BEARDING, A LESSON IN NO PARTS: To begin, we must first point out that the existence of the beard is, before it is anything else, a philosophical question, at least in the West, whereas in other cultures the beard is not merely simply a matter of philosophy, but one of theology. Orthodox Jews, for example, refrain from shaving, obeying Leviticus’ command that the Children of Israel, or at least the male portion thereof, shall not mar the corners of their beards; whether the bearded ladies at the circus must comply with this commandment is a subject of debate. Devout Muslims do not shave either, but, following the example of the Prophet (peas be upon him), they will clip their mustaches away from their upper lip. Sikhs are the champions of theological hirsuteness here, however, as the tenets of that faith not only forbid the devout to cut their beards, but any other bodily hair as well, which taboo goes a long way towards explaining why there are so few photographs of devout Sikh girls in bikinis. In contrast, Christians, at least here in this our Great Republic, represent a clear-cut victory for Saint Jerome.

In the fourth century, a group of Christian theology students in Alexandria came to blows, a common enough event for Christian theology students then and for centuries afterwards, over the question of how long a beard should be in order to demonstrate the wearer’s personal sanctity. After a night of exhaustive theological and pugilistic investigation of this admittedly arcane bit of dogma, someone hit upon the bright idea of asking the great scholar and Biblical translator Jerome for a ruling on the matter. So the collected students hied themselves and their black eyes down to the great library of Alexandria to pose the question to the saint.

Our seekers after knowledge found Jerome (or Hieronymous, if you people prefer the original with all this Bosch) standing at the circulation desk arguing with one of the clerks about his overdue copy of Valley of the Dolls. The students, in a burst of youthful enthusiasm, which is always the most annoying kind, breathlessly asked their tonsorial question of Jerome, an irascible man in the best of times—he once called someone who disagreed with him an ignorant calumniator, stuffed with Irish porridge (clearly, a man who knew how to vent and to vent well)—and now a man driven to new heights of irascibility because of the clerk’s obstinate refusal to let him keep the book out a little longer so he could translate the good bits into Latin. Jerome told the students, with perhaps more heat than charity, that if sanctity depended on the length of one’s beard, nothing in the Lord’s creation would be holier than a goat. Then, driven to distraction and left there without a return ticket, the great saint hurled anathemas at the students, as well as volume I of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Aardvarkus to Aggravatedus), and the chastened students fled for their lives from the saint’s onslaught, returning to their usual haunts to discuss the theological significance of the goat. As per usual, the conversation grew heated and the neighbors then called the police to suppress the rioting. In the end, only three people were killed and 27 goats reported missing, although the police later found five of them tied up behind Jamaican restaurants on Alexandria’s west side. The owners declared that they had no idea how the goats got there.

I bring up all this aggressive hirsute shilly-shallying because I now have a beard and I am under some very substantial pressure from a number of people to get rid of the thing. My mother, for one, has never liked beards and finds the prospect of looking at mine for any prolonged length of time a prospect to horrifying to contemplate. Mom does not like anything that reminds her that she is, as she puts it, getting on a bit, although I should point out here that at 82 she is not getting on, she’s got on, and no, that is not something I would say to her face, thank you very much, and therefore having to look at her eldest son’s impression of Robert E. Lee is as grim a memento mori as you can find here in our happy little burg. The kid next door, an obnoxious munchkin as viciously noxious as she is relentlessly ob, takes my mother’s side of the argument and does so with no end of sonic gusto, usually in as close a proximity to my ears as she can manage. Scarcely a day goes by hereabouts that I do not hear that annoying little cockroach bellowing her incessant demand that I shave the ugly gray ferret off my face, and scarcely a day goes by that I do not wonder why I didn’t smother the rotten brat with a pillow when I had the chance. Ah well, it’s too late for regrets now, I suppose.

On the other hand, a good many people like the new look, something that I find very heartening. I look, depending on whom you talk to, like a professor, which is what I started out to be all those years ago, or Ernest Hemingway, a comparison I simultaneously love and loathe—I admire Hemingway the writer a great deal and I dislike Hemingway the man about as much; the type of person who could write the kind of nasty hatchet jobs that appear in A Moveable Feast is not the sort of person I would want to know personally. And, apparently, I look like Santa Claus, a resemblance that has led more than one youngster to sidle up to me and mutter, “I wanna Playstation.” I must admit that since growing the beard I am taking a good deal of pleasure in playing the Anti-Claus and telling them that they can’t have one unless they beat up their little sisters two days before Christmas, and that they may get nothing at all this year because the cookies they left out for me last year were so stale that the reindeer wouldn’t eat the damn things, and let’s face it, reindeer are neither the pickiest of eaters nor are they the brightest bulbs in the box; if the reindeer won’t eat the cookies, no one else will. I may not stop Christmas from coming this year, but I managed to take some of the shine off of the holiday, especially if you happen to be a little sister hereabouts just a couple days before Christmas, and before you start calling me names, let me reiterate my long held position that Ebenezer Scrooge was a deeply misunderstood man and that the Grinch was a equally unappreciated…well, whatever grinches are, with or without the tight shoes, they are unappreciated.

