It Might Get Messy

It Might Get Messy

When I was a kid, there was an oddball theme park somewhere in the Greater New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area called “Freedomland”. I don’t recall too much about it. I do seem to remember a sort of set-piece sequence to the attractions. First you road a “paddle wheel steamer” down “the Big River”, along which were such animatronic arcana as a settler’s log cabin, a bear, a native American, a fox….you get the idea. Disembarking from your paddle wheeler, you proceeded through a succession of exhibits such as craftspeople hammering horseshoes, some penned-up bison, a petting zoo, etc. Somewhere between the blacksmith hut and the electrically-lighted wigwam, we would park it on a bench and eat lunch, invariably egg salad on white, ham and cheese on rye, and pasta salad made with elbow macaroni, and a half-gallon “guj” as my parents insisted, of Kool-Aid or lemonade. 

As theme parks went, it was fairly lame (of course, I’m no reliable judge, having raised 3 kids and never gone to a theme park!). But the routine was comforting. You knew, when the adults were hauling you to Freedomland, how long it was going to take, what you were going to, when you had to ooh and ahh, when you could be tired and bitchy. 

The process of dealing with cancer has turned out to be rather similar to a summer-day visit to Freedomland. A settled sequence of events, tolerable, even comfortable in their own weird way, familiarity yielding calm, not contempt. 

Which means, not much to report on the cancer front this week. That alone, of course, feels pretty damned good. Oh, there’s the usual litany of what are presumably permanent complaints. Room service here at the Marriott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana just retrieved my tray and the poor food and beverage manager called after noticing the hamburger was barely eaten and wanted to know if everything was ok. I assured him it was delicious (and in fact I must say it was, handmade, well flavored Angus beef, plenty of good blue cheese, a nice crisp pickle which I’m finding is something of a Marriott trademark, at least in the south). But I can only get so much solid food past those shards of my epiglottis before it rebels and makes it clear that it’s not going to put up with any more pointy, sticky, or dry stuff and it’s time to switch to those thick shakes or give it up. Given that my weight has reached the high 220s, or higher than I want it, the shakes are going in favor of iced decaf coffees and low-fat mochas. 

So I got my ongoing discomforted throat. I realized the other day while dealing with some technical difficulties with my crossbow (it may be getting close to time to switch to a recurve version without compounding cams to complicate things) that my left arm is still partially paralyzed. I want to get an inexpensive traditional recurve and get that old fire-at-will feeling back. But I may not be able to do it very well. On the other hand, it may be just the exercise I need to rebuild some of my left arm function. 

Finally, I gotta get my annual drug and alcohol screen so I can work for a particular client. And I’m looking at the handful of meds I take every evening and thinking that one or more those must bleed a detector output spike somewhere near something illicit. But I got the scrips and I clearly have the need, so I guess we’ll find out.

This is what passes for adventure in my life these days, BTW. Sigh. Catch ya’ll next week. Later in the week there’ll be a new professional blog up at http:\\aehsfoundation.org\, it’ll go up later this week because it made it up late last week and I like to leave ‘em up for around a week for proper aging. Similarly, I’ve got some decent autumn photos, I’ll start getting those up over at http:\\docviper.livejournal.com\ later in the week, shoving the Thanksgiving invitation down to a deeper date. I’m expecting Thanksgiving to be just awesome this year, coming as it does a few weeks shy of the Mayan long count calendar end of the world. We ain’t lettin’ the universe end without a fight!