Woodworking Sans Wood

It begins, as all tragic love stories do, with a clean bench and a naïve heart. You think you’re just stepping into the shop to work on dovetails and a distraction. But somewhere between the Japanese pull saw and the Firmagon injection, your body becomes less temple and more abandoned shed: structurally unsound, hormonally haunted, and smelling vaguely of linseed oil and despair.

Androgen Deprivation Therapy, they call it. As if it’s a subtle change. Like giving up sugar in your coffee. No—this is more like removing the engine from your car because it might have a leak. And then being told to coast downhill and enjoy the view.

But for the woodworker, ADT is not without its... applications.

Hot flashes become your new shop heater. Why pay for propane when you can self-immolate every 17 minutes?

Mood swings add artistic flair to your mortise and tenon joints. One moment you're lovingly shaping walnut; the next, you're weeping into your bench vise because the grain raised again.

Loss of libido? Perfect. You now have uninterrupted weekends for French polishing and existential brooding.

And then there’s bone density loss. A cruel irony when you consider how many hardwood scraps you now have to avoid tripping over like a brittle-boned ballerina. If you break a hip reaching for a clamp, at least you died doing what you love: silently judging the mitre joints of others.

Still, there's a strange peace in it all. A kind of monkish, celibate discipline. You, the shop, and your hormone-suppressed soul—grinding through the silence, varnishing over the void.

In the end, ADT and woodworking do form a synergy. One strips you of testosterone, the other strips wood. One slowly erodes your masculinity, the other lets you build something vaguely phallic to compensate.

There is a cruel poetry in it: the more a man loses his wood, the more obsessed he becomes with working it.

Take a stroll through any suburban garage, and you’ll find him—grey of beard, soft of jaw, testicles dormant like ancient pagan relics—meticulously hand-planing a slab of maple as though communion with hardwood might somehow resurrect his own. He strokes it, shapes it, sands it smooth. Not with lust, but with longing. A longing so deep it has bypassed the loins and gone straight to the soul.

This is not coincidence. It is metaphor. Tragic, Freudian, mahogany-scented metaphor.

Wood, after all, has always stood erect. Literally. It is what trees do best. A tree is nature’s proudest phallus—tall, rigid, penetrating the sky with unwavering conviction. And when men take to woodworking, they are, quite unconsciously, participating in an elaborate ritual of substitution. They are building what biology has withdrawn. Where once they rose with the dawn, now they rise only to joint a few boards and cry softly into the sawdust.

Enter ADT—Androgen Deprivation Therapy—that cold scalpel to the hormonal heart. It doesn't just lower testosterone; it performs a philosophical castration. The libido dies. The erections retire. Morning wood becomes a euphemism for early carpentry. And suddenly, the man who once reached for his lover now reaches for a lathe.

Wood becomes a stand-in, a symbol, a safe outlet. You can sand it. You can polish it. You can run your hands along its grain and pretend you still know what desire felt like. A well-crafted table leg might be the only thing standing proud in your house anymore, and by God, you made it yourself.

There’s also comfort in its obedience. Wood doesn’t say no. It doesn’t require performance. It doesn’t wilt under pressure. You shape it; it yields. You finish it; it gleams. In a world where your own biology has begun to stage a mutiny, the woodshop is the one place you still have mastery. It is therapy. It is religion. It is a very sad, very well-organized shrine to what once was.

And yet—there’s hope in the absurdity. Because what is more human than taking one’s decline and turning it into a weekend project? The same hands that once fumbled with passion now carve dovetails with monk-like precision. The man who can no longer rise with desire now rises with purpose, if not with a boner.

So yes, it’s about wood. It’s always been about wood. But not the kind that betrays you in the night. This is the wood that stays, that forgives, that listens as you sand away your regrets and wipe on a finish thick with metaphor.

Because if you can't have wood, at least you can make it.

It’s a match forged in the celestial woodshop of Hell. Or the infernal clinic of Heaven.

Either way, you’re sanding. Always sanding.