I have worn glasses for as long as I can remember. I know that this is only the fault of my poor memory, and that before fifth grade I didn’t need glasses. I have no first memory of glasses, but the the image that most clearly captures onslaught of spectacles for me is one from fifth grade, in which I have been saddled with a pair of black-framed reading glasses at least two sizes too large for my head. It is not a pretty picture, this ill-dressed aspiring intellectual trapped in shorts and a purple cougar-emblazoned t-shirt. It is the kind of angst that they write mediocre first novels about in MFA programs across the country.
Archive for the ‘Self-Portrait Series’ Category
Self-Portrait Series VII – My Eyes
Friday, August 5th, 2011
Self-Portrait Series VI – My Teeth
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011My teeth are big and straight, but they are not strong. It’s possible, I suppose, that my teeth were in fact strong, but that my treatment of them was so poor they were forced to succumb. I was exceedingly lucky with my orthodontics, which makes it all the more shameful for me that I haven’t taken better care of the teeth that came in so straight. I never needed braces, and my teeth could be attractive, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a dental checkup without a cavity, which may explain why dental visits are so fraught for me.
Self-Portrait Series IV – My Temples
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011I am waiting for my temples to go gray. They may have already and I just haven’t noticed, but I don’t think that’s yet the case. With my head shaved, it is hard to tell. There does not appear, at nearly 32 years old, to be any gray in my beard or my hair. I don’t know why I am waiting for the gray. I suppose that in my mind the gray hair is connected with wisdom, or perhaps more accurately, the appearance of wisdom. In my mind’s eye, the vision I have for the man I want to be, or the man I want to appear to be, I imagine that once I go gray, a patina of silver glinting in the stubble at my temples and my chin, that I’ll approximate in some way Brett Favre or The Most Interesting Man in the World: a weathered, handsome visage across which wisdom and experience are elegantly scrawled in silver script. Okay, I’m pushing it; wisdom may never be one of the things that’s written on Favre’s face, but there is something captivating, and handsomely grizzled in his appearance that I desire in mine.
Self-Portrait III – My Belly
Sunday, May 29th, 2011Somewhere out there, buried in a forgotten box tucked away inside an abandoned closet already full of things floating on the edge of abandonment, the limnal space between wanting to remember and needing to forget, there is a photo of me in my youth, 18 years old. My arm is wrapped around my first real love, the girl who would become my first true broken heart. The wound I left untended festered for years, its fumes producing a kind of intoxication, an impenetrable Delphic nostalgia against which nothing measured up, whose abyssal sense of loss I treasured much longer than was healthy for me or for the her that existed beyond the mythology I did not want see through. The photo was taken at school, after hours. I had finished with volleyball practice, and she was still in the yearbook room working on a deadline. It was a loopy kind of afternoon merging into early evening, the unusual feeling of being a usually strict place without much supervision or regulation. At some point that evening, somewhere in my things I discovered a tie, the one I wore in my senior pictures, and tied it around my head bandanna style. The absurdity of my bleached blonde hair combed upward, hommage a Kramer, set off by my refashioning of the tie is difficult to describe, and is in some ways inconsequential; it was high school and I didn’t care, or perhaps more accurately, I wanted everyone to know that I didn’t care. Read the rest »
Self-Portrait II: My Forehead
Monday, May 23rd, 2011There is a disfigurement in the center of my forehead, a small lump and a tiny star-shaped scar. I got it when I was 7 or 8 years old. We had just moved to Southern California and were living in a shitty two bedroom condo in a complex called Countryside. Its cruelly ironic moniker another example of the wishful naming culture of Southern California and reminds me of the diatribe of Wesley Snipes’ wife in White Men Can’t Jump (a staple of my youth) about living in the Vista View apartments: “There ain’t no vista, there ain’t no view, and there sure as hell ain’t no vista of no views!”