For every hero, there has to be a villain.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately since my recent discovery about Nystagmus.  It also turns out that there’s more of us at work than I thought – I’ve been informed that the number of people with this gift now stands at five.

But if there’s going to be a league of superheroes that all have the ability to voluntarily activate Nystagmus, then what good our we without a group of super villains in our midst?

I would imagine that in this instance, villains would range somewhere between the blind and the double-jointed.

But for every bunch of villains, there has to be the ultimate foe, a singular adversary, an arch-enemy; there has to be a nemesis.

For Superman, it was Doomsday.  For Spider-Man, it was Venom.  And of course for Morph, it was Chaz.

So I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to figure out who or what could possibly be so deadly, so cunning, and yet so ultimately evil that it could be my nemesis?

I think it’s my beard.

It sneaks up on me every single week.  I battle it regularly but it keeps coming back. Regardless of how much I try, I cannot defeat it.

Sometimes I don’t even realise it’s there. I often forget to shave, which I’m positive is due to my beard using some form of mind control on me. When I do remember, there’s never enough time. So every now and then, my beard grows bigger, longer, and far far stronger.

We’ve been fighting in a particularly epic struggle for the last couple of days.  However, I think I’m starting to lose this battle.  The more time that passes, the more and more it’s beginning to hurt.  The bristles are becoming sore. I can’t stop scratching my face. Even without touching my beard, I can still feel it, stabbing away at me from the inside-out.

Those bastardly hair follicles secretly sit there in wait, beneath my skin.  Without my knowledge, they burst through – and when the shaft gets long enough it causes immense pain.

I know that I could go and shave right now, but somehow my beard has incapacitated me.  I don’t know how, but it has discovered a weakness within me and now I just don’t have the energy to get up and do anything productive.

But the more I think about it, the more I begin to feel that there is something darker, far deadlier than my beard at work here. I don’t believe that my beard has the ability to do this much on its own.

Besides, the Jem’Hadar, Shredder, and even Darth Vader were all merely pawns carrying out the work of an evil higher power.  I see no reason as to why this is not the case here too.

I am convinced that this is not a regular beard on my face, and that the bears outside have something to do with it…