Beard

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

One day when my older son was a toddler, he noticed I had a few days’ worth of scruff on my face. He pointed to the little dark specs he saw, and declared, “Ants!”

From that day forward, that’s what we all called my facial hair. Ants. “Daddy has ants.” And now daddy has a swarm of ants. A goddamned colony.

See, I have trouble with the whole idea of beards.

This is curious as I am currently sporting one, and not for the first time in my life. But to be sure, it has been an exception to an otherwise clean-shaven rule.

Let us put aside for now the fact that the growth of facial hair is “natural” and built into our species, along with just about all other mammals. I know. But we live in an age in which it is entirely optional to allow it to grow. Many, many other things that humans naturally produce we readily take measures to remove, such as showering to rid ourselves of our stink, clipping our fingernails and toenails to manageable lengths, and, oh yes, cutting the hair on the tops of our heads. Not to mention natural, bodily-generated things like cancerous tumors.

Facial hair serves no meaningful purpose. It has no utility. Perhaps if you’re living in an arctic climate in which one must greedily retain every fraction of a calorie of warmth to stave off hypothermia, something like a beard makes a difference, if for not other reason…