Day 1: I embark on an experiment with facial hair, having noticed that men won't grow beards anymore except the close-cropped mustache-goatee combo that makes you look slightly like Allen Ginsburg without getting you fired.

So I will let everything on my face grow unchecked, forging into the wilderness of itchy necks, uneven sideburns and beards that taste as much of my soup as I do. Then I will trim the hair into various styles and note everybody's reactions until I get at least a few people to stop speaking to me.

Day 5: Hair has spread from my clavicle to just below my eye sockets. People treat me like I'm drunk, and they keep taking away my car keys. On the plus side, when I ask people directions, they hand me coins and walk away before I get bored with them.

Day 11: I have trimmed my neck and upper cheeks. But I find there is no way to have a full beard and still feel particularly young or slim. One woman calls me “professorial” and fellow columnist Kevin Riordan says (by way, somehow, of a compliment) that I look “rabbinical.” These are not the words you want to hear when you're 41 and still dating. Apparently, a beard will take whatever your ethnic background is and make you look like an extreme, 60-year-old version of it. On the plus side, people continue to hand me coins.

Day 20: I descend further into madness, for I have shaven off just the chin portion of the beard, leaving a continuous connection of mustache, mutton chops and sideburns. This turns out to be the most fascinating stage of the experiment so far, and the hardest during which to keep from laughing.

The reactions to this style are amazingly consistent. Men try to place where they've seen it before. Neal Young? Metallica? Chester A. Arthur? Women, on the other hand, almost universally hate it. Oh, they don't say they hate it. They say, “Well. That hair. Certainly is. A statement.” Or, “Let me look at it. I like it. Let me look at it again. I like it.” These are things you normally would say to someone who likely will come back later with a pipe bomb and a Xeroxed copy of the Book of Revelations.

Also, you know how it is when you have some quick, fluttering encounter with some woman on the street? One of you holds the door open for the other or you turn a corner and nearly run into each other. Your eyes meet. You smile briefly.

Well, that doesn't happen when you have the mutton chops. Women look at you only for a nanosecond, which apparently is just long enough for all their instincts for survival to kick in. Then they turn their eyes away so fast, the direction they end up looking surprises even them. One of them looks straight up and walks into a sprinkler.

Day 28: I shave the mutton chops and sideburns, leaving the mustache and two extensions from it on either side that go down to the bottom of my face and hang off my jaw. A gay friend of mine points to a gay movie theater and says, “You look like you belong in there.”

Day 28.5: I shave off the two extensions that drop down to the jaw, leaving a mustache that is long enough to cover my upper lip. Now people say I look like a cop. This could be a problem, but still isn't as complicated as looking like a gay porn star.

There is a drawback to looking like a cop/19th century saloon keeper, though. Strangers keep patting me on the back. And they don't stop. Some French guy I've just met pats me on the back because I made a joke and …

Day 36: … his hand is still there. Three other people have joined him. They are starting a theater company. The whole thing is out of control.

Nonetheless, I have decided to stop the experiment here. The only thing left to do is shave off the mustache, leaving me back where I started – which, as I dimly recall, kind of reeked. So the mustache stays for now, along with the French guy.

I've proved my point in any case, which is that changing the way I shave can totally upend my position in society. Yet, despite looking – by society's standards – like a dork, you can survive outside convention, as long as you have the courage, grace and strange numbness that come when you realize you might never have sex again.