I’m on my laptop, on the Internet in a car named Da Rio for Real. We are passing Hebron, ND, exit 102. Snow spattered fields are rolling by under a big ‘ol blue sky swept clean of clouds. Technology is amazing and I doubt I’ll ever ceased to be awed. Our generation might be the last to feel this way, since we remember a time of modems and yelling at family members to get off the damn Internet so we can use a phone.
Kerouac and Willie Nelson allusions aside, we’re going on the road again. The plan is Denver-Boulder-Gran Junction-Las Vegas-Sequoia-Fresno-San Francisco-Bozeman or something close to that. One benefit I did not realize about becoming freelance and mobile, doing what makes my heart sing, is that a big marker of home, work, follows you. I’ve written of some of the follies of this, how you can forget to take a vacation on your vacation, but one of the victories of this is that when you have ten hours sitting in a car doubling as an office, you tend to get a lot of your backlog hammered out.
In any case, I am not posting today about victories. Today, I face defeat. You may have been aware that this week I was engaged in a fierce competition with another blog, AIM To Travel. AIM’s curator, Josh Brownlee, and I faced off over who had the best facial hair. This morning the following missive came through from Josh.
dude, i just looked. I’m showing my two polls (how I had to do it) at12/4 for me and 5/3 for you. So 16/8 on my side and on yours 23/16 for you so that puts me at 32 and you 31 for you. Correct me if I’m wrong somewhere.
An adult loses gracefully. The mature man congratulates his opponent. He slaps him on the back. Maybe a little hard, but then he shakes the victor’s hand and says, “atta boy.” He does not come up with dubious rationales for reasons why his opponent should be DQ’d (And I’m not talking about Dairy Queened).
And I would have. I was ready to put on my disappointment-masking congratulations face and accept my defeat. That was before I had irrefutable proof that Josh acted totally unethically. Luckily, I have people in Asian who let me know about these things. Below you see Josh having infiltrated a classroom in the Far East where school aged children, under what could only have been the threat of violence, were forced to vote for Josh’s beard.
Unethical as Josh is, there are no rules to this game of life. We must accept the will of the people and all take a moment of silence to think about how horrible it is for a beard to lose to another beard. My current beard is new, just a baby beard, and when he grows up I don’t know how I am going to tell him that his father lost the first annual facial hair contest.
I even had Ryan Van Duzer endorsing my beard, which according to Travel Blogging Lore, should have made it impossible to defeat.
I guess even the Oracle of The Open Road gets it wrong sometimes. So Josh’s beard won fair and unethically. And based on readers votes, my defeat requires me to do the following emasculating things:
1. Stand on a busy corner for an hour holding a sign that reads, “My manliness was questioned and I lost”
I plan to do this in Vegas.
The next one is the one I really do not want to do:
2. Sing “I’m a Little Tea Pot” with actions. Wear your underwear on your head and post it on youtube?
Before I do this one, I definitely need to by new underwear.
