Readers, if you're anything like me, you've long been amused and/or bemused by the photos of men with ice-flecked facial hair that regularly appear on social media sites this time of year. They all look more or less the same, which is to say they all look more or less like the one above.
I can't explain why these photos have always amused and/or bemused me. Maybe it's their ubiquity. Or their sameness. Or their perennial nature. (They materialize on Facebook, every winter, as reliably as those photos of "tan, outstretched legs" -- or are they hot dogs? -- do every summer.) Probably it's a little bit of each. Whatever the reason, the impulse to (a.) take such photos and then (b.) display them online has always struck me as weird.
Well, not anymore. Now I get it. Because that photo up there? Of the scowling weirdo? That's me, in my first-ever Ice Beard Selfie. I took it Sunday morning, after an 8-ish-mile run here in eastern Pennsylvania.
Now, I've run in plenty of brutal winter weather over the years. And I've occasionally had facial hair -- or at least my own sad, patchy version of it -- over the years, too. But I've never had substantial enough facial hair during brutal enough winter weather to yield an Ice Beard. Until Sunday. On Sunday, the planets aligned.
Here's how things went down after my run:
1. I walked past a parked car and glanced at the window.
2. I saw my face.
3. One-tenth of one microsecond later, I actually said, out loud: "Oh, I have to get a picture of that."
4. I got a picture of that.
Moments later I was sharing it on Facebook.
None of this was conscious. It just happened. Such is the power of the Ice Beard.
I mean, just look at that expression. I wasn't even trying to look tough. It's all the Ice Beard. This is how Ice Beard rolls. Ice Beard don't play around. Ice Beard has a mind of its own, and if you don't like it you can take a hike!
With an Ice Beard, you feel, anything is possible. It is transformative. Almost like a drug. This is wonderful, your Ice Beard self thinks. I am rough-hewn. I am a new man, capable of great things. Rarrr.
Normal Mark sees a locked door and thinks, Ah well. Guess I won't be entering THAT room. Ice Beard Mark sees that same door and smashes it. With his Ice Beard.
Normal Mark wouldn't dream of bringing outside food into a restaurant that clearly prohibits it. Ice Beard Mark carries a roast suckling pig into that same establishment and eats the whole thing while staring at the waiter.
Normal Mark sees a driver on his cell phone rolling through a stop sign, mutters a curse word, and moves on. Ice Beard Mark leaps onto the car's hood, pulls the terrified driver out through the window, and frog-marches him to the nearest driver's education school, where he signs the man up for remedial driving lessons. Then he disassembles the man's cell phone with a set of tiny screwdrivers, and feeds it to the man, bit by bit, until the man has swallowed the entire phone, and then waits six to 10 hours with the man until the phone has "passed," and then forces the man to reassemble the phone and use it to call his mother to apologize to her for being such a disappointment. And then he hurls the phone skyward so hard, it achieves low-earth orbit.
In short? Ice Beard Mark is pretty freaking tough.
Well, at least until the Ice Beard melts. Which it does. Almost immediately.
