Unknowable unknowns

5:15AM on a Saturday morning. Tomorrow they claim a snowstorm could dump as much as a foot of snow here. Normally, this would bring me joy--I love Winter--except this Winter, as I look back upon it, I have never felt warm. Literally, I mean, not metaphorically--in SF with Scott over Christmas I kept wanting the thermostat up, I hocked his warm fuzzy pull-over, my hands were constantly cold.




I chalked this up to being 52. Should I revise and chalk that up to cancer? At least indirectly--that all of that mouth pain and tongue horror took so much attentive resource that my systems were whacky and unstable throughout the body. A scientist would take some horror in my belief that this can be easily chalked up to cancer, but that's why I'm a poet and not a scientist. Cancer, j'accuse.




A few years back, I had a pain in my gut that was intense and over a period of time became unbearable. It took some time to figure out that I had an infection in my ileum (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-ileum.htm), which is atypical for people without Crohn's Disease so it was decided that I had Crohn's.




This was news to me as up to this point I could just about eat broken glass and get away with it depending upon how hungry I affected to be, I never had gastric distress, I never had to avoid certain trigger foods,

I seem to have no sensitivities to gluten, I'm not even lactose intolerant, I knew I could simply not have Crohn's, I was just the unlucky bystander who happened to get an infection in a weird place.





I wonder why I didn't react that way when they told me I had cancer--either I "knew" it or once I heard it, could trace the obnoxiousness of my condition back to that first zombie cell that refused to die, threw up its flag in my tongue and declared war upon my peace.




I do wonder when that happened. How many times I laughed, or had fun, or made jokes while tissue in my tongue was being degraded. How much joy should I not have had--or would have forsaken--had I properly known?




It is a shame to use Rumsfeldian language for any purpose but to belittle one of the least human individuals this country has ever produced...a man so evil that the death of others was a mere inconvenience to a plan, to whom the suffering of a nation of people was an acceptable outcome to a desired acquisition of his. There is a numb stupidity to the construction that cannot be bested. It should remind me and you that there is such a thing as true evil in the world, and to call it otherwise is merely to abet its existence.When I think of cancer, I think of him. They seem a pair.




I was unable to sleep last night because I continually had to suction the drainage from my mouth and throat. I decided around 1am to view this as the logical result of my tendency to heal rapidly, and to accept the inconvenience of sleeplessness as a trade off to leaping forward toward normalcy. I will see a victory where I can.








I wonder, pre-snowstorm, pre-dawn Saturday, when all of this happened to me. Was I happy that day, was I an asshole to anyone? Did I forget my wallet at home or my keys on the table? Did any part of my body shudder just a bit feeling a piece fall out of place? And did that shudder feel like a 52 year old realizing it's Winter and he's cold?