One of the most incredible feats of biology is the transformation of moths and butterflies from slow crawling caterpillar to winged and free-flying adult. Just think what happens. The caterpillar hatches from its egg (laid earlier that year, in some cases the previous year and left to over-winter). Immediately, it starts stuffing its face. It eats at a frantic pace, chewing off hunks of plants (for most caterpillars, the range of vegetation consumed is specialized, sometimes as single-mindedly as Giant Pandas, eating only one species of plant) and processing them physiologically as fast as its gut can work. Then, one day in late summer or autumn, the caterpillar feels a change coming on. When the hormones of change reach a certain level, the caterpillar can no longer resist them. It stops feeding and starts building, crafting a little one-room domicile from its own silk and often fragments of the environment. When the cocoon is ready for occupation, the caterpillar settles down inside and passes out. While it’s unconscious, all of its muscles and internal organs—everything inside its skin—liquefy. The caterpillar literally digests itself. It is no longer a recognizable caterpillar, but a few milliliters of thick, protein-rich goo. Then, somehow, the goo itself starts to reformulate. Structures in the digested liquid caterpillar called “imaginal disks” take over the operation. The imaginal disks activate some of those proteins and direct the digested goo to produce the various parts of an adult moth or butterfly. Having digested itself and transformed itself, the former caterpillar busts out of the chrysalis its skin has become, and slips out of the cocoon like a guy with a pan of brownies and power tools in an upstate maximum security prison.
The (almost always) winged adult flies away to complete its life cycle. Some adults feed voraciously, some don’t bother at all, having pumped in sufficient calories acquired by the larva (that is, the caterpillar). The adults mate, lay eggs, and die, having formulated the recipe and ingredients for another generation of adults to appear from the digested goop of the prior.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, many of us thought (or maybe felt) that the incredible transformation of butterflies and moths could be an analog of human society. Hell, we thought, if a frickin’ insect can make that kind of change, then we can as well. Most of us avoided the obvious flaw in this concept—that for butterflies to transform, they had to be broken down to a soupy elixir. Granted, some of the more radical among us thought destructive anarchy might be a necessary step in the process, leading to incidents of murder and mayhem by people who otherwise believed humanity was headed for Nirvana-like status. But those were aberrations. We were on our way, we thought, to a higher plane of existence.
Then the shit started to rain.
• JFK killed in a bloody froth of brains and skull fragments.
• City police raid the Stonewall Inn, a comfortable club setting for gay society. The patrons, having had enough of the constant harassment of law enforcement agencies, fought back. Five days of riots triggered death and destruction where love—or at least a safe place to hook up—otherwise prevailed.
• Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, hired informally for “security” at an outdoor concert headlined by the Stones and paid in cases of beer, fatally stab an audience member at Altamont Speedway
• LBJ’s intent to craft a more humane and inclusive society was derailed by the nightmare of Vietnam. Said nightmare took 58,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (not to mention Lao and Cambodian) lives, and ripped open the fabric of American society. All for a truly stupid endeavor in a conflict in which the U.S. had no compelling interest whatsoever.
• U.S. and Soviet Union amass incredible destructive power in thousands of fission and fusion weapons. Had JFK and Nikita Kruschev not had the foresight to ignore the warmongering advice of their own staffs, the crisis of Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in Cuba would have triggered the use of the weapons stockpiles to devastate human society.
• The movement toward civil rights for minority citizens crashed and burned against a solid wall of bigotry, hatred, and fear
• Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on a hotel balcony in Mempis
• RFK was gunned down in a hotel in Los Angeles
• Students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot down in the streets by their own government
• Palestinian terrorists bring murder and mayhem to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich
• A seemingly minor bit of burglary brings down the Nixon administration and further—aided and abetted by Stonewall, civil rights atrocities, Kent State and more--crater the formerly comfortable relationship between law officers and the public who pay their salaries
• Massive genocide grips Cambodia in the wake of the Vietnam war
• Stephen Biko is tortured to death by the apartheid government of South Africa
• A wall insulating West Berlin from East Germany is constructed, closed, and used as an excuse to kill citizens attempting to leave the East for the West
Awright, that’s enough of that. I’m getting the same queasy feeling now that I had when all this shit was pouring from the skies like an unstoppable attack of Ju-87 dive bomber airplanes used to terrorize doomed populations across Europe as Nazi Germany gave face to the dark (really, really dark) side of humanity.
