It Might Get Messy

Holy smegging hell. I’m not sure what we did to deserve this, but it must’ve been something that really, really annoyed whatever quorum of gods was paying attention. Most of the world deals in daily tragedy ranging from war and domestic bombings to deep unemployment, environmental nightmares, epidemic illness and violent cultural unrest. While we here in the “New” world are cursed with pure, unalloyed comedy in the candidate pool of national “leadership”. Perhaps I’m just being overly sensitive, because I didn’t expect to be here this far into the electoral cycle. But I don’t think so. I’ve seen every movie the Marx Brothers ever made. And there is no question that the people running for the U.S. Presidency do funnier improvisation as a collective than Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, Chico and Gummo (the latter admittedly never made it into any of the scripted movies, being strictly devoted to the stage acts) ever contemplated.

Of course, “all politics is local”, so the best thing to do to explore forthcoming electoral possibilities is to check in with our neighbors to see what’s up in their lives. But before we get too far down that Highway to Cynical Hell, let’s check in on my physical condition. Not much happening physiologically this week. All things considered, that’s pretty much the best outcome by far of all the possibilities. It means the seed cancers splattered around my lungs and chest cavity haven’t sprung to life and re-started their multipronged attack on my respiratory apparatus. When I was with the oncologist a couple weeks ago, I asked her what signs, symptoms and signals I should be watching for to indicate the rise of active pathology [(for some reason I think of it like a “rise of the machines” in a Terminator movie. And of course the ability to travel in time seems like it should have potential therapeutic benefits. Either I could return to the past and eliminate some of the grossest carcinogenic behaviors from my repertoire, or I could jump to the future on the assumption that at some point cancer will become a curable problem and I could pop naked (unfortunately not looking AT ALL like Arnold Schwarzenneger or Kristanna Loken) into the post-cancer world. Of course, after thinking about it for 30 or 40 seconds I remembered that Sarah Connor died of leukemia. So I’m gonna have to go deeper into the future, hoping that the Terminator Wars haven’t impaired human medical advances. Maybe it would be easier to just track Kristanna Loken through space and time as she appears naked from the ether via the nearest wormhole. Admittedly this wouldn’t help fix my cancer, but it would probably get me to forget about it at every T3 pop-in/pop-out event]… . 

OK, dammit, I lost my train of thought there. Lemme look back earlier in that bloated paragraph… . Ah. There we are. Signs and symptoms of resurgent cancer. She said it could be increased pain, bleeding, trouble breathing, massive swings in mucous production…any one or more of a wide range of pathological changes in my condition. Sort of a “know it when you see it” deal, apparently. And I do pay attention. Mostly because of a now innate terror of the horrific effects of chemotherapy, which accounted for essentially all my hospitalizations over the past few years. So I live in walking dread of the week after the infusion bags are locked to my medical port. When my cancer returns, Dr. T is planning on putting me right back on the chemo drugs that were so effective at getting me to this point. We don’t have the option of going to the more advanced technology of monoclonal antibodies. We started my treatment there, and I promptly fell into anaphylactic shock and had to be put on a respirator. But I’m wondering if there’s not some other cocktail of drugs we could try, just in case they work without sending me barfing, whining, and/or barely conscious via ambulance rescue to the Emergency Departments. 

Happily, at least for the moment, I don’t seem to need treatment beyond my daily regimen of painkillers and physiobalancers for blood pressure, gastrointestinal activity, anxiety, etc. In other words, I’m feeling surprisingly good for someone with a terminal illness. I intend to ride this pony as far as it’ll take me before I have to “switch horses in midstream”, as criminally underappreciated California female rock group “Fanny” from the 60s would have it. (their 90 song Rhino Handmade collection is available as an mp3 download on Amazon for the bargain  price of $33. Highly recommended. No household should be without).

OK. So now we can go back to the stand-up comedy contest that is the initial marshaling of forces for the 2016 national elections. From Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Lindsay Graham, and on and on, the humor value is enormous. Of course, the comedic fun has to be balanced against the potential to really screw something up in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. This means it would be nice if we could elect somebody with half a brain and two scoops of meaningful global experience in 2016. And I’m not seeing that person anywhere between here and the horizon, otherwise known as “nominating conventions”. 

Of course, should somebody meeting minimal standards of intellect and experience actually show up and run, you’d like to think the “locals” of famous political aphorisms would have the brains and ethical perspective to recognize and vote for same. 

