On my way down the hall to shave, the wife asked if I was going to shave. To maintain balance of power in the castle, shaving at that point was out of the question, so I said, \u201cWell honey, I think I might just grow out the beard and be one them lumbersexuals.\u201d She gave me that look women give you when you put your shoes on the wrong feet like a little kid to see how long it takes them to notice. <\/p>\n
\u201cLumbersexuals?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh yeah.\u201d I said, \u201cYou can look it up. All I need is a new flannel shirt and some work pants without holes in them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lumbersexuals aren\u2019t logger guys named Kenny who are built like coke machines that got thrown down a cliff. Lumbersexuals are handsome. They iron their flannels. Their axes don\u2019t have pitch on the handle or dings on the edge. Unlike jog-bra women in sportswear catalogs, they rarely peer into the distance. Lumbersexual male models peer through their foreheads directly at the camera, one shoulder forward, head cocked to the side, with a look that\u2019s half \u201cBeware, I\u2019m feral\u201d and half, \u201cI can\u2019t wait to kiss myself in the mirror.\u201d Their essential accessory is the beard.<\/p>\n
Growing a beard for most of us means nothing more than not shaving. \u201cI\u2019m out of the military. I\u2019m not shaving\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m not shaving until the novel\u2019s finished\u201d or, \u201cBecause I don\u2019t feel like it.\u201d Our beards are fields that go to seed when our chins have better things to do. Lumbersexuals, on the other hand, are the Liberaces of beards.* We\u2019re talking clean, trimmed, oiled, scented beards: no wood chips, no crumbs, no tartar sauce. And memes. Beard memes. “It\u2019s good to have beardless friends. When you go out people assume you\u2019re their leader.” And, “Excuse me ladies, my eyes are up here.” Or, “When two beards cross paths, the larger beard has the right of way.”<\/p>\n
The movement has spawned a lucrative beardsploitation industry pushing hundreds of beard grooming products including vitamin supplements to help you grow your \u201cman mane.\u201d The premier \u2018real men have beards\u2019 company is the Dollar Beard Club (pretty much everything costs more than a dollar), founded by Chris, whose beard struts through hilarious commercials with Chris not far behind. They march past manly men and fawning, almost nude women who are helpless in proximity to the animal magnetism of beards. In one scene, Chris sees a lesser man shaving, yanks the guy\u2019s T-shirt over his head and punches him in the gut. It\u2019s a funny scene, but not as funny as the comments section where someone says, \u201cChris punches like a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing, trendy facial hair lacks the bad to the bone beardosity of Walt Whitman, Peter Freuchen, Edward Abbey, Frederick Douglas, Omar Mukhtar, Jerry Garcia, Odin, Fidel Castro (and Che), Blackbeard the Pirate or pretty much any Confederate general in the Civil War. None of those epic whiskers ever needed the Dollar Beard Club or its competitors: Striking Viking, Beardilizer, Beard Monster, Beard Envy, or Aphrodisiac Beard Balm. Personally, I like beards and support men who wear them with the caveat that a good beard, like good bluegrass music, shouldn\u2019t be overdone. As a famous banjo picker said, being too close to perfection spoils what you\u2019re striving for, \u201cTo be good, it has to suck a little.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ah \u2026 but all things must pass. Even in no-shave November, even with trendy axe-throwing boutiques in the big cities, the days of lumbersexuals are numbered. But no worries, beards have watched the rise and fall of all history\u2019s epochs including the late, great urban cowboys who wore Stetsons and pointy boots when they roamed the wilds of 1980\u2019s Manhattan.<\/p>\n
What ever happened to Bud and Sissy, mechanical bulls, and the original Gilley\u2019s\u2014where are they now? Oblivion baby, gone as mastodons that roamed the late Pleistocene where Park Avenue is today. But beards remain, and when lumbersexuals march into the sunset of fashion extinction there will be a vacuum.<\/p>\n
Pay attention all you bearded brothers long lining your summers away out in Cross Sound. The future is bright for ye who oil your man manes with halibut slime … Beard On! Slime is money. Bottle it. It\u2019s only a matter of time before Fishingsexuals seize their moment in the Land of Opportunity.<\/p>\n
*Actually, Liberace had a beard, but it was Betty White. At least, according to her.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Dick Callahan is a Juneau writer. In April 2016, he won first place in the Alaska Press Club Awards for best outdoors or sports column in the state.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On my way down the hall to shave, the wife asked if I was going to shave. To maintain balance of power in the castle, shaving at that point was out of the question, so I said, \u201cWell honey, I think I might just grow out the beard and be one them lumbersexuals.\u201d She gave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-8817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8817"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=8817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}