In the interim from 1980 to now, it seemed like the evil that clawed its way over, under, and into human society was consolidating its stranglehold. Yeah, the Berlin Wall came down and “communist” governments fell. But AIDS evolved from a rare condition of African primates to a serious public health crisis for human beings. Famines struck Africa and parts of Asia. Chinese society more-or-less digested itself, killing millions and never emerging from its soupy environmental and social nightmares…and on and on, yadda yadda yadda… .
We, the people of peace, tolerance, and at least half a brain, were relegated to the sidelines. Viewed by aging politicians and citizens of what we ironically call the “American Heartland” as dangerous, anti-U.S. traitors. Dick Cheney was elected Vice President and promptly flushed the country down the toilet of war. Which was (and remains) fine with Dick and his buddies. They have no vested interest in “winning” and/or ending the wars they precipitated. They just want to get rich providing fuel, weapons, and mass commodities to the war machine. Eisenhower’s “Military Industrial Complex” not only became reality, it was viewed as forward movement of society by aging politicians (think G.H.W. Bush, John Boehner, G. W. Bush, et. al) and right on approximately 50% of U.S. citizens (that figure continues to pertain).
So. When he have a run that clears the table like we’ve had recently—symbols of Confederate apartheid becoming social anathema, health care expanded to pick up more than 10 million people who otherwise would have continued to function without, the SCOTUS recognizing the bigotry, hatred, and stupidity of arguments against inclusive marriage, tossing the decades of childish idiocy relative to Cuba onto the trash heap of history, et al., it’s a real shock to people of my generation. But one hell of a positive, unexpected, and delightful shock.
And the concept of “delightful shock” brings us neatly to the purpose of this weblog—keeping track of me and my cancers. For another surprising week, overt symptoms of malignancy have failed to appear. Making this one more week that my doctors can notch on their stethoscopes.
Of course, with a case of serious, ongoing, and destined without doubt to be lethal cancers, all is not sweetness and light. Even on the most comfortable summer days, when it’s cool (well, relatively cool), I need to spend the bulk of my time indoors hooked up to an oxygen concentrator. It only takes a few breaths of pollen-rich outside air to trigger a sore and inflamed throat, massive and immediate generation of masses of mucous, and the initial signs of anoxia. So, I ain’t gettin’ much exercise. Which I do desperately need. On the flip side, of course, that I’m alive and sufficiently cogent to perceive environmental conditions is a huge win for the good guys (that is, the awesome medical team who have given me several months of relative comfort beyond what their own estimates of my survival potential was).
And then there’s the logistics problems. Of necessity, my private health insurance is ending and we now need to find, buy, and enroll in health insurance for Cathy, Jesse, and Colin. This is a big expense, although, having had the financial planners run a sort of profit and loss model including this seismic shift in health care, it appears that we will be just fine financially. While the family is shifting to private insurance, I believe I am being shunted onto medicare. Which means I need supplemental insurance to backstop the medicare. Which is just the kind of nitpicky, organizational, detailed operation that I really suck at. Hopefully Cathy, who has my power-of-attorney, can deal with some of it.
All this health care crap is, of course, triggered by the fact that I am still alive. Having planned things expecting me to be dead by late last year, we have to scramble now to catch up to the new reality. Which is that I am NOT DEAD YET!!! Yeah. I’ll trade some logistical contretemps for additional time to live. And since the docs were so successful, my discomfort and pain levels are under control. So, at least for the moment, things here in Cancer Land (trademark, copyright) haven’t changed much. I’m going to see my Oncologist in a few weeks, for both a brief examination and renewal of the prescriptions for federally controlled substances (that is, the pain meds). She has yet to reach the point where her curiosity gets the best of her and she sends me in for diagnostic CT/PET scans. She is puzzled, though, that I’m doing so well. She knows there are incipient and/or fully armed and operational death star…uh, I mean armed and operational malignancies throughout my lungs and chest cavity (at least. Probably elsewhere—liver comes specifically to mind, in prior PET scans a region of my liver was lighted up like FAO Schwartz in Manhattan during the week before Christmas.
