Beard Talk

Right now I’m wearing a beard so my blog photo is a little out of date. However, my tentative plan is to shave off my beard next week, so I’m not going to update the photo.

I’m not wearing the beard as any kind of fashion statement.

A few weeks ago I cleaned out my closet and I found some old photographs of myself from when I went tandem skydiving with my friend Sandy. I was a bearded young man, back then, and I looked pretty happy. I remember feeling kind of happy back then, too. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll re-grow a beard and see if the look brings back a little cheerfulness.

The results have been equivocal.

Since nothing magical has happened—at least, nothing I know about as I type this—I might be going back to my more-or-less clean shaven look soon.

Next week Thursday will be my two year anniversary here at Impossible Kisses. I’m planning on updating my template and I might as well take the opportunity of updating my face as well. (Although the face bit will be going back to normal . . .)

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I’m not really a snapshot kind of guy, but in the spirit of being wildly unusual (the theme of the blog is Forteana, after all) I’m going to put up three of the photos that inspired me to re-grow my beard.

One note: I’ve actually blogged about this particular day once before. My post “Magic, The Elder Gods, Fall Festivals” took place as my friend Sandy and I were driving home from our tandem skydiving adventure. (Or maybe we drove into town for lunch while waiting for the wind to die down.)

Anyway, on with the snapshots—


One cool thing about rural airfields—this was at Hinckley Field, Illinois—is that the whole place feels more like somebody’s backyard than like a real airport like Midway or O’Hare. This kind of stuff, old wrecks along the runway, frightened my friend Sandy, but I liked it. I wish I’d been drawing back then, because there was a lot that would have made cool pictures. This is me still in my street clothes.




This is me suiting up. My head, typically, is in the clouds. If you look carefully above the clouds over my left shoulder you can see one of the experienced skydivers coming down.


Here I am completely suited up, thinking. This isn’t me having second thoughts. This isn’t me nervous. This is me being envious. The skydiving club had two planes back then. One was a rickety, old single engine thing that looked like it was held together by duct tape and kind thoughts. My friend Sandy and I went up in that. The second plane—I’m looking at the second plane in this photo—was a big, beautiful, twin engine plane that looked like it had just flown out of an Indiana Jones adventure. Since Sandy and I went up on the same flight, I don’t have any photos of me actually coming down.