Last night, I slept as deeply and undisturbed as I have in months. I woke up this morning much later than I’d planned, my body heavy, and unwilling to move on its own. Seamus slept against my hip, Marlowe was curled up next to me, her little face resting against my head.

I took my time waking up, and coaxed myself out of bed.

The wood floors of my house felt cool beneath my feet as I made my way into my kitchen and made the first of what will be many cups of coffee — not because I need coffee, but because I’ve figured out a way to make cold brew coffee that gives me the most delicious cup of coffee I’ve ever had.

Through the living room, I paused to kiss Anne good morning. I walked down the hallway into my office, sat down in front of my computer, and began my day.

I read emails, checked the morning news, glanced at Twitter, moderated comments here and at Radio Free Burrito.

Then I looked at a blank composition window, unsure where to begin. I looked into myself, tried to find something that needed to be recounted, a story that needed to be told, an amusing event over the last few days that was clamoring to be translated from memory and experience into narrative.

I found a single thing, but it’s actually too personal and painful to share. That one thing, though, once identified, starts to feel like a bug bite, demanding to be scratched and then itching more, asserting itself more, the more I scratched it. Though it is, in relation to everything else in my world, very small, it became the biggest thing, the only thing, pushing out everything else

And yet, I can’t.

So I begin typing, putting together images and moments from when I woke until when I began assembling them into words.

And when I get to that point where the thing asserts itself again, it holds me and will not let me pass.

And so I write it, but I don’t press publish. I put it away, in a document that is just for me, and I write this instead.

My friend, Atom, has an EPIC beard that is so epic, his wife commissioned a song from Molly Lewis to celebrate it. That song is called The Year of the Beard.

I have had a beard in some form or another since the writer’s strike of 2007, when it started out as a solidarity beard, and quickly grew into an NHL playoffs beard, and finally into a “I’m lazy and this saves me literally minutes a day” beard.

I like having a beard, though I’ve always kept it very neat and short, mostly because I’ve been working on camera in some way or another, and I’ve needed to keep a constant appearance.

See, always I’ve never been able to drastically alter my appearance in any meaningful way, because for most of my life I had to either look like my headshot, or stay in continuity for the show or movie I was working on. Sure, I’ve done colors and even shaved it (which was awesome and I’d do again in a second if I could), but I’ve never been able to even consider a mohawk or sweet juggalo tattoo on my neck or bifurcating my tongue and changing my name to HISSSSSSSSS.

But I’m not really doing anything on camera at the moment, and I’m primarily working as a writer and voice actor, so what I can do, and am doing at this very moment, is let my beard just grow until I feel like doing something about it. At the moment, I don’t feel like doing anything about it until at least after JoCo Cruise Crazy, and I may even keep it through the production of Tabletop’s RPG Show, because I kind of like the idea of having a big old GM’s beard for that show.

Some people think it’s great, others think it’s horrible. I don’t particularly care what anyone else thinks, though, because it’s The Year of the Beard and mine is almost big enough to hide stuff in it.