Lifting Fog

TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK. Hear that? It’s the digital bits of code on the corner of your laptop screen alerting you to another hour spent in Farmville. It’s a Garfield clock’s hands continuing their relentless march toward forever. Calendars. Sundials. Innumerable shapes and methods charting our hours, days, and years on earth, quantifying mortality; counting down to death.

…Growing a beard is another way to mark time’s passage, not to mention a fun road trip activity!

Looking at abstract ways (are there any other ways?) to document this journey through America, it became immediately clear to me that facial hair had to play a part. Journal entries and license plate games are work, but beard-growing — man’s ability to sprout a never-ending series of Chia pets ON HIS FACE — that’s no-effort art. Fascinating, too, that a perfectly normal adult male (or abnormal female) can go from this…

…to this…

…in just under two weeks. Hell, remarkable. And OBVIOUSLY worthy of continued editorial.

So in the name of art, and science, and everything holy under this golden sun of ours, I’ve compiled six representative beard-shots taken during the trip. Crucial moments, too — the first miles north to Ithaca, taking inventory outside Nashville — that tell the tale in ways no amount of ceaseless, meandering journal entries ever could. Today the blog becomes the Beard Log (or B-Log…or BLog), and we all reflect on the wonders of human hair growth. Enjoy!

Tags: Beard Log, Facial Hair, Photo Essays

This entry was posted on October 31, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Barfoed Does America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.