Mid-February

Loyal follower, we are now at the six month mark of the giant Goat and the taming of the beard has begun. What was a snaggly mess has begun to change its shape and feature from day to day, graduating from the in-between Mon-Chi-Chi of three weeks ago to the flowing tidal surge you see before you now.

We have moved on (somewhat) from straight-out Civil War reenactment to something that still needs daily tending. Though my hair is long, and destined to grow longer as we scrape funds close to our tax return, it still requires far less daily manicuring than my chin.

The tides may shift approximately every twelve hours but the Goat presents a Christmas morning surprise nearly every day. No matter the amount of combing, it still decides which way it will flow each morning and resists all attempts at shaping and guidance.

One morning it may be pulling to the right--a car badly in need of alignment--while the next it might curl up in a pseudo-nefarious motif. The Goat, apparently, is fully capable of making its own decisions. It's like I have an independent life form on my chin. The only time I feel slight harmony is during a run in the wind, when the Goat braces itself against the wind just as the rest of my body does. It screams out, "OK, you're leaving me hanging out here with no protection, so I'll curl up under your neck and help you for now, but only for now! When we get back home, we are back to our previous arrangement." Perhaps I should go running more often.

Here is close-up view:

Beginning of February

There are always times, in the beard's evolution, that things go a little haywire and the beard takes on its own personality and appears ready to make its own decisions. Whenever I shave my head (usually each summer) I often shave it several more times before allowing it to grow back in. This does not occur because I am afraid it will not grow back in, as one of my college roommates often claimed was his number one reason for not shaving his head, but because I have to commit to the Mon-Chi-Chi look at some point, and I am always reluctant to do that.

The Mon-Chi-Chi head occurs about two months after I finally commit to the full re-grow, and there is rarely anything I can do about it. It is the stage of hair growth during which my hair is too short to boss around, and I am unable to shove it into any position which I would like it to assume. But it is also too long to leave untouched: the true beauty of a shorn head. So, for those two or three weeks of in-between growth, I am stuck with the hair that resembles nothing other than those horrible pseudo-monkeys of mid-eighties toy fame; or fleeting fame, as it were: the Mon-Chi-Chi.

This is what the Goat has come to as well. A far cry from the resemblance to an early primate ancestor hairdo, the Goat at this stage shares one thing in common with that Mon-Chi-Chi look: it does whatever it wants, wearer be damned. Have a look for yourself below.














Note the left side of the Goat (on the right in your view of the photo.) That "wing" of hair has actually subsided over the past few days, transforming from its worst moments, as the mischievous curl of dastardly cartoon villains' moustaches to the flowing wing of facial hair it now resembles. This is usually the point during beard growth at which a student will ask me, "Why don't you just trim that thing?" When I confess that such a deed would defy the spirit of the pact we entered into all those months ago, I am usually met with an incredulous stare, followed by, "Well, then you could at least comb it!"

Little do they know how much time I have to spend each morning combing this beast, bringing tears to my eyes with every fifth stroke as it catches hair and plucks some wayward tangle from my chin. I have more respect for the ladies in my house each time I do this, as my hair does not tangle or snag very easily and I rarely suffer through the horrible rip-sessions that serve as their daily hair-combings. The small knot of chin hairs in the sink after each combing would probably worry me if they were from my head but, as this is a temporary commitment, it does not bother me in the slightest. Enjoy a second view below: