Concatenating 2014: Astrology! Mindfulness! Lourdes!

What did I learn this year? or what didn't I learn? 

I learned once again that I'm like the Love Canal for toxicity. If you have a chemo drug you need to dump in a guy who won't automatically glow, I'm your man. I've now been at this chemo stuff for over a year and a half and the only problem I've really had is that I once had trouble breathing during a taxol infusion--allergic reaction, I think. They just slowed the drip down and I got over it. Case closed.

My newer drug, 5FU (5 times Fuck You), has a possible side effect of something called hand and foot syndrome, where the skin cracks, and it can cause nails to become brittle--and both of these have now happened to me--in fact, typing is somewhat painful because I have fissures in my nail beds that are annoying and prone to infection. My nails are breaking up into pieces, somewhat abstracted by my habit of picking at them. I was a nail biter all my life, and when nail biting was taken away from me, I turned into a nail picker. I am, after all, not a new Mark but a McGuyvered version of the old model. 

As I look at what I wrote about this year, I learned about the importance of other people in my life, how much deflection they provide me, how much love, the type of support they give that I cannot replicate. I learned how fortunate I am in the people I have around me, closely, or distantly orbiting. I have an interesting family that finds me interesting. I learned that I'm not really all that needy, but I need them, and I need the friends I have, and I need to hear their voices occasionally, on Facebook, as I read what they write in the voice I know of them. In person, as this past weekend when Jerry the Doll came calling, and spent time glorying in the idea that we are survivors. 

I have, too, a bro-crush, a admiration so absolute that it remains a pillar of my existence--my old India Studies boss, Dr. Sumit Ganguly. I know so few people that I believe are geniuses--actually, do I know any others? Some very close...perhaps just Katy Borner at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center....anyway, Dr. G., as I call him, is my completely nonsexual brain crush. Recently, he's had a serious health challenge of his own and I've been trying to get him to talk to me about it--and he defers on the basis that I'm dealing with enough of my own. Arrgh! I cannot get him to understand that focusing outside myself is what I most want to do. I can't change his diagnosis or prognosis, but I can offer a lot of perspective on dealing with the healthcare system, on how the mind twists to escape the illness the body presents it, how to stay yourself when nobody thinks you can do that anymore.

I recently saw a segment on 60 minutes with Anderson Cooper exploring mindfulness and going on a retreat and walking around deliberately and chewing in silence and what not. That's mindfulness? You see, to me, mindfulness is what I'm trying to do with Dr. G., what I encourage myself to do with all my friends--mindfulness is living the experience of others, understanding through their perspective, melding that with your own to learn of a new way of viewing, thinking, feeling. Mindfulness is not how I am to me, it's how you are. I suppose I learned in 2014 that all my life I've tried to do this--and that's one of the best parts of me that I'm glad is still here. It's not empathy I'm speaking of, but a real effort to retrain one's thinking to enculturate another perspective, and to then feel and think from that new geography. I understand what Anderson's mindfulness was trying to achieve, but to me, it's just stealth narcissism--and don't we have enough of self fascination? 

I'm perfectly ok with myself, and these days I only occasionally have moments of depression over how much cancer has changed me--yeah, it changed me, boo hoo. I'm not cute anymore, if I was cute before--my body is a map of big surgery and subsequent adjustments. My skin is dry and thin, my ass (what's left of it) hangs and isn't pert. But damn if I'm not sexy beautiful in my own head--a man who works for his good, fights, thinks, advocates, loves and occasionally stoops to charm. 

I learned this year to have a different sort of respect for belief and what power that represents. The parishioners of Charles' Catholic parish have been unfailingly lovely about my illness--they pray for me, they send me blessed oil and blessed water--and I drink the water and apply the oil, because I've learned that just as I have agency, so too do they, Belief, for them, is an act of sincerity, not attrition, not a lowest common denominator way to hate others, but a level playing field upon which to love, and even to heal. I've had my problems with Christianity, and with some of the cultists and Dominionists, I still do--but I've come to see the fact that others believe as a positive force. 

I thought of this the other night when I watched a PBS show about wounded soliders congregating yearly at Lourdes, men and women with horrific injuries and even worse memories, seeking not a cure but a healing, not absolution, but a cessation of the worst after effects of bombs and suicide bombers and IEDs. It was moving, it was a profound statement to me of the mind's power to effectuate a better life, and belief's powers to move the unmovable. So if I am less overtly anti-Christian, consider the lessons of 2014 well learned. 

I stopped reading horoscopes for the most part in 2014--I used to read them fairly regularly, and while I didn't think they predicted my life, I did sometimes hope they did when they seemed more interesting than my existence merited. I do still receive a weekly horoscope and newsletter from Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology which I enjoy because his writing is so intelligent and entertaining. But this week's offering also was one that spoke directly to me:

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You may already know what I'm about to tell 
you. It's a core principle at the root of your Scorpio heritage. But I want 
to focus your attention on it. In the coming months, you'll be wise to 
keep it at the forefront of your conscious awareness. Here it is, courtesy 
of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "You have it in your power to invest 
everything you have lived through -- your experiments, false starts, 
errors, delusions, passions, your love and your hope -- into your goal, with 
nothing left over."

That was 2104 to me--a time when I committed everything and thought always of my goal--to live, to

live gloriously and fully, mindfully, with belief.  In 2014, I started telling people, more people 

at least, the truth I see, and how I see it, and why I see it that way. I used to fear that my

 perspective was too off-putting, now I see how harmless I've been all along. I was rarely

 out to hurt anyone, I rarely felt threatened, and 2014 was the year I decided I could be me,

 because I don't have enough time to be anyone else. 

