From the consensus of both digital and analog friends, I realized unequivocally that the beard had to go – at least temporarily.

Still, fearing withdrawal pains, I decided I’d best ease my way out of the world of facial hair. Hence shaving partially, yet leaving something so horrendous that after a couple of days I’d be rarin’ for the chance to hack off the rest.

The resulting final product combines the Fu Manchu of Ben Stiller’s nursing home orderly in Happy Gilmore with a standard beret-and-bongos soul patch. Like, dig, man:

On my way to lunch, sporting the new look, I’m pretty sure I saw at least one person point and laugh.

Update

According to several sources, the Fu Manchu / soul patch combo was treading too close to goatee territory, clearly the nadir of cool (hipster or otherwise). Therefore, I have reductively switched to child molester mustache, leaving me looking like (by varying accounts) either the policeman from the Village People or the lost Mario Brother:

Update 2

Sooner than expected, I’m back to clean-shaven, as my Cyan colleagues Yoav and Colin refused to hold this afternoon’s budget and casting meeting with me still sporting the thoroughly ridiculous mustache.

Completely hairless, my face feels oddly naked.

On my Uncle David’s exceedingly kind invite, spent yesterday making a travesty of eighteen holes of golf out on Long Island. The weather was dismal when we set out, so I embarked sans sunscreen and returned having burned on the World’s Greatest T-Shirt Tan.

Frankly, I think I’ve found my new look.

I’m not going to lie. At 23, I still find poop jokes wildly entertaining.

Because I would so totally dress my kid in this for Halloween.

A sick-at-home-all-day addendum: For some reason, my feverish brain feels much better while I’m playing Aimee Mann in the background. In particular, “Two of Us,” a Beatles cover she performs with her husband Michael Penn on the I am Sam soundtrack. I must have played that song some 100 times today. I have no good explanation.

For much of April and May, largely due to the stress and excitement of starting Cyan, I’d been having trouble sleeping, waking in the middle of the night. Within the last week or so, however, the company has finally started falling into place, and I’ve once again returned to sleeping through the night. I’ve noticed that I’m now sleeping unusually soundly, as if dropping instantly into full nights of REM sleep to make up for the prior insomnified months.

As a result, I’ve begun dreaming rather vividly. Though I hadn’t realized it, somewhere in the weeks of broken sleep, I stopped having dreams. Now they’ve returned with a vengeance, startling in their realism and fascinating for the people and places I’d long since forgotten they recreate. Were I a Freudian, I suppose I’d see these dreams as a window into my soul, a glimpse of my true nature. As I’m not, however, the whole thing just sort of weirds me out.

During the last few months, several readers I know in real life have pointed out that the picture in my bio was getting fairly old, and looked decreasingly like me (a combination of a few years of aging, a fairly significant haircut, and losing the glasses in favor of contacts.) To avoid misguiding curious readers intent on factoring me into their burgeoning fantasy lives, I’ve updated the head-shot. As I haven’t had a set of business shots done since the ones I intended to replace, I fell back, instead, on a cropped version of a promo shot from a no-holds-barred fight. Yes, sadly enough, that’s my best attempt at looking ass-kickingly menacing.

The ritual continues. This time, I forgot my belt.