It Might Get Messy

Here’s one I didn’t see coming. Well, actually, first there’s the one I DID see coming. Thanksgiving was a riot as usual, maybe more of a riot than usual. I don’t know how many people were here for the Wednesday Night Seafood Supper, but it was a shitload. I whipped up a huge batch of drop biscuits with Old Bay, and Dan and Jeff made a huge pot of seafood gumbo and one of rice. All day, appetizers by the kilo left the kitchen and disappeared into the melee. The feeding was so frenzied that poor Colin, who arrived last on the late flight from Atlanta ended up having to forage for his supper—there were only scraps left on the table!

Then Thursday, of course, was a high-throughput mill churning out food, including the turkey, the ham, the spit-roasted full 7 standing rib roast of beef stuffed with garlic cloves and herbs (pretty sure I stuffed the turkey with garlic cloves as well), plus all the trimmings, the baked ziti, the eggnog, the fried oysters, the stuffed mushrooms, the deviled eggs…well, you get the idea. Friday was a lot mellower from the cooking perspective, but we saddled up and took a nice hike through the Patuxent Preserve over across town. 

Anyway, the deal is that after 3 days of standing up and working, I was frickin’ exhausted. Slept most of Saturday, and again a big chunk of today. I think I’m back to full strength, but man, I was tired. But I’ve known for a while how out of shape I am. My physical conditioning is just awful. Walking a speedy 5K leaves my hips sore. So I wasn’t surprised to find myself beaten down by a couple days work.

I was surprised to find my throat getting raw and swollen. Surprised mostly because I didn’t change my still-deficient eating habits—didn’t eat many solids, mostly lived on chocolate milk. Oh, I sipped little dribs of the good Scotch Eric brought and the fabulous dark rum whose origin I never did establish. But no wine or beer, and really, I just wet my tongue with whiskey once in a while around the fire in the evenings—didn’t do any serious drinking. 

What I did do was talk. And laugh. For pretty much 3 days straight (as the Peter Case song would have it). Plus sang just a few songs when the guitar fell into my hands Friday evening. Granted, the general volume of chitchat, given the number of conversations going on at any particular moment, was fairly high. Nor is my system conditioned to the particulate irritants of wood smoke before I subjected to long evenings at the patio fire pit. But still. Who would’ve thought that telling stories and laughing at others for 72 hours would make your throat sore and palpably swollen?

Certainly not me. One thing about being a cancer survivor—you never stop learning. Just another lesson on the long road to becoming an aged cancer survivor (well, assuming that the world doesn’t disintegrate on 21 December this year. In which case we would have just had the Best Last Thanksgiving Ever. Not a bad way to go, if you gotta go at the hands of a 5000 year old chipped stone calendar). Anyway, tomorrow morning I see Dr. N, radiation oncologist who stepped in for retired Dr. Z. Just a routine visit. I’ll alternate seeing him and Dr. H, along with my GP, every few months for the next year or two. Usually they’d break it back to 6 months at this point, but that sore spot that appeared in my throat a while back shook everybody up so they want to pay close attention. I’m afraid, like most things in life, the problems I’ve got now, including those associated with the cancer, are things I have to deal with myself—they’re not the kind of problems the docs can solve for me. I have to get my ass back into functional physical condition. Keep my weight down (yeah, its rising again). Make sure I get most of my calories from nutritious solid foods instead of goopy chocolate milk, no matter how uncomfortable actual eating is. Get my energy reserves back to where they’re not overloaded by 3 days of cooking. 

Blahblahblah. Good thing I don’t have REAL problems, huh? Time to crack the four Gospels and Revelation. Always takes me the whole time from Thanksgiving to Christmas to get through ‘em. But I’m least I’m here to take the slog one more year, and for that I’m most grateful.

Unless, of course, the world vaporizes on 21 December. Then, just before my molecules vibrate themselves into the interstellar strings that control all things physical from 19 asymmetrical dimensions, I’m gonna have a good ironic chuckle. Could be many, many worse ways to go, my friends. Hope everyone’s having a fabulous start to the holidays this year. Check out professional blog over at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/, and there are lots of Thanksgiving photos, cooking hints, decorating tips, and suggestions for easy entertaining with simple desserts and store-bought ingredients over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ . Well, Thanksgiving photos, at least. Finally, I’m back hacking away at the urban ecosystems book, I’ll start posting chapters again in a week or so as I get a stock of new ones built up. Love to everyone. May your waitstaff get your order to your table in time when the Restaurant at the End of the Universe opens on 21 December!