I don't particularly need mindfulness or Jesus or Buddha, Mohammad or whoever, and I

 don't need to know when Pluto is transiting an impatient Mars. I need to know when Charles is

 coming home, so I can open the garage door. I need to know that Rally gets that Daddy loves him.

 I need the people in my life. I need to do what I can to be as normal as possible without

fooling myself that I'm normal. Of course I'm not. I fought every day in 2014, I'm going to fight 

my way through 2015. You see, I have a goal, and I'm saving nothing to reach it. Nothing left over. 

Or, as the Goddess Tori would say: Pretty good year. 

How Much It Loves You Back

The house has a scent wreath of meat, wine and garlic wafting from a slow cooker. It's being joined by the setting of brownies topped with walnuts coming to life in the oven (Mark Bittman, "How to Cook Everything"-we don't Duncan Hines in this household). This all in anticipation of my old friend Jerry, who is coming down for the weekend from Fort Wayne.

We are the oldest of friends, having met on the streets of Fort Wayne's tiny "gay block" downtown in 1977. I was 16, and not supposed to be there, Jerry was 15 with a Camaro that I coveted in chocolate brown with tan leather bucket seats--or was that pleather? It could have been, we are talking mid-Seventies. We have know each other since then, with breaks in communication--37 years!  I know he likes pot roast and brownies, as does Charles (as does any Hoosier). And that, I can do.

We haven't seen each other since before the cancer diagnosis and the surgeries and the changes. I'm nervous. I've written to him in my emails and begged him to be sure and not forget that I look different, that inside is still the creamy filling of Mark, but outside is a different story. I likely shouldn't worry. I'm not a circus freak, but if you knew me in 2012 the 2015 version is decidedly less streamlined. There's the bandages, the face mask, the coughing, the dry skin, the chemo jew hair, the weird patches of facial hair I ignore until they absolutely must be shaved (note to radiation: you took away 80% of the hair that grew on my face and I'm good with that, in fact, bravo. Life is much easier that way--but leaving the mustache and two patches on my upper cheeks? Such a bitch move.)

Because it's the holiday season, I've been randomly writing emails to people to say hello and tell them I miss them, which I do. I've grown fond of thinking of my past, and not in a "ein tag war hochzeit" sort of way (apologies, Sally Bowles, but that's real German Expressionism!)--rather, simply that it was better than I knew it to be at the time. This amuses me a great deal. I always felt apart from what I was doing in life, at least most of the time--either too sophisticated or too degenerate to care, too savoir to faire, too bitch to deal. Turns out to have been untrue--I live these moments now because I lived them then. I just didn't allow myself to think I was...

The reason that cancer pisses me off is that it struck me suddenly in the middle of the point of my life where I finally felt I was real, adult, present--at the point where I loved my job despite its shortcomings, and I loved the people I worked with in Washington, DC on the grant that funded it, and I loved my boss and my coworkers. I had a plethora of great friends I could call upon for help or fun or just for shits. I would have told you my ass was too fat but I liked myself, I liked my body, I enjoyed my own sense of humor. Then, boom, clap, all gone.

I thought of that moment, particularly, when the curtain came down as I received an answer to one of my random acts of emailing--from a friend I particularly admire whose mother has received a cancer diagnosis and isn't considered a good candidate for chemo. This is like finding a knife in your side that can't be removed for fear of losing the kidneys and eviscerating the spleen.

I will admit I don't know what to say about that cancer, about this event...knowing that sorry is a small word thrown upon a big wall of shit. That I don't pray for myself so I'll not be praying for her, except in my non-traditional way. I'll send my best most positive thoughts into a universe I know to be grim and hostile but creamy, like me, on the inside. I'll hope they make it through.

To anyone starting this voyage, I can only say it's time to pull your big girl panties up and gird your loins. The one step forward, two steps back thing is an apt description, walking through mud is another. But do this:

1. Let your doctor know you're smart and you want to be engaged:
         Ok, I know this is going to sound awful, but bear with me. On virtually every doctor's visit I've attended, the waiting room is full of people talking about that there sammich at Mickey Dee's made their guts hurt when they crapped. This is the gum smacking, trash talking, shit food eating heart of
'Murica. They've spent a life never exercising, never walking, never attempting a rational diet, hating brussel sprouts and eating lots and lots of Freedom Fries. They'd rather die than figure out a way to do anything but pop pain medication and act like nothing was really happening to them.
          This is what your doctor is seeing more frequently than you--a person who has read, studied, been curious, learned how to satiate that curiosity, acted, thought, theorized. You have rational responses, you know that cancer wasn't just a product of A or B, but like geometry, often enough, there's a C in there, too. You want them to take you seriously? Speak like a grown up. Express like a scholar. Shut up and listen, listen, listen. Often enough, the question you want to ask is contained in the answer to something else. Just shut up. You're back to undergrad, and Cancer U is not for the snotty self-assured A-holes who used to talk about ciphers in literature and New Criticism's application to the rise of Confessionalism in American Poetry circa 1955 onward. Just shut the fuck up. Try it, it's really refreshing. Not to have the smart ass remark, the bon mot, at the ready, but to honestly let your doctor know you WANT to learn. They will quickly see that you mean business and the entire way they treat you will change--for the better;

