Thoughts Going Into Novembeard

With sports beards in the news recently with the Red Sox making their harried run to another World Series appearance, it is no surprise that Boston players and their beards in various stages of "development" were recently featured in an online article entitled A Six Stage Manual For Growing Out Your Face Pubes This Coming November. Not so sure how much I like the word choice ("pubes"?) but the sentiment is one I can get behind as I am heeding the clarion call to beardedness a few weeks early in an effort to maximize my November. (That there are "purists" out there who suggest it's not No Shave November if you start in October--spare me!)

The blogger with misguided
goatee, circa 1992-ish.

It sure is funny how facial hair, in general, and the month of November have now been married in the cultural zeitgeist in such a way that even the stigma attached to growing a mustache have been given a pass for the sake of a good cause in the form of Movember. Good cause or not, while I applaud those raising funds toward prostate cancer awareness via growing a mustache, I will donate my funds and defy the rules which strictly prohibit the "joining of the mo to your sideburns" as that makes it a beard. It is just too difficult to grow out "the mo." Given my poorly executed attempts at pulling off both a goatee (see pic to left) and an honest-to-goodness mustache (pics have mysteriously disappeared) it is for the best. Though I am sure half the "fun" is growing a crappy looking 'stache, my half-hearted attempt would like just get me followed by police when I walk around my neighborhood.

I will , however embrace the coolness of cultivating a hilly-billie beard... at least until my wife gently suggests that it (and the roughly fifty years a huge white beard adds to my appearance) needs to go. I am committed to the manliness of No Shave November, just not enough to ruin my marriage over. Today, after one week of abstaining from the self-mutilation that is shaving one's face, I am just slightly beyond Stage 1: The “Oh, ya I forgot to shave," or as my wife refers to it, the "You Look Like a Wreck" stage.

An occasional summer beard-wearer (and ultimately, shaver), each time my chin is shorn, I am quickly reminded that Jean Cocteau's related words are more a truism than merely just a clever quote: “There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.”