In his new Substack, Every Twenty Minutes, Richard is interested in the fact he can’t know what he says and does in extremely low blood sugars. They are altered brain states similar to drug trips or alcoholic blackouts, where memory is erased.
He doesn’t know that guy, who sometimes doesn’t know the meaning of his words. That guy sometimes can’t speak at all. That guy is super strong and will push against you if you try to feed him things to raise his sugar levels. That guy is fearful something is happening to him he can’t control, and although he is sweating, and babbling, and his eyes are glazed, he will insist he’s not having a low sugar.
Richard is interested in what it’s like for me to know both him and that guy. He’s writing about it in his posts. The other day, we were walking on Warren Street, and I said, “I think that guy is the real you, and the other Richard you are most of the time is the impostor.” He said, “Really? You think I’m angry and violent?” I said, “No.”
I was thinking of something Bryan Cranston said about playing Walter White in Breaking Bad, a high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer, and his alter ego Heisenberg, a meth kingpin who goes up against a Mexican drug cartel. Cranston said he played Walter as the impostor and Heisenberg as his true identity all along.
I said the thing to Richard because it was funny. A “what if?” the charming and sensitive person who goes around with that adorable English accent and shy smile is an act, and the real Richard, as in the Jeckyll and Hyde story, is only allowed out when the moon is full and blood is in his throat.
Once you say something because it’s funny—because you want to reverse the direction of a thought as an exercise—once you find yourself going down a path you’ve invented, no matter how far-fetched it may at first appear, you can find evidence for a thing being itself and its opposite at the same time. You can always find evidence. That is something I’ve learned through writing, and the question is: is that evidence that you’ve discovered real, or are you playing imaginatively for the pleasure of playing, and that alone?
When Richard asks what it’s like to live with a person with two different personalities, depending on the amount of glucose floating in his blood, I tell him it’s fine, most of the time. To me, most of the time, he is one person with fluctuating moods and abilities to function. When we met, I was already hyper-alert. I came that way. And it has come in handy in our relationship. Maybe it’s the core saving factor in our relationship, not in a female nursey sense. More in the sense of someone is awake all the time, allowing the other person to sleep, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where, when you fall asleep, the pod people come and replace you with an empty replicant.
The only time these dips disturb my peace of mind is when Richard slips into one of those really low sugars. He doesn’t know it’s happening as he leaves himself, and I don’t see it because I’m not in the room with him. At those times, I become hysterical with an edge of futility that causes rage in me. This may seem odd. Why get angry at a person who can’t help himself? It’s stupid, but that’s my response to my own helplessness to bring him back.
A year or so ago, when he fell into such a low low I had to call an EMS crew to revive him with a glucose IV, for a few seconds he wasn’t responding to anything. He was lying on the floor, and I thought he might be dead. Panic and pain went through me that felt like I was dying. Soon, he stirred or made a sound.
I had found him in his studio, sitting in his chair, sweating. I knew he was having a low sugar, but by the time I was downstairs, he’d fallen so low he wasn’t able to chew glucose or drink or eat anything. I didn’t know that and tried to bring him back with the usual methods of glucose tablets, chocolate, and orange juice. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t reviving and was slipping further away. I went upstairs and got his emergency glucagon kit, gave him a shot, and it didn’t work, either. It turned out, he wasn’t swallowing anything. His mouth was filled with what I’d tried to feed him, and when he slowly returned to himself, he said, “What happened?”
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Sally Mann, artist of the next moment.
The other day, I received a press release for Art Work, a forthcoming book by Sally Mann (Abrams Press, September 2025), and I remembered when, in the early 1990s, she was accused by an assortment of censorious forces of child exploitation and publishing images akin to child pornography. No legal action against her has ever been taken.
She was accused of hurting her daughters by photographing them nude when they were small, and in the photos the little girls give off a sexual and seductive energy, or at least it can be seen that way, because that is precisely what little girls do and feel inside themselves, independent of any guidance and interpretation of them by adults.
The erotic experience of ourselves in childhood is a gorgeous spectrum of “maybes,” and “what the hells,” and “oh, this feels good.” A spectrum adults have forgotten and that arouses them and confuses them and then they don't want to think about honestly.
Then I thought, wow, it's okay for parents in religious societies to cover up their girl children and older women in veils, and tents, and cages and that's just fine because God doesn't like the free-floating sexuality of female humans of any age. God doesn't exist, so we know who is really in control of the female body in public and private space.
Then I thought: all the women in the world, right this minute, we should walk around naked. Including my naked body. I am 78, and I would do it to transform society. Because if all the women in the world just walked around naked all the time, weather permitting, you just watch what will happen to the control of men, to wars, to other kinds of violence. We would be making clear: You don't own us.
Who's in?