2. Advocate, and cuss:
          I have never said "fuck that" to so many doctors with so much good effect--because that's me, that's how Mark used to talk when he could talk. I don't know why I love vulgarity so much, but I do. Sue me.
          I advocate for myself by allowing my doctors to know who I actually am behind all this cancer--and that Mark is still very much alive and very much wants to stay that way. I advocate for myself by a process of concatenation of our last visit, our last theoretical discussion, our last possible future plan. For example--in my last visit with Dr. Dayton, my Oncologist, he was discussing the chest wall tumor we've been fighting. He believes that chemo will not completely destroy it this time, and we'll have to excise some of it surgically, and follow that with a skin graft, because this tumor occurs in a patch of my chest that was so damaged by radiation that the skin doesn't heal well, and abraids and forms open sores easily. (I know, so sexy to think about that, right?)  Last time I simply asked where the skin graft would come from, we talked about the importance of gaining weight to support the skin harvest, to maintain my relative health. I've been thinking of this everyday, asking myself what I want to know of this plan. I want to know how long the surgery will take, whom he will suggest should perform it (and then of course look up their credentials), where, what recovery time in the hospital would be necessary, what Plan B is if the skin graft doesn't take, who does the follow up care, and is he still my point guard on Team Mark, varsity Cancer Fighters.
          I advocate for myself by establishing that I've paid attention and done what is asked of me, and made it my own routine. As Dr. Wilkins told Terri the nurse at Wound Care last week:  I'm just the doctor, he's running the show.

3. I allow myself to feel
         Finally, and most simply, I allow myself to feel. I cry a lot. Sweet videos tear me up, baby animals affect me, people amaze me, beauty astounds me. I absorb as much of the universe as will tear through me in a day, every day.
          Words that have moved me: "fixed stars govern a life" (Plath); "Live or die, but don't poison everything" (said to Anne Sexton); "I'm Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, I came out two days on your tail/Those two bald headed days in November/Before the first snowflakes sail." (Joni "Goddess" Mitchell); "No voice divine the storm allayed/No light propitious shone/As snatched from all effectual aid/We perished, each alone;/But I beneath a rougher sea and whelmed in deeper gulfs than he." (William Cowper).  There are so many of these...
          To be in gratitude of the bounty of incredible things requires an innocence we are often bullied out of--a simpleness in the face of grace that we are told is semi-retarded. Hardly. That has it fully backward and half assed to boot. Yet how often we are talked out of our goodness and how frequently our mercy is never spent upon ourselves...

To my friend's mother: Good luck and welcome. Please decide you'll board the S.S. Survivor. Please set a goal--mine is live to 70. I like to think big--yours can be feel better by May, or just be of good cheer. One's goal within Cancerville need not be lofty, it just feels necessary to have an end point to the work.

Spend the time to find out why you're not a good fit for chemo, and what sort of chemo that is--there are all kinds of formulas and mixes and perhaps your oncologist is overlooking an older therapy that is not currently vogue that might work for you. For me, they pulled me in a very old cancer fighter that helped me for many months--in fact, it was part of bringing me back from concentration camp Mark to almost pink faced Mark. My oncologist at the time dug deep to think outside the reigning paradigm and it worked. Make sure your oncologist knows you believe in his/her ability to do the same, and to be a bit daring if you will be too.

My oncologist knows my goal, and he thinks I can do it. That's because I have told him I want to, and he has seen that I have a certain power to getting what I want. Mark A. Price, the honey badger of cancer fighting. Your oncologist should know yours, and why you want it, and who you are, and why you are worth assisting, rising, to meet that goal you've set. You must convince them you are ready to survive because survival is not just something that happens--it is something that you make happen.

It is Sisyphean to survive, because it is done and redone every single day. There is no let up. Once you commit to the merry go round, that bitch goes round and you do not get off. You believe in yourself or you slide off. You act like an adult or your grip loosens. You love what you have because you hate to have lost what you lost.

Now, look around you. It's beautiful, the yellow light of a sun, the diffused light through a cloud. The composition of color as you look out the window--here, early winter, it's yellows and browns and grays with some small weeds in my old shade garden tossing red in a leaf or two. The maple tree has gradients of grey and black, streaks of moldy green and rust. How could you leave this? How could you not want to learn to love this and see, finally, as an adult, as a survivor, as someone special as you are, how much it loves you back?

Who are you, anyway?

It's Sunday and I've been up since 4am, victim to misplaced fluids which refuse to leave my throat, and refuse to move, and won't respond to my attempts to dislodge it. I can breathe, but it's in the way, and I can feel it, and that irritates me. I made a pineapple upside down cake at 5:30am because my nephew and his partner, girl partner, woman, his "sex", are coming over in the late morning and his birthday is quickly approaching on the 12th.

I have had to twist his arm to allow me to make him a lunch, which I had hoped would be a dinner, which I believe he will enjoy if he allows himself to do so. He will, he informs me, forgoe the joy of White Castle for the privilege of the strip steak I have in soy dijon marinade in the refrigerator. For the honor of allowing me to make him some roasted potatoes, roasted brussel sprouts with walnuts and a small bit of fresh corn cut off the cob.

Jesus Christ, I'm like my mother.

This is the way she was--a bit snarky, everything an event horizon. My poor little nephew is probably ready to sneak out of Bloomington and drive back home, and I'm gluing his ass to a seat at my janky dining room table (it really is janky), and listen to me pontificate for an hour as politely as he can before he escapes. His girlfriend (I truly don't think that's quite the word, but I don't know what to call her) doesn't like me and has made that obvious on several occasions of being semi-rude to me; I care little. If my nephew likes banging her, it's not my business. We can be frenemies over all, as long as the boy is happy.

