John McCoy

Out of touch

Getting a psychiatric diagnosis affects everyone differently. For many, it’s a catharsis, a key to self-discovery and self-acceptance. For others, it can be a troubling albatross, a confirmation that in some basic, inescapable way you will never quite fit in, not matter how hard you try. But one experience almost every newly diagnosed person shares is searching their memory for the clues to their condition that were missed, but now seem obvious: for all the past embarrassments, conflicts, deviations, and social failures that now have an explanation.

My first few weeks after being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder were full of denial. I told myself that I couldn’t be autistic because 1.) I was highly verbal; 2.) I didn’t have any sensitivities to the textures of fabrics or the sounds of chewing; 3.) I thought of myself as empathic to a fault, feeling shame for people who didn’t feel it for themselves; et cetera. But slowly I realized that none of this was cut-and-dry.

For example, I definitely have a lot to say (too much sometimes) when I get going on a topic that interests me, but I am super hesitant to talk with people I don’t know—and often even people I do know. I can talk too loud, I can mumble, I can stutter. I have to remind myself constantly to take turns with my interlocutors. And while for the most part I don’t have sensory issues, such as an aversion to anything but my favorite foods¹, but often when I am wearing layers in winter I have a sudden claustrophobic reaction and need to tear everything off at once. And while I may feel empathetic, I have a very hard time expressing it, to the point that a lot of people assume I am blowing them off.

Then there are some dead giveaways that should have tipped me off much sooner: my many stims, the oddest and most off-putting of which is my constant desire to rub my feet together; my ability to develop any number of special interests and to flit from one to another; and my tendency towards living entirely inside my head. I learned from my mother that when I was a little boy I would sometimes drift off into an unresponsive reverie and she had to shake me by the shoulder to get me to focus.

So long story short, I eventually accepted (though didn’t embrace) my disorder. It has become painfully obvious to me that if ASD had been viewed with the more expansive eye of contemporary psychological practice, I would have been diagnosed much sooner, which might have given me tools to fake that eye contact that neurotypicals seem so keen on for some inexplicable reason². This broader classification has led to more late-in-life diagnoses such as mine, as well as significantly more childhood ones, and is the obvious reason that reported ASD cases have greatly increased over the last decade, so RFK Jr. can go pound sand.

Eventually I worked my way through denial, bargaining, and depression (skipping over anger because I’m such a cool-headed guy³) and found my way into acceptance, however. By this I mean, paraphrasing Alan Watts, I started to become what I am. I embraced my obsessions, even the nerdy ones like math that I had tamped down so as not to bore people at parties. I found times and places to space out entirely and stim in all my weird ways. And I recognized a somewhat painful truth, which is that I don’t really like to be touched.

(This is where I assure my wife that I’m not talking about her. I have always loved her touch.)

What I am talking about it the various social ways people used handshakes, hugs, and (ugh) encouraging hands on shoulders. This had become a problem for me in the 2000’s because there was a growing norm that when you greeted people, or were greeted, you were expected to hug. Even men were often expected to hug other men, and it felt like a minefield to me. I was never sure how long or how hard I was supposed to hold on, and how to not be creepy about it, and it caused a lot of stress. My liberal self was glad that men were letting go of gay panic, but my autistic self was dying inside.

Two things happened that saved me: The #metoo movement brought scrutiny to previously tolerated behavior. And then there was the pandemic, which had even more of an effect. Over the course of a few years hugging became less and less prevalent, although there still are huggers out there, you just have to watch out for them.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, we got a dog, Hunter (see header image). Hunter is a large and muscular dog, half German Shepherd and half Catahoula (if you don’t know that breed, neither did we). He can look intimidating, and will bark fiercely at anyone with the temerity to deliver a package on our porch. But he is also a big softy and will snuggle up with any of the family (and strangers that we bring inside without his noticing). And he will vigorously lick, by which I mean he gets his whole foot-long tongue involved, and will stick it down your ears and your nostrils and anywhere else you don’t actively discourage him from.

And the weird thing is, while this seemed all too much at first, I became able to stand it. I told myself that Hunter needs to be able to express affection in his own language, and that whatever my personal reaction was (which was ick), this was something I could do for him. And herein lies the truth that I’m sure is obvious to neurotypicals, but which eludes many with autism: when you do something for someone you love, you can put up with a lot.

