Beardy McBeardface:
I'm in the midst of trying to grow a long biblical Patriarch beard, mostly because I can. For the last 20 years, up until around mid-December, I have been satisfied with growing the lazy man's beard: let grow for three to four weeks, cut off, repeat--year after year after year.
The idea for the Patriarch beard came a long time ago, back in the early nineties. I was at Northeastern University in Boston, taking classes and mostly hanging out in funky coffee shops at Central Square in Cambridge, where I could still smoke indoors while I wrote bad poetry and short stories and surreptitiously eyeballed the pre-hipster grunge and riot grrls.
One day I was standing in line at the counter, waiting for my Chai tea with a double shot of espresso, when I turned around and nearly bumped into a young man wearing a 3 foot long beard. I could not help but stare at his beautiful corn silk face waterfall, flowing in a single orderly and unbroken wavelet right down past his belt buckle. I was entranced.
Ye gods, it's a 25 year old Gandalf! I thought.
Except, back then, even before the movies came out, every good nerd knew that Gandalf had spent no less than 20,000 years growing
his beard, yet here was this kid in front of me sporting nary a single gray in his yard long whisker kit. From that time on, more than anything, I too wanted to be a 25 year old Gandalf.
I didn't have the goods for it, though. Many beards take a lifetime to fill in. In my early twenties, mine was too spotty, too neckbeardy, too Amish in that the mustache was still vestigial at best. I'd also grown a ponytail down the the small of my back, so a long beard would have been too Jesus-like by half, even if I could pull it off.
Now in middle age, with short hair and filled-in whiskers and mustache, living thousands of miles away from disapproving conservative family members who don't enjoy the biker look, yet who are not quite conservative enough to enjoy the Duck Dynasty look, I've found a window to try to grow this **** out, for once in my life.
I have a lot of grey in there, maybe a little more than in Nick Offerman's beard,which is my current model. I keep wanting to claim that mine looks like Offerman's beard, but it doesn't. I don't have the length yet. I'm operating, at best, at .65 Offermen, and if Old Nick doesn't soon shave or at least trim things down, I'll never catch up.
Offerman's Beard
[x] necessary
[x] sufficient
Yesterday I played a nice lunchpail 8 hour session. I faded a bit towards the end, but that's something we all do at work. Normally, towards the end of a long session like that, the booze would be starting to catch up on me. That's not been the case in this dry January.
Flamingo: 8 hours:
+$127
Last edited by suitedjustice; 01-17-2019 at 10:55 AM.