It Might Get Messy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Might Get Messy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Might Get Messy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Might Get Messy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Might Get Messy

Autumn. Time for many creatures to prepare to meet their maker. Personally, I try to always be prepared to meet my maker. It’s easy because I’m usually pretty ticked off at him, her, or it and anxious to meet so we can sort a few things out. Like how and why an all-powerful being can stand aside while 10s of thousands of children around the world pass their nights alone, abused, cold, hungry or sick. I mean what the hell kind of deity has it in its power to prevent shit like that from happening and does not do so? What does that say about the morality and/or intellect of said deity? I know what it says to me. It leaves me pretty pissed off is what it says to me. 

But that’s not why we’re here. At least not mostly. We’re here because this is now the…uh…second autumn since I was diagnosed and treated for cancer. An autumn I might easily not have survived to see. So I’m damned happy to be in attendance! Sure, we don’t have the sugar and Norway maples that give those gaudy reds to New England towns and hillsides, but the mid-Atlantic has its own, slightly more subdued, color palette. Oaks and hickories, sweetgum and tulip poplar, all give things a nice yellow-to-orange air for the season. 

And I continue to slip toward “normalcy”. Voice still impaired, check. Swallowing still clumsy, check. Fitness still sucky, check. But. My voice is actually getting noticeably better. Last week I had several lengthy conversations with people I’d never met and who were at distant ends of teleconferences and who managed to understand me all the way through. Spent a couple days in the field in the deep, deep south with people who all understood me for the entire time. Ate real food, sort of, on the road.

Actually, the food was a little humorous. Stayed at a Marriott property in an old high rise building on the fringe of Baton Rouge. Had fabulous lacquered wood escalators, BTW. Didn’t really fit in with any of the other décor, but that dark wood with the thick lacquer shine was absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, I was tired. Ordered a room-service burger on the first night. It was delicious. Handmade, high-quality beef, plenty of good blue cheese, perfectly cooked. I managed to choke down a quarter of it before giving it up and calling for the room service guy to come retrieve the tray. 3 minutes later the food manager was on the phone, horrified that I’d eaten so little of the burger. He was terrified that there was something wrong with it. In fact it was one of the best hotel burgers I’ve ever had. I ordered another one the next night. Managed nearly a third of that one. 

Gotten into a decent nutritional rhythm the past few weeks. I stick a frozen breakfast sausage biscuit in my brief case on the way out, eat it around lunch time with a weak and diluted mug of cold decaf instant coffee. Works pretty well. With that solid food going down every day, I feel ok about weakening and doing liquids for breakfast and sometimes supper. Seems to work pretty well. 

Almost makes me feel like a normal human being. I know I’m not. My Arabic CD instruction is being impaired by my destroyed epiglottis. Means my glottal stop—a key phonemic function in Arabic—is sloppy, doesn’t stop quite suddenly enough. Makes me sound, I’m sure, intoxicated. Which is also against the rules of Islam. 

Which takes us full circle to that “meet your maker” deal. In addition to the letting-children-go-to-bed-abused thing, I’m gonna have to discuss the fact that he, she or it invented high-quality whiskey and then made it a) physiologically destructive, and b) proscribed by certain religions. We live at the behest of a sick deity, my friends. Or at least one with a sour and none-too-funny sense of humor. But don’t worry. I’ll sort things out when, eventually, he, she or it and I meet up. Shouldn’t take long to sort things out pretty effectively. Maybe I’ll have that opportunity on the night of 21 December 2012, huh? I’ll try to be prepped. Send me any messages you want conveyed. I’ll carry them in for you. What the hell, if I’m askin’ questions and takin’ names, I might as well take some for you! Love you all, my friends. Holidays about to kickoff. Thanksgiving invitation is out in via email, the driving CD goes to the US Postal Service this week. Walking into another one. Who woulda thunk it?!?!?!

It Might Get Messy

It Might Get Messy

When I was a kid, there was an oddball theme park somewhere in the Greater New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area called “Freedomland”. I don’t recall too much about it. I do seem to remember a sort of set-piece sequence to the attractions. First you road a “paddle wheel steamer” down “the Big River”, along which were such animatronic arcana as a settler’s log cabin, a bear, a native American, a fox….you get the idea. Disembarking from your paddle wheeler, you proceeded through a succession of exhibits such as craftspeople hammering horseshoes, some penned-up bison, a petting zoo, etc. Somewhere between the blacksmith hut and the electrically-lighted wigwam, we would park it on a bench and eat lunch, invariably egg salad on white, ham and cheese on rye, and pasta salad made with elbow macaroni, and a half-gallon “guj” as my parents insisted, of Kool-Aid or lemonade. 

As theme parks went, it was fairly lame (of course, I’m no reliable judge, having raised 3 kids and never gone to a theme park!). But the routine was comforting. You knew, when the adults were hauling you to Freedomland, how long it was going to take, what you were going to, when you had to ooh and ahh, when you could be tired and bitchy. 

The process of dealing with cancer has turned out to be rather similar to a summer-day visit to Freedomland. A settled sequence of events, tolerable, even comfortable in their own weird way, familiarity yielding calm, not contempt. 

Which means, not much to report on the cancer front this week. That alone, of course, feels pretty damned good. Oh, there’s the usual litany of what are presumably permanent complaints. Room service here at the Marriott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana just retrieved my tray and the poor food and beverage manager called after noticing the hamburger was barely eaten and wanted to know if everything was ok. I assured him it was delicious (and in fact I must say it was, handmade, well flavored Angus beef, plenty of good blue cheese, a nice crisp pickle which I’m finding is something of a Marriott trademark, at least in the south). But I can only get so much solid food past those shards of my epiglottis before it rebels and makes it clear that it’s not going to put up with any more pointy, sticky, or dry stuff and it’s time to switch to those thick shakes or give it up. Given that my weight has reached the high 220s, or higher than I want it, the shakes are going in favor of iced decaf coffees and low-fat mochas. 

So I got my ongoing discomforted throat. I realized the other day while dealing with some technical difficulties with my crossbow (it may be getting close to time to switch to a recurve version without compounding cams to complicate things) that my left arm is still partially paralyzed. I want to get an inexpensive traditional recurve and get that old fire-at-will feeling back. But I may not be able to do it very well. On the other hand, it may be just the exercise I need to rebuild some of my left arm function. 

Finally, I gotta get my annual drug and alcohol screen so I can work for a particular client. And I’m looking at the handful of meds I take every evening and thinking that one or more those must bleed a detector output spike somewhere near something illicit. But I got the scrips and I clearly have the need, so I guess we’ll find out.

This is what passes for adventure in my life these days, BTW. Sigh. Catch ya’ll next week. Later in the week there’ll be a new professional blog up at http:\\aehsfoundation.org\, it’ll go up later this week because it made it up late last week and I like to leave ‘em up for around a week for proper aging. Similarly, I’ve got some decent autumn photos, I’ll start getting those up over at http:\\docviper.livejournal.com\ later in the week, shoving the Thanksgiving invitation down to a deeper date. I’m expecting Thanksgiving to be just awesome this year, coming as it does a few weeks shy of the Mayan long count calendar end of the world. We ain’t lettin’ the universe end without a fight!

It Might Get Messy

Have drugs saved the world? There’s little doubt that they will, someday, maybe someday soon. The emergence and host transference of hemorrhagic fevers like Lassa and Ebola, highly evolved immune system nightmares like HIV, and the reservoirs of Yersinia pestis, cause of black or bubonic plague, all argue for the near-future probability of some massive contagion requiring heroic pharmaceutical intervention (see, among most recent examples, epidemic epic and Laurence Fishburne vehicle “Contagion”). Hell, there’s apparently still enough smallpox on ice in Russia, the U.S., and Ukraine to trigger such an event via a power outage and some careless cleanup of some messy old freezers.

But I’m thinking of this another way. One place I’m amazed drugs didn’t alter the world for the worse was the brain of Charles Darwin. On the Beagle as a young man, probably somewhere in South America, Darwin contracted a persistent tropical infection. He was plagued, so to speak, for the rest of his life by abdominal pains and other complaints. He was treated with increasingly frequent and massive doses of mercury-based medicines. Mercury, therapeutically useless, is in fact a powerful nerve toxin, and impairment of brain and other nervous system functions inevitable outcomes of chronic dosing. Yet Darwin created, thought through, and finished his most brilliant and prolific work in the throes of mercury poisoning. Of course, he was very slow to get the Origin of Species into print, and he actually meant for it to be the abstract or précis of a much larger and more seriously scholarly work. Maybe some of that was an outcome of his mercury intoxication. But if so, on the scale of the lives of us normal human schleps, you’d be hard-pressed to clearly label that a negative impact.

