bear(d)s

My yin and I are leaving on our honeymoon in less than a week, and today marks the last time I plan on shaving between now and sometime the end of next month. I've grown a beard only once before, at the end of the last millennium, when I was on tour with a well-known modern dance company. I referred to it as my "protest beard" to anyone who would listen, and when asked exactly what I was protesting, I would respond in my very best impersonation (which was not very good) of Marlon Brando in The Wild One:

"Whadya got?"

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I'm protesting nothing this time, merely responding to the inconveniences of spending so much time in a tent. Running water will be a luxury for at least the middle third of our journey, and I don't want to be shaving in creeks at sunrise every morning when I could be snapping photos with our new camera, currently en route:

I do not remember the last object that inspired such obsession.

Furthermore, my yin's cousin is especially heavily-bearded, and I need all the lead time I can get before we reach his home in Boulder one week from tomorrow. It would be shameful to show up with a scraggy little beard that could be mistaken for simple laziness, or even worse, the inability to grow facial hair altogether.

There is nothing more untrustworthy than a clean-shaven outdoorsman – and this applies even to temporary, honeymooning outdoorsmen like myself. I'm of the firm belief that growing a beard brings one closer to nature, which is especially important in my case because I have a substantial, imaginary fear of bears.

They have one on the state flag for heaven's sake!

I've been told this fear is both unnecessary and unfounded (as opposed to contrived and perfomative), but I have seen proof of what happens to city slickers who go off into the woods in search of themselves.

for my response to Grizzly Man click here

Although my mountain upbringing and the fact that my surname is a corruption of the word "bear" would probably protect me from the worst of the maulings, it still seems prudent to enter Into the Wild:

[slippage: 34 months ago

At what price freedom?
If one must go somewhere to get it
is it really free at all?

I have not truly considered
the size of this life
how infinite and small my being.

Contemplating dharma and meaning;
there are untold possibilities
stretching in every direction from this single moment

and these twenty-six letters are not big enough.

Imagining myself in the wilderness
with only pen and paper.
The writing would change
but the pads would still be filled
the intricate balance of dandelion and larva.

Caterpillars spinning their coffins.

There is no end.
There is no beginning.
And one of the meanest lies we tell
ourselves: there is something better than now.

The breath in lungs, the blood in veins, the pen in hand.
I cannot write what is touched and if it were to open, if it were to open…
There is nothing more than what is, and what appears is, truly is not.

Was the path I took any less desolate than that of Alexander Supertramp?

and return to present]

with as much facial hair as possible. I do not want to end up like those dreamers and fools in Alaska...