But the best opinion of all came from my brother, who agrees with my mother, thinks that the beard should go sooner rather than later, and says that the damn beard makes me look like a refugee from the ZZ Top Fan Club. This is fine by me; I’ve been a fan of the Texas rockers for years now, so if I’m going to look like I’m with the band, I might as well keep the beard. Like the boys say, every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man. Of course, ZZ Top is not the sharpest looking band around—I think they look like the miner ‘49 and his daughter, Clementine, especially the latter—but then again, they don’t have to look sharp. Unlike me, they’re actually with the band.

MY APOLOGIES, OR MORE EXCUSES, A CONTINUING MELODRAMA: Okay, folks, I realize that I gave an absolute guarantee that there would be a new piece here by last Monday. The fact that you are reading yet another mea culpa for it not being here is not through any lack of willingness on my part, but rather said lack is the unfortunate byproduct of the large scale viral invasion of my upper respiratory tract this past week. It was a wonderful invasion, as invasions go; I got to play the part of Wake Island as my immune system and the viruses fought it out for control of my destiny. I am hear to announce that, unlike the Marines at Wake Island, the immune system has beaten back the invasion and that I am now well on my way to full recovery. It still hurts when I cough, but this is a vast improvement over laying on my back and looking up at my ceiling (which is peeling, by the way; I will have to get around that shortly) and wishing that I were dead. So, let me reassure you, the readers, on a couple of points: first, there is a new piece (and no, this is not it) completely written out and about halfway typed up, and second, that this piece shall be posted to this site no later than Monday of this coming week. I absolutely guarantee this, barring a relapse or some other act of God. Then you can blame God; that's His job, apparently.

ALERT! : Okay, folks, there will be a new piece here either Monday or Tuesday; I've written it and it'd be on today, but I am working now and I don't think the powers that be would approve of my using office time to work on my personal blog. So hang on just a little bit longer. In the meantime, go over to Akaky's Amateur Photos Inc. and enjoy some of the new pictures I just put up there.

Brazilian Independence Day has come and gone, and no, I do not have anything new to post, although I am working on something. In the meantime, there is the young lady to the left, who is much more pleasing to the eye than anything I could write here

O CANADA, GET LOST: There’s been a great deal of debate about Arizona’s illegal immigration law in particular and illegal immigrants in general these past few months, and yet I haven’t seen much comment about the Vampire State’s plans for one group of unwanted immigrants, which, I must admit, surprises me no end. I thought the idea would raise a ruckus with the same breathless alacrity that the gaggle of goniffs in the state legislature raise taxes, but no one seems to be complaining much about the idea, except for the usual suspects, and, strangely enough, no one seems to care about their opinion in the matter. I know that odder things have happened here in the Vampire State—odd is something we do well here— but this seems very peculiar to me, yes, it does.

So let me go on the record right now and say that I am all for gassing these lousy little bastards, and before you go calling me a typical, right-wing Rethuglican scumbag, permit to say that my brother, a life-long New Deal Democrat, supports gassing these wretches as well. And to the inevitable charge of racism, I say poppycock; I do not, in any way, shape, or form, advocate physically harming this country’s large population of illegal Mexican immigrants. Mexicans come to this country to find work to support their families, to help their children have better lives, and to earn their share of the American dream. Canadian geese come to this country to crap in my driveway. There is a difference, although it’s difficult to get some people to see that.

Unlike Mexican immigrants, who work hard for their money, Canadian geese lead entirely parasitic lives once they get across the 49th parallel. They contribute nothing to the economic life of the nation, they refuse to pay taxes, they are a burden on the community, they are an ongoing environmental disaster, and they spend an inordinate amount of time relieving themselves in my driveway. Supporters of this ongoing avian assault on this our Great Republic and my increasingly noisome driveway (they crap there in the bucket loads, just in case I haven’t mentioned it already) excuse such behavior by saying that, unlike Mexicans, most of whom intend to stay in the United States, Canadian geese are migratory by nature and will leave our country and my driveway sooner rather than later and that all we Americans need to do is display a little patience with them. I can sympathize with this point of view and those who hold it, though I also understand that in order to reach this conclusion geese supporters must weave intellectual loop-de-loops so intricate that they would take the breath away from anyone even reasonably irrational and leave the completely rational completely agog and looking for a drink, but my sympathy fades when I look out my window in the morning and see the objects of their intellectual desire parked in my driveway crapping away like they had nothing else to do with their time. I don’t like having to park my car in the middle of my lawn, folks, I just don’t, and then my toleration for this weak-minded rubbish flies out the window, often with some choice words following after it.