And so this is the blindingly simple life hack (again, ick) that I have learned from my dog. And while I don’t know if it will help me to hug any better, I’m all set the next time a four-legged friend greets me with their tongue in my face.

I even have a great fondness for unpopular flavors like licorice, cilantro, mushrooms, olives, pickled herring, etc. ↩︎
Honestly, guys, what the hell is this “windows of the soul” nonsense? Learn how to say what you mean and you’ll never have to guess what’s in someone’s head. ↩︎
This isn’t remotely true. ↩︎

The stream of warm impermanence

Strangely enough for a podcaster whose whole deal is revisiting high school assigned reading, very little of the plot of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) sticks in my memory. I know it involved a lot of wandering through the seedier parts of New York City, and that there was a lot of stuff about how phony adults are. There is one passage, though, that I remember clearly and think about often: a section where the novel’s runaway teen protagonist, Holden Caulfield, reflects on the enduring appeal of visits to the American Museum of Natural History. In particular, he describes the life-sized dioramas that—in his mind, at least—never change:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they’re pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’s be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

In this passage, Holden is seemingly describing an actual diorama that was on display in the AMNH when Salinger wrote the book: a depiction of an Inuit woman ice fishing¹. The scene has been preserved in a guidebook photograph from 1911:

But in spite of Holden’s prediction of the display lasting “a hundred thousand” visits, just four years after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye the AMNH had replaced that diorama with another, reflecting the changing ethnography of the time:

“Polar Eskimo” installation at the American Museum of Natural History, 1955

Today, of course, neither of these dioramas are still installed, and the term “Eskimo” is considered both overly vague and possibly offensive. Arctic natives are now referred to by their nation names of Innuit or Yupik.

Exonyms aside, in this passage Holden expresses a common assumption: that museums are by definition static, fixed in time, and that the objects they display are and will always be definitive. For some, like Holden, this seeming changelessness is a source of comfort. Others may find the idea petrifying or morbid. For example, Bruce Dickinson of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden has criticized Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, claiming “Rock and roll music does not belong in a mausoleum […] It’s a living, breathing thing, and if you put it in a museum, then it’s dead.”

Pro or con, immutability is implicit in both Holden’s and Dickinson’s words. But in fact, Museums are in constant flux. Sometimes changes are little. When I was in graduate school in Art History, the nautical artist currently known as Fitz Henry Lane was called Fitz “Hugh” Lane. While art museums everywhere (inluding the Fitz Henry Lane House) have corrected their attributions, I still find myself using the old name out of habit². Some changes are enormous changes. When I visited the AMNH myself as a young child, the Roosevelt Hall—the grand entryway from Central Park West—did not feature its current display of mounted Barosaurus and Allosaurus skeletons battling. Instead it had a series of bronze statues of Nandi warriors hunting lions³, and the dinosaurs it did have on display on the fourth floor were still walking upright and dragging their tails behind them. And, of course, the most famous dinosaur on display then was the Brontosaurus. The skeleton was one of the first excavated by Earl Douglass at the fossil deposit that would be designated Dinosaur National Monument. I had a toy Brontosaurus that we bought at the museum; it was a mainstay of my childhood, although the tail eventually got chewed away by the dog. And by me.

Marx toys *Brontosaurus* (mold from 1955). This palaeontologically incorrect toy line is, like so much of my youth, highly collectible.

But as you probably know⁴, this skeleton was in fact a frankenfossil, an Apatosaurus whose missing skull was replaced with one from a Camarasaurus. When the skeleton was re-mounted in the 1990s to reflect new beliefs about the posture of dinosaurs (no more dragging tails) it was re-labeled as an Apatosaurus. Brontosauri were, in fact, no longer considered a genus. Except in 2015 they suddenly were real again. As Ramona Flowers put it, “Dude…”

change — Bryan Lee O’Malley, *Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Scott Pilgrim Vol.6)*, 2010

(Warning: Politics) Recently I’ve been thinking about Holden’s dioramas a lot these days in relation to the complaints President Tump has made regarding the Smithsonian Institution’s collections and exhibitions. Putting aside issues of the legality or propriety of the Administration attempting to set policy for an institution that is supposed to be independent of any branch of government, this the culture-wars approach to museums seems to me to be related to the assumption that museums are, or should be, the caretakers of singular, true and timeless narratives.