Sigh. Here in our neighborhood, the most recent insight into the state of voter’s minds was revealed by the owners of the house across the street, caddy corner to ours. This family borrowed a shitload of money against their house (given the listed value, it is apparent that they have at least two, and maybe more, mortgages). They put their kids through college, built a small collection of high end automobiles, and then simply walked away. That’s right—they stopped paying off their mortgages. Apparently they stopped making payments several years ago. The banks finally foreclosed. And the family simply packed up and disappeared. Leaving an empty house to deteriorate and drive down the value of the rest of the properties on the street. Eventually, hopefully, somebody responsible will pick the place up on a short sale or foreclosure auction. But that could take a long time. Time that will see that house falling ever deeper into thermodynamic hell as the lack of maintenance lets things slip into entropic degradation.

Sigh (again). To the degree that these people gamed the system (a not-uncommon event, search on “strategic foreclosure” for all the fun details), they’re going to win and the remainder of the neighborhood is going to lose. No wonder a complete whack job like Ted Cruz is a viable presidential candidate. Not only will the electorate not call his bluff, his dim understanding of reality and cruelly shallow thinking may be right in tune with the times. 

OK. I hate to leave you all with this depressing story, but I’m afraid this is the road we’re walking as a collective social enterprise. To counter this frightening overlap of local and national politics, I suggest you take full advantage of the changing seasons. Get out and watch the songbird migration this spring. Cook outdoors all summer. Live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever!

It Might Get Messy

So, as an official Dead Man Walking, I pay obsessive attention to physical signs of decline. “Is my breathing tight today? Shit, maybe the cancer’s waking up in that right lung.” “Am I running a fever? It must be pneumonia.” Etc. I do the same regarding psychological markers, but (shockingly), until recently, haven’t found much down that rabbit hole.

I’ve spent my life functioning in an oddball maze of interests and obligations. Read this, write that, sketch that dream from last night, practice those new scales, structure the chords for that new song, get the camera, there’s a good bird on the feeder. Half a century of bouncing from project to project, always with a pit of guilt deep in my gut that I’m not finishing things fast enough to move on to the next thing.

What I realized this week is that, while I still work the same way—book to guitar to manuscript to recipe to sketch pad to watercolor sheet—that nugget of gonna-miss-the-deadline-panic is no longer there. In fact, when I open that book or pick up the guitar, I actually become calm and comfortable. Where I used to get tense and worried. So what the hell happened?

Took me a bit of self-analysis to figure it out. But I think I got it. Back when I was healthy and anticipating a long, strong life, everything I did was about PRODUCT. About getting it done. Finish it so I can move on to the next thing and finish that so I can move on, and on and on. And of course I never (well, seldom) actually finished anything. Thus the gnawing deep inside. 

But now I can see the end of my life. And it isn’t that far away, and it’s very, very real, not the abstract empty concept of my younger, hardier days. Not only can I see it, I can feel it. In the pain, the discomfort, the mucous, the blood, the crazy surgically redesigned plumbing in my throat and chest and gut. And now, when I put down book A and pick up book B or the guitar or the sketch pad, I feel still and quiet and complete. And it’s because, to a dying person, doing something--anything-- is life-affirming. It’s time off the track to the grave. It’s no longer about product, because there’s no hope that I’m going to generate meaningful product before I’m dead and gone. Now, it’s all about PROCESS. Process of the things I love—reading, writing, music, photography, drawing, painting, cooking, hell, just watching my kids come and go. For someone in my condition, BEING is everything. Because pretty soon I am no longer going to “be”. I’ll be gone, trading physical presence for existing as fading memories of family and friends. So the more being I do now, the longer I hold off that moment of not-being. Time to wrestle that guitar and the scale book out of the corner behind my double medicine cabinets… . 

Along those lines of being, we had old friends in for dinner last Sunday. It makes me feel incredibly good to have family, old friends and young kids in the house, sharing food and wine and telling jokes and stories. Almost allows me to forget, for a while, that I’m living on borrowed time with a terminal illness. And that’s a great feeling.

For supper, we wanted something easy but delicious. Right away, when those are your criteria, you think Italian. A few plates of antipast and some simple but tasty main dish and everybody’s life takes on that Zen patina of comfortable existentialism. So we went for one of my Mom’s best repertoire items, Pasta Fazool.

Of course, I ended up too sick at the key moments to contribute physically to the cooking. I did manage to direct Colin, Molly and Cathy through the process of getting it all together. And it worked out well—probably better than if I was on the case myself.

Pasta Fazool. An Italian, and Italian-American, classic. Properly it’s pasta y fagioli, pasta and beans. “Fazool” is commonly believed to be a sloppy Americanization of the native Italian. I don’t buy that (but as far as I know, I’m the only person on the planet who doesn’t). I think “fazool” reflects Arabic “fool”, for beans (offered 3 meals a day in the four-star hotels of Jordan and Kuwait, and I expect elsewhere although I can only provide on-the-ground verification for these two). Given the dominance of Muslim influence around the Mediterranean, including Sicily and Spain through the 1500s, and the continued mix of cultures since then, it seems likely to me that the peasantry of the Italian peninsula conflated things before Italy became an actual national entity in the late 1800s. In which case “fazool” is a linguistic bastardization and not simply a slipshod error.

