MATT LEIBEL

How to Grow a Beard

It’s a strange feature of our natures that the things we do with the least effort often feel like our grandest accomplishments. Congratulations: you didn’t die today. Your nose didn’t fall off of your face: Mazel Tov! For some of us, beards are a default condition. They are as inevitable as potholes, telemarketers, and the piercing wails of infants on airplanes. To make your beard grow faster, point it in the direction of the moon. To make your beard grow slower, dip it in molasses. Accompany your beard into a hall of mirrors: it is possible, if unlikely, that this will make satellite beards grow all over your body, including in places you definitely didn’t ask for them. This is known as “invasive beard.” There is a kind of beard more adept at touching your toes than you are. This is known as “cult leader beard.” There is the beard that should have grown on your face, but for whatever reason refused the assignment. This is known as “invisible beard.” There is the beard that would have grown on the face of former Southern California TV news anchor John Beard, had he chosen to grow a beard (ironically, he sported only a mustache on-air). This would be called “John Beard beard” or “John Beard squared.” There is the beard that vacillates between wanting to grow bushy, and wishing to be shaved clean. This is called “ambivalent beard.” Then there is the beard that swims unimpeded through the currents of the Atlantic, chased by a mad one-legged captain who can’t seem to grow a decently-shaped beard ere all the years since he’s set sail. This is called “Moby Beard” and if you spot one in the wild, your own beard will shine like a lighthouse beacon, for the rest of your days.

If you can’t grow a beard naturally, it’s fun and easy to grow one in your backyard garden! This is a great activity to do with your beard-curious children as well. Simply pick up a packet of beard-seeds at any face-friendly hardware store near you. Beard growing season is typically in late autumn, but beards can be grown under controlled conditions almost all year round. Make sure to watch your beard as it expands, and trim it as necessary. Beards that meander beyond the bounds of your yard and begin to encroach on your semi-enclosed patio are known as “gazebo beard.” If your beard sprawls out of control, you might be forced to call a Beard Control professional to reign in your garden scruff before it becomes a public nuisance. Your Homeowner’s Association may have strict rules about backyard beard length and scope (e.g. “Section 15.4(a): Facial hair shall not exceed the height of standard fencing of 66 inches [167.64cm], nor shall any beard encroach on a neighbor’s property [fines up to $1,500.00]”) Sure you could tough it out, but you know how hard-nosed Mrs. Crowley can get on these matters (the conniptions she went into when the Cohens decided to paint their garage a non-approved shade of slate gray) so please, for the love of God, keep your beards under control, and within the bounds of propriety.

How to Tie a Necktie

1. It’s 1982. Your parents have dressed you up—a little too formally, you think—for a restaurant dinner. You and your brother are wearing ties, even though you’re going to a steakhouse—no lobster, no caviar, no white-gloved waitstaff, not that you know of. When you arrive, the maitre d’ greets you with a stern message: no neckties allowed. He promptly brandishes a pair of scissors, and snips off your ties, just below the knot. You look up: hundreds of half-ties stapled to the ceiling, all staring down at you like taxidermied animal kills. Your parents are laughing uproariously at this, and you gather that you’re supposed to be laughing too. The lesson you internalize here is that ties are something serious and stuffy that you should go out of your way at every turn to undermine. You open a few buttons on your dress shirt and dig into your ribeye and fries.

2. Someone has passed away: it’s a relative, someone you weren’t especially close to. At the funeral, you learn that this person had a much more fascinating life than you’d imagined. They’d marched against the war—whichever war, it doesn’t matter. They’d traveled around the world in a boat: you imagine something tiny and heroic, like Heyerdahl with the Kon-Tiki, even though it was likely an extended trip on a cruise ship in between their second and third marriages. Your relative is buried in their finest suit and tie, Windsor knot. In life, you’d never seen them in anything but a cardigan. Your own tie is strangling you: you’ve nearly hanged yourself. Also, gazing around the funeral you realize you could have easily gotten away with not wearing a tie at all. You wonder about this tradition in general. You know from bar trivia (Wednesday Nights, your team name “The Manhattan Transfers”—you’re all originally from the borough, and you love to pound Manhattans while cogitating on obscure knowledge) that either Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, or his father, George V, invented the Windsor knot. The cravat dates back to the Croatian mercenaries serving in the Thirty Year’s War (1618-1648). Their fashion was taken up by Louis XIV in France, and the craze spread across Europe like wildfire, or syphilis. Ties could as easily not exist as exist. There is a non-negligible risk of cutting off blood flow to your brain if you tighten a Windsor knot too zealously.

3. You want to throw your tie to the ground like a snake who’s attacked you. You can’t think about your dead relative even a little bit. All you can think is how constricted you feel. You hate the seventeenth century Croats, and not for any ethnic reason. You hate that bewigged bastard, the autocrat Louis XIV, for fanning the flames. You hate yourself for giving into the idea that you needed to wear a nylon noose when your distant relation themself despised all forms of fussiness and formality. This funeral is making you realize that you want to live free, unencumbered by stylish neckwear. You remove your tie as discreetly as possible. A few people stare, but you don’t mind. You sneak a few cookies from the post-service spread. It feels weird to eat at one of these things, but you’re actually starving. When you get home, you take out a pair of scissors and cut every single necktie in your closet in two.

How to Survive in a World Without Hats

“We are a sad people, without hats”
-from Mary Ruefle, “The Bunny Gives us a Lesson in Eternity”

Your first mistake was assuming there is only one kind of Hell: there are as many hells as there are islands, grains of sand, brands of mustard, or shades of gray. And each hell is worse than the last. The sole consolation of these hells is that there will always be a counterfactual more tortuous, more painful, more humiliating, more hopeless, more unceasing in its lack of mercies. And then you arrive in the world without hats. No bowlers, no panamas, no pillbox, no baseball caps, no Napoleonic tricorns, no fascinators, no sombreros. Visors are permitted, though: an epidemic’s worth, most emblazoned horribly with the logos of those investment banks and insurance providers who regularly sponsor mid-tier professional golf tournaments. If you wear a hat in public in the world without hats, you will be assessed a hefty fine. You may also have your hat forcibly removed by the Hat Police. This is all eerily reminiscent of the Russia of Peter the Great, who imposed a Beard Tax on the populace. Men who wore beards (and in the Russian Orthodox tradition there were quite a lot of those) would be forced to pay a levy, depending on their means. Peter wanted the country to become more Westernized and secular—and beyond that he was a controlling psychopath who tortured even members of his own family in horrid ways and staged exploitative dwarf weddings for the amusement of the Nobility, in addition to causing mass death in the course of conquering Sweden. Still, even Peter was not sadistic enough to consider banning hats. Your only chance for happiness in a world without hats is to wear an imaginary hat. There are underground stores that sell imaginary hats, and many of these are effectively invisible to the Hat Police, because people who ban hats have no imagination, so it’s a blind spot for them. You might say that an imaginary hat is no substitute for a real hat, just as imagination itself is no substitute for real-world experience. I say you are wrong: you simply haven’t developed your imagination sufficiently yet. An imaginary hat will not save you from the worst Hell imaginable, but it will make such an infernal journey more endurable. It will, at least, shield your head slightly from the heat. Someday, the Hat Police will be defeated for good. But until that day comes, imagine them trapped in ten-gallon stetsons that, through some fateful alchemy, have been permanently spot-welded to their skulls. Imagine walking by these headwear-haters—these fedora-forbidders, these beret-banners, these cap-olitionists—and doffing your derby to them, and wishing them a very pleasant good morning.