For the supporters of these geese to call these birds migratory is to take the dictionary meaning of the word, lay it upon the Procrustean rack, and stretch the word beyond its lexicographical breaking point. There are birds that migrate thousands, if not tens of thousands of miles every year, looking for food and a place to breed, preferably somewhere with much lower school taxes than I am about to get hit with. Those Canadian bastards parked out in my driveway couldn’t migrate back to Canada if their lives depended on it. There is not one of them that doesn’t look like they’ve spent their entire time in the United States chowing down on everything on the supersize menu at McDonald’s five times a day and twice more on Sunday, and then washing their Big Macs down with vanilla shakes served in fifty gallon drums. If this particular set of Canada’s ornithological pride and joy tried to migrate to the driveway across the street, 75% of them would drop dead from heart attacks before they’d managed to get to the other side, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that the 25% that did arrive in my neighbor’s driveway were all diabetics. In short, the only way these fat, crapulous bastards are flying back to Canada is if the immigration people buys them all tickets and ships them home on American Airlines, preferably in economy class.

The foreign policy mavens will insist that I do nothing to these geese, that I should wait for the wise solons who govern my native state to decide whether or not they should use poison gas on these birds before I do something rash and permanently damage US—Canadian diplomatic relations. Again, to this I say poppycock, and if you don’t like poppycock, then there are balderdash, codswallop, twaddle, and baloney, attorneys at law, for you to select from. The fact is that the state government will never gas those geese—they will either find a way not to do it or they will try to kick the decision up the Federal level or they will try to run the geese for the state assembly on the Democratic Party line, where the geese will immediately become incumbents and thus a not terribly endangered species protected from the thousand natural shotguns that gooseflesh is heir to. So the geese are here to stay, which means I will have to do something about them, whether or not my doing something causes an international incident. Remember, I did not invite these geese to use my driveway as their personal rest room; they invited themselves, so clearly the onus is on the birds and not on me, although I suspect that more than one of those birds has tried to drop more than an onus on me these past few weeks. If the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs objects to the forcible methods I intend to use to remove their citizens from my driveway, let me just say that if the Canadian government would be better off trying to find ways of gainfully employing these geese in Canada rather than looking the other way when these birds decide to come across the border to crap in my driveway. If Canadian—American diplomatic relations suffer because of this, tough, that’s not my problem. In any case, that’s all I have to say about this. Really, it is—I’m not kidding.

EXCUSES, EXCUSES: My apologies for the prolonged absence, folks, but I have been writing something for the first print edition of an online magazine and trying to think of captions, and so my mind has been elsewhere the past few weeks. I do not write great captions, unfortunately, and as these captions are going into a book of photos about the Green Line in Cyprus, they can’t be the usual wisenheimer stuff I put underneath my own pictures. And the weather’s been outlandishly awful here in the Northeast corner of this our Great Republic and I don’t write well when I am physically uncomfortable. Now that I am done annoying you with my many excuses for why I’ve put nothing new up, I just want you to know that I am working on something that I hope to have here fairly soon, weather and captions permitting.

JUST A THOUGHT: There’s no long piece attached, just an observation here. I ate my lunch about half an hour ago down the street in my favorite deli, a nice place that offers quality sandwiches, air conditioning, and, even more important, distance from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread, enough distance so that the importuning masses who plague my existence during working hours will not follow me hither and yon demanding that I solve their problems for them, as opposed to solving them themselves and leaving me alone. I know that that’s too much to hope for, I know, and I suppose if these people could solve their problems themselves they would, which would put me out of a job, but it’s still annoying, no matter how you look at it. So there I was, consuming my chicken cutlet sandwich and looking out the window at the traffic, vehicular and pedestrian, passing down our happy little burg’s main thoroughfare, when I saw a man parking his car on the other side of the street. He was careful not to park in the handicapped spot, something that clearly marked him as an out of towner, since no one who actually lives here pays the slightest bit of attention to those handicapped zone signs, a basic lack of respect that flows inevitably from the ease with which you can get a handicapped sticker for your car in this neck of the woods. I think at this point damn near everyone in town has a handicapped sticker somewhere either on or in their automobile; even I have one and there’s not a damn thing wrong with me that kicking a small child in the shins and then lying about it with a straight face wouldn’t cure in a New York minute. So our careful parker makes sure that he is in his carefully allotted slot and then rolls his windows up, which brings me, at last, to the point of this screed. I am not sure I fully understand the logic behind driving a convertible with the top down, parking said vehicle, and then rolling up the windows without putting the top up. Rolling up the windows in such a vehicle will stop a potential car thief for less time than it takes a Democratic politician to propose a tax increase and thus has little or no deterrent effect on the criminal classes. Nor will rolling up the windows and keeping the top down prevent sun, rain, wind, or the occasional incontinent bird from soiling your nice new leather seats. There must be a point to performing such an action, but clearly I am not grasping the Aristotelian depths of the logic involved and no one wants to explain it to me. I also find it impossible to detect the difference between minutes in New York and minutes in any other state, but I usually ascribe my ignorance to my limited knowledge of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which can, no doubt, explain all the mysteries of the universe, except, probably, why a man in a convertible would roll his windows up while leaving his top down. Some things are just beyond the wisdom of men and this is one of them.