I am not quite as bad as my mother about cleaning the house this time around. I'm learning. Usually when someone is coming over for virtually any reason, I'm dusting the baseboards and freaking out about pubes. Today, not so much--Breathing is not normal, snot is not flowing as it should, I'm tired. Fuck it. If there's dust on the television and that traumatizes you, I pity the life you are forced to lead.

Thank you cancer, I'm not just like my mother.

But she too with her cancer had to step down a bit from her tornado of housefrauing. Once my father had died and she no longer felt compelled to wipe down the toilet with antibacterial after every visit he made in there, she looked about herself and understood she wasn't made to keep it up. It couldn't all run like Mussolini's trains. She wasn't young, she had cancer, and it was killing her, and she knew it.

I am like my mother when her practicality switched on. I'm tired, and I'll be tired. I have lower event horizon reactions. I wait longer to do things. I do them in smaller batches. I avoid up and down, up and down, and hope for long periods of interaction, not action.

Yet, I am like my father, which is a damnable thing. As established here earlier, the man just didn't like me, and never did. In my early years, he took delight in telling me what a disappointment I was; in later years, he simply ignored me as best he could. I in turn couldn't stand being in the same room with him, feared him, disliked him, and only put that aside for the last ten years or so of his life for the sake of my own sanity, to explore whether we had anything in common at all.

It turns out we have plenty in common, probably the biggest problem between us. My father never liked himself all that well, and he certainly didn't like encountering himself in me. He didn't like my smartass mouth, he didn't like my verbalness, he certainly was never in favor of my fagness, though he kept that to himself. But we both had stubborness. and intelligence and perseverance and intuitiveness and a belief that whatever we felt about ourselves personally, we were worthy of respect, and dignity, and by god if you didn't give it to us, we'd knife you as fast as look at you.

Those traits, benighted as they often are, are useful in fighting cancer, in fighting insurance companies, in demanding to be treated as a person of skill and agency and intelligence. You may not know but once you are marked for death in the system, a lot of people simply write you off--you become the ghost who watches as your spouse is consulted, the shadow who breathes while others sign forms, you are not the king anymore. Once in such a position you have to fight your way back, prove yourself, yell, declare your agency. You have to be rational but firm, you have to question your doctors and direct your treatment and demand that you be given the full range of options and information.

Then it becomes easier, as my mother would have had it.

Apparently, my mother was very popular at her infusion center because of her good nature, and she certainly had one. She was not tempted to blame anyone for her condition or make their lives more difficult because of it, and I've consciously tried to pattern myself that way because I respected that about her so much. Like me, her sentence to chemo was life long from the point of diagnosis. It went on for years, she was quite tough. I have that from her, her utter resilience, my sister had it. We three cancer victims learned from one another like water cascading down a smart hill. I am the fortunate recipient.

Today, I'm trying as best I can to be Mark, but Barb is poking out of me when I look at the pineapple upside down cake and second guess me decision to not use those gross cherries on it (ugh, maraschinos, so Fifties). Jim is sticking me in the ribs and telling me I'm a failure because I can't get my nephew to dinner, so he must think I'm stupid. Hardly, I tell Jim, the boy has his own life. Calm down, Barb, I say to her as she stands fretting, looking at the cake tray. Mark is here, the coffee is ready when I need it to brew, the steaks are prepared, the potatoes are roasting.

My mother didn't like most of her daughters-in-law when she first met them. They were just never quite up to her snuff, not perhaps good enough for her two heterosexual sons. My dates or relationships she was invariably nice to, but they weren't permanent to her (or, mostly, to me). She had no expectations. My father sat smoking in the earlier years, on oxygen later, and said little, preferring to act as if what was on television was much more engrossing that I or we could ever be.

And, I am all of that, all of them, all of me. Waiting for Jason, waiting to chat, and feed and fuss, and even love, a bit. Unlike Barb I'm not lovey, and unlike Jim I'm not distant. I am Mark, I have cancer, I am surviving it every day a little bit, and I am all of us.

Thankful!

Of course I'm thankful to be alive and here, watching the dog watch Charles eat pizza. I'm thankful for the meta categories, friends, family, relative health. I spent the first part of this week fighting an errant bug that led me to sleep about 16 hours a day. Today, I spent the first part of the day at chemo as my nurses get a day off on my usual Friday--isn't that good? I figured my pals would have to work and I'd show up to oppress them on Friday but they get to be human and real, and I'm thankful for that.

In considering thankfulness, most of mine is rather specifically focused. So here's a partial list, and by  far not exhaustive:

Bridget

I'm thnakful my niece decided to lose weight for herself. I'm happy she's grown up to like herself, everything else is either cake or static. She bangs out her makeup like a pro, and looks like a model. No mere boy is going to be good enough.

Amanda

My little niece has two adorable children and a husband I like to fuck with. I really couldn't ask for much more. Well, I would like to eat when I go to her house, but I do get to bitch about everything, which she encourages, because she is a bitch and I'm proud. In our family, we own it.

Kathy and Chano

My niece used to just be irritated by me, but we've both grown up. I enjoy her eye popping bitchiness and she enjoys mine. I like her husband, a sensitive intellectual traveler. Kathy was the first of my nieces and nephews, my sister Barb's first. She carries her mother well, and I miss her less when I'm around KJ.

Jim and Debbie

My oldest brother doesn't let me down. He took me to the drive-in in his cool Mustang in the Sixties, fed me potato soup when my mother couldn't make it home to fix dinner. He married a quiet woman named Debbie who turned out to have a wicked sense of humor and the biggest heart. I love them both because my life at every step has been better with them in it.

