Greetings, readers of Beard Hair in My Coffee!

It’s no secret that I’ve been putting most of my creative efforts (with regard to writing, at least) on my other project, Iconoclast (which I hope you’re subscribed to!), but I’ve put in quite a bit of effort on this blog in the last year, trying to keep it going after 15 years and 10 months. Hard to believe this is turning 16 in January! I certainly have some of my annual posts coming up – my 5/5/5 music series and my yearly birthday post – but most of this year in the blog has been dedicated to the Oppdrag: Norge project, which continues ever onward.

But this space is still exactly that: a blog. It always has been and always will be. I realize that my fitness stuff has extremely low readership, which is fine, but I thought it would be fun to breathe some new life into Beard Hair by taking another attempt at National Blog Post Month (otherwise known simply as NaBloPoMo). I’ll still be sharing my Oppdrag: Norge updates (I have a dinner planned for next weekend), but I’ll also be sharing a variety of blurbs, shorter essays and excerpts from other things I’ve written, all over the course of the next 30 days.

This includes a series that I have been wanting to start for several years now called The Combined Man.

Years ago, I briefly worked for the Combined Insurance Company in Western North Carolina. And while my time there was short, my experiences there were vast and I’d love to share them with everyone. I was holding onto a lot of my desired content in the form of an outline, hoping to eventually fully flesh them out, but I finally realized that a long-form series they were not. Think of this more along the lines of the Miracle of Winn-Dixie series I posted a couple of years ago:

• Part 1: I Got a New Job
• Part 2: Steve
• Part 3: Dave
• Part 4: Bathroom Bitch
• Part 5: Tips
• Part 6: Let Me Find Someone Who Can Help You

The Combined Man will just be bite-size pieces of information about my experience working for what may very well have been a cult that preyed on the underprivileged.

So brace yourselves, dear readers. In the next 30 days, I’ll be sharing multiple shorts about my time with Combined, some current happenings in my life and some other observations that I’ve had that just aren’t the right tone for Iconoclast. I’ve completed NaBloPoMo once before, so I know I can do it again. 

The whole point, though, isn’t so much to finish, but to participate and write even more than I already do. I just hope y’all never get sick of it (or me).

-jtf

This is post 1 of 30 in my most recent attempt at tackling NaBloPoMo. Funsies and such.