Anyway. Pasta fazool. About the simplest and most delicious dish in the global Italian repertoire. My family always made it with nonsmoked pork, which distinguished it immediately from pasta y lenticci (“pasta lindeech”, or pasta and lentils), which we always made with smoked pork and/or bacon. Pasta fazool is usually made on the stovetop, but there is a high risk of burning the bottom and rendering the whole batch inedible. I make it in the oven, which requires much less fussing, and also accommodates a huge batch if you want to make it for a crowd.

So. Get a chunk of pork. Not a lean piece. No loin, tenderloin, chops, or fresh ham. This is needs to be an old fashioned fatty and gristly piece of meat. The best cut is the shoulder (sometimes called “butt” or even “Boston butt”, and I have no idea where either odd misnomer came from), bone in. Without bones is fine. If you can find shanks, these are excellent, good fatty ribs work, and if you’re a little adventurous, a couple of pig’s feet make it even better. 

In a baking pan appropriate for the size of the batch you’re making, put olive oil, the pork, chopped onions, plenty of crushed and minced garlic, heavy doses of salt, pepper, dried basil and dried oregano, a couple of bay leaves, canned diced or crushed tomatoes, canned or boxed beef and/or chicken broth, and a heavy sprinkle of standard supermarket-grade balsamic vinegar. Throw in some wine, if you have an open bottle/box in the frig. Stick all this in a slow oven. Let it cook until the meat is falling-off-the-bones or falling-apart (if no bones) tender. To a certain degree, you can adjust the size of the chunks of meat to the time available for cooking. If you use a whole shoulder, it will take 6 to 8 hours. The same shoulder cut in 10 or 12 hunks will need 3 to 5 hours. Check periodically to make sure things aren’t drying out, this wants to be stew or even soup texture. At this point, remove the meat and let it cool so that you can pull it from the bones and shred or dice the flesh and skin. Skim some of the fat off the contents of the roasting pan. Just get the easy stuff, don’t be anal about this. You need some of that fat (which is part olive oil, remember) for flavor. Return the pan of liquid to the oven. When it re-reaches a simmer, add small pasta (what Italians would use for soup—ditalini, little elbows, tiny penne) and canned Cannellini beans. When the pasta is done, so is the dish. Toss the meat back in. Serve with Parmesan, grana padano, and/or pecorino grating cheese, good bread, a salad, and plenty of rough wine. Made correctly, this dish has the odd property (associated with other dishes of Italian extraction, such as sauce Bolognese) of rendering the happy diners unable to stop eating until they are stuffed to what would be gills in an aquatic version of human beings. Very satisfying for the cook!

And for the cancer victim. Sitting in my hospital style bed and watching it all go down gave me just that same Zen-of-being peace as picking at the guitar. Which I did for most of the afternoon while the garlic clouds drifted through the house. Having people around actually feels better than a full dose of dilaudid, which is a highly pure and potent opiate. Which is pretty much the gold standard for “feeling good” in human beings. Along with, as I now know, simply being alive and paying attention!

As always, I urge you to live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. But if you use ‘em well, you can wring some real value from them. Thanks for being here, everybody. I love you all. And I love still being here to…well…be here!!!

It Might Get Messy

Been a heavy week here in Cancer Land (trademark, copyright)(note: I claim the trademark on “Cancer Land” because at some point I intend to write a business plan for a disease-based theme park. It’ll go up near some famous hospital and have rides that take the happy visitors into the bone marrow where they can experience leukemia developing, happening, and being treated; a liver for liver cancer; mouth and lungs, perhaps with oversized realistic simulations of tobacco use, etc. Based on my post-adolescent experience at Warner Brother’s Jungle Habitat in West Milford, New Jersey, I’m certain we can make a fortune with this). Had the first diagnostic scans since early December and met with the oncologist despite having to juggle serious winter weather. But before we get into that, let’s consider the difference between KNOWING something vs. DOING something.  

We can start with a gimme. Visual arts, painting, say. Out of any hundred people you drag off the street into an art history program, a fair proportion…for argument’s sake, let’s say 70—could memorize enough names, dates, styles, even technique details to get a middling grade—a C. At the same time, no matter what package of incentives, punishments, and pedagogical methods you string together, a much smaller number…probably well under 10—could produce even minimally credible canvases. It’s that difference—70 vs. way less than 10--that I mean by "knowing" vs. "doing". 