Jason, Jeremy, Jennifer

Jim and Debbie brought this tribe to life. They are foul mouthed, vulgar, loving, fabulous people. I couldn't enumerate the number of times they have amused the hell out of me. Like their parents, they've only made my life better . They continue to fascinate me, Jason with his beautiful daughter and his two sons, Jeremy in his first house, Jennifer who married my sweet Roller, a Debbie-level addition to the family, their boy Logan who is polite and sweet and 15-and I can't wait until he goes as wild as his uncle...

Dale

When my sister married Dale in 1966, I thought he was a tool. Well, however a six year old thinks an adult is a tool, I thought it. Growing up, Dale would say things like "practice makes perfect" that made me want to smack him, but as I grew more, I came to appreciate the qualities that drew my sister to him: steady, predictable, knowable. Further, I came to know the greatness of Dale's heart, and i am still amazed by it. We often say we don't know the heroes amongst us. I do. Dale is one of mine.

Charles

18 years after meeting a long haired, wire rimmed glasses wearing organ student at The Other Bar in Bloomington,  there's still no one I'd rather bitch talk with, sit in front of the television and scream at commercials with, criticize grammar in the Times with, or have sit with me when I'm in chemo. I don't think everyone gets to meet the person with whom they have compatibility, empathy, and a great deal of love. I did.

Friends

I don't predict I'll like people, but I usually instantly know that I do. I knew it the first day of SLIS 505 when I sat next to Galadriel and Donna came in wearing a sweet dress and heels to class when the rest of looked like denim warmed over. I loved Karen in 503, who studied Farsi because she dug Iranian guys and was a mess who was a genius. I worked with Katie but that was because in her interview she was awesome and I just wanted to KNOW that woman. In my India Studies interview with Dr. G and Lil Jan, I wanted the job, but I wanted the people more--Dr. G because he's international level brilliant and Jan because she has international level love for others, and it shines through her, and you can see it and feel it.

Healh is wondrful, happiness is great,  Without people, these people, and alot of others,  I wouldn't have survived my first round of cancer. I had moments of intense doubt, intense grief, I felt intensely how much I'd lost and thought I didn't want to live without those things. But I thought of how much the people in my life would be disappointed that I went down like a bitch, without a fight. I thought of how I told them I was though--was I now going to be a liar?

Well, no. And I love you all, and I'm thankful for that.

54!

Richard tells me I've been quiet. This might be true. Lately I've been dealing with weird sleep patterns due to effluvia, coughing due to effluvia, effluvia due to effluvia. I seem to be a teeming mess of snottiness that has nowhere to go and only me to bother.

I thought this would improve after we had a few good freezes and the moldiness and dust of Autumn was behind us, and perhaps it is better. My nose runs less, that's true. But my recent effluviamania seems to simply be a new wrinkle in what proves to be a dynamic, not static, system. We learn to our disadvantage, kids, that cancer isn't a one-shot, one-trick, one-act fuck up: it just morphs itself to new problems, new ways that effluvia gathers.

I've been staying at home a lot, and I've missed a bunch of lectures I would have liked going to, but it's rude to cough as loudly as I cough in lectures, sometimes the echo of throat gunk sounds like a bullet shot through my trach tube. I can't predict it, I can't control it. At least not yet.

If that all sounds bad, it's not really so terrible. I like being at home, and Rally likes it too. We enjoy flagrant, long afternoon naps, light late morning power naps, heavy late afternoon fuck-this-shit naps, and any other nap we can think of to have. Effluvia, if I may again, typically wakes me up a few times during the night, hauling me to the bathroom to check the neck hole, the tube, to clean up or out, change the tissue in my mouth, sop out the face mask. Interrupted sleep is not happy sleep, and thus, the naps.

This year, I gave myself an early birthday present of an electric blanket. This thing is awesome--ten settings, ten hour run span, soft, pretty, and warm. This was the very best thing I could have done for myself, considering it's already in the teens here, and the snow has already arrived. I like winter, and last night when Charles and I made a late run to the grocery store, the air was fifteen degrees, still, and wonderful. That's when I like Winter best--without  the wind. The snow? love it. The cold? enjoy it. The wind? fuck it.

I tell people that I'm made of chemicals, and without blood I have no hopes of being warm. I'm only half joking. I truly don't warm up the way other people do, and once I've caught a chill, you might as well get the hot water bottle because I'll stay that way until I'm warmed. I have my older electric throw in the living room for watching TV because I get cold sitting there doing nothing, I get cold when I drink cold water, my whole body taking in the temperature of what runs down my tube. When I pound hot coffee in the summer, I sweat; when I dump a cold bottle of water in the tube I freeze.

But listen--the worst I've been dealing with is an ongoing battle to get rid of snot that is annoying and cloying--but it's not killing me. Occasionally, especially lately, my face has hurt--and that's a real problem. Can you imagine your face hurting? and when I say hurting, I mean it feels like someone has smacked the shit out of me, everywhere, and then pinched me for good measure. When I was a civilian, I'm sure I never once thought of my face hurting, and I don't remember that it ever did.

Now, gravity pulls on what skin has no bone to support it, the system changes, my upper teeth are pushed together, sores form in my mouth, a film coats the mouth that has to be chipped off, nothing is quite where it was yesterday. My mouth, which hangs a bit, now hangs more askew, so that I truly do look more and more like a Scream mask. I could do Munch, and be famous for the uncanny resemblance.

