2004-06-03 - 3:03 p.m. The Neckbeard My girlfriend went away for a week a month ago about. Maybe it was 3 days. It felt like a week. Well, who knows, but for some reason that was the week I decided to try and grow some facial hair. See my girlfriend, being infinitely wiser and more sensible than myself, knows that this is a mistake. Still, like every guy, I must prove something is a mistake the old fashion way. I must perform the task until I am mocked or can not longer stand the look of my own face. Basically it all ends when I declare myself a �disaster,� or can no longer pay my rent and must grown the hair for warmth. The first problem with growing facial hair for me is that I can�t. So I planned ahead and I knew that I had a good two days before anything would realistically be growing. I forget the dates, so I am going to lie and say I stop shaving after Wednesday morning. Thursday night I said good bye to my girlfriend. She noticed nothing. I woke up Friday morning like a kid on Christmas. I ran to my mirror and rubbed my mug. I felt something that some may call stumble. To those older than 14, they would call it �lint.� That day passed like most others. Meaningless and worthless, with my only goal in life to somehow forcibly grow hair from my face in a desperate hope to make myself appear masculine in a baby blue powdered shirt. Just a fact I notice: Guy in turtleneck � gay. Guy with beard in turtleneck � ruggedly gay. I figured beer helped hair growth, so I drank as many as I could. I also did so to cheer me up because I am an alcoholic. Just kidding. I�m the thing worse than that -- A drunk. I woke up Saturday, and the mirror revealed nothing. Now in my fantasy world, which is where I always live, I would shave that day; not out of necessity, but out of habit. And so bedtime comes and then the next day appears. I say that as if it were magical. It wasn�t. But I noticed something. Faith and Beoria, (Beer gorda??) a mustache!!! I know what you�re thinking. One of those handlebar jobs that everyone tells me I should grow and wear because it would look so perfect. No. It�s a Puerto Rican mustache (even though it�s too late, sorry to all my PR kemosabis). Incidentally: The mustache never looks good on anyone except Alex Trebek, and someone who you met who has always had a mustache. It�s a life long commitment. I only have 2 more days. The next morning I was shocked. The mustache had faded away, thus confirming my fears that it may just have been dust all along. However, I did have noticeable black hair. It was ranging from the top of my neck to my chin. Ah � the indomitable neck beard we meet again! This accursed facial phenomenon has plagued me since the dawn of time. Also know as puberty. It�s probably the most fierce and ugly growth in the facial hair family, and that�s saying something. The neck beard, for those who haven�t seen it in the wild, is a arrangement of patchy black hairs that look mostly like a shadow until its too late and you realize they are these dangly black hairs that aren�t uniform and grow insanely fast while the rest of the face remains hairless. It is as if a ghost of the opossum you ran over two months after getting you license has officially come back to haunt you, and does so by hanging upside down from your chin. In response to this strange formation, I put on sweatpants. This is because I had officially �packed it up�. I always keep one pair of sweatpants hidden in my room like the cigarette that the quitting smoker always hides somewhere in the house �just in case.� The just in case for the smoker is simple. In case my car blows up, my wife sleeps with the dog again, or I need a smoke. The �just in case� for the sweatpants is much more complicated. Not really. It�s so that at any point I can transform into the laziest person in the world, just in case I need to. There are only three types of people who can wear sweatpants. Painters, (because painters by profession are obviously disrespecting whatever clothing they have on), Olympic Female figure skates, (because the ice is cold and they are crying and hysterical and don�t know that someone just slipped sweatpants on them), and people with neckbeards. People with neckbeards have nothing to live for. Not even Grizzly Adams would shake the hand of a man with a neck beard. Since most of what I do is based on the reaction of the opposite sex, sweatpants can only be worn by me if I have won one million dollars, or in my attempt to grow facial hair I accidentally grow a mammal on my chin. Having money will get you sex beyond the pants and the neckbeard�well�with a face like that -- sex is simply out of the question. Listen, the guy from mask (with Cher) should be wearing sweatpants like it were Armani. No one�s hooking up with the Mask. Regardless. I made it through the night and I noticed my friends talked to me less, my parents wouldn�t call me back, and even people on the internet refused to chat with me. It got pretty ugly. At one point I hid in the corner of my room from nothing. But nothing found me, so I guess it was a failure at that too. In the end, my neck beard got longer and I ate a moonpie to try and make the mustache come back, but nothing happened. The worst part of the story is when my girlfriend returned and since I had been wearing sweatpants and I was so lazy that I wasn�t able to clean up before her arrival. However, I did throw on jeans. This probably saved the relationship. The nicest part of the story has nothing to do with me, but the fact that my girlfriend had enough gusto to actually kiss her broken down man creature upon arriving in the airport. Neckbeard and all. | |||||||||||