Interestingly, the same delta doesn’t necessarily pertain, at least at a conceptual level, to the sciences. “Knowing” a science—that is, the vocabulary and grammar that makes up its description and verbal record—is challenging simply because of the volume of bullshit involved. And “doing” science is, theoretically, anyway, relatively simple. Science operates by experimentation. The best and most robust experiments are simple in concept. Hold all variables the same except for the one you are interested in. Vary that “interesting” parameter. If you’ve done your job right, differences in experimental outcome will be clearly attributable or not attributable to your variable-of-interest. Simplicity itself! That is, until you get down in the weeds. When your variable-of-interest is the velocity of certain subatomic particles, you need a 17-mile ring of high-powered electromagnets in a facility involving dangerous electrical power levels, vacuum environments, and near-absolute-zero infrastructure taking up a large chunk of high-priced real estate in alpine Europe. 

My point is…uh…hang on a second, lemme think about this…Oh, wait, I remember. The point is that reading even a brief paragraph comprising a radiologist’s report regarding a patient’s cancer requires you to understand a boatload of specific jargon, or, as phrased above, “volume of bullshit”. 

Which brings us right back to the weekly report of this weblog. On Monday, we went all the way to the hospital for a CT scan of my chest. We didn’t use the local radiology lab here because the last scan was taken at the hospital when I was there for pneumonia between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then yesterday we met with the oncologist, for the holdover appointment from Thursday’s “massive” (maybe 10 inches) snow.

The entire radiologist’s report comprises precisely 13 lines of text. To read it, we need to know the definitions (most of the following are from dictionary.com, which nicely tacks specialized medical usage of words onto the normal people definitions) of “hilar” (the hole where blood vessels or nerves enter an organ, also called a “porta”); “mediastinal” (a septum or partition separating two parts of an organ); “nodular spiculated” (having the form of a spicule); “atelectasis” (incomplete expansion or collapse of the lungs); and “subcarinal” (no definition at dictionary.com or other rapidly available dictionary sites); among others. Perhaps we should turn to the 5 line “Impression”, which has more the flavor of a summary intended for medical professionals who are not cognoscenti of radiology. 

The “Impression” says: “Overall improved lung aeration with diffusely scattered nodular and spiculated consolidation with atelectasis. New dense and ground glass right upper lobe consolidation. This could represent infectious/inflammatory changes or neoplasm. Continued follow-up imaging is recommended. Large right and moderate left pleural effusions have increased mildly when compared to the prior study.”

Basically what he’s saying is that my airways are surprisingly open, the pre-existing cancers are still there but they’re smaller and fewer, there are some new spots in the right lung that could be inflammation or scarring (as from chemotherapy or pneumonia) or new cancers, and that there is some fluid in the pleural cavity around both right and left lungs. I assume “ground glass” is a term-of-art describing nodules in the lung tissues. 

So I discussed the meaning of all this, particularly possible timelines, with the oncologist. She, being a good and honest practitioner, warned that it is impossible to forecast temporal changes in my specific case. However, in her experience, individuals with generally similar conditions have gone a few months to a year before the disease has climbed back into the cockpit and fired up the afterburners. She also pointed out that my cancers (but not the rest of me) responded very well to the chemotherapy that followed the radiation that followed the surgery last year. Her point being that if I’m willing to put up with the hammering of the chemotherapy, it is likely to have a good therapeutic outcome so that when I get sick again, we’ll have a place to turn if I want to buy some more time to be alive. Given how horrifically ill the chemotherapy made me last year, I will certainly have to consider how much ugliness I’m willing to trade for more time on earth. 

But that’s an issue we’ll deal with when the time comes. For the moment, I’m breathing relatively easily, I can take enough medication to sleep through the night without drowning in mucous, and I can function, at least minimally, like a human being (like I can get up and down, walk around, don’t need to haul oxygen with me for every excursion, and seem to be keeping my weight stable despite ongoing struggles with getting sufficient calories of the U.N. emergency rations ingested every day). Given that all three of my key doctors—oncologist, surgeon, and radiologist—believed I would be dead or, at best, clearly dying right around now, I’m at least a bit ahead of the game at this point. You can believe I’m gonna live ‘em while I got ‘em, because now I seriously know they’re not forever. But I’m gonna stretch ‘em out as long as I can, and I commend the same to you. Thanks for being here, everyone. Check back next week to see if my present good health is robust and maintaining, or fragile and fleeting. Where else can you get such a truly life-and-death documentary for the investment of reading a few paragraphs of online text?

It Might Get Messy

My entire adolescence took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. It also took place in the context of my primary personality trait at the time, which can only be described (charitably) as “stupidity”. 

It was my mother, a woman of enormous (if often sharp and sarcastic) insight, who realized that the spatial and temporal overlap of those two phenomena was a foolproof recipe for disaster. She spent some months early in the year my draft number came up (the 1970s draft was run as a lottery, based on date-of-birth selected randomly. I do not know how the government randomized the numbers, I’ve always imagined it being done via one of those rotating minnow trap cage things that was spun before each little piece of paper was drawn and the “lucky” winners announced to great fanfare) in a panic. When she calmed herself down with cigarettes and possibly tranquilizers, she formulated a plan. She bought a one-way set of train tickets from New York City to Toronto, packed a small travel bag with clothing and toiletries, and telephoned my dormitory on the Rutgers satellite campus in the quaint and/or historic metropolis of Piscataway, New Jersey. Usually when she called we would do 15 minutes of chitchat and then go our separate ways. This time she told me just to listen. If my number came up below the draft cutoff (to get the necessary quantity of cannon fodder, the government set a cutoff at the number of days expected to yield sufficient dimwits to meet their needs), I was to say nothing to anybody. I was to take the bus to the Port Authority building in Manhattan, transfer to the Pompton Lakes/North Jersey line, walk home from the bus stop next to the paint store in downtown Pompton Lakes, pick up the bag and tickets, get back on the bus to the city, and get on the train to Canada. 

But that’s not why we’re here (despite the bloated number of words in the paragraphs above). We’re here to discuss the age for legal consumption of alcohol in New Jersey. Which, oddly, had a lot to do with the Vietnam War. From the 1800s through 1973, the drinking age was 21. By 1973, the military draft took everyone 18 years or older, in conjunction with the voting age [1]. There was heavy pressure to let people you were training as adult military conscripts and sending off to die in the steaming heat of rice paddies in the Mekong Delta drink, so the age was dropped to 18. It went to 19 in 1980 and jumped back to 21 in 1983 [2].

In other words, the legal drinking age bounced up and down during my (extended) college career. During the pre-1973 gotta-be-21-to-drink years, a couple entrepreneurial dorm residents operated a weekly run (usually on Wednesdays so we’d be prepped for the start of the weekend on Thursday) to New York State (a couple hours away by high-speed motorway) to purchase primarily cases of something called “Boone’s Farm Apple Wine” and “Boone’s Farm Berry Wine”. The bottles sold for somewhere south of a buck apiece, our smugglers took a 25% premium, so we basically paid a buck and a quarter per bottle. Because there was a finite amount of alcohol available every week, things seldom got out of hand (well, wait, they still got thoroughly out of hand, but it didn’t really have much to do with serious overconsumption). Then in 1973 the dam broke. Now we were on our own, with no need for intermediaries willing to risk their arrest records in return for not very much money. And without logistical constrains on the availability of beverage intoxicants.

Because we bunked in a campus well away from downtown New Brunswick and the main Rutgers campus, the selection of booze in our general area was somewhat constrained. In fact, the nearest purveyor of alcohol was a tiny store front shack that sold every available size container of Colt 45 Malt Liquor. And that was it. You want wine? Whiskey? Actual beer? Keep driving through the pasturelands to the next town down the line.

Because it was cheap, handy, and really not too bad…did I say that out loud?!...I became quite the devotee of Colt 45. I started the year drinking about a liter-and-a-half a night. But I found, over time, that I habituated. To achieve the same level of intoxication, I had to drink more and more Colt. My tolerance for alcohol rose steadily and consistently as the school year progressed. Costing me more and more money. Fortunately, Colt 45 was cheap enough to support an alcoholic habit. 

Many toxic chemicals (which is a category properly characterizing beverage alcohol) exhibit this process of rising tolerance. Nor is this property trivial or merely an inconvenience. With alcohol specifically, a heavy drinker going cold turkey and simply stopping drinking can die from the withdrawal effects [3]. The generally intense withdrawal symptoms from opiates, while horrible in the experience, don’t usually have the potential to kill.

And opiates is part of the reason I’ve dragged you through the above rambling trip through my subconscious. As you’ll remember from this column a couple weeks ago, I take a lot of medicines. Quite a few of them are psychoactive, including dilaudid (a powerful and pure manufactured opiate), Xanax (a tranquilizer), Mirtazapine (relaxant and sleep inducer), melatonin (sleep inducer) and others. I had gotten in the habit of taking my meds three times a day—once in the morning, once in late afternoon, once in mid-evening. Lately I’ve been combining the afternoon and evening meds (including the heavy dose of multiple varieties of sleep inducers), taking them around 6 pm as the TV news comes on. Taking higher total doses of some of the meds (like painkillers and antihistamines) is necessary at night because if I get the proper dosage, the pain and mucous drips stay away and I stay asleep. The problem with this was that I would fall sound asleep by 8 o’clock, bolt upright with my computer in my lap, whatever books I’m reading or researching spread out on my bed, the TV blaring, all the lights on. Then I’d wake up around midnight to pull myself together, shut down the computer etc. and get back to sleep. Cathy noticed this phenomenon and asked what I had changed about my meds, making the (spot-on) assumption that I’d changed my daily dosing procedures. She was concerned about my discomfort after sleeping bolt upright. I figured she had a good point, and that I was drugging myself into a stupor and so missing potentially useful reading/writing/researching/movie/TV watching time.

So this week I started revising my dosing routine so that the heavy sedatives and sleep inducers don’t get taken until after 8 or 9 o’clock PM. This has had the interesting effect of inducing withdrawal symptoms. I was getting weirdly dizzy and nauseous by the late-evening time I took the last round of drugs.

So I’ve actually had to spread the doses out, taking some of addictive drugs at a lower dose several times during the day. Still, the sleep inducers tend to slap me into submission right after I take them. If I am smart (and Cathy pointed out today that I have not been handling this intelligently), I would put the computer and books away immediately, so when the drugs put me to sleep, I’m not risking tipping over from the elevated hospital bed to the floor. 

I’m gonna try it starting tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes next week.

Thanks for being here, everybody. Remember to use ‘em while you got ‘em because they are NOT forever. And you’ll get more free time to enjoy yourself if you adjust your drug doses so you don’t get knocked out immediately upon taking them!

References

[1] http://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/news/th-amendment-lowered-voting-age/article_20a91b9c-2c80-11e4-9319-001a4bcf887a.html

[2] http://www.drinkingmap.com/drinking-age-in-new-jersey.html

[3] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000764.htm

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…^&*((*&^%$^&_)(*&^!!!!!!…………

It Might Get Messy

I was a rather sickly adolescent. And the way I recall it now, it happened in one day. As in one day I was fine, the next day I was sick and remained more-or-less sick for years and years. 

It was early autumn in either the 5th or 6th grade (not sure which). A warm, dry, breezy day. Gorgeous. Dried grass and late flowers everywhere. I was walking around the hill side of Pompton Lake to get down by the falls to do some fishing. And I started to sneeze. A few hundred meters further on, and I started to wheeze. A while after that, and I was choking and having serious trouble breathing. I made it home, where I must have looked awful. My Mom had the doctor in almost immediately (Dr. Gortych, likely an Armenian immigrant, was around my parent’s age, heavy smoker as were nearly all the adults in my world, and he made house calls, which was standard practice until a few years later). The diagnosis: acute allergic asthma. The treatment: a norepinephrine inhaler, occasional antibiotics to forestall pneumonia, and hot tea with gin. 

I SWEAR. I assume hot tea with gin is some sort of Armenian folk medicine. Every time I saw Dr. G for years after my inaugural asthma attack, first thing he asked was “how’s the tea and gin working?” And my mom, who had tasted the first cup we made (and you should have seen the twisted combination of astonishment, disgust, and nausea on her face) and I assured Doc G that it was working just peachily (word?). Even though, after that first batch, we never made it again. 

My asthma (and associated illnesses—acute and chronic bronchitis, periodic pneumonia, fits of vomiting, et al.) lasted for years. And then one day when I was in graduate school at the University of Georgia, the asthma lost its grip on my body. And following the cessation of physical symptoms, the psychological hammering that came with it also disappeared. I was a “normal” person physiologically. I tossed my inhalers, and from that day forward never had to endure another life-threatening asthma attack.

I beat the asthma out of my lungs by rigorous daily exercise. I started playing regular pickup basketball in the gymnasium, something of a lunchtime tradition at UGA. These were intense games, even though they were completely informal. Microbiologist Dr. M, a regular reader of this weblog, was also at UGA at the time and played in the lunchtime league. One day he read me the riot act because he didn’t like my technique for dealing with an opposition breakaway. We had a 15 minute screaming argument (even as the game went on) about this. I figured I held the high ground, since the breakaway guy missed his layup. Lex disagreed—he wanted to see good form, and damn the outcome. 

Anyway. I wandered off message there, for a bit. My point is simply this: for a decades-long, and occasionally life-threatening, illness, I had a total of maybe 3 medications. Let’s compare that with what I take now for my (temporarily) asymptomatic cancer:

• Twice daily splashes of liquid potassium chloride to re-balance my serum metals
• Twice daily big-ass tablets of magnesium oxide (same purpose)
• Thrice (good word, no?) daily tablets of Xanax (tranquilizer)
• Twice daily tablets of Prevacid, an over-the-counter antacid to assist in my ongoing struggle to get sufficient calories via the liquid emergency rations
• Twice daily tablets of Carvedilol, a blood pressure suppressant (my blood pressure swings wildly between too low and too high, the one place it seldom rests is in the “normal” range)
• Once daily tablet of Cymbalta, an anti-depressant
• Once daily tablet of Mirtazapine, a sleep-enhancer
• 8 tablets daily of low-dose (4 mg) dilaudid, a pain killer (to which I am now thoroughly habituated, but my pain level is fairly low at the moment so it still works ok)
• Up to 3 doses daily of Zofran, the current state-of-the-art antinauseal
• Frequent doses of antihistamines (over-the-counter products, mostly Benadryl) to suppress massive leakage of mucous from various bodily orifices
• Over-the-counter stool softeners (to counter the weird gastrointestinal side effects of the pain killers)
• Frequent smears of petroleum jelly to reduce chapped and cracked lips

At the moment, that’s pretty much my ritual medications. If and when I have to return to radiation and/or chemotherapy, there are additional drugs (such as steroids) needed to prevent the toxic effects of the treatments from dragging my carcass into the muddy morass of near-death experience. And all these pharmaceutical products have to be crushed into powder, a fussy job involving specialized (if primitive) hardware and brute strength. Oh well. I can certainly use the exercise!

Now that I see the complete list of medications written out, it’s no wonder I can’t pump more food into my overworked gastrointestinal system. The sheer volume if pharmaceutical products takes up quite a bit of room. There’s no place to put the necessary quantity of liquid emergency rations!

Oh well. One lesson cancer teaches is that you do what needs to be done, however weird, uncomfortable, difficult, or painful. Which leads directly to motto for daily functioning: live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever! Now I see that there is a corollary to this aphorism. It goes something like this: if you want more of ‘em, you’re gonna have to work for them. Primarily by ingesting massive quantities of physiologically active pharmaceutical products.

Hang in there, everybody. Despite how it seems when you get outside, we are sliding down the back side of winter, heading for spring. Day length is increasing. The mid-day sun is higher in the sky. Quite unexpectedly, I may actually live to see one more spring. Assuming I can keep ingesting this massive quantity of drugs… . The following photo illustrates the daily drugs issue…

It Might Get Messy

I’m not dead yet. Which, all things considered, is rather remarkable. It was early in 2011 that I was diagnosed with a massive tumor on my tongue with a secondary malignancy occupying what was, until it lost the battle, my right parotid gland (which is a large salivary gland that runs up along the back of the jaw just behind the ear). Through 2011, I endured the standard hell of cancer treatment: radiation, chemotherapy, surgery. Having the disease in my tongue struck me as kind of a sick joke on the part of the universe. I’ve made my living by teaching and public speaking. And I was just learning how to write, sing, and record songs, and had geared up the hardware—including a state-of-the-art 32-track recording deck—to do so. 

Music meant a lot to me. Hell, it still means a lot to me. So losing my tongue (after the cancers reconstituted themselves and made a second attack on my oral cavity after the first round of treatment) was about as bad as it could get. Tied together with my love of food and cooking and wine and whiskey, it was a double punch. Not being able to teach (and leaving the ecological risk assessment class teacherless just after the semester began) or talk (talking being basically what my job was) just added to the savage kick in the ass delivered by the cancers. 

Now I’m a couple months out from the last of six rounds of chemotherapy that followed the radiation that followed the surgery that treated the second appearance of the cancer. In terms of my own music, I’m reduced to working on instrumentals. Given my clumsiness as a guitarist, this is a losing battle. The only real “positive” outcome of being slammed by cancers is having time to read and listen to music. Oh, and of course, take photographs. Unfortunately for the latter, it’s far too cold outside for my now-stabilized 160 pound frame (a weight I believe I last saw as a high school freshman, on the mimeographed roster for the freshman football team) to walk around. But I still manage to get some useful photos.

So, let’s make a virtue of necessity. Some quick reviews of the music I’m listening to right now, and I’ll leave you with a few photos on the way out. I’ve pretty much swapped out compact disks for MP3 files. I have several massive external hard drives (special thanks to Tim for his massive contribution) holding the bulk files. I usually keep a smaller selection on the hard drive of this MacBook for ready headphone listening. Let’s see what’s here.

First, there’s gospel. But not just any gospel. I’ve been in the mood for raw, rough, savage stuff. The kind of music I would have needed when I was younger to get me moving on a Sunday morning after a hard-partying Thursday through Saturday. Of course, Blind Willie Johnson, whose entire recorded output fits on a double CD set (easily available via Amazon), is the master at this, and Reverend Gary Davis (much larger recorded library, also easily obtained) his disciple. I want to put you onto a really weird and impressive set. Pick up the three disk set titled “Fire in my Bones: Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel 1944 – 2007”. This stuff will amaze and delight you, from the guitar instrumentals through gravelly a cappella, to rockin’ sermons backed by drums, banjos, and dancers. Amazingly, for one of the most stunning collections of music on the market today, Amazon offers the entire three disk set as MP3 files for $12. The CDs run $27. Either way, it is worth every freakin’ penny. This stuff is simply and overwhelmingly awesome.

Next, let’s take a crack at the Grateful Dead. As early (in fact, the very first) adapters of the “sell everything on tape to compete with the bootleggers” (who they also didn’t generally discourage, being a pop music oddity—people who cared more about the art than the money), stuff’s been available from barely listenable audience recordings to unmastered soundboard recordings to the generally excellent studio stuff. One of their sets with a reputation for being the best of their live releases was “Europe ‘72”, a two disk set, beautifully recorded, on nights when they were hitting on all cylinders. Well, recently, a mass of tapes from that 1972 European tour have been worked up and offered for sale. There are at least 15 multiple disk sets available now, and every single one is as good as the Dead ever got. Both the artistry and the recording are first rate. I assume you own both of the comprehensive box sets pulling all their “officially released” recordings as of a few years ago together. But, to be honest, if I wanted the best of the Dead, stretching both their repertoire and their skills, I would collect this entire stack of 1972 recordings. It is that good. In fact, even though it’s live, it is recorded as well or better than most of their studio stuff. High powered. No household should be without. 

Let’s do one more. I’ve only recently discovered these people, so I may be behind you on this. The “modern roots” movement has bubbled up a group of experts. Experts not just at the music, but at the roots themselves. This is Cross Canadian Ragweed. Despite the geographical sounding name, these are U.S. kids, writing, singing, and playing at insane intensity, with equally insane imagination, humor, and depth. In keeping with the present model of musicians trying to find a way to make a living in a world full of digital reproduction, they’ve released tons of titles. Near as I can tell, they’ve done so without diluting their quality one bit. I do have an approach I recommend for starting out approaching their stuff. I suggest you snag the two disk live set “Back to Tulsa—Live and Loud at Cain’s Ballroom”. This is a great introduction. Then, grab the incredible bargain five CD, one DVD set “Box of Weed”, available for an incredible $27 at Amazon! At that point, you’ll be hooked and you’ll dig up the rest of their stuff, including awesome YouTube bits and dozens of disks and files, commercially released (e.g. Amazon) and at their web site. These kids sound a lot like Uncle Tupelo on steroids. And since Uncle Tupelo imploded after 5 (or so) albums, Cross Canadian Ragweed fill in a deep hole in modern Americana.

OK, that’s probably enough music reviewing for this entry. A quick catch-up on my health. I’m getting stronger and stronger. I’m desperate for warmer weather so I can get out and walk. My breathing seems to be ok—whatever cancers are left in my lungs, throat, sinuses, and oral cavity do not seem to be impacting my respiration. I continue to have a hell of a time maintaining my weight—I just can’t get enough of this liquid formula into my gut to yield the necessary calories. But I’m working on it. My pain, after subsiding for a while, seems to have reached a plateau, but the drugs I have access to are more than enough to deal with it. So, all in all, it could be a lot worse. I could be anywhere from dead, to dying, to back in horrific treatments at this point. Instead I’m perched in my hospital-style bed, reading, practicing guitar, photographing birds at the feeder, watching movies and TV. It’s not a bad life for the moment. But I really want spring to come. I’d hate to regress back to terminal cancer (which day is coming, it’s just a question of when) without having one more spring time to photograph the flowers, spiders, snakes and frogs. Now it’s just a race between my immune system, residual malignancies, and the natural turn of the seasons. Stay tuned weekly here at this blog to see how it plays out!

Finally, I leave you with some photos. The Coopers hawk was long-range shots of the bird on a fence. I knew it was somewhere in the neighborhood, because the song birds didn’t show at the feeders. And they’re usually there in crowds. Coopers’ favorite food is songbird, so it was wise of the dickie birds to huddle out of sight. The remaining photos are from a bouquet brought as a very nice house gift by recent visitors. 

Thanks for being here, everyone. Live ‘em while you got ‘em. They are NOT forever. And with spring coming, you want to be sure you’re here to see the blossoming of the woodlands and the snakes emerging from hibernation. At least I do!