It Might Get Messy

In Italian families, food and drink is a way of life. Wait, that’s not right. Food and drink is THE way of life. I don’t mean nutritional functionality. I mean the way to, through, around, under or over all of life’s features. Food and drink express Italian love, friendship, companionship, joy, humor and fun. They also accompany and light the pathways through sorrow and sadness. As well as being enablers and enhancers of addictions, delusions, resentments, angers, and just plain dysfunctionalities.

Both sides of my family had Italian threads in their origins, by marriage on my father’s side, blood on my mother’s. My father’s sister, beloved Aunt Helen, married into a big Italian immigrant family smeared across northern New Jersey and Long Island. As I recall, the major outfall of Aunt Helen’s cultural venture beyond the German, Irish and English customs of her parent’s household (we’ll ignore for the moment Grandpa’s contention that we might be of Alsatian and/or Jewish origin) was a serious upgrade in the routine partying of Sunday visits. Not to belittle Butch Grandma’s cooking or hospitality. She did indeed switch to LeSeur Very Tiny canned peas when they first came out, and I thought her devotion to a vinegary form of mayonnaise labeled as “salad dressing” was a nice touch. But Uncle Tony’s appearance brought with it not just a quartet of cousins (shoutouts here to Ms. G and Ms. ME), but pasta, sausage, meatballs, tomato sauce and a more serious emphasis on appetizers than ever before. Coupled with theirs being the first household I knew of to own a color television (we invariably left for home just as Ed Sullivan was ending and as the theme song for “Bonanza” came on), and the replacement of sparse canned beers by rapid-fire Manhattan cocktails, those visits picked up a lot of cachet.

On my mother’s side, Italian genes were snuggled deeper in the DNA. Her father arrived in the U.S. in 1902, with assorted brothers and sisters, from the agricultural hinterlands northeast of Genoa over toward Parma. He married into a large German family who also had Italians scattered over their genetic landscape. Holidays at Aunt Deet’s in Union City, New Jersey (shoutouts to cousins Ms.’s L and L and the latter’s wonderful children), at the rental cottage in Point Pleasant, or the aperiodic “family reunions” in summertime yards or parks were just short of riots at all times. Packed into a narrow second-floor apartment in the family-owned townhouse there were two rooms full of men smoking and drinking heavily and watching sports (and I’m proud to say that the family included a gay couple, guys who I’m not even sure were related but who appreciated televised sports and alcoholic beverages and were considered as much family as anyone), a large and active Irish setter named Debbie, a kitchen full of women pumping out a stream of stuffed peppers, chicken gizzards and livers, stuffed pasta, baked pasta, homemade pasta, hunks of beef, pork and chicken cooked in tomato sauce, desserts, and espresso with lemon. There was nasty homemade red wine that was only drinkable mixed half-and-half with lemon-lime soda, olives and anchovies, and provolone and pecorino Romano cheeses so sharp they would blister your mouth. Cases of Knickerbocker longnecks and big bottles of rye and bourbon filled in any voids. Everybody ate and drank until they couldn’t move and/or shouldn’t have been driving. Simmering interpersonal mistrust, suppressed anger, lifetime disappointments, depression, borderline abuse? Donnya worry aboudit, have a cannoli and some Sambuca, a couple of unfiltered Pall Malls and you’ll be alright.

The point is this. The holidays are here. And I’m faced with the hard reality that much of my life, and nearly all my holiday rituals and memories, are built around eating and drinking. Which turns out to be hard because eating and drinking have little meaning for me anymore. They are difficult and marginally painful to do, clumsy and best conducted out of the sight of others, and just generally damned uncomfortable. Far from being pleasant ties to the past and happily anticipated gates to the future, they are chores to be dispensed with.

Facing the holidays without enjoying the food and beverages? Holy hell, it’s enough to make you panic. For a little while. Then, off in the distance, he heard a gritty blues guitar twanging out a deep and slow walking Texas boogie. A tear grew in the corner of his eye. And he realized, as hard as he tried, he just couldn’t make himself that pitiful. He knew he had plenty of non-food rituals to fall back on. Watching long nights of variable-quality movies culminating in the restored original version of Wicker Man with Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, and Britt Eklund. Getting decorative lighting up in the neighborhood cul de sac. Reading the four gospels plus Revelation by midnight on Christmas Eve, when it’s time to switch to the Vatican mass broadcast. And feeding everyone else who comes anywhere nearby over the course of the winter.

