning person into an evening oddity. I saw what it looked like on most of my male relatives and I knowing in counter-tradition kept the Barbasol and the Gillette close at hand to repel the family fuzz.
Then I got a girlfriend. And she loved facial hair. And at first I protested like a sputtering lawyer, satisfied in the ways of a close shave. And she insisted, persistently I should add, that I should let it thrive, even if it looks a little feral. And so I did, seeking a little novelty in her unrelenting interest that wouldn’t require serious attention. Think a short term mentality of convicted procrastination. With a little neglect here and some “maybe, maybe nots” there, the barbito crept along. The hard part was instinctive scratching at what seemed like an infestation of the jowl. Then the soft part was the first ever sensation of thinking:
“Hey, this feels like a used carpet on my face”.
Even though it did itch quite often and made my jaw feel heavier than it was I will admit that it has been relaxingly worth the effort, or lack thereof.
In a way a beard could be said to be a means to layering another persona to the person of a guy. Although some world cultures expressly or tacitly encourage or prohibit the growing of a beard, the mere glimmer of a beard is to some guys rite of passage towards seeing himself from a different angle. And besides aesthetic reasons, a beard is practical enough to protect an otherwise seabreeze-vulnerable face allowing us to forgo the very necessary December scarf as we head outside. Maybe nature programmed that kind of change of face into some men. Since without a little superficial growth, for the sake of warm content, we’d be freezing chatterboxes.
I didn’t shave for four months. It was the loneliest four months of my life.
Is that a picture of ZZ Top?