I should probably update this thing.

Seriously.

One of my childhood issues was that people kept mistaking me for a girl. It’s something you can still see a hint of today if you give me a girly wig to wear. I eventually grew out of looking like a full-on girl, and more like a lesbian butch¹. Facial hair, I had hoped, would eventually come to save the day and make me a real boy at last.

Unfortunately, my genetic makeup had other plans. Puberty kicked in late, with the first signs of leg hair showing up during my freshman year in college. My arms remained decidedly delicate, and my chest is as pristine as porcelain. Naturally, my dreams of looking like a disheveled hobo were dashed. Whenever I let my facial hair grow for weeks, I look less “Burt Reynolds” than I do “I got Dirty Sanchez’d”².

Lauren likes to call me “hormonally androgynous”, which is a really nice way of saying “girly man”. I happen to think, however, that beards look manly beyond the hormonal implications a face full of hair has. There’s something much more primal behind looking like you can house a squirrel under your jaw. We need only look at what life was like for our ancient ancestors.

In a word, it was shit. It was shitty and it was short. Life expectancy isn’t all that high if your idea of shelter is “whatever big thing you can hide under”, and the height of medical science was blowing on a boo-boo. Our ancient ancestors were ridiculously risky assholes who discovered what food was safe to eat by putting every damn thing they came across into their mouths. Tell me that the first human to drink cow’s milk wasn’t half-insane for sucking on a cow’s udder.

Totally not poisonous³.

So people in the earliest days of humanity were probably dropping like flies, stuffing their faces with brightly-colored mushrooms and learning the many different kinds of rashes plants can give you. Odds are, a good chunk of them weren’t even making it past puberty. It only goes to follow that those who survived long enough to grow full beards were the sturdiest motherfuckers on the early end of the Paleolithic Era. Dirty, mangy facial hair, then, was the ultimate sign of badassery, the biggest middle finger to the face of mortality. It was what made our ancestors MEN.

Hair has very much been tied to the concept of masculinity. Aside from the fullness of the soup-mops that sprout on our faces, there’s also the matter of color. Like in silverback gorillas, white hair is a sign of dominance. The first people to ever grow it didn’t just live long enough to develop beards, they survived past the point where their bodies can produce hair pigment. It was a sign of experience, wisdom, and an incredible resistance to bacteria. White-haired cavemen were like a bad meme – they just wouldn’t die.

I HATE YOU SO MUCH⁴.

On the flipside, male pattern baldness is often brought about by an overabundance of testosterone⁵. Though normally counterintuitive to the concept of “more facial hair = more badass”, a shiny dome is representative of the fact that you are too fucking manly to need scalp protection. Your hormones are chugging beers and kicking the shit out of your hair follicles. You literally have way too much man-juice for your head to handle.

It’s no wonder, then, that we see balding men with a decent amount of facial hair as paragons of “Do NOT Fuck with Me”. People like…

Bill Goldberg

Denton Van Zan from Reign of Fire

Kimbo-Fucking-Slice

And… and…

Holy shit. SANTA.

Based on the criteria we’ve established, Santa Claus is one of mankind’s greatest badasses, second only to Norrisaurus⁶. When you think of it this way, Christmas is the time of year when the Ultimate Alpha Male breaks into our homes, eats our food, and leaves shit he had  slaves make for zero pay. Santa is fucking hardcore.

And so, given my Christmas wish and this stunning revelation, I feel it is only appropriate to leave you all with this greeting:

Happy holidays, y’all!

Footnotes:
1. See “Aiza Seguerra”.
2. If you don’t know what a Dirty Sanchez is, and you value your faith in humanity, I urge you to NEVER look this up.
3. Amanita phalloides, AKA the Death Cap Mushroom.
4. I really fucking hate this meme. It is nowhere remotely funny, and deserves to be buried  in a pit of shit.
5. SCIENCE.
6. The logical inevitability that Chuck Norris will one day become an even bigger badass by splicing himself with dinosaur DNA.

It was with this innocuous tweet that I discovered the latest addition to my Beerpocalypse survival kit.

But what IS Beerpocalypse, you ask? Simply put, I’ve got a love affair with tasting different beers. Every so often, I treat myself to a tiny binge of multiple frou-frou beers, a self-indulgent alcoholfest I like to call Beerpocalypse. And yes, I’m the only one who calls it this. I’m a silly monkey.

When I heard (read?) about the Zinger Double Down from KFC, I knew immediately that this would be a perfect food for my next Beerpocalypse. Rather than just tell you why, I thought it’d be nice to supplement the reasons with pictures. This, of course, means I’d have to hold another Beerpocalypse.

Behold, the evening’s culprits!

So, why exactly is this most glorious of sammiches such a shoe-in for a night of beer-debauchery? Four reasons:

1. It’s What You Look for When You Have the Drunchies

From my experience, when people have the drunchies (drunk munchies), most folks tend to look for salty foods with a little bit of grease on it.

Oh, hello.

The original Double Down was exactly what the doctor ordered, with a little bit of an upgrade – the heat. Which brings us to Reason #2:

2. It Makes You Drink More

When you want to all-out binge on beer, you’ll want your food to encourage this behavior. The Zinger Double Down is a pretty spicy piece of meat, making you reach for your mug a little more often than normal. It certainly helps that beer is an excellent choice for taming the flames dancing on your tongue.

Totally not photoshopped.

In fact, it creates a vicious, yet delicious, cycle of eating and drinking – you drink and get hungry, you eat and need to drink, and you continue until you’re a happy, unconscious lush lying on the kitchen floor. Not that eating’s a problem because…

3. It Goes Great with Beer

It’s meat; glorious unadulterated meat. And it’s spicy. How can it not taste good with beer? This being Beerpocalypse, of course, I wanted to choose a fancy beer to go along with it. Rogue Chipotle Ale did the trick, with its peppery flavor complementing the heat of the sandwich.

Of course, it’s great with just about any beer you can buy. You’ll be enjoying your brews by the bucket with this baby on hand, which works out swimmingly since…

4. It’s an Awesome Hangover Cure

Remember how you look for salty foods with a little bit of grease? That’s because SCIENCE has found that rich, fatty meats like bacon actually help people get over hangovers. Meat contains protein, which breaks down into amino acids. Those amino acids help replenish the neurotransmitters lost during a ravenous tryst with beer. In short, meat helps your brain feel better.

The next time you’re feeling hungover, then, shove a meatwich into your mouth.

‘Til the next Beerpocalypse!