The Beard of Protest
Today I woke up and I noticed that my face had, of its own volition, sprouted whiskers. I cast my mind back on the preceding days, trying to find what thing could have driven my face to this drastic action. Perhaps it misses my ritual “shaving” and thusly has sprung this unsightly ginger growth to voice its objection. Those things that drive a face remain mysterious to me and so I must rely on the wisdom of others.
There are those who claim that the face creates a reflection of the inward state of the bearer. They say that rage, sadness, joy, and aces over eights can all be transmitted through the various contortions of the face. Perhaps this “beard” is some sort of external manifestation of my internal malaise. For you see, we have just now entered the nadir of March. Oh March, not so cold as February or so wet as April, it contains a certain grey brutality all its own. Where April brings the promise of rejuvenation and February the end of winter March sits quietly in the corner, a bleak and colorless place holder in our annual circuit around the sun, a sapping endurance test best passed in the relative comfort of some quiet equatorial region.
Many societies have discovered a time-tested technique for dealing with this month of nothing. In Germany March is the month that the Marzan beer is first drunk, a grim bookend to October’s gleeful kicking of the last kegs. The Irish endure March with the same practical fix-all that they apply to most situations of adversity, with a sweater on the outside and a whisky on the inside. Philadelphia being the cosmopolitan city of the world that it is has found a happy middle ground, a month long celebration of our local breweries and a St Patrick’s day ritual that could only be pulled off by a city of hard eyed professional drinkers. Observant readers will begin to notice the pattern here.
Perhaps I’m looking at this fledgling beard the wrong way. Instead of beleaguered sigh it is a stalwart square jawed challenge to time itself. Take that March, this beard and I are here and shall remain so, stoic and firm footed, our resolve unshaken in the face of slate grey days. We’ll not cede and inch until March exits, humbled and broken, a lion reduced to a lamb. Let history record who is still standing when April makes its long awaited entrance. < /span>
March 14, 2008 at 5:53 PM
O Infidel, we are in Lent. Time to start looking over the ways and means of your existence and how they do or do not harmonize with grand plan of our maker.
March 14, 2008 at 7:40 PM
Stand fast, o infidel! Your squared and bushy beard will surely outgrow the March to spring and April will find you more unruly than a lawn beyond its weekly mow and yet can you match the Fairmont Park nearby which covertly clandestinely daily during March is gaining growth? March is hiding her strength for the April contest.
March 14, 2008 at 9:05 PM
Clearly there are those who find some sin in my wooly cheeked fortitude. They say that this decadent and superfluous hair growth is more becoming a billy goat than a man and that the goat is the creature if him below. To them I say, forsooth I am the very paragon of fidelity, fidel to the last gasp or sip whichsoever it might be. Some may look askance upon my moderating my moderation during this time of sacred bereavement but they would do well to remember that the absence of abstention is not abstention from absence.
March 15, 2008 at 9:53 AM
abstaining from absence is the very restraint the hair upon your face has not mastered. o infidel, if the hair does not abstain from growing out of sheer nuance of emotion and sensitivity of gesture simply restrain itself from invading the space of the aura that surrounds you closely out of respect and a certain awe how can your brain living within an inch of such thuggy behavior claim cultivation and self mastery?. Here is a multi threaded hydra pushing without self awareness into the rainbow of your aura that cloaks you all around in heavenly light How can you live with such a face that produces such thuggery?
March 15, 2008 at 11:02 AM
I'll remind you that there is a good inch and a half impenetrable skull bone betwixt my thuggish mien and my dapper brain. I can assure you that the two have never met. No, this beard comes from a simpler more primal region, namely the spleen. Perhaps I long for a less troublesome, some say, nobler time. An era when humanity said what it meant to say and was understood and saying what they said, never-mind the truth. An era when a man was a good as the rock he carried and the mastodon he brought home. Ah, to be in those golden halcyon days when the only worry in the world was pterodactyl attack.
March 15, 2008 at 2:56 PM
define "beard".
March 15, 2008 at 7:56 PM
what ya think?
the demo:
visionarydemo.blogspot.com
me so far:
unholymuse.blogspot.com
March 16, 2008 at 12:48 AM
I like that it doesn't have the big unsightly graphic at the top of the screen that the red magazine template has. I also like the tabs, and that there is a post at the start. Really the only thing I miss from the magazine are the drop down menus.
There was another template that I want to try out, I'll give it a go when I get back home tomorrow.
March 16, 2008 at 8:46 AM
This comment has been removed by the author.