Fuck. Fuck. Shaving your chest is a terrible idea! I awoke this morning with razorburn and the t-shirt I am wearing has stuck to me all day. Gross. I would have hoped for at least one day of smoothness. But no. I’m stubbly. Had I really premeditated the action, I would consider chest-shaving to be an ill-conceived plan.

I had not planned to return to the journal quickly, but I had to get this down before the details escaped me. I evaded lunch with workers both because I didn’t want to do the hour-and-a-half state-employee lunch that they’re famous for, and because I really just preferred my own company today. So, right after they left, I lit out for the one place in Chapel Hill that I could be guaranteed they would not go: the U-Mall. My intention was to eat at the new Bear Rock Cafe, but the lines were everlong, so I went with old standby Chik-Fil-A. The place was packed, but there were no lines. Literally, maybe ten seconds passed between the time I uttered my order and the time I had my change and food in front of me. Well met, Chik-Fil-A!

I snagged one of those two-person booths, which was the last available seating, facing out towards the mall area so I could do a little people-watching. The first person to come in after I sat down was 6′10″ monkey Kris Lang, who I am pleased to report will no longer be playing for Carolina next season. He has shed the pencil-thin beard, which makes him look like less of a moron, but I did sneak a peek at him having difficulty paying the right amount for his food. So, beard or no beard, the boy is dumb.

A blonde woman was pacing just in front of the entrance to the restaurant, talking on her cell phone. (This is no food-court Chik-Fil-A, oh no. This one is a store unto itself.) She was clearly agitated by whoever she was talking to, which made her fun to watch. (She was cute, too, which was part of the fun of watching.) At one point, our eyes met and she smiled a kind of awkward smile, which I interpreted as the “you watched me having a fight on my cell phone in public, and I’m ashamed” smile. I immediately darted my eyes back to that delicious chicken sandwich.

Over the next few minutes, she became louder but less physically animated. She stopped pacing and camped out to one side of the Chik-Fil-A entrance, and raised her voice slowly. It was obvious that she was having a fight with a boyfriend or husband, and though I was closer to the counter than the entrance, I could pick up that she was upset that he had not come home until very late the night before. “You don’t respect me.” She said that four or five times. I think by then, a lot of people in the restaurant were looking at her. Kris Lang was– he eyed her carefully on his way out.

Still arguing, she shuttled in and without missing a beat, ordered. As though she were punctuating her verbal aggression with the beat in which she was talking to someone else. I wasn’t watching her as she did this– my back was to the counter– but I was a little surprised when, after she got her food, she wandered right up next to my table and surveyed the seating situation. She made a snide comment about someone named Corey, and then, without moving the phone at all, leaned down to me and asked if she could sit with me.

I gave her the “have a seat” hand motion and spent the next four minutes trying my best not to look at this woman, who had now lowered her voice but was still spewing venom at this guy. (”You don’t respect me” again. Twice.) But I couldn’t help myself– she was, after all, seated directly across from me. And once again, we locked eyes for a brief second, and she gave me the same clumsy smile.

I finished eating as quickly as I could, and left the table. “Hope it works out,” I kind of muttered to her as I was leaving.

I’m a little mystified by this one, folks.

I suppose it’s kind of passe to begin a journal with some thoughts on journaling. So I’ll do it.

I’m a really horrible journaler, or journalist, or whatever you call someone who journals. I’ve tried a number of times to start them, and I always end up with a nice notebook that has writing on two or three pages and then a lot of white. All those imposing blank pages. And I’ve always begun journaling with very unclear motives… I’ve never cared much for recording my thoughts so that I can come back to them, at least not in prose form. I used to write a lot of poems, and those were better journals than anything else. I kept finding that when I committed an event to paper, it dried up in my memory and became nothing more than what I had managed on paper. But whatever I could capture in a few lines… and it was never an event as much as a snapshot… that stayed longer.

But the idea of journaling here is like a creepy, attractive thrill to me, because I have been peeking in on all of you from afar, and regularly. I wonder how many of the regular readers in the journal section know the writers; I’m guessing that a lot of you are reading the tasty morsels left by folks you’ve met at the Theater or at festivals. I don’t know a single person whose journal I’ve been reading. I’m not in New York, or Chicago, or LA, or anywhere with a particularly hopping improv scene. Which alternately makes me feel like I’m the ideal audience for these journals, and like I’m a real bastard voyeur.