So. When we failed to change the world when the opportunity presented itself in the 1960s and 70s, I recalibrated my expectations for the rest of my life. I resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to live to see an African-American President of the U.S. That we would continue to shed millions and millions of people from functional access to health care. That the social savagery of white southern Yahoos with confederate flags on their trucks would continue to intimidate. That marriage as a process would continue to be owned and operated by bigots who find homosexuality too icky to be graced by marriage. And on and on.
But, my doctors kept me alive long enough to see the social upheavals of the past few weeks. And I am really, really grateful for that.
As I am for the support from everyone out there in weblog land. You have my thanks. And I remind you: use ‘em while you got ‘em. They are a perishable commodity. So rock and roll here on the rapidly transforming earth. Maybe…just maybe…human society is not just a doomed accident of evolutionary processes. One message to take from the past few weeks is that we are NOT doomed (that’s a collective “we”. I, personally, am doomed, and destined to check out in the not-to-far-distant future. You all will be around hopefully much longer than that). Maybe humanity can sort out its social and ecological problems, and get a seat at the table for a long, long game of Low Chicago. I hope so. I’d push all my chips in now. But you all can horde them for a while. I love you all. Check back here next week. I’ll try to keep the column to a more compact and readable couple of pages. With so much happening this week, it seemed necessary to run over my word limit. ROCK AND ROLL, everybody!!!
PS—a few celebratory photos immediately below.
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (that would be Tulsa, Oklahoma, which, if it’s not in a different galaxy, is certainly in some alternative universe where hand-tooled boots made of exotic leathers including, based on my questioning of wearers, ostrich, alligator, crocodile, python, bison, shark, zebra, stingray, and dozens more are preferred, if not mandated, workday wear for the suit-and-tie crowd. Actually, if I recall correctly, men uniformly wore boots, women were split among heels and boots, same leathers for both) I was engaged to assist a law firm submit comments to regulatory authorities on a report addressing environmental issues involving one of the law firm’s major clients. The lawyers set up the project the old-fashioned way—a partner, another relatively senior attorney, a couple of legal assistants, a couple of technical experts (one was an in-house GIS guy, the other one was me), a secretary and a document preparation specialist all prepared to work (and more importantly, bill) 24/7 right up to the last possible instant that the product could be delivered to the regulators. In this case, that turned out to be 7 or 8 days running. We took over a large conference room, scattered our technical materials (papers, books, maps, more reports, copies of applicable regulations, etc.) on the table, chairs, and floor, and got down to work.
We got started around 9 every morning (I passed the only Starbucks on the walk from my hotel, so I showed up with gallons of coffee), and shut it down around midnight. We had pizza, pasta, Chinese, sushi, or barbecue shipped in every evening so we could “work” through supper. Then we did the drill. We turned the barely-legible marginal notes that we had marked up report copies with into a formal set of numbered, checked, cross-checked, edited, and nicely produced comments for submittal to the government. The process involved discussion, argument, writing, re-writing, re-discussing, re-arguing, about every word and punctuation mark in the subject report. And then subjecting our draft comments to the same painful “methodology” (which is preferred, because more letters, than the perfectly adequate “method”). Sometime on Saturday night we cut off the comment process to allow for document production and “final review”. And on Monday, we had our fat, plastic-bound comment document ready to be boxed up, hauled off, and handed to the regulators.