But listen--that sucks hard but I take some Lortab Elixir and it's fixed for a few hours. If it's terrible, a bit of morphine sulfate and bitch just goes to sleep, and dreams of fried chicken.

As I'm writing, my 54th birthday is tomorrow. I'm going to celebrate it with a lunch with friends--the chili is concatenating in the kitchen right now, the potatoes for the potato salad are about to be boiled and marinated. I'm happy.

Happy is a construct, true, but it feels like a place. This place, now, here. This is happiness. The dog, the shitty old kitchen that I love, the shitty old ranch house that is one year younger than me--I liked this place the minute I walked into it that fateful day the realtor showed it to us. It was the first house we saw, and we went and saw others, but none of them had the least interest to me. This place, where it is in Bloomington, the yard, the neighborhood, it was exactly what I hoped for, and it has never let me down.

Happiness is a construct, of course, but it's also a choice. I choose it. On a wall of options this is what I most want--to understand what is happening to me, how it effects me, and still know that I'm here, I'm ok, that it will never touch what is truly me--I choose that.

I have decided, as I might have mentioned before, that I will at least make it to 70. After 70, all bets are off--by then my man tits should be somewhere around my waist and my dick might have shriveled to the silhouette of a peanut, but by hook or by crook, I want to see me there. I think I'll be a jolly old fellow--maybe I'll be talking again by then, eating again, celebrating my birthday with a fat slice of cake, one that would choke a pit bull, but no problem for me.

I hope, 16 birthdays from now, that I will have mastered happiness. I'm working at it diligently, I have hope of my achievement. To laugh the great laugh I'll have earned remembering that they told me people like me live 22 months on average after diagnosis. Oh, you silly doctors.

Be Who You Arent

This Halloween I am donning a costume for the first time in years. I won't preview my choice, but this year chemo and Halloween fall on the same day, and my decision to play dress up is to give my nurses a moment of delight. I love those women. They care for me, fuss over me, celebrate with me, commiserate and soothe.

In my old life, I was too busy trying to be hot and way too over it to dress up for Halloween, and I wouldn't have taken time to notice so acutely that a silly costume might make someone smile. I would have rationalized a different method to achieving something pleasant. It may never have worked so well.

Tonight I'm in agony because Charles is eating one of my favorite trashy dinners, Zatarain's Dirty Rice mix and canned corn, which he's backing up with a baguette. Virtually nothing he has eaten in the past year has bothered me so, made me want so badly or curse my dumb fate harder. I'm not sure I can tell you what kind of crack they sprinkle in that box dinner mix, but it's powerful. I have ignored roast chicken, lasagna, exquisite green salads, meat loaf, steak--this is what kills me.

Despite this bit of throwback envy, I find more and more often that my moorings to my old life are pulling loose and when the pieces fall into the water, they aren't much missed. I don't mean I hate the man I was, far from it. I lived in the way many do, not particularly deeply, not always to the surface but not nearly as perceptively as possible. I more often than not was in the tube river, floating--and who amongst us isn't?

The surprise to me has been how utterly ordinary my life was, when of course it seemed to be such an involving drama to me. What seemed to be great forces bringing change turned out to be typical events; romance of the epic sort was normal in its erectile potential.

This newer life, some think, is a much more heroic venture. One that requires a level of gutsiness to achieve basic results and that's true to a degree. But I operate like an old guy, not a hero with a limp-- I plan my travels and I plan my movements like an astute bingo player. I move with deliberation, trying to scan my horizons for dangers to avoid. Loose dogs, uneven pavements, drunk kids, none of which I could yell at or reason with to save myself. I think a lot in this newer life, and that thinking is a priori disaster management.

Not terribly heroic, is it? At least not in those comic book superhero terms; this is far more pedestrian stuff. The heroism in my life is saved for upper level events. When surgeons tell me people like me live typically two years. When consulting doctors look at me and tell me I have months to live. When they tell me cancer is in my lungs. What I think is heroism is pushing back, saying no, disagreeing when bullshit is spoon fed to me like applesauce. It is a simple matter of preservation: heroism is the act if recognizing you are worth saving.

Nothing revolutionary there, aside from the fact that it can be incredibly difficult to assert that simple little fact. To commit to that idea everyday while utterly necessary to surviving cancer is beyond the scope of usual power to utilize. You wake up, you pick this idea with its prickly skin out of its resting box and you pound it into your brain until there's no way to forget it. The heroism is in the doing. Against all of our modesty conditioning to scream to the ether: "I am, and I plan to continue to be."

I'll be thinking of this on Friday, which promises to be coldish, perfect for the holiday, the time of year. Already the leaves are piled by the road, some trees are bare, orange everywhere, backed by every shade of maple red. I love this time of year. I love being here for it. I'm willing to wear a silly costume for it.

An Afternoon of Autumn Sunshine

If Indiana gets a bad rap for anything, often enough it's for the environment--and we deserve it. We're one of the most industrial and least regulated states, leading to a cornucopia of crap in our air, rivers and land. We're rural, too, and filled with pesticides that leach off into the watershed. Our love of coal power kills forests from here to New England.

But today, ah, today...there was that special sunshine that hits orange leaves, and sets yellow ones alight. I woke to it, after falling asleep for a morning nap that went until Noon. Last night, I was fussing with too much gunk in my throat that wouldn't come out and kept me awake until early morning. Today, I'm fussing with beauty. I'm fussing with my nap buddy, Rally, who loves a nice morning snooze. He, in fact, doesn't mind an afternoon, evening, night or brunch-time snog, either.

