Trinities

I have three drafts sitting in here that I started yesterday, but as I got no sleep yesterday, in writing them, I kept finding nonsense, bad spelling, grammatical horror. I correct things I find wrong in anything I write, but particularly with this blog, I think it, write it, publish it. I use as little filter as I can manage between reaction and production. It has its moments.

But when I'm so tired that I can't even figure out in retrospect what point I was trying to make, or I have a line of a single letter where I fell asleep typing, it's time to stop. And, yesterday, my release from the hospital day, was a long one, with no sleep, a couple of extra doses of unnecessary trauma, not enough food, too many tests of  my vitals. I was in the hospital for 7 days and had my blood pressure checked at least once an hour--often more--on a 24 hour basis. At least 168 blood pressure checks. The fact that I didn't kill someone has much more to do with fatigue than desire.

I'm sure there are arguments to be made for treating sick people like that and they all make sense so let's just agree to not bring them up right now, because I don't care to hear them. Hear this from the patient: Get real.

Three drafts mirror three emails I've yet to answer. These too present conundrums. In one love lost has truly changed someone I love. In another, there's such a tone of warmth that I wished I knew my correspondent even better, because there's soul light in how some items are expressed. In the third, old friends, from decades back, who reconnected at a very weird and completely non-cancer associated way.Is that even possible anymore?

Lost love: My Answer:

     It grieves me that months later you are still mourning the loss of someone more than celebrating the years you grew in the relationship, the happiness you felt at whatever moments you felt it. I understand your reliance upon a spiritualism that both moves one and reassures one, but your reliance is half-felt. You have not allowed yourself to practice any reliance upon it to recover your sense of your own incredible goodness and move on. And, frankly, you are good. I could feel it every day we worked together, I knew it when you took that summer overseas and came back like an Edison bulb. I loved that light and I miss it, and I wish you could offer it to me now. I'm the guy who needs it.

The soul light--what I should say:

I've always liked you and have been amazed at the brain power you give off--just a great vibration of thought and action. I learned a great deal being around that, and to me, that's the pinnacle as far as success. One can do no better.

Reconnection--the guy

I wonder if I've grown up at all from the time we knew each other and I'm tempted to say I haven't--at least in the good way that my humor is still quite a bit the same, I'm still vulgar, but I became nicer, and more engaged with other people and less engaging to them. I don't do the old floor show; I'm older and certainly now, way too tired.

Reconnection--the girl

You wore the most god-awful shorts back then, and they did nothing for your figure--they were a bit awkward, perhaps, and I likely said something about them, because of course that was my job. Fashion critic--yes, this from a guy who can barely figure out why I'm not in 501s at every possible minute of the day.
I don't trust myself like that anymore--I'm free!

And there's a fourth conversation that's been pulled through this situation and to which I've never stopped to give a definitive answer. It's a conversation between three people, and it's been delightful to be one of them. It's tide is love and respect, concern and caution. In one part, two guys are trying to find their relationship that has in its early life had nothing but trauma. It came in with the most blasted and unexpected strength, at a weird time, in a banal sort of way, and was and is a stun all the way through.

In the other part, there are two guys who have talked a hell of a lot for 16 years and not much has been left out of that exchange. That conversation is with someone who will always be in my family--the one I've created--because he did more than anyone to empower me to create that very structure.It's a conversation that has contained every ambivalence I've felt about myself and all instances of hubris and has combined them into something far tastier, some great dessert cake made out of equal parts dumbass and wonderment. I can't wait to eat it.

I'm out for now. In a few weeks, we'll find out about what chemo and radiation will look like, and soon enough, how they feel. I'm working on doing those treatments at the University of California San Francisco where there happens to be a nightly backrub and a cheerleading squad (not to mention good transit options and all treatment in one location!). A new blender awaits any smoothie I can possibly have or think to have. And during all this I learn or relearn--on the gross level, how to swallow, to eat, to chew, to speak, how to adapt to what has changed in my appearance, if anything by that point. How to be grateful for a slice of shit pie that came with a dollop of whipped cream for palatability.

Don't be afraid of eating heartily of those concoctions. They are meaningful.

How to tell a bunch of people you love them because they've made you better, and that's what you've wanted all along.