In a Glass Darkly

Much of the jaw I was born with is gone and in its place is an artfully bent bone from my leg. That then is attached by some sort of medical steel or titanium to hinges that are now my jaw and upon which my future hopes of eating and speaking rest. Right now, my mouth and jaw are odd, to be nice about it. My lips feel as if they have cramps, and are just working out how to operate-the bottom lip is swollen, the top is recessed as if I were half siliconed Hollywood starlet, half Jethro Bodine.

Anyone who knew me before would know me now--but of course it would be obvious that something was amiss. They'd see the swelling on the left side of my face as abnormal and the contour on the right--depending upon their intimate knowledge--not quite as was. I did ask for the Brad Pitt look--I mean come on, 18 hours of surgery? I should be able to look like anyone after that!--but I will end looking somewhat Mark Price-ish.

Nothing wrong with that--ostensibly when I look in the mirror that's who I'm looking for in the roundest sense. The idea of the person who was carried forward in the augmented guy who is, and the look to go with it.

I have avoided a lot of mirror time. Some of what I see is painful to me to look at, though I do have to shave. Now that's fun--a lot of my lower face and jaw are somewhat numb-ish, and shaving numb skin is sort of like petting a dead stuffed dog.

I have at various points of my life contested the idea that I'm vain. Mostly because I've never thought I was that spectacular looking to begin with, and rarely have I ever been able to uphold the sorts of regimens typically associated with vanity. Brushing my hair bores me, so I keep it short. 5 step skin regimens scare me, so I use soap. The idea that I'd rub product x into my face in the morning, product y during the day and product z at night seems a prison sentence.

But vanity comes in more forms than simply consumer-driven obnoxiousness. It's surely, too, the desire to never slip from the perch one occupies on the attractiveness ladder, wherever that happens to be; it is the hidden mathematics by which one calculates social value by how many heads turn at room entry or not; too, it is the calculation over time of capital depreciation, of how one head turning when you enter the room at 50 is roughly equal to 12 when one was 25. It is the fact that one thinks of this crap whatsoever.

I am vain, then.

Because vanity is thinking of the self before, say, the suffering of one's fellow man, it is surely the least attractive quality of our social selves, but the most common. I grew up surrounded by the idea that one should not be vain, but I was  given every example of how we are, simply by nature. In my later teens and twenties, too, I heard about how horribly vain gay male culture was, and how shallow and horrific and judgmental, as if it stood alone outside any other in viciousness. Hardly.

If I'm seeing in a glass darkly these days it's not because I'm gay. I utterly reject that line of homophobia that claims gay men as unique purveyors of this sin. I'm vain because I was trained by Proctor and Gamble, among hundreds of other companies over thousands of hours of commercials to distrust how I look what I think, the packaging of my self, my face, the play of my emotions. I was drilled by my father on how not to cross my legs, what a sissy is, what a man isn't. Every impulse I had as a person was microscopically examined for what was wrong with it, how it didn't fit and why it wasn't good enough.

Our culture is a vanity trap. Most cultures are.

Even Amazonian tribes rub mud circlets on their breasts and thighs just so to attract fecundity or emphasize fertility. In the absence of mirrors there's the rough glass of sexual choice to make an upland tribesman in New Guinea feel hot. That, and his ability to snap the neck of a forest boar quickly and efficiently.

I'm thinking of all these things this morning as I'm rubbing my hand over my right cheek and trying to figure out how long it's going to take before I look as I did. I'm aware when people look at me what they are looking at, and how long they look at it. On one of my first outings with Scott to the grocery store, someone bald face stared at me and I thought I would take my cane and beat them until they couldn't see. Luckily, my energy was being used up in the art of motion, not the art of the social beat down.

I would think it easier, overall, to emerge altered from surgery if one is coupled than not--but in my case, I don't know that to be entirely accurate. I worry that Scott comes out of this deal having committed to Don Juan and then finding himself emotionally chained to Quasimodo. That algebra comes directly from the movies, I suspect, or the plot of some god-awful movie of the week I was too lethargic to turn off. One that impressed upon me that value is 2x looks if x=true love and y is =true choice.

Luckily, I chose someone who liked my brain as well he enjoyed the angle of my nose (veers slightly left, naturally). Someone who is quite ready to deploy a far higher calculus when I try to argue the stupid mathematics that vanity pulls out of events, and usually the negative, and usually for the worst of reasons.

Yesterday, my niece changed her profile picture on Facebook to one that has a guy in it, pre-surgery, who I know. His hair, a bit too gray for my taste and his face, a bit too florid for my preference, are familiar. He may very well have been a looker in his time, but tsk, what time will do to one of those. One has to hope that, going forward, he has reserves of love and awareness of self to rely upon, because he is not going to be conquering any worlds looking like that. Or is he?