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.