Museums should, and do, take their role as authorities of truth—or at least, of cultural significance—seriously. Non-specialists visit these institutions in part because they trust curators to know their stuff. Visitors want to be guided through subjects they care about but of which they know little. But curators, conservators, registrars, and others who do know a lot have are also aware of how knowledge is never complete. They design exhibitions to reflect the current state of scholarship, and scholarship—in both the sciences and in the humanities—is constantly questioning and re-evaluating what we think, and asking what has been overlooked, and what assumptions got us here. Truth isn’t a matter of supporting a specific set of beliefs, and the stories we tell—even about ourselves—change the more we know. (end politics)

Nonetheless, I get what Holden is on about. As this blog has documented again and again, I’m full of misplaced nostalgia, and that can express itself as a general aversion to change. I think I have the most nostalgia for things that I wasn’t even around for the first time. As a child, I would visit Youngstown, Ohio’s Mill Creek Park. This park had a nature center that was housed in a 19th Century stone building, and within this was a display of old museum objects, including a shelf full of small animals and plants preserved in large jars of formaldehyde, with their contents written on peeling gum labels in a shaky copperplate script.

biological samples — I couldn’t find any photos of Mill Creek Park’s samples, so instead enjoy this collection of engravings of the zoological preservations of Frederik Ruysch.

These jars both fascinated and horrified me, and they gave me a lifelong love for Victorian and Edwardian museology—stiff taxidermy, dovetail jointed display cases, hang tags, and all the rest. They represent a time when knowledge consisted entirely of collecting, categorizing, and cataloguing. I don’t know if these jars are still on display, but the fear that they may no longer be has kept me from revisiting the park as an adult⁵.

photo by Kasuga Aho, licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

My favorite archaic museum exhibit, however, is Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond. Created by the wonder couple Charles and Ray Eames in 1961, one of the traveling versions of the exhibition is still somehow improbably on display at Boston’s Museum of Science in this, the year of our Lord 2025. This wonder of Mid-Century design could just as well be housed in an art museum. It drips with the charm of 1950’s typography, pastiches of Victorian broadsheet design, and cool, elegant physical objects demonstrating probability, topography, and number theory. A highlight are the “peep show” videos that accompany the exhibition. Here are a few:

Maybe it’s the sheer artfulness of this exhibition that has convinced the Museum of Science to continue to devote to a portion of limited floorspace to its presentation. It could also be that the subject of Mathematica is seen as pretty permanently fixed. But even mathematics changes, and perhaps one day this exhibition will also find its Brontosaurus.

I’m not sure what Holden would make of this essay. Like many of my posts, it sort of chugs along and then stops when I run out of things to say. I guess I hope he would understand that nothing is ever the final word—not museums, not scholarship, and certainly not blogs.

Holden says that the figure is a man, but Holden is wrong about a lot of things. ↩︎
I also still haven’t heard a convincing explanation as to why it was “Hugh” in the first place. ↩︎
These statues, by taxidermist and big game hunter Carl Akeley (or perhaps a separate set of bronze castings), are still housed in Chicago’s Field Museum. ↩︎
Being the kind of nerd that reads my blog. ↩︎
Well, that and having to travel to Youngstown. ↩︎

The Quest Begins Anew

From 1974 until 1977, when I was between six and nine years old, my dad was the minister at Youngstown, Ohio’s First Christian Church. This was a position which came with some strange perks: the church owned a literal mansion, the Myron Israel Arms home, which they called the “Disciple House,” and my family lived in this building for several months after moving to Youngstown from New York City, while we sought an affordable place of our own. Some of my memories of this time include sleeping on a tiny mattress placed in the center of a cavernous, empty room with marble floors¹; the bathroom that adjoined it had been furnished sometime in the 1920s in elaborate Art Deco tiling and still had a toilet whose tank hung on the wall overhead and flushed with a pull-chain².

The church building and the Disciple House were right next to the Butler Institute of American Art, which I visited often to see the fantastic scale models of masted ships, some tossed in realistic resin waves³. It was also surrounded by the Youngstown State University campus, whose Modernist library I wandered through freely; there was no security in those days, and I explored anywhere that wasn’t locked. As I recall the library had a floating staircase and that seemed like something straight out of The Jetsons.

