Brains!

Going Presi-mental in a two-part series

OUT, DAMNED SPOT!

This is going to be gross. When you’re burning through the final embers of your First Amendment rights, and it’s Sleepy Holloween season, you might as well both delight and disgust.

I would like to share my little brain with you. Look away if you must.

For my entire life up until Thursday, I had an ugly mole on my scalp. I had other moles which my childhood doctor removed one day all in one fell scoop, including the trademark birthmark on my forearm that seemed significant enough upon birth to include in my natal records. There are stitch scars where my founding stain used to be, so to remark my lost mark, I circled the void with the logo of my Stain Bar, and around that, more recently, encircled it again with the romantic record-playing diagram for future aliens to find on the Voyager mission riding into the outer ether eternal.

These moles had been deemed “irregular,” so they were excised. But not my nasty scalp bump. I asked the doctor then (at age 12 or so?) if he’d get rid of this gnarly thing and he said no, that would require shaving some of your hair and take too much trouble for the 1980s or blah blah major headwound bleeding.

Well, fast forward four decades with all the derma-tech advances to turn flesh-women into plastic Barbies, and I’ve clocked in many hours just mindlessly reading and tugging at what became known through the years as my “little brain.” My mini-mind. What the rare hairdresser might snag with a comb and say “ewww.” I’ve tried to pull it off, as any tactile imperfection on my anatomy drives me nuts and becomes a project to ruin. Of course that made it worse, and bumpier. If you zoom in, as I was able to do the other day, with some super awkward attempts at photographing the backside of my head, you can really see that it looks like a little bit of my brain ooze. Maybe my mental matter is leaking. Maybe this is the rotten sauce that makes me special. The ounce of mucky magic of my uniqueness. My soul sputtering in a coagulated nugget of squishy tongues.

I had an appointment to remove it at last, which the dermatologist said would require “surgery,” i.e. blade and stitches. Instead, when I got there and she took a more careful gander again, she figured it might be a shaving-blade kind of job, with some cauterization if that notorious headwound bleeding wouldn’t stop. In moments after the prick of a numbing needle, my tiny alien life form was gone. The doctor was as excited as I was that this proved to be like a tree without roots, only a trunk, and she could trim it at its base without digging in. I smelled burning, zap zap zap from some beeping machine, but apparently I only lost all of two hairs and the wound was now singed shut.

I have a Show & Tell I’m hosting in a few weeks, I said, I was hoping I could keep this to share during my intro? She thought I meant I regretted removing it. You want me to put it back? No, I mean, can I leave with this thing, like have it preserved in a little jar forever, please? Like they do with organs at the Mütter Museum in formaldehyde, so I can display this in an alcove over a tiny tealight? We had a good laugh about my request. No, she said, you can’t keep it. It goes off for a biopsy and doesn’t return. But could it—come back? I want it! No, sorry, it really can’t. Oh well.

But here’s my dude* in the nude before he departs to the lab and his final demise. (*Which is odd actually, because when it was attached to my head it struck me as female, since my brain and its ooze is surely a “too-much-ness” extension of my gendered self. Surrounding the operation it had to become an ‘it’ so we could remove ourselves from any empathy of excessive feeling for this neutral nonentity. But now? From this jar it seemed male somehow. The kind of male who might have thought he was something significant back in the day but now amid all the broken bravado he just seems small.)

Ewww!

MIND MAPPING

You’re still here? Cool. If it’s true that we only use a tiny portion of our brain matter, what if my mini-mind was actually the tiny portion that mattered, held at bay externally because it was agoraphobic or something and needed breathing room and access to the exits?

An important takeaway from this week’s tangential research for me was to myth bust the notion that we silly humans use but a wee fraction of our brains. In an article explaining how scientists are intricately mapping what cognition happens where and what thoughts alight what sections under our skulls, Science.howstuffworks.com reveals:

It is a myth that we use only 10 percent of our brains. We use it all. Brain images have collectively documented activity in all parts. What’s more, damage to a small area can wipe out major abilities.

