"You know who you look just like?"


does this look like me? i should say not.

This guy who comes in the store a lot is obsessed with my beard. Every time I see him he tells me about how he used to have a beard but it went gray so he shaved it off. He rides a very, very expensive road bike and eats coffee beans to "satisfy his oral fixation" (his words not mine). He always tells me that I need to enjoy my beard while I can because it's going to go gray and I'll have to cut it. I've had this conversation with him several times, to the point that I think he's hitting on me.

Today he's talking to me, and I'm sort of ignoring him, sort of avoiding him, but he waits for me come back over to the espresso machine. He says, "Do you know who you look just like?".

ME: I have no idea...
GUY: US Grant
ME: Really? I don't know about that... we both have brown beards but...
GUY: You know who he was? The civil war general? I know a lot about the civil war.
ME: Well, I don't have a big cigar, so I don't know...
GUY: You know he smoked ten cigars a day. He died of throat cancer you know.
ME: Well, cigars are bad for you.
GUY: You know, a lot of people don't know this, but so many people back in the 18th and even the 17th centuries, like back in the 1700s, well they all had beards because they really didn't have anything sharp to shave their faces with...
ME: (stunned silence) Oh yeah? Huh...
GUY: Yeah, that's why you see all those old pictures with men with full beards, they looked like that because they didn't have a way to shave.

I chose the better part of valor and just agreed with him instead of citing a long list of examples about why that's not true at all. Why would you think that? I'm baffled by it. I can see how you might think that if you were talking about the 12th century, but even then you'd be wrong. Anyway, the dude creeps me out and wears wrap around sunglasses and lycra cycling shorts.
- posted by Mason @ 7:09 PM