So, I could rationalize this journal as an attempt to sort of give something back and assuage some of that voyeur guilt, but it really isn’t that. It’s actually pretty cowardly in a lot of ways. I just need a place to say things, and I feel like this is a pretty harmless forum. I only have two or three friends who will wander by and see this journal, and they seem so far removed from my everyday life because they are in New York. I have met one or two others through Improv Everywhere missions that may see this. But for the most part, I can keep a very public journal and still enjoy a degree of anonymity; it’s in some ways an attempt at community with people who wouldn’t know me if they passed me on the street. And that’s really comforting right now, as I find myself more and more in need of solitude, retreating to an empty house a few more nights each week. Where I promptly hop on these, and other, boards.

I think this current malaise is not unlike the summer that Anthony accused me of locking myself in my room to obsess over a girl. Same general M.O., only no girl involved. Which is actually nice… the last month or so is the first stretch in a while where I haven’t found myself obsessed with some girl or another. So maybe it’s a well-adjusted malaise?

Whatever is up with me, I find that I’ve had some strange compulsions of late. The big one involves my bathtub. I’m a notorious night person, which makes me completely dysfunctional in the morning. If I don’t shower when I get up, I won’t wake up until one in the afternoon, which just wouldn’t work for a 9-to-5. So, like I have just about every day for a couple of years, I’m showering every morning. But when I get home at night, for the last three weeks or so, I am compulsively drawn into the bathroom to soak in the tub for 20 minutes. And on occasion, twice a night. It’s not overwhelming or anything, so I don’t find it outrageous or terribly strange, I’m just kind of cognizant that I have been enojying a tub full of hot water more than TV or books lately. Toss a couple hundred mp3s in random order so I won’t know what I’m getting, turn the stereo up, and hop in the tub. In fact, I’m quite certain that’s where I will end up when I finally hit submit tonight. But then, tonight, I kinda need to hop in the tub or shower.

I think that if I have an emerging psychosis and the whole bathtub thing is the first sign, the second sign occurred when I took a break from writing this about 15 minutes ago. I had to wear a suit to work today, and I left the AC off at home, so my house is pretty warm. So when I changed clothes after work, I didn’t bother with a shirt. (I have a bug bite on my chest which drove me nuts for an hour today while I was in a meeting, so I wanted to scratch at that.) And, as I was finishing a bathroom break during the detailing of my voyeuristic fascination with the IRC journals, I looked in the mirror, and without thinking much about it, grabbed a razor and shaved my chest.

I am at a loss as to what possessed me to do this. I was halfway done before I thought, “Holy shit, I am shaving my chest. This is abnormal.” This was not a particularly difficult chore, as I have never been very hairy, but what the fuck compelled me to do it?

Not that chest-shaving is particularly scandalous. Admittedly, I don’t have much of a chest to show off, and don’t plan to show it off to anyone anyhow. But it’s not something I had done before, and not something that I can rationally explain. It’s almost like I did it in a fugue state.

It’s something I’ll mention to my friend Constantine. He’s just opened his own office for hypnosis, and I’ve been toying with going in there to see if I can get some benefit from it. He claims that hypnosis can be used to control addictions, limit chronic pain, increase your energy, and lose weight. (He also confessed, in one of his more drunken moments, that in times of extreme self-pity, he has used hypnosis tactics like suggestion and mild trancing to pick up women. This may explain the constant stream of 21-year-old women that he picks up despite his really unflattering British invasion haircut. I am almost certain but unable to confirm that the haircut is merely masking for a hearing aid, so at least he has an excuse for the do.) My real interest in hypnosis is memory recovery. I don’t think I have painful repressed memories or anything, but I do feel like a lot of the past couple years– good years– are hazier than they should be. And I’d really like to be able to pluck more out of that haze, and remember the conversations and events that my friends refer to and I sort of shrug and nod about. It’s all, somehow, lost to me. And that pisses me off.