Actually, this particular matter turned out to be a lot more dangerous than “normal”. When we set up the conference room on Day 1, there was a candy dish of M&Ms on a sideboard. So, we nibbled handfuls of M&Ms while we worked. Day 2, the candy dish was empty. But when I went into the little kitchen area and rattled around looking for coffee, I discovered an enormous bag full of M&Ms. And I don’t mean “relatively” enormous. I mean like the size of a 40 pound bag of dog food. Full of M&Ms. At that point, things started to break down physiologically. In place of the candy dish, I found a 4 quart Tupperware bowl in the kitchen. From that moment on, whenever the supply of M&Ms in the conference room started to look low, I would haul the 4 quart bowl into the kitchen and scoop it full of M&Ms from the dog-food sized bag. Which means, of course, that we were eating M&Ms for 15 or 16 hours a day, for 8 days running. That was, in fact, the most disgusting week I’ve ever spent in my life. And remember who you’re dealing with here. I’ve eaten duck tongues In Hangzhou with the hyoid apparatus intact. Spent an afternoon wading waste-deep in a free-running river in Jordan, whose unidirectional flow turned out to be 100% secondary and/or combined sewage effluent. Dug my rodent trap out of the massive pile of shit a black bear took on it over night in the Nantahala Mountains of North Carolina. So I’ve got sterling credentials to judge degrees of “disgusting”. And 8 days of unlimited M&Ms took the prize by a long shot.
I was so disgusted with myself when I finally made it home from Tulsa (there has to be a bad country song in this somewhere) that I immediately went on the Atkins diet. Which means, of course, that I swapped unlimited bacon, butter, and mayonnaise for the M&Ms. Still, motivation is motivation.
And why, I hear you asking, did the Tulsa law firm have dog-food sized bags of M&Ms in its kitchen? Well, because one of the Partners successfully defended Hershey’s in some litigation matter. Hershey’s gratitude wasn’t limited to paying whatever massive billings were involved. They sent said Partner dog-food sized bags of M&Ms for life. Which, in my case, given my usual standards of self-discipline, would have put me in the morgue in no time. Where the Medical Examiner would probably have had to stuff me into a drawer, perhaps by slathering my carcass with mayo.
Which brings us neatly to the nominal subject of this weblog. My health status. In general, I continue to be able to breathe clearly and deeply. Except, of course, when I go outside on a hot, humid, pollen-filled summer day. Then I start to go anoxic within minutes, and must return to the supplemental oxygen in my hospital-style bed in the corner of the living room. Given typical summer conditions here in the mid-Atlantic region, my physical stamina has declined because I can’t really spend enough time outside walking to improve things. We took a drive up to the National Park on the Catoctin Ridge this week while Beth was out here visiting. I made it down the trail about 200 meters, then had to lean on Colin to make it back out of the woods to the car. Cathy, Beth and Colin walked further in on the same trail when it became clear that I had reached my limit. Where they found an intensely agitated family staring at a rotten tree stump. The father was giving a breathless lecture about how deadly the local “Cotton Head Snakes” are. Colin took a peak into the stump, where the sleek, strong body of a black rat snake could be seen. Nobody tried to disabuse the museum-docent wannabe father regarding the differences between rat snakes and copperheads, much less the fictional deadly “Cotton Head Snakes”.
Anyway. The deal is that my malignancies have been quiescent for another week. I continue to struggle to maintain/gain weight via the milk-like (but milk-free, because in most of the world, everybody older than a couple of years is drastically lactose-intolerant) liquid emergency rations. But even that I seem to be coming to grips with. I’m going to guess that Dr. T’s curiosity is going to get the better of her next time we see her. I think she’s going to send me in for a CT/PET scan, since that last one I had was something like 7 months ago. But I continue to be free of overt symptoms of cancer. And until such symptoms appear, I stay as comfortable as possible. I can now play all 5 of the instrumental pieces I’ve written for guitar, so it’s time to write another one. I get as frustrated over my inability to “sing” as I do at my inability to eat actual food. But then, of course, I consider the alternative. And, difficult as it is, I’m still alive.
Rock and roll, everyone! A few photos below for your interest. Use ‘em while you got ‘em. You can’t bank ‘em, save ‘em, or hide ‘em. You have to maximize your living now, while you have the opportunity. I’m pullin’ for you. Thanks everybody!!!
