Self-portrait with more leg hair; panel from the book I’m making for Lynda Barry’s class about starting testosterone (whatever starting means).
Four months on T
I am in an exam room, dropping my pants for a shot of testosterone. Nurse Katie has been giving me shots since the beginning, four months ago. She is down-to-business. I walk in and she says Okay, so tell me what we’re doing today.” And I say, “Well, you’re going to give me a shot of testosterone.” She already knows this, but it’s our ritual—she asks every time. Then: “Do you need paper shorts?” I hate the clinic’s paper shorts (one size fits all, or really, none) so I always wear a pair under my jeans—she knows this too, but always asks. I unpack my canvas bag. It has a hummingbird on it, kind of in an abstract way. Then I ask Nurse Katie how she is and on this particular day she tells me she “can’t wait to go to Boston for the marathon.” To run it, she means. Katie gives me my shot really quick. For her, injections are a highly developed motor skill. Not like the way I drive stick shift, stalling the car in a tiny parking lot where I’ve been driving circles for half an hour. Katie’s shots are one noiseless continuous motion.
‘C calls me “the reference desk” for the way I’m really good at the internet’ is what I wish I had written in my library school statement.
I often think that what I do falls somewhere between writing, librarianship, and oversharing on the Internet.
Also, I forgot to tell you about the complimentary New York Times subscription that comes with renting this place.
I read somewhere once that you can only read Wittgenstein in a hard wooden chair, no real reason, it just worked better that way, but I am reading Wittgenstein on the couch and it’s going reasonably well.
Down the street she notices a man in his yard in his undershirt standing looking up at the rain. Well not every day can be a masterpiece.
Nine weeks on testosterone. I recorded myself reading a new poem, at my dear brother Huck’s suggestion. Here is my voice.
Mine is a thing in here.
One day Professor Old Skull asked her Unthinkable Mind Students to do the exercise found on page 37 in Ivan Brunetti’s book, “Cartooning, Practice and Philosophy” but instead of doing each drawing on a separate index card, they folded a sheet of 8.5 x 11 paper into 12 panels and drew the following scenarios:
A) The beginning of the world
B)The end of the world
C) A self-portrait, including your entire body
D)Something that happened at lunchtime (or breakfast if it is still morning)
E) An image from a dream you had recently
F)Something that happened in the middle of the world’s existence
G)What happened right after that?
H) Something that happened early this morning
J)Pick any of the above panels and draw something that happened immediately afterward
K)Draw a ‘riff’ on panel ‘J’
L) Finally, draw something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything else you have drawn in the other panels.
A few days later, Professor Old Skull asked them to cut the panels apart and mix them up. Then she gave them a poem written by Thomas Treherne in the mid 1600’s and asked them to cut the poem up into 12 parts, maintaining the original order of the poem. Then students were asked to glue a panel above each part of the poem, trying to find which pictures made the page have a kind of resonance that can happen when two things don’t match up literally, but have some sort of swing between them.It’s a good way to get to know a poem, repeating it. Learning it sideways, as if it were a song.
This sequence features the work of Frontal Lobes, Corpus Callosum and Amygdala
