Thanks to A.J. for asking me to fill in this week. My non-TSB blog is here.

Last Friday I shaved off my eight-month-old beard and almost no one noticed. I went to all my usual places, some with people I see every day, and while I never tried to guide the conversation to the newly-wide expanses of my face, I made plenty of eye contact. I sent a photo to a friend, who responded “Haircut!!!” A coworker — my one direct-report, who dressed as me for Halloween at work — had never seen me without a beard, so she noticed. I concluded that I reside in a few dozen humans’ mental HTML as:

[beard] Ben [/beard]

This is the inciting incident of Emmanuel Carrère’s 1986 novel, “La Moustache,” which he adapted into a film 20 years later. The lead, Marc, shaves off his mustache after 10 years, no one notices, and intense psychological drama ensues. It’s unclear he ever had a mustache, when pressed on his lack of mustache, no one bites, is the photo evidence of his mustache real, etc. It’s very well written and oddly harrowing.