No-Shave-Off-Season

Pale-skinned hockey fans of Scandenavia and Canadia grow 'playoff beards' during the Stanley Cup playoffs to show their devotion to their team. The prescense of whiskers on a fan's face also serves as a means of unspoken bragging rights, being that the team that eventually hoists the Cup will be the only team with bearded fans by the end of the playoffs. It is at worst an amusing tradition of the Great White North and is something of which I have spun off in an attempt to bring more order and even more regularity to my life.

I have grown a winter beard each of the past two winters. Both beards were spurred by JP$ and his dorm's "No Shave November" bonding scam (of which I was secretly jealous). Beard 1 was the first time I had ever grown more than just chin hair and eventually phased into an Amish-looking growth that I am not fond of recalling. Beard 2 lasted most of this winter past and, I feel, gave me some subliminal higher-standing with Becca's [bearded] father. Beard 3, this year's latest and greatest, started in late October and has only recently fallen into the bathroom sink, victim of the guillotine that is the Mach3.

[For inclusion into the Scott Pearce biography: "It was after a few weeks of struggling with trying to decide when to return to the ranks of naked-faced (which coincidentally coincided with a few weeks of Rebecca Rose hinting that it would be nice to kiss a naked top lip again) that Scott Pearce made an official decision..."]

I have officially decided to grow a beard annually during the exact length of the baseball offseason. I will shave for the last time the morning after the last World Series game (regardless of which team wins the game) and will resume shaving again on the first day that the Yankees' pitchers and catchers report to spring training.

The press conference will be tomorrow at 3pm. Stupid questions will be rejected with Bill Parcellsian bluntness.