Can you hear it? Pounding like a huge metal heart, resonating through the ground, shaking the windows, rattling the framed photos on the wall? That reassuring pentatonic march, reminding you. You don’t need to deal with reality, or the hair-raising disclosures from your mother’s deathbed, or the bizarre wackiness of your anti-Semitic grandfather suggesting the family is actually Jewish. You can feed everyone else. Knead up the Pan Dulce, bake the ziti, roast the beef. The holidays are here, and you’re alive one more year to see them.

And, what the hell. The world ends in any case on 21 December 2012 when the Mayan long-count calendar runs out. I might just have to have a big-ass turkey sandwich and a mug of Sambuca this Thanksgiving. It won’t be pretty goin’ down. But it’ll remind me I’m alive!

Hope everyone’s looking forward to a bitchin’ holiday. As many as possible of you should be convening here at some point in the coming week. Beef is ordered. Turkey’s in the frig. There’s 10 pounds of tiny creamer potatoes on order at the grocery store. Check out the professional blog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . By this time next week there’ll be new material here and Thanksgiving photos up on one of the other blog sites. I’ll let you know. Have a great time, everybody. Damn, it’s great to be here!

It Might Get Messy

So here’s the thing. All of the stuff we can see, hear, feel, smell, measure or otherwise sense and know something about, from subnuclear particles to galaxy clusters and the great swirl of matter, energy and time that is the universe itself is only about 4% of what’s out there. The remaining 96% is “dark matter” and “dark energy”, which we know exist because of their clear and accountable impacts on gravity and material kinetics. But that’s all we know about it. It exists.

Everything that we understand, that we know anything about, that we can describe, catalog, manipulate, utilize, or otherwise deal with knowledgably comprises less than 5% of the total manner and energy of the universe. We know nothing whatsoever about 95% of it.

Where does that leave us? Well, I can tell you where it leaves ME. It leaves me in a philosophical quandary of major proportions. Assuming that the “hidden” 96% of the universe is at least as complex and interactive as the 4% we can experience (and I see no reason to hypothesize otherwise), we know damned near nothin’ about nothin’ in terms of reality. In other words, “reality” is almost completely made up of stuff that we do not understand and have no conceptual foundation for defining, delimiting, or categorizing. 

And why does this concern us in the blunt-force context of, say, cancer and cancer treatment? To me it suggests that what we can perceive only in the uncertain terms of probability might well have simple, direct and deterministic causality. Just not related to anything in the tiny bit of the universe we know about. The causality for cancer—the biophysical and biochemical misfunctions in molecular production pathways—might well arise as effects with simple and singular causes. We just have no way to see it, if it originates in the big hunks of universe we don’t sense.

This also brings theological questions into focus. Old friend and colleague Linda from a former professional life admonished me not be blaming deities for human failings. Pre-cancer, I would have dismissed any interest in me on the part of any meaningful deity out of hand, as a pipe-dream driven by anachronist hopes of unlikely connections.

Now, I’m not so sure. If we know nothing about 96% of what’s going on, it seems to me that what happens over here on “our” side of the plane of understanding might well...or far more than likely…arise from causes over there on the “other” side. 

Unknowable cause, deterministic outcome? Sounds like a definition of a hand of god, God or gods to me. Which means  I’ve moved my chess pieces from the “nominal nonbelievers” board to that of the “nominal believers”. THERE’S a profound effect of cancer for you. An objectivist cynic like me acknowledging the likely existence of god, God or gods? Mein Got (so to speak, auf Deutsch)! What are things coming to?

Well, they’re not coming quite as far as my truly religious friends and relatives would recognize I suspect. I am prepared, based on my experience with cancer and the matrix of human knowledge, to be a believer. I am not prepared to be a worshiper. Things still break down at my “children going to bed cold, hungry, sick, alone or abused” test. Which is simply this. I may believe in a deity or deities who can cause and cure cancer at their whim, given that they have the power of more than 95% of the universe at their disposal. But I’ll be damned (literally, I guess) if I’m going to worship such deity(ies). If something out there in the cold and the dark vastness between galaxy clusters has the power to make innocent children whole until they (the children) can know enough to be responsible for themselves, and doesn’t do so, that is not a something I’m prepared to worship in any way, shape or form. In fact, it’s something I’d like to meet so I could have a good solid discussion regarding priorities and imperatives. You want worship, big guy/gal? Do something to earn it. Take those kids in the slums of Rio and Delhi and Singapore and Cairo, tonight, this very night, give them some comfort and food and a blanket and hope. If you vested in me beating cancer and left some kid sick and alone in a shithole on the edges of Shanghai City, you got some re-thinking to do. Seriously. You want belief? You want worship? Earn it, dammit. Or live without it. Over there on the dark side of that 96% plane dividing the known from the unknown universe. We’ll muddle our way through just fine over here, thank you. 

