The Other Fifteen

Me and my perma-stubble, AKA the calm before the storm.

Welcome to the Not Sports section.  You comfy?  Want something to drink?  No, you ‘re good?  Ok then, let’s get started.  I have an unheard of amount of facial hair.  I pretty much shave from my eyeballs to my collarbone.  To say that I am hairy is like saying that Angelina Jolie is kind of cute.  It just doesn’t do it justice.

Since I can grow such a full beard, especially at a young age, my friends have always encouraged me to grow out the mustaches and beards that they can’t.  Some of these requests I have turned down, such as shaving my initials into my face.  But if their idea’s are sufficiently hilarious, and not too much of a pain in the ass, then I’ll grow a beard for 2 weeks, cut it down to the proper specifications, and walk around in public causing laughter everywhere I go.  So, with no further ado, I give you a gallery of my most hideous creations.

This is my first attempt, the fu manchu.  I grew this out as a sophomore in college to wear as a Halloween costume.  But the best part is that I had this thing on my face for the entire month of October without letting anyone in on the joke.  I had people begging me to get rid of it, to which I would reply that I thought i looked pretty good [totally untrue].  One time, after having that conversation, a girl I knew from Georgia actually sad, “Well I think it’s hot.”  I immediately lost some respect for her.  It all payed off on Halloween when I put on this Colorado rancher getup and had good friends of mine introducing themselves to me because they didn’t recognize me at all.  It was totally worth it, and absolutely wet my appetite for future attempts.

The next year I was studying abroad in England.  After hearing all of the stereotypes that the Brits had about Americans, I decided to give them what they wanted by dressing up for Halloween as a typical NASCAR watchin’, gun totin’, beer swillin’, tobacco chewin’ southern gentleman.  I have to say, I’m pretty on point.  The problem was, it was too perfect.  My impersonations were too close to the real thing, so people didn’t get the joke. They just saw an American with an impressive, though inadvisable, fu manchu/soul patch combo.  This was the last time that I would grow anything that people could mistakenly take seriously.

This guy is probably my all time favorite, and will be hard to beat.  I grew this after a conversation I had with two friends when we were traveling in Hong Kong about the worst facial hair any of us or our friends had grown.  When one of them mentioned a chin strap, i got an epiphany… what if, instead of a strap across the chin, you made the strap go straight across the face from sideburns to mustache in a straight line across the face?!  And with that, the lip strap was born.  I wore this baby around Hong Kong for a day, with people pointing in my face and falling down laughing constantly.  That’s not an exaggeration.  People were actually dropping to the ground and rolling around laughing while pointing at my face.  It was great.  But just like the fu manchu, a woman who I had met the day before actually started hitting on me while I was wearing this thing.  There has to be some kind of hideous facial hair fetish that some women have but that no one knows about.  That’s really the only explanation I have.

The Swashbuckler.  I grew this when I was in my Robin Hood phase.

The cop ’stache.  I just wanted to se what I would look like should I want to pursue a career in law enforcement later on in life.  I don’t mean to brag, but I pretty much nailed it.

The mask of Zorro.  This was an attempt to top the lip strap, which I’m starting to think is impossible.  The mask of Zorro is a combination of the world’s highest sideburns  with a diagonal line back across the face, followed by a chin strap.  I probably only had this on my face for 3 hours or so.  It was too ugly for me to take.  But my friends got to enjoy it, and the waitress at dinner got a huge kick out of the fact that I was willing to massacre my face for the laughter of others.

I don’t even know what to call this thing.  The world’s biggest handle bars?  It’s a mustache that extends from one corner of my neck to the other in a big arch over the lip.  Maybe I should call it the St. Louis.  Either way, this only lasted for a few hours as well.  For those of you that can’t grow such hideous facial hair, or just haven’t for obvious reasons, it wears on you pretty fast to have everyone who sees you look at you with total disgust written all of their faces.  You can only have a joke written across your face for so long.

The full beard, AKA the cave man, AKA the lumberjack, AKA the single block of marble from which I carve my masterpieces.

Feel free to leave suggestions for new creations in your comments, as this will be an ongoing column/fixture in my life.