I had a rendezvous with Wound Care today, too, and I was in an unusually good mood for it. Along with the bright light as I drove, I reviewed all my good news, from my scan, from the evidence of my life, from how I feel, from how I think--and added to this, the fact that I can see that my chest tumor has shrunk recently, significantly to my eyes, and is expelling tons of grossness into the bandages like the dying wrath of a volcano god with no further believers.

I am cautious these days with too much celebration, wondering if I need to quietly slip by cancer and hope it forgets who I am. I dream of hearing words that they've told me I'll never hear--"cancer-free"--because I want to beat odds and, yes, I love to say I told you so.

I went 70 mph down 37 South past Bloomington's answer to the strip mall dingys that someone believes every city requires. Headed to see Dr. Wilkins, with whom I'd also celebrate the fact that we won't have a treatment interruption because of insurance issues--marriage is here! I mused upon the fact that everywhere I turned recently, things seem to be...working. They seem to be ok.

It's times like this that I allow myself to think of survival, and how sweet it is to do so, but also what shape that survival takes in the near and further future. Lately, I've had terrible issues with drainage. I work and work to get this stuff out of me but I lack the natural power of a throat and mouth that help one expel so efficiently. Recently, gunk has started to shoot out of my trach tube when I cough--thick, snotty threads that are, sorry, gross to the touch. If I could save this stuff, one could build with it, I swear. Roman concrete.

Though, it's kind of fun to see how far this stuff will shoot, and what kind of cough it takes to really work up a nice arc of a few feet's duration. You have to make your fun, often enough, and find it where it lives. This is my odd fun. Just to let you know, I've mastered hitting the bathroom wall from standing at the sink--a good couple of feet.

I am reworking my social graces because this year, I'm hosting with the help of IU's wonderful Political Science Department Ladies (Jan, Amanda and Jessica), a birthday celebration on November the 20th when I'm 54...54!  Imagine that. Just a few years ago I worked out like a fool to not look 50; I worried about my tummy and my ass, I hoped I'd keep getting erections forever. I thought of everything like I believe a typical man does, hoping the rest of my life had good food, hot sex, cute dogs, warm rooms.

So, the cute dog and the warm room remains, and the rest of the ideas have changed. I could give less than a boner for how much tail I get from here on out, I am learning how to deal without food better and better (while keeping hopes alive!...). I see survival as a power that overweens the incredible smallness of who I was, the little hopes, the modest wants. Survival has demanded of me that I grow bigger than what I'm fighting, such that in looking down, I can see in physical fashion that the greater entity rules my world. I can keep going.

As I keep going, and keep finding new tricks to do with my trach tube, and new ways to ignore how good that chili smells, I hope I become better, too. Better not as in vital signs, but better as in moral signs--that when I care, I care more and more because of who I am; that as I grieve, it is with the true sense of loss, and not an ersatz cry for attention. That I continue to see how small my problems are in the sight of the world.

At my birthday lunch, with--hopefully--20 or so of my favorite people around, I hope to type the word fuck about twenty times on my Ipad, and laugh, and maybe even tear up a bit--I haven't seen some of my IU friends since the great change happened. I want them to feel a bit of what I felt today as sunlight came into the room, hitting Rally's face, warming my leg, waking us up to what was a terrific day. I want them to know how readily these days are available. 

A Snark and Two Bitches

Snark: noun Combination of "snide" and "remark". Sarcastic comment(s). Also snarky (adj.) and snarkily (adv.)

Like most I know, I prefer my life with snark embedded within it. I enjoy the wit that often turns the mundanely stupid into the sublimely ignorant by dint of a snarky comment. The world revolves in such a way to merit snark frequently; the educational system which is turning out STEM test achievers and humanities idiots in droves makes the life of a snarkmeister easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But what I'm learning more and more, about everything it seems, is that moderation is not a bad thing.

Unlike many people, I love the word bitch--it has multiple, complex meanings depending upon how I use it and where. I don't hesitate to call my best friends "bitch"--a term of penultimate endearment, the top being usually "hon" in my Baltimorese or "whore" or "Miss Thing." I am not, I suppose, for the faint of heart. When I apply it to situations though, when it is a verb, I think of it in two ways--one, the ideation of annoyance within a situation to a describable state of frustration, and two, the pitching of a bitch, a moaning often "poor me" sentiment into which the generally privileged are forced to be temporarily put out of sorts.

I've pulled in many times, in many situations, both types of bitches. I have without reservation elevated simple irritation to a state of nuclear alert, I have ignored all notions of my general well being to be over-antagonized at small irritants. I have enjoyed the sound of my own snark, I have loved the pitch of my outrage, I have disdained moderation to my own, I know now, disadvantage. I am a bitch, no doubt about it.

Within the world that I've been constructing from day one of cancer to now, I have begun to lean more heavily upon optimism and a generally uplifted outlook, and to be less ashamed of it as I go along. I've always been susceptible to the allure of optimism. It was the idea of it that got me through four years of high school, through the daily fag torments, through the hatred of a small farming town for anyone of difference, that the future would be better, that college would be fun, that I'd get laid a lot. And it was better and I did get laid a lot, and that cemented for me a place for optimism to be. I didn't let it be known that I was a closet optimist--amongst my acquaintance there was a certain elegance in an exhaustion with happiness, a sneer toward middle class satisfactions, the admission of pedestrian entertainment as an exercise in slumming. An optimist was, to the crowd I ran in, an idiot.
And frankly, without moderation, optimism is a very stupid thing.