1907 image of a brain, from p. 39 of Labour and Childhood

This poses a new concern for me: what if damage to my wee appendage diminishes the rest? Will I be bedumbed now without my secret superpower. Lobotomized. Perhaps calmer and less chaotic? So far so good. Contrary to what I expected, I don’t feel depleted by the loss of my little brain. Not even nostalgic or wistful. I feel smooth at last, free, and can’t wait for day four when the Dr. said I can finally wash my greasy hair again, if gently around my burn-scab.

You know who else has a little brain he thinks is the cat’s pajamas?

Here’s a short montage of earlier footage from Mr. T’s first romp in the White House and campaign when he already packed in enough brain-talk to enter the Hall of Fame Brain.

• I know I have an IQ better than all of them.

• I guarantee you my IQ is much higher than any of these people.

• [When asked what experts he consults]: I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain.

• Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest.

• I know words, I have the best words.

Stephen Hawking, right up there in the real genius ranks with Einstein, has the quiet confidence to know better than brag about his measurements. “People who boost about their IQ are losers,” he said, from his perch on the space-time continuum.

Meanwhile, ever since our subject started yawping on the national stage, overeducated but well-meaning neuroscientists in windowless labs on undisclosed campuses have been adjusting their dials on their EEGs, frantically mindmapping the Presidential brain all day long every time he speaks or Tweets, in a mad dash before he cancels their funding. Admittedly, it’s hard to keep up. And once they think they’ve paired the sentence or fragment to a certain bundle of firing synapses in a particular region of whichever lobe, the neurotransmission darts willy nilly pell mell to another portion of the brain as part of Patient T’s so-called artful and inspired rhetorical “weave” technique. (They’ve also brought in a team of linguistic experts who politely disagree, referring to it as “tepid smegma.”) In any case, it seems with 88.7% certainty, says researchers, as if the man indeed does use all of his brain, in a sort of fingerpaint smear everything everywhere all at once 24/7, and that the output of words therefore has almost become in this relentless spasm over every surface (gilded office digs included) the sort of puree served via straw (plastic not paper please) in a nursing home, as when the child has gleefully overmixed the distinct paint colors which then tragically can only be defined as brown. But here’s one recent mind map the PhDs shared with me in the wee hours, with the regions identifying only a smattering of Trump’s “greatest hits”—“because we could barely make it fit legibly on one page in a nice graphic as it is.”

If this is hard to read (though you can click to expand), they did say they are working instead now on condensing this into a topical map, more of a legend or table of contents. Meaning, you might have the region of Epstein Isle, the corner of Lunatic Left, the not-so-distant Third Term, King, Tariffs, Penis Size, Windmills, Straws, Murderous Illegals, Sleepy Joe, China, My Daughter is Hot, etc. etc. But then it scrambles again and they throw away the draft.

Off the record they also told me, as advised by the linguists, you can just as easily replace the rotation of rando stand-in quotes with a word cloud a la the dirt smog surrounding Pig-Pen with arrows in any direction:

nonsense balderdash blather blether rubbish drivel gobblegook poppycock claptrap mumbo jumbo tripe hogwash baloney bilge bosh bull bunk gibberish gabble gibber blah blabber hocus-pocus tattle hokeypokey babble jabber burble jabberwocky twaddle double-Dutch malarky drivel rot bunk gab twitter patter cackle prattle chatter double-talk abracadabra slobber clatter prate clack hot air wind bafflegab gas crap hot air fatuity hoodoo muck bunkum hokum piffle taradiddle garbage humbug rot

The GPS won’t stop recalculating. It’s enough to make your normal size, full capacity brain ache.

Without my mini-mind in a jar, whatever will I share for the Show & Tell now? Of all my worldly goods, the only things I seem to find compelling enough for storytime are the dead ones. They come with more charge. Spark more joy. Maybe my metal film canister of cat ashes and the epic tale of their creation will do. That should both delight and disgust enough. Stay tuned.

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