No, I’m going the other way with this line of inquiry. Consider. Through the 1930s, Adolph Hitler was smart, rigorous, and systematic. He manipulated first the Germans, then the Europeans and Britons, then the Soviets, in succession until he’d taken the European continent on a pretty casual basis. If he’d retained that systematic rigor through the 1940s, there’s no telling what the hell the world would be like today. Let’s say Hitler retained the peace treaty with the Soviets (who were nowhere near ready to defend themselves) and gone ahead and taken Britain instead. Oh, that wouldn’t have been easy. But it would have been doable. Then, without a hostile pipeline for American wrath at his back, he could have turned his sole attention to the Soviets. Given how fine a line there was between success and failure at Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and in the resource-rich southern Ukraine, it seems like the Germans might have made a real run at it. And we know from recently discovered research documents that German engineers were already thinking ahead to the Western Hemisphere. Ambitious weapon systems like 8 engine intercontinental bombers, huge transport submarines, and nuclear fission weaponry were all on people’s drawing boards. 

What we have to thank for the way things actually worked out is a string of oddly piss-poor decisions made personally by Hitler himself. He insisted the Messerschmidt 262, a stunningly advanced jet fighter that could have be in production by the early 1940s, be configured inappropriately as a bomber. He discounted jet and rocket technology and strategic bombing following the tactical success of continental blitzkrieg. He gave up on invading Britain after a long hard year of strictly aerial combat. He halted the units that were moving in to capture the allied forces the heroic Britons pulled off the beaches at Dunkirk. He signed on with Italy, putting a political and military albatross squarely on his chest. He insisted on mistreating Ukrainian and other non-Russian Soviets who initially treated the Germans as liberators. And most stupidly, he opened the second front with the Soviets, and in the process of dividing his limited resources shitcanned a succession of competent and professional military leaders and appointed himself, amateurish, petulant, irresponsible, and, basically, clueless, as top commander. 

And what might account for Hitler’s transition from unlikely but disciplined and successful political leadership to incompetent and untenable insanity? Well, historians generally do NOT blame his physicians [1].  But as the 30s became the 40s, Hitler met a mystical, semi-competent, marginally ethical doctor named Theodor Morell. As a fellow wack-job, Morell and Hitler hit it off right away. Especially since Morell immediately began administering cocaine eyedrops, amphetamine breakfast injects, morphine bedtime injections, a weird patent-medicine supplement product that contained a considerable concentration of nicotine, and other, even odder substances (possibly none quite as toxic as the nicotine, though). And he Morell gave him this stuff in increasing frequency and quantity right through to Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker in the late spring of 1945. I think it’s likely that Hitler crossed that fine line between evil genius and evil idiot as a result of Morell’s ministrations. Morell—and his drugs—may well have saved the world. 

And why do I bring up this rant of historic esoterica in the context of a cancer recovery diary? Because I have my own drug problems. As I’ve told you several times in the past couple of years, I’ve had to wean myself off of addiction to powerful sedative Xanax (actually the generic equivalent Alprazolam). Like quitting daily alcohol when my cancer was diagnosed, I don’t seem to have a lot of trouble attenuating then breaking the inevitable addiction to the sedative. It’s just odd to go through it repeatedly. Last time I saw my GP, he loaded me up with blood pressure and anti-depressant meds, and started to renew the scrip for Xanax. I told him not to bother—that with the cancer over, I was sleeping just fine and didn’t need it. Two days later, we found that scary tumor-looking blob on my throat. I faxed a note back to Dr. K, explaining that I had been too cocky, that I’d probably need that sedative to sleep effectively for a while. He renewed, no problem. As you can see here:

Xanax generic equivalent ready for use.

So I’ve been sleeping well on a milligram, milligram-and-a-half of Xanax. Got a couple more weeks of that, then the scrip will start to run down and I’ll wean myself back off it. I apparently inherited my father’s awesome control over his physiology. Dad was a serious alcoholic for decades, not having a night in maybe 30 years that he didn’t go to be at least pleasantly drunk and often further into it than that. Then his doctor told him alcohol was poisoning him and his liver and heart were going to fail very soon if he kept it up. That night he stopped drinking. No problems, no physiological issues. I read somewhere that you can’t die from heroine withdrawal, but you can die from alcohol withdrawal. I wonder about Xanax? 

Notes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Morell

[2] http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Morell/Morell.pdf