By now, you’ve probably heard the news that everyone’s
beard is covered in poop. This revelation sheds a whole new light on the
lumbersexual trend, which may or may not be finally dying out as we reach
maximum beard saturation and the hairy pendulum begins to swing back the other
way. With any luck, the scoop on poopybeards will help this along.
The long and short of it is that a news anchor in New Mexico
swabbed an unspecified (but doubtless too small to be statistically
significant) number of men’s beards and then shipped the samples off to a
microbiologist for analysis, presumably without dipping them down his pants
first. The microbiologist allegedly found some poop on some of the beards. Why
is there poop in your beard? Because you don’t wash your hands after you go to
the bathroom, or if you’re like some of the scruffy male diversions of my
misspent youth, you don’t wash your hands at all.
While various news outlets are scrambling
to reassure that public that it doesn’t
have poop in its beard, I’m sitting here feeling all smug because this is
the exact reason why I’ve disliked beards for years. I mean, it’s not that I’ve
specifically suspected that you have poop in your beard, it’s just that having become
acquainted with perhaps more than my fair share of men, I happen to know that
men are somewhat, how shall I put this, less
fastidious than women are when it comes to their personal grooming and
hygiene habits. I mean, I once had a boyfriend who didn’t shampoo because he
believed shampoo is what causes men to lose their hair. Another boyfriend
refused to wear deodorant because he was convinced that antiperspirant is the
true cause of body odor and it’s all a conspiracy by Big Hygiene. I mean, to be
fair, he didn’t smell, but in retrospect, he probably had poop in his beard.
When I posted on Facebook about the poopybeards, one of my
friends (a man – coincidence? I think not!) pointed out that there
is poop all over everything, including your toothbrush, restaurant lemon
wedges, your computer keyboard, and the
money in your wallet. Also, since I have cats, everything is covered in cat
poop, including the cats themselves. My Facebook friend and fellow
writer Lee Anne Barnes remarked that she was happier before she knew that
everything has poop on it. Too right. I’m all for scientific advancement, and
there was a time not too long ago (about 20 hours, to be exact) when I wouldn’t
have placed any limits on it. But that was a carefree, innocent time, before I
knew that Science is going around checking everything for poop, and, more
importantly, finding it. It’s time to stop. There are some things we don’t need
to know.
