Present, and accounted for...

In the past few years, most of my pleasure reading has been in history and biography. Nothing obsessive, but I've trolled the British royal and social history for a bang of entertainment, France for edification, Russia because Orlando Figes is one of the best historians writing today, Italy because of the Risorgimento, Spain because the Reconquista is so much fun for people like me who cheered the accomplishments of the caliphate, Greece because it's Greece, and Turkey for the Hittites and the Byzantines and the Ottomans and the myriad other reasons it fascinates.

I went at this reading at the expense of literature, explaining to myself that the world that George W Bush was creating around me was so grim and ugly that I didn't want to get lost in fictional worlds--I wanted to understand the antecedents of this one--how we could possibly have come to such a flaw in leadership, such a lack of will, such a paucity of compassion.

I thought I would turn back to literature at a certain point, even get over my disdain for contemporary writing and give up my obsessive re-reading of the classics to understand the world of the new--I thought that project was coming my way. Obama, though not my choice of leader, seemed to presage a weltanschauung more closely aligned with one I'd have. Outside of a few murmurings of my general equality, etc., I've found his administration more Bush III than not. And my lit project yet to take off....

I could be faulted for taking too much of the problems outside my head on, and allowing them to control my agenda--or I could be faulted for excusing my lazy application by reference to world events, thus inflating their sense of importance out of proportion to their real application--I mean, will the world really suffer if I don't read Michael Chabon? Of course not. But sometimes the world is just here, just personal and just you and me.

In cancer time, I've read (literature, history, biography-wise) virtually nothing. I've taken no solace in any book and not hidden or delighted myself with anyone's virtuoso voice. I haven't uncovered any truth in antecedent time that illuminates my struggle or the world  in which it takes place. My reading has all been of the now and present--politics, blogs, newspapers, gossip, celebrity sightings, cancer boards on the net, doctor reviews, and entertainment videos from Hulu, Logo and Lifetime TV.

At first, this really bothered me. I figured I was become yet another sponge that could be parked in front of a television and entertained with the adult version of a Monster Truck. I figured I was just a step away from discussing characters on sitcoms as if I knew them and they had agency in my life--"that Whitney! how she talked to her husband!" or "what if the rose goes to the slut? Will he marry that bitch?"

It's not that bad, I'm happy to report.

I began to realize, slowly, as Scott and I discussed re-reading "Mansfield Park" together that what I want isn't in any book or television show right now. Those are just gloss and floss. What my mind is looking for is to connect with the now around me. To observe, to delight, to disdain and revel in what people do. I want to know what normal looks like, and observe how people eat. What they choose at the counter of a Starbucks, why they stop at McDonald's, ever.

I feel like perhaps I have no idea who other people are and what this experience has brought home to me is that I do actually want to know more about them. I bore myself. I bore myself enough to host a bunch of killer cells--maybe it's time to learn from outside in, and instead of judging from inside out.

What I like, right now, is the voice of other people. Not necessarily the one you hear but the one that is revealed in how they do things, in their apparent choices, in where their point A was and how I encounter them at point B or later. I want to fill them in as puzzles, but without supposition. I want to understand how facts click into place, one after the other, and somehow make a story. Indeed, how does a series of truths end up sounding so fictional? That is magic, and magic I've ignored for far too long.

Although I sit and write this, I'm a lot less interested in myself that you might assume. Granted, I'm proud of what I'm doing, health-wise  and happy with how I'm doing it, but I don't assume I have--in either subject--a teachable product. I went into this at a good weight and in good shape, so the exhortations of the health care industry to quit smoking, get in shape and attain a goal weight for your best chance at survival are true. I'm the poster child for most of the public health newspaper stories of the past 20 years. They are true. Follow them. And much of the way my body has recovered and will recover owes a lot to that, and to my genetics, and to my mindset--much of which I received from my stubborn parents and their peasant ancestry, that which required we get off our broken asses and get back to plowing to forestall starvation.

I recover more the less I uncover of me and the more I uncover of you, them, and the group of us. The more I think it may fascinate me to understand how Project Runway entertains so many people versus why I particularly watch it (and I do, and it's crazy, because I am so not the fashion). I think I'd like to spend the next part of my life motivated not by facts and knowledge and mentality but more by intuition, joy and impulse. I'd rather see myself not apart from, and not necessarily part of, but more connected and a bit more viscous than dry.

I know that once you're part of Cancerville, you never really move away. You might be declared free of it, you might be scanned clean year after year, but you are a citizen. How you live it and move forward is a matter of such choice that you cannot imagine you have--but you do have it. My choice, evolving as it is, might be summed up to be organic--to lean back into the tide of voices and experiences and let them rush over me, hearing them, acknowledging them, letting them adjust me as needed. Adding my voice to yours, to theirs, and to them.