The Lecture Series, Part I: BEARDS!

Disclaimer: This is entirely a work of fiction.

Disclaimer #2: I realize that I have already posted this elsewhere. I have reposted it for your enjoyment.  You're welcome.

So you know, it's really interesting to just look at what beards really mean in our society. I mean, what is someone really trying to say when they grow a beard? You've got to wonder what the sociological, physiological, psychological, sexual, metaphysical, astrological, transcendental, existential, metaphorical, theological, anthropological, and ornithological, meaning they really carry. I mean, if you look at the impact of beards alone on our society, the ramifications are just fascinating. I mean, just look how much our culture is dominated by what goes on with our face. We have beards named after people. Sideburns, Wolverine Chops, and the Clapton Stubble are probably some of the most commonly tossed around phrases to describe physical appearance.

Just look at what the beard does to your face, you know, it accentuates your mouth. Are you trying to draw attention to your mouth? What does that say? Do you want to visually draw attention to you words? I mean, do you want people to see your words come out of your mouth, dance around the room, and slap people in the face. Is that what you're trying to say with your beard? What is this fixation we have in so many cultures with just these structures of extraneous proteins? You could write a whole dissertation on this. You could write a graduate thesis on this. There is just so much to comprehend here it's staggering. What would happen if we had no beards? What would happen to our economy. If we woke up one day, and our beards stopped growing, what would happen to the razor industry? Stocks of Gillette would plummet. Steel and plastic futures would plummet. The economy would spin into a nose dive. The economy would be a 747 plummeting towards earth. And you'd better hope that that economy-plane metaphor doesn't land on your house, because what if it did, and your beard caught fire, and you could never grow it back again. I mean, if you knew that the next time you shaved your beard, it wouldn't grow back, would you still do it. Would ZZ Top cease to be relevant? Would they just become another classic rock band, doomed to be remembered for the latent sexual urges that their songs stirred in the hearts of a generation. Lemme tell you, I'll never forget the time back in 75, when I was a junior at Grover Cleveland High School in a sleepy little suburb of Chicago, when I first heard Tush playing on the radio. I was studying for the science bowl, and I heard it coming from a transistor radio on my neighbor Seth's back porch, and all of a sudden, I thought "I don't want to be here right now, I wan to go out and have some sex!" So that's what I went out and... well ok, I didn't, but it was hard, ok, I had a lot of acne and my voice really hadn't stopped cracking and most of the girls at my school were pretty prude, ok! Of course, when I saw a picture of them, everything changed. Those beards, those monolithic bushels of defiantly ungroomed facial hair made me want to turn to academia. But then Van Halen came along. They didn't have any beards. People heard them, and man, all they wanted to do was have sex. There were no beards to turn their thoughts to the sublime. No, all they caused was a whoooooole lotta fuckin. This lead to a whole lot of babies. And what if those babies knew that they could never grow beards? What if, when they came out of the womb, the first thing they heard before they yanked off the umbilical chord was "hey, your face is going to be soft and supple your whole life, never once to be covered by a coarse layer of unkempt hair that might potentially harbor fleas that will probably carry a strain of virulent plague that your generation will have to deal with, much like my generation is combating AIDS?" Are these the babies we want to be having? That's why these questions are so important. That's why I ask myself, every day when I get up, what the hell gives our society meaning?

Do beards give our society meaning? Are they the expression of one's manhood? Just look at the people who have facial hair: hell's angels, firefighters, rabbis, homeless men, hippies, lumberjacks, bearded ladies in sideshows. These are all dynamic movers and shakers in our society. Look at what Osama Bin Laden has done to change the way we operate as a society. When I fly somewhere, I have to get to the airport hours in advance just to be allowed on the plane. You know what I do with that extra time? I go to the airport Starbucks and get a shitload of coffee. Soon, I'm going to consume so much caffeine that it doesn't even do anything for me, so I'll have to take up snorting coke just so I can get up in the morning. And look what he has done for the beard itself. He is advancing the work of the Unabomber, John Brown, and chief justice of the Supreme Court John "Mutton Chops from Hell" Marshall. These were men (and in the case of John Marshall, people speculated of being a sort of man/woman/goat hybrid) who pushed the limits and redefined what a crazy whacko really was. Before these men stepped onto the stage of history, who was the most famous bearded guy? Jesus! Now, he couldn't even make it through airport security, with his deep, bronzy skin, lush, supple beard, and dreamy, hazel eyes... wow, sorry, I'm really getting ahead of myself here. Anyway, he would get yanked right out of the security line and flown straight to Gitmo. So what does a beard say now? It says you're a rebel, you're a nonconformist, you're so unpredictable there just might be C4 strapped to your chest right now.

And you know, what if beards weren’t on our faces. What if they were on our elbows or the lower regions of our buttocks? I mean, how would that change the way we feel about them? How would that change the way we visualize such concepts as "masculinity" and "stalker potential?" Furthermore, how would our clothing be different? Would we have holes in all our shirts or pants to accommodate elbow and/or butt beards? How would razor commercials be different if our beards were located elsewhere? Someday, when I finally get that federal grant to do research, I'm going to conduct an experiment on genetically modifying people with beards growing from different parts of their bodies, and see how the public reacts. There will be a man walking into a job interview, and the interviewer will reach out to shake the applicants hand, and BOOM, he'll be confronted with a palm full of disgusting, unkempt, pube-like hand-beard. It'll be a celebration of scientific discover. I've written a lot of letters to the head of the department for a grant for this experiment, but it hasn't happened yet. Last time I asked him at a staff meeting, he muttered something about "sinning against nature." But you know man, that's science. That's how things get done. That's how we got from being cavemen, smashing each others' heads in and sporting unkempt beards into modern humans with technology like the internet, robo-cops, microwaves, and bio-domes run by genetically augmented bears, and with such complex beard styles as the Garibaldi, the Friendly Mutton Chops, and the Soul Patch. And that's why you need to write to your congressman telling them to provide more funding for beard-related research. Also, throw in something about a monument for John Marshall. It is a rarely known fact that he was actually Jerry Garcia gone back in time. I would love to bring this up at the next department meeting, but I don't have tenure yet, and I don't really want to be rocking the boat until then. Well uh, yeah, that’s about it. Until next time, dudes and dudettes, keep rockin’ the ‘chops!