Take that. So there. Thanks for putting up with my ranting, my friends. See professional weblog at http://aehsfoundation.org/ . Working on getting more stuff up and going in time for the holdays. Thanksgiving coming up, and for one reason or another, primarily having to do with fast doctors and good technology, I’m here to see it. Can’t wait!

It Might Get Messy

Molly wanted something to go with polenta on her Sunday night home from school, so I tried a new all-oven method to cacciattori a chicken. I got a big deep glass roasting pan, spilled in some olive oil, added a pound of baby portabella mushroom caps without their stems, half a bag of frozen cocktail-size onions, and a couple dozen cloves of pre-peeled garlic from one of the giant organic conglomerates in California. On top of that I put a cut up “smart-cleaned” chicken from the upscale super market, lightly salted and peppered the whole pan, and stuck it in a very slow, 300 Fahrenheit for a couple hours until browned up nicely. Then I dusted it all with oregano and basil, topped it with a big can of diced tomatoes, poured in some off-the-shelf grocery store balsamic vinegar and some red wine, pushed the oven to 325, and let it ride for another couple hours. It was reported by Cathy and Molly to be quite delicious.

But here’s the thing. Remember a few months back when GP Dr. K asked me what was the hardest thing about a year-and-a-half of cancer and cancer therapy? Well, I was still fighting the physical battle then, and it was a physical answer that came to mind. Told him it was the second night after my radiation and chemo were finished and my physiology collapsed into painful and swollen dehydration and anemia. And maybe that was, then, the hardest thing. 

Since then, my physiology’s gotten better. I’m strong, back to fighting weight gain, not really discomfited by my partially paralyzed left arm, able to mostly function like a human being. But.

But. For as much of my life as I can recall, two of my greatest personal pleasures have been eating and lecturing. Hell, I was watching food TV before there WAS food TV. Spent a whole summer watching “The Galloping Gourmet” sink deeper into  hilarious, if pitifully dysfunctional, alcoholism before he got God and got clean. Worth noting in passing that he now offers a mixture of high-tannin brewed tea and non-alcoholic grape juice as a wine substitute. And I was a teacher before I started teaching. Used to take younger neighbors sloshing into the woods and wetlands giving them long, undoubtedly soporifically dry, lectures about the biology of the salamanders, snails, and centipedes we’d find.

But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here so I can report the revelation that struck me while I was doing the grocery shopping this morning. That eating, the actual mechanical process of ingesting, masticating and swallowing food, is so uncomfortable now that I dread it. I don’t like to eat any more. I have to force myself to do it. Which is ridiculous on its face, but now a fact of life. More often than not I forget to stick a microwavable sausage biscuit in my brief case on my way to the office, and then I skip lunch and sip cold coffee instead. At night I have a very hard time passing up the soothing smoothness of a thick chocolate milk drink for choking down some solid or semi-solid food. Total bummer.

My speaking, I suppose, isn’t quite so massively depressing. I don’t have the control over tone, cadence and clarity like I used to. But I can make myself understood. I feel sorriest for kids in classrooms and presentation audiences. When I get wired up in front of a white board or Power Point screen, I tend to start to roll my speech faster and faster. Now I have to catch myself, remember to slow down, enunciate carefully, constantly ask if they’re understanding. Which is ok. I can do that. I miss the silken abilities of rhetorical persuasion I’ve lost with my whole voice, but that might be for the best. Now I actually have to think before I speak, which, for me, is a genuine life-skill gain. Still, I miss being able to convince people that my concept was correct because my mouth was so smooth.

Well, you know, it is what it is. I had some email from an old friend and colleague that got me thinking about my relationship, such as it is, with whatever passes for God, god or gods in my psyche. We’ll pick that thread up next week. Don’t miss the semi-coherent personal steel cage theological death match between Dave and his gods next week! And don’t miss my professional blog over at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ either. I have a built up supply of autumn  photos, with a little luck by next week I’ll have this whole multi-weblog empire up and functioning. Live it while you got it, my friends. Because it ain’t forever!