Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again, though it doesn’t feel like it should be, because I didn’t write or go to work on Monday.  I also haven’t been doing any significant walking since the end of last week, as I’ve been feeling quite physically low.

Unfortunately, my physical health doesn’t seem to be recovering much, yet.  I still have an irritating, dry cough, and my nose is stuffy, and I feel rather crappy.  But I slept well (for me) last night, getting almost five hours of sleep, and possibly a little bit more.  I didn’t wake up feeling particularly good, but I think that’s just mainly because I’m still sick.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of illness that will be life-threatening, but we can always hope.  After all, it’s possible for a simple viral upper respiratory infection to lead to a secondary bacterial infection that ends up becoming a lethal pneumonia.

Fingers crossed, everyone!

I haven’t shaved this week—I normally just have a sort of goatee (not a fancy one, just a straight, old-fashioned, The Master style goatee, as shown below), but occasionally I let the full beard grow out a bit.  It tends to be irritating because the spacing between whiskers on my cheeks is wider than on my chin and lips, and also the whiskers on my neck get irritating.  Obviously, it’s possible to muscle through that, but another problem I have is that, apparently, when I have a full beard I look quite amiable, and strangers start talking to me out of nowhere, much to my surprise and discomfort.

I never wore a beard at all while I was married.  My (ex-) wife thought my goatees looked “too aristocratic”, which I take to mean that they made me look vaguely villainous.  I was also in the Navy when she and I first met, and of course, I couldn’t wear a beard then.

I don’t know quite what the fetish is in the US armed services about being clean-shaven and having short hair; maybe it’s born from days of fighting lice, though being completely shaved would be better for that.  I’ve been shaved-headed before, and I found it quite pleasant in many ways.  If you roll out of bed late, for instance, no one can tell if you haven’t showered.  Apparently, I also look a bit like a real life version of Doctor Evil when my head is shaved, but less funny, more actually evil.  I’m okay with that.

My ex-wife also had an interesting attitude toward beards in general, which was her explanation for why she didn’t like them:  She always had the feeling that men with beards were trying to hide something.

Think about that.  If you’re a man who actually does grow a beard, that means you are genetically programmed with that secondary sex characteristic.  Without modern technology, once you hit puberty, you will start growing a beard.  Not all human males (or related alien species or replicants or changelings) grow beards, but for those that do, it’s just what happens when one doesn’t take other action, much as getting old is just what happens when one doesn’t die young.

What that means is that, when someone who would otherwise grow one does not have a beard, that is the more unnatural situation.  It requires regular (usually daily) effort to be clean-shaven for a post-pubescent man who grows facial hair.  That seems like a situation where people might be trying to hide something.  Specifically, they seem to want to hide the fact that they are adults, that they grow beards, and whatever comes with that.

Maybe they want to appear boyish and thus less threatening?  That couldn’t explain the military tendency, but that tendency is clearly only a modern affectation.  Traditional warrior classes tended to have beards.  Think of the Vikings, and the hordes of Genghis Khan, and the Spartans, and of course the many middle-eastern warrior peoples, from the Persians to the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Also, of course, it’s pretty clear that every Abrahamic patriarch and/or prophet, from Moses to Jesus to Mohammed, all had beards.  Even King David almost surely had a beard by the time he whacked Goliath (it’s hard to imagine a hunting bandit, leader of a band of outlaws, being preadolescent and/or taking the time to shave every day).  Michelangelo made one heckuva statue of the young King as clean-shaven, but that doesn’t have to be any more true to life than it is literarily accurate to put pointy ears on hobbits and elves in Middle-earth*.  Also, of course, by most accounts, the illustrious (and sculpturious?) Mr. Angelo had quite the beard, himself.

It’s a bit weird, all of it.  Maybe the admiration for being clean-shaven harkens back to some not-so-secret preference of the medieval church higher-ups for prepubescent boys.

It’s probably at least partly just random, or at least stochastic, with the highly nonlinear equations of sociology producing weird eddies and fluctuations in local social mores that aren’t necessarily motivated by anything inherently logical.  But still, it seems rather silly to me for someone to think that men who simply allow their faces to do what those faces naturally do—i.e., grow beards—might be hiding something thereby.  It’s a bit like imagining that an apple tree is being slyly malevolent by growing fruit.

Still, the whole amiable appearance thing is a much better reason for me to avoid beards.  I feel very awkward and tense, engendering urges toward literal physical aggressiveness, when strangers talk to me.  Apparently, my tendency to grow “wizard eyebrows”, as my ex-wife described them (fondly) is not off-putting.  Perhaps when I have a full beard, I look like a kindly wizard too much.  Whereas with a goatee, I look more like a Warlock (which used to be my nickname in high school).

Now, if having a full beard encouraged beautiful, intelligent, interesting women to come up and talk to me out of the blue a lot, I might be less displeased (though I would almost certainly be at least as tense and anxious).  But that seems vanishingly unlikely.

Anyway, that’s enough nonsense for now.  I don’t have any idea what Shakespeare quote I might alter for the title to this post, but you will know by the time you read this.  Of course, yesterday’s title was an actual, full-on quote—from Gloucester, AKA the future Richard III, in the play Henry VI part 3—but that was unusual, and I did put quotation marks around it.

I’m sure I’ll find something adequate.  I have all the works of Shakespeare to use as a source for my material.  That’s a hell of a deep well from which to draw.

TTFN

*Think about it.  Tolkien went to great pains to describe how hobbits had curly hair on their heads and on the top of their feet, that they are smaller than the bearded dwarves (and that they themselves do not grow beards) and that they tend to be rosy-cheeked and stout around the middle.  But he never once said anything about their ears.  You would think, if their ears were meant to be pointy or otherwise remarkable, he would have specified this; he was an obsessively meticulous creator of his world, a tendency he self-parodied in his short story, Leaf by Niggle.  There is apparently some obscure reference in his notes that could be taken to be saying that his elves might have had slightly pointy ears, though I’m unconvinced by what I’ve read even of that.  Certainly in the Bakshi version of LotR, the hobbits and the elves all had “normal” ears, and that’s the way I have always pictured them in the dozens upon dozens of times I’ve read the books.  The ears are my only major complaint about Peter Jackson’s original trilogy.  I consider their presence an instance of pandering to the “broader” audience of people who aren’t actual Tolkien fans.