Ornette Coleman died. While he dabbled in other instruments, Coleman was, in his heart and in his brain, an absolute giant of the saxophone. Only 2 bands played at Coltrane’s funeral—one was Albert Ayler’s, the other was Coleman’s. Shit, if you take those 3 men, add in Charles Gayle, Eric Dolphy, and Peter Brotzman, you’ve got yourself the foundations for all the abstract expressionist saxophone there’s ever been. And Ayler, Coltrane, and Dolphy were taken from us way too soon. Ayler was found floating in the East River under mysterious, and never sorted out, circumstances. Coltrane had cleaned up his act, going cold turkey in the face of his heroin and alcohol addictions and quit using other drugs (primarily marijuana). He did continue to smoke tobacco. The shining gleam of his brand spanking new (I’ve used the phrase “brand spanking new” for my entire adult life. Looking at it now, written out on the digital “page”, it occurs to me that I have absolutely no smegging idea what it means and what its origins might be) lifestyle proved to be too little too late. Coltrane died in July 1967, 41 years old. His liver, overworked and under appreciated, came apart at the seams. Coltrane died of hepatitis and aggressive liver malignancy.
Coleman soldiered on, leaving in his wake (that’s gotta be a soupy, sloppy mixed metaphor, no? “Soldiers” implies, at least to me, terrestrial gendarmerie, as in “army” vs. “navy”. And “wake” is an artifact of motion disturbing the surface of a body of water. So my usage of the idiom would seem, at least to me, to indicate dry-land military operating boats on the open ocean, a conceptual non-starter in this context) such fabulous musicians as Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Wayne Shorter, Steve Coleman (no relation), Greg Osby, David Murray, Joshua Redman, et al. His recorded legacy is enormous, includes several well-recorded live dates, and can serve all by itself as a master class in jazz evolution.
So, anyway, for all the obvious reasons, death is on my mind…a lot…these days. In fact, it’s been on my mind since my local general practitioner first peered into my mouth and realized the chronic pain in my mouth and throat was due to cancer. An interesting aspect of having a terminal illness turns out to be the psychological fluctuations that accompany and magnify the good and the bad of the physical condition I find myself in at any particular moment.
For example. On a recent weekend day a few weeks ago the house was completely empty (except, of course, for me and the dog) as everybody else had places to and people to meet. So here I was, with my solid-body Yamaha Pacifica and an industrial strength amplifier with an 8 inch speaker. Music technology has reached an awesome pinnacle, where “small and convenient” amplifiers can pump out serious volume and very high-quality sound production. So, for a couple hours I treated the neighbors to my technically marginal but technologically marvelous guitar improvisations.
Then things went suddenly south. Remember that when the doctors administered the second round of radiation and surgery, the plastic surgeon had to improvise a way to replace my dysfunctional epiglottis. You may recall the photo posted here of the poor little valve’s misshapen condition. It looked distinctly like a squashed and wrinkled piece of dried fruit, perhaps an apricot that was dehydrated without the sulfur treatment that preserves color. Anyway, the best he could come up with was to borrow a chunk of muscle from my chest and insert it between my GIT and my airway. Given that my lungs are full of malignancies, keeping them free of aspirated gut acid seemed like a good idea.
And, of course, while the rest of the family was engaged in various errands, I managed to aspirate a big slurp of gut acid. So here I am, alone in the house, unable to breathe, unable to speak, so thinking I had to make it a neighbor’s place to get somebody to call 911. But of course, since I’m not breathing, I can’t really get across the 40 or 50 feet to the nearest neighbor’s place (Cathy later berated me—she long ago arranged with the 911 people to send an ambulance if my home number calls and nobody talks). So I suppressed my panic, sat down, calmed down, worked to get my breathing back to at least a survivable minimum. And just as I’m finally recovering after sitting zazen for half an hour, Lucy the dog runs downstairs and demands to go out (she ordinarily is loathe to let me take her out, so she was probably rather desperate). All I could do was look at her sympathetically until she went back upstairs.
The meditation eventually worked. I could breathe, and avoided a nasty ride in an ambulance followed by getting slapped around in the emergency room for hours and hours while waiting for a room to open up. Over time, such acute failures of my improvised thoracic infrastructure have become blessedly rare. Of course, I still struggle to pump in sufficient U.N. emergency ration liquid “food”. Otherwise, I’m able to breathe surprisingly normally. Oh, and I now have a couple of guitars and an amp, along with the fantastic effects box Tim was kind enough to lend me right here in my sick bed corner of the living room.