Yesterday, as luck would have it, I received a galley copy of Art Work, and I began reading it. It’s great!! It touches my core, even though I don’t have a core. I want to quote great gobs of what Mann says about art making. I will be judicious, but please pre-order this book from Abrams Press and buy it when it comes out in September.
Here, she’s talking about lifting boundaries around who can have a say about anything:
“I, too, bristle when my work is appropriated, and in some cases have taken legal action when I feel a line has been crossed. But we have to accept the porosity of art, the democracy of it, the infinite and multifarious ways it enriches not just its audience, but other artists as well. When we are just starting out, we usually begin by emulating the work that moved us, that spoke to our nascent sensibilities. This is derivation, but not necessarily plagiarism or forgery, anymore than Beethoven’s early work was stolen from his instructor, Franz Joseph Haydn. I am not ashamed to show how I, either by unconscious, osmosis or deliberate stimulus . . . have borrowed certain visual elements from my predecessors for my work . . . Mary Ellen Mark and . . . Joseph Szabo.
“It may be that all art is a creative concatenation, a free-for-all in which infinite parts ping and constellate, each generation resonating with the next and bringing its own and contribution to the evolution of an idea. Because each time we look at pictures—and most of us look at thousands of them these days—we are building and reinforcing a memorial aggregation, a subliminal mathematic impulse, which informs, consciously or not, our artistic output. The goal is to organize . . . the cacophony of images . . .
“In other words, if you’re going to imitate, or steal, you damn well better do an irreproachable and transcendent version that is entirely your vision or voice. . . . I guess that’s the crux of my argument throughout this book: make the best work you can make make it uniquely yours make a lot of of it, and you will know what yours is supposed to look like.
Later, she writes about never being secure:
Why do I insist on believing that every other working artist has it easier than me—that they are out there effortlessly producing good, new work while I am stuffing my cabinets with rejects? Or, more to the point, that good work is inevitable at a certain stage in a career? That once you get past that hurdle, the good-work minimum-height, requirement, from then on you will be buoyed by the inevitability of continued success?
. . . It is assumed that each good picture, every resonant poem, each uncracked pot, eases the path for all the subsequent ones, that you get better as you go, not repeating the mistakes of the past and finding inspiration at every return. But that is not always the case. . ..
Sing it, sistah!
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To paywall or not to paywall
Yesterday, I started reading a Substack piece by a writer I like a lot. I was allowed to read only the first, excellent paragraph and then a message popped up saying I had to become a paid subscriber to continue.
I pay a number of writers for their stacks because I want to support them, and they support me, although not all of them. I don't expect a quid pro quo arrangement there or anywhere.
The famous writer I admire is a man. I think this man has gone through life expecting to be compensated well for his intelligence and skills. He should be. His paywall sends the message, I think: I have something of value, and if it's valuable, you need to pay for it.
I do not have a paywall, and I will never have a paywall. I wonder, though, after experiencing the paywall of the famous and skilled writer, whether, in our culture, not having a paywall—in other words giving away my "product" for free—sends the message: This product isn't that valuable.
Maybe it does send that message. Nothing I can do about it.
The intentional message I send readers is this: I, as a professional writer, need to make a living from my work. Without a paywall, it comes down to passing the hat. Some people put money in the hat to show appreciation, and some people who feel the same amount of appreciation do not put money in the hat.
When you pass the hat, do you wind up bringing up the issue of payment more often than the famous writer? I doubt it. Everyone here has to hustle to gain paid subscribers.
If you feel the stack is valuable, please take a turn at support.
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For paid subscribers.
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From the next post (coming tomorrow) of Every Twenty Minutes:
After 50 plus years with diabetes, I don’t yet have any of the complications that kill you—among them strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure, etc. I don’t find anything to be proud of in this. I’ve taken care of myself, and I’m probably genetically lucky (if you don’t count the genetic factor in developing type-1 in the first place, which is an auto-immune disease triggered by, possibly, a temporary viral illnesss.) I loath heroic “life with diabetes stories,” where someone conquerors the north face of the Eiger in a blizzard or heads the Olympic badminton team, all the while calibrating their insulin pump.
To check out Richard’s stack, click here: richardtoon1.substack.com/p/it-aint-me
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Keep doing what you're doing the way you are doing it. You don't need a paywall. Your excellence has won you subscribers both free and paid. This is the new world we live in. You are a rock star within it.
I live with a man who has essential tremor and heart failure. I've thought he was dead a dozen times, I've called the EMTs dozens of times. He wants to live. I do the best I can to help him and the least little kink in the rope makes me insane. Don't know how this is going to end, but it will, and of course I could drop dead tomorrow! But meanwhile, he's alive, I'm alive, and the house is peaceful. No one else I ever lived with has made it easy for me to write whenever I want to.
PS I love Sally Mann. And I remember being one of those girls . . . I was shocked that she was attacked for her so true visions.