To my Ex-Beard,
I’m not sure how to begin. We had a fabulous four months together, I want you to know that — but I won’t beat around the bush. While I miss you, I simply can’t be with you anymore.
Maybe I’m too impatient. I get bored too easily. With you on my face, my appearance just isn’t malleable enough. I need to be able to grow short, sculptable scruff for sideburns, chin-straps, or cleft tufts to keep myself entertained. And I like being able to clean up quickly, in case of an emergency job interview or the like.
I guess I don’t know why I feel you make me appear unkempt. It’s almost like a beard grown simply for style, not for religion or necessity, is an excuse for laziness. And, no doubt, I would get lazy. With you, I often wouldn’t trim for days; I’d have a mess of random hairs extruding perpendicular from my face, making acquaintances, friends, or onlookers say with their words (or their stares): there goes an apathetic man.
But a beard signifies more than laziness, to say the least. It signifies devotion. It can show respect to our bodies, respect enough to not destroy anything which comes from us — including the hairs we grow. My body became a temple. A hairy, prickly temple.
Of course, my reasons for growing you were less than divine or religious, but I respected the high maintenance you required. You gave me an entirely new body of hair to condition, brush, crimp, and occasionally braid, to keep myself looking, on better days, like more than just a mountain man. I was Ernest Hemingway, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, all rolled into one unkempt undergrad.
Beard, I will miss the comments that I received because of you, that were surely meant for you alone, but that I accepted as my own. I will miss the nicknames, the “nice beard, man!” refrains, the pats on the back from fellow scruffy gentlemen (and occasional ladies). Sometimes, I felt a part of something bigger than myself — and that was all because of you.
But was it just sarcasm? You were patchy! You were weak at the cheeks! You grew unevenly and tangled about my visage!
I’m . . . sorry. That’s unfair. I can be patchy, too. And there’s no reason why a beard has to have the same surfeit as Justin Vernon’s or Doug Martsch’s to be legitimate. I admit that I sometimes expected too much from you, and for that, I only have myself to blame.
Maybe I’m really trying to work through why a beard grown purely for style is always viewed as ironic. Beards were once surely grown out of necessity, for warmth. The beard’s current shape on the human, though, appearing almost solely on the lower region of the face, suggests that it has evolved for style — scruff chic. Much like a finch’s feathers, or a butterfly’s wings.
Is this why beards are funny? Do they poke fun at the silly simplicity of attraction? Are they a reminder of the fact that we humans are just animals — and that the concept of being a human is merely a play we put on for each other in an attempt to combat the inevitability of death?
Perhaps an ironic beard is a reminder of the condition of humans striving to understand that which never can be known. Socrates, one of the first and foremost historical beardos, once said “I know that I know nothing” — was his beard a reflection of this paradox?
But I digress. Regardless of any one specific meaning, it seems that a beard is a means to think through what it means to be human.
So why, you might ask, did I bid you adieu? Maybe I’m just tired of my own vanity, of counting the stares and the comments. Maybe desiring that attention became too much a part of my identity.
But having a beard was always something beyond my ego — it was about becoming a part of human history and connecting with every beard in the past, present, and future. It was supposed to be about understanding the human condition, about finding common ground with my fellow human beings.
Maybe I’m just not ready for that kind of responsibility yet.
Let’s not say goodbye. I think of you often. Every time my fingers unconsciously search for you in a moment of deep contemplation only to be met by the stubble scratching my fingers like sandpaper, I’m reminded of you.
I miss you, Beard. And I almost find comfort in that longing, in the empty five o’clock shadow you left in your wake — because I know you’re still with me. And you always will be. But I simply can’t live with you any longer.
Yours truly,
Joel MacKenzie
Former SFU Beard Club Founder and President
You can watch a video of Joel’s scruffy love affair here.