Anyway. In general, I continue to be surprisingly well and functional these days. Yesterday, in fact, we hosted a low-key get-together of old friends. The grilled pork shoulder was delicious (of course I’m forced to go with second-hand reports regarding food quality). We sat on the patio in the comfortably (if a little overly-so) warm afternoon and laughed the day away. I’m now physically exhausted but psychologically pumped. I thank everybody for the wonderful party. Such events make me feel like a normal, functional human being. For a few hours I forget that I’m dying. I feel the life and the strength of the friendship and the humor. The outcome is far more therapeutic than any of the vast array of medications I am forced to take.
My thanks to everyone who reads this weblog, and to those who think of me once in a while, and especially to the wonderful crew who schlepped their way here to spend their Saturday afternoon. Some experimental flower photos follow below. Thanks again, everyone. I’m still alive, and I’m still strong, because of your love and friendship!
This week, the world seems to have achieved a particularly wacky moment in history. I don’t know if anybody out there has fired up their Official Men In Black Weird-Shit-O-Meter, but this would be a good time to do it. Consider the internet news sources crème de la crop…or is that “crème”…or “crap”…. . Anyway. Consider things, including: 1) Bruce Jenner transformed into Caitlyn Jenner, got a hot magazine cover, and has her children call her “Dad”, 2) Larry Hogan, business guy and hardcore republican governor of Maryland, returned from a state-funded boondoggle in Japan raving about a multibillion dollar maglev commuter train between Baltimore and Washington, 3) the Muslim world, not screwed up enough by 15 centuries of overlay on landscapes defined by tribal ancestry and a century or so of maps fingerpainted by British and French diners deep into their after-dinner brandy finds the befuddled west (that would be Befuddled West, as in us and our European compatriots) managing to forge a powerful military union between otherwise diametrically opposed DAESH/ISIS/ISIL and Al Qaeda, particularly Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, 4) republicans, dozens of ‘em, smell Hillary Clinton’s blood in the water and are circling like crazed, but not overly intelligent, sharks on a grey whale carcass…and the list goes on. We could play this game for hours. Instead, let’s consider the important stuff.
Like the fact that the U.S., nation renowned worldwide for systemic disinterest in soccer, put together what appears to be a generally-accepted-as-credible corruption case against the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA). Note that FIFA does not limit its interest to soccer. It also governs organized “futsal” (an indoor game played on a small pitch with a dead ball) and “beach soccer” (which I can only presume is played under a dress code similar to that governing “beach volleyball”).
Actually, it seemed at first that most of the world, raking in millions and millions of dollars from international football activities, were content to let FIFA walk. The backbreaker came when the tiny, incredibly wealthy nation of Qatar, a desert outpost of raw petroleum and high-end retailing, was awarded quintessential summertime fun of the quadrennial…(is that right? It happens every 4 years, not 4 times a year)…World Cup of Soccer. Summer temperatures in Qatar generally peg well north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And they don’t fluctuate much. If it’s summer and you’re in Qatar, it’s really, really hot. A completely insane place to play summertime football unless you a) get paid big bucks but b) don’t actually PLAY soccer at all. This would describe the white men in ties who run FIFA.
