It Might Get Messy

A month almost to the day before 9/11/2001, Tim and I found ourselves in London staring at a Lindisfarne bible. Unlike most celebrated artifacts of the Dark Ages, the gilded, illuminated manuscript more than lived up to its advance billing. It really was an awesome work of art.

Just about 1200 years before we stumbled upon the display copy, Scandinavian Vikings made the first of a series of destructive visits to the monastery and found the bibles being produced in the copy rooms. I gather that the Norsemen were less than fascinated by the books--after all, the gold content, while extravagant for manuscripts, compared unfavorably with candlesticks, crosses, reliquary chests, and other monastic paraphernalia. 

For most of my working life, I saw “retirement” as a time when I would get on the road and travel, spend long days hiking and taking photographs, birding, catching snakes and lizards, working on my archery expertise, singing, writing, and recording songs, learning to ski, etc. In other words, I expected to function at a high level of activity, doing stuff like going to see Lindisfarne itself along with so much else in the world I need to visit. 

Then “retirement” plowed into my future in the form of the cancer diagnosis. It’s now been 4 years of struggle with my own runaway cellular systems. For much of that time, I’ve barely been able to breathe, dress, or stumble 3 or 4 steps to the bathroom. I’ve been rendered mute by the surgical removal of my tongue, weakened by the impact of the disease on my respiratory system, and devastated by the loss of ability to eat and drink. At the chess board of life, the malignancy sits opposite, smugly punching its move times and chuckling at my ongoing loss of high-point pieces. The cancer knows it’s eventually going to win via brutal checkmate.  My doctors and I can see it coming, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.

However. At the moment, I seem to be in a good place relative to where I might have been, which latter would be near, if not actually, dead. I saw the oncologist this week. For the first time in a year I walked, without using a wheelchair to get from the car to her office. I didn’t need oxygen in the car or exam room. Except for palpable fluid in the pleural cavity around my right lung, I’m as healthy as it is possible to be given my general condition. 

However. The active retirement I saw in my future before I became ill is no longer an option. Along with preparing myself for the return of symptomatic malignancy (I’ll have a CT scan in a couple of weeks which will allow us to judge just how quickly things are likely to deteriorate in my chest cavity), I’ve had to revise my expectations for activities to occupy my remaining time. In lieu of traveling, hiking, singing, dining, and drinking, I spend time watching television and movies, working on guitar instrumentals, listening to music, writing, and preparing small desktop versions of the much larger pen-and-ink and cut-paper art pieces I used to produce. 

In sum, I can live with what’s available to me. Every week I learn a little more, and make interesting discoveries in the world of consumer media. I’ll share a few of the recent highlights with you here.

One worthwhile bit of television is The Americans, a drama serial on FX Network. Set in Ronald Reagan’s America (I know, you were hoping that entire period of history was just a bad dream. Unfortunately not. It was real and we’re still dealing with its consequences), a KGB sleeper cell in the form of parents living in the D.C. suburbs with their two kids, a neighbor who is an FBI agent in a unit formed to expose KGB sleeper cells, the protagonists deal with the simultaneous realities of casual inept comfort in the American life style and the diamond-hard undercurrents of the Cold War. The complex premise needs outstanding writing and acting to succeed, and fortunately it gets it. The episode-by-episode conflation of comedy, tragedy, suspense, horror, and action is awesome. Very worthy of your time, even if you are not, like me, confined to a hospital style sick bed. 

If The Americans isn’t violent enough for you (the body count is consistently in the single digits), try The History Channel’s costume drama Vikings. Where The Americans digs into the everyday minutiae threaded through the fabric of global conflicts, The Vikings sweeps entire historical movements into every 46-minute episode. It only takes two shows for the Norseman to get to Lindisfarne from the fringes of the iron age, four for them to take over chunks of Wessex farmland and settle in for the long haul as residents of the British Isles. Along the way we get plausible portraits of the Vikings as intelligent, tolerant, egalitarian, democratic, family-oriented, scientific explorers. The scripts and acting are excellent, and the whole package is lighter and more humorous than you would think possible. The June 793 first raid on Lindisfarne is presented as an artifact of navigational difficulties. I would note that The Vikings in the show are suitably impressed by the beautifully illuminated manuscripts but, true to the facts, fail to carry them off with their plunder. Presumably the Bibles on the copy stands include the same one Tim and I saw at the library in London. BTW, the complex relationship of 8th century English and Scandinavians are nicely presented at http://www.ivargault.com/vikingene/iona/klostrene_en.html and https://www.lindisfarne.org.uk/793/.

Let’s move along from video to audio. Those of you who had access to a radio as the hell of 1968 broke on the rocks of 1969…(uh…is that metaphor mixed enough for you? For some reason I kind of like it…)…where were we, there…oh. Right. On AM radio (those of you under the age of 50 may want to google “AM Radio” to understand something of the primitive nature of communications in those early days of civilization) at the turn of the year, your gears were nearly stripped clean by the sudden appearance of “Proud Mary” on the DJ playlists. If you were paying attention earlier in 1968, you might have perked up when Creedence Clearwater Revival’s cover of “Suzie Q” made the late night rotation. But Proud Mary was a life changer, for the listeners, the DJs, and the band. CCR actually beat the Beatles’ White Album into air play as a stripped-down, simple, beautiful response to the cascade of psychedelia that followed Sgt. Pepper. Since CCR gave it up, we’ve…well, those of us my age, anyway…been listening for somebody to take that concept of gorgeously simple quality and run with it again. Important to note that this is not easy to do. Much easier to do covers, imitations, lame attempts to break 40 year-old ground. But of course, it has actually been done. A couple weeks ago, I gave you Cross Canadian Ragweed, which fits this bill precisely. This week, I offer you a group of Ohio guys named Afghan Whigs. They started in the 80s pretty much as a hardcore bar band, pounding the little stages in the Cincinnati clubs (if you’ve never spent a few nights hunting up original music in Cincinnati, I commend this activity to you. You will have good beer, meet funny people, and hear some of the best unknown/unlikely to ever be known music on earth). Driven by singer/guitarist/song writer Greg Dulli, the Whigs made literate, highly listenable, outstanding music from the late 80s to the late 90s. Everything they recorded in that period—albums, EPs, singles, bootlegs—is absolutely worthwhile. Recently—2013 through 2014—the band actually DID get back together. The new stuff isn’t bad. But for that shocking brain freeze like the one that came with Proud Mary, make sure you pick up the stuff from their first go-around. Awesome. Proves there’s hope for every half a dozen kids slinging guitars in every garage from New Jersey to California, via Ohio. 

The lesson? For those of you my age, of course, it’s that we need to keep on chooglin’. For everyone, it’s remembering to live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. And with that, I’m signing off for this week. Snowed like a sonofabitch all day here, we’re dealing with at least 8 inches. The only family member on the road tonight is Jesse. He’s incredibly reliable—probably the only one on his shift who made it to work tonight. The rest of us are about to deal with a big hunk of beef cooked in a gorgeous tomato sauce, creamy, buttery, cheesy polenta, and a big bowl of salad. Well, no. Everybody else is dealing with that menu. I’m slicing the meat and then pouring a couple boxes of UN liquid emergency rations into my aquarium-tubing feeding apparatus…^&*((*&^%$^&_)(*&^!!!!!!…………