One day when I was gadding feral⁴ about the campus, I discovered under a bush a discarded YSU yearbook, the 1972 Neon. The book was in tatters, and many of its pages had been cut to ribbons (presumably to remove personally-relevant photos), but what remained was intact, and so I flipped through it; to my kid mind, whatever this book was, it looked like it was probably full of adult stuff, and that made it enticing. There was a color section of grainy art photos of students staring into sunsets, or their post-degree futures, or whatever. There were stiff group photos of the Math Club and the Libertarian Society (which had four members).

But then, without warning, near the end of the book there was a many-paged comics section—but not a ha-ha funny comics section. It was a weird fantasy story drawn in the style of Frank Frazetta, featuring a bare-chested barbarian who walked through blasted landscapes strewn with corpses, and who confronted an antagonistic wizard. Interspersed between fantasy panels there were brief vignettes, drawn in a much more cartoonish style that recalled Vaughn Bodē⁵; these featured (mildly) satirical scenes student life on the YSU campus.

At the end of the story, the wizard opens a dimensional tear and spirits the barbarian away into the present-day university, where the barbarian, not understanding what happened, or why he is surrounded by disaffected hippies, smites everyone dead with his sword. In a final two-page spread he stands alone amidst yet another field of carnage as the entire scene dissolves into the John Tenniel illustration of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.

Of course, being six or seven, I had no context for any of this. My child-mind saw only death and destruction involving the campus I was currently inhabiting. Looking about, I saw the students wandering to class, long-haired and bell-bottomed, apparently un-smitten by barbarians. I was shaken to my core. What even was this? Why would someone draw this? I was nearly as upset as I was after sneaking a peek at an issue of National Lampoon and reading a photo comic that featured a mother shooting her kids in the head.⁶

So of course, I did the reasonable thing: I took the yearbook home with me and hid it in my bedroom where my parents couldn’t find.

At first I would regularly steal furtive glances at my contraband for the illicit thrill of its wrongness. But over time, I looked at it less and less, and eventually the yearbook was lost—a casualty, I suspect, of one of the many flooded basements my family suffered after moving to a ranch home with terrible drainage. By that time, I was no longer discomfited by the comic, understanding it to be a pastiche of sword and sorcery tropes; but I did wonder about how it came to be, and who the weirdo responsible was.

Okay, so to cut to the chase that I’m sure you’ve anticipated by now, a few years back I recalled this bit of childhood trauma and I searched online to see if any record of it existed. At the time, I didn’t even remember the title of the yearbook or its specific year, but after a bit of digging I found an online repository of digitized YSU stuff, and lo and behold, after scanning through several PDFs, there was the Barbarian of my youth. And after I re-read the story (and found it neither as frightening nor as confusing as I remembered, I checked the yearbook credits to see if I could find the cartoonist and there he was: Val Mayerik.

If that didn’t make you gasp, you probably weren’t reading comic books in the 1970s, so I will explain: Mayerik was a comics artist who initially made his name in fantasy titles, working alongside and sometimes with P. Craig Russell and Barry Windsor-Smith; eventually he transitioned to illustration, particularly work for TSR games and Magic: The Gathering. But it was in 1973 that he achieved his place in comics history by being the original artist to draw Steve Gerber’s creation Howard the Duck, in Fear 19. The YSU book I had discovered dated only one year before.

Howard's first appearance — Howard the Duck’s first appearance, drawn by Val Mayerik, Marvel Comics’ *Fear* 19 (December, 1973)

If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m someone who holds onto childhood obsessions, particularly when they’re only half-remembered. Time and again I have attempted to track down a movie, book, or comic that thrilled, horrified, or confused my young mind. These fragments of mental effluvium had their origins in a pre-Internet world, making them difficult and sometimes impossible to recover. Most of the time, when I’m successful in identifying and re-acquiring the artifacts of my memory, they turn out not to live up to expectations. But every once in a while, I am genuinely delighted by the outcome of my search—and the discovery of a young Mayerik’s contribution to my mind’s warping is one of these times.

Or, you know, linoleum? I was a kid, in my mind it was marble. ↩︎
The building was sold to YSU in 1983 to be used for alumni relations and its stately halls were divided into fluorescently lit cubicles. ↩︎
In 2005 the Butler Institute purchased the Disciples’ church building and it is now home to folk art and Americana collections. ↩︎
As all proud Gen-X kids did. ↩︎
This is me editorializing after the fact. No way was I a cool enough kindergartener to know who Vaughn Bodē was. ↩︎
I don’t know what issue this was and I don’t want you to tell me. ↩︎