So the U.S. Department of Justice busted FIFA for obvious corruption, which can be summed up simply as “pay (lots and lots of pay) to play”. The bidding process for award of the next couple of World Cups was characterized by under-the-table enrichment of individual FIFA executives in exchange for the Cup. I must admit I have not dug deep enough to determine whether FIFA rules and regulations actually outlaw such payments. But I’m guessing they don’t specifically address such things at all. If I were, say, FIFA President Sepp Blatter, I would first, before anything else, change my name to something that doesn’t sound so much like a rare and deadly parasitic worm. Then I would simply announce that the FIFA Cup process is driven by who gives more money and other valuable items (jewelry, destination travel, works of art, anything likely to bring bidding minima in the range of 6 figures and farther (further??) north on eBay) to FIFA leadership. I’d issue a simple, baldfaced press release explaining that a basic assumption of the World Cup bidding process is that countries willing to spend big bucks obtaining the Cup games are likely to spend bigger bucks making Cup activities just delightful for spectators, athletes, and team officials. This would ease the job of everyone involved in prosecution and defense in the World Court, or United Nations, or Switzerland, or wherever things like this go to trial. Think about it. Prosecutor’s got a list as long as a Gutenberg Bible of checks, cash, and jewelry collected by FIFA executives from Qatar federal government. Chief Prosecutor runs her hand through her hair to emphasize to the judge (or jury) her frustration, and then starts on the list: “did you not, Mr. Blatter…haven’t you changed your name yet?...umm, where was I…oh yeah. Did you not, Mr. Blatter, accept Cashier’s Check number 9917540 in the amount of 1.37 million dollars U.S., drawn on the Royal Bank of Qatar, on 3 April 2014 at a meeting in the bar of the Hotel d’Angleterre in Geneva, Switzerland?” And Sepp Blatter (his legal name change, to “Captain America”, is hung up in European Union bureaucracy in Brussels) says “Uhh…yeah.” Prosecutor runs down her list of thousands of checks and piles of cash, and each time whatever FIFA executive is on the stand simply acknowledges “yes”. By the end of the trial, the Chief Prosecutor has replaced her studious, no-nonsense, rigorously focused persona with that of a tank-topped, tramp-stamped, beer-swigging, weekend user of injectable narcotics who has left her husband and two young children to work as a caricature artist on the waterfront in Marseilles.
Anyway. From the perspective of me and my cancers, it’s been another really good week. In fact, and completely unexpectedly, my health is clearly improving, rather than deteriorating, over time. Much as this delights me and Oncologist Dr. T, it is confusing the hell out of her. As she points out repeatedly, I remain riddled with malignancies throughout my respiratory system and in thoracic components of my body cavity. It is possible (although we have NOT collected data to verify) that my diaphragm is itself populated by cancerous loci. Regardless of the precise distribution of malignancies, in general I am stricken with cancers that, by virtue of their locations, “should” be rapidly claiming my remaining life.
But, for whatever reason(s), my cancers are on vacation, and have been since my last chemotherapy infusion 7 months ago. I am continuously grateful to whatever god, gods, God, or naturally random processes have gifted me with this unexpected slice of life. If you remember back to when I was a total physical wreck (those of you who made the wonderful, life-affirming, unselfish journey to see me over Thanksgiving know what I mean by “wreck”), the docs provided me with an estimate of the value I might expect to wring from the devastation of the chemotherapy—3 or 4 relatively comfortable months. That was the payoff that Cathy, the kids, and I used to judge the benefits vs. costs of continuing to take the incredible pounding administered by the chemo. And here I sit in the real world, having bought not only at least twice the time the docs thought likely, but also the partial recession of such ugly symptoms as chronic pain, mucous-impaired breathing via tracheostomy, ongoing bleeding, panic attacks, depression, and intractable vomiting.
So here I am, perched in my bed in a corner of the living room, reading, writing, working on guitar skills, taking photographs whenever I get outside to shuffle slowly around the house or down the path to the woods and the creek. I do find myself irrationally annoyed that the cancers claimed my abilities to eat, drink, and speak, 3 things of enormous importance to me. But I kick myself out of such blatant self-pity by thinking of people whose illnesses were so much more difficult, so much more devastating, than mine. People like Beau Biden, with a young family, living by his intellect and dying of brain cancer. Musicians like Charles Mingus and Jason Becker, living by their fingers on bass and guitars, dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”), robbed of their primary physical abilities and the art they loved. And zillions more, so many and so much worse off than I am.
Then, just to make sure I’m REALLY paying attention, there’s this story [http://tribune.com.pk/story/898882/three-killed-in-sargodha-gas-cylinder-blast/]. Two guys on a street in Pakistan, both wearing massive suicide vests. They get into an argument. Argument escalates to shouting. And then, when they’re really pissed off at each other, they both detonate their vests.
Sounds like the ultimate trump (is that redundant?) in a formal, competitive debate. I wonder how many points you get per gram of C4?
Live ‘em while you got ‘em everybody. They’re precious and they’re perishable. Jason Becker knows it. I know it. And now you know it. And you’ve got time to do something about it. Let’s Rock and Roll!!!