The power of the mind stuns in a world that places faith in physical action. The idea that a patient can be as responsible for their recovery as the drugs prescribed for it is treated somewhere between 9/11 truthers and touched by an angel-ites. Everyone nods belief at it and everyone discounts it heavily. But I am opening my closet door to proclaim it as critical--in moderation. Last Autumn, several doctors gave me a period of months to live. At first, this was very depressing--for an hour or two. And then it pissed me off. After that, it was simply a challenge and anyone who does know me well knows that I love nothing more than proving to a smart person that I am way smarter than they could ever hope to be. Fuck you, dumbass, I thought, just watch. That is, I admit, a twisted beginning to optimism, one that grows out of the roots of stubbornness and pride, but hey, often enough good things deracinated reveal less exalted beginnings. Yet I know that even my talented and optimistic oncologist in San Francisco could not have gotten me to a point of improvement alone. That without my active straining towards betterment and without my belief that it was a possibility, and without my belief that the world is a fascinating place of which I've seen and experienced too little, I wouldn't be here now typing. I do not doubt it.

In an act of fair admission, though, optimism wasn't a straight arrow up my chart of better--I had moments, hours, a day here and there where I wanted to die. At 120 pounds, feeling useless to the world, an expensive burden, unattractive, unloveable, unimprovable, I occasionally hoped I'd just quit, choke on a snot ball, what have you. Each time, each moment of that, I climbed out, I kept going, I changed my thinking. I may not have felt that I had a choice in surviving, but I felt I had a choice in how I did so. It is, to me, Midwestern to the core to understand that your obligations do not end at your desires. They are part of a great network into which you were inserted at birth. Your obligations to your family are legion; as a young person, you're a handyman, a gardener, a housecleaner, a caregiver. As an adult you are an economic engine, a pattern to your younger relatives, a moral exemplar, a participant in group decisions that are, ultimately, just North Korean votes for your parents' wishes. As an older family member, you are the dispenser of gifts, and wisdom and unconditional love--your eminence gris is fulfilled by smiling, somewhat mysteriously, as the children run by you like sugar crazed freaks.

I have thought about optimism, pessimism, bitchiness, snarkiness, in various combinations, in various ways, because I am all of those things, in various combinations and ways, their general influences waxing and waning as moons around Planet Mark. I am, by habit as much as birthright, a snark. I am, by practice and hard work, a bitch. I am pessimistic because it's so supported in our culture, and so easy. But I am optimistic because I see that nothing is possible without it. I should be clear and say that optimism, to me, is a far more inclusive concept than just placing a wreath of niceness around events. I think that sort of optimism, "little house on the prairie fuckery" as I call it, is just as lazy as pessimism, and worse, totally fake. It's the kind of optimism that has the face of Southern Hospitality which is often just a way to say fuck you without having the balls to actually say it. My connotation of optimism is that when leaves fall, they make great garden mulch; that when snow comes, it means we aren't in a drought; that a dog sleeping next to me is an expression of confidence; that I deserve to live; that I deserve to be happy; that my life, for all its weird bumps, permutations, and losses, is a statement of how good overcomes bullshit; that whatever I face, others face much worse, and I'm obligated as much now as always, to ameliorate that when I can; and, when I cannot, to understand that acknowledging the fact is an obligation to placing my own shit in perspective.

I have thought of these things, too, because of social networking, Facebook in particular. I find myself engaging my snark there because it's fun, pessimism occasionally because it's easy, and bitchery, well, that is highly popular on social media. Optimism, though, at least in these public spaces, is often canned and trite--it comes out as a response to a negative post about an event in someone's life. One can't fix the problem, one can't offer the recipe for improvement, but one can say: "that's shit and you don't deserve it," and in that way, trite makes the reason of its existence known--the power of recognition overweens the repetition of its stated sentiments.

There are those whose feeds are full of their personal woes. That's ok to a point: some lives are more problematic than others. Some people less proactive, less motivated, less idealistic, less optimistic--some people love their problems more than the difficult puzzle of their solutions. In fact, often enough, the solution is quite simple, but perhaps emotionally expensive. Your husband treats you like dirt? get rid of your husband--easy enough for the peanut gallery, not so easy for the burdened spouse. Economics, both visceral and real, ties both emotional and practical, facts not in evidence in a two line wail online demand, probably, less ideation and more balance than that with which we typically react.

Cancerwise, my feed is probably full of it--I don't think much about that. I do not, though, try to bitch about it. Like guests and fish, there's a limit to how much any bitch or snark should be posted before it smells. There's a limit to how much woe is me. There's a limit to fuck-my-life, shoulder-shrugging this-is-how-life-treats-me stuff. In optimism, factually, I find a lot about my situation that is fascinating, and for which I'm actually grateful. I've been slapped and forced to examine myself, unpack my psyche, admit my errors, and celebrate my strenght. I found that I am tough, in ways that many people can't or won't be, that I can shoulder loads that I thought would stagger me and don't. I found that I take to surgery like a duck to water, and I pop up after that delightful knockout sleep feeling refreshed and happy. I think more now that I can't talk, I express better without words, I see and hear more in acts and movements and pauses than I ever did as a speaking snarky bitch. I am becoming more and more aware of what my value is, who I am, and while age is helpful here, it's been jet charged by events in my life. I can't hate cancer for that.

I do find, though, a creeping indifference to the constant bitchery and snark around me, a feeling that optimism is degraded while pessimism is exalted to a point that even my cohort in the Eighties, and my friends in the Nineties, would find disturbing. That the only acceptable way to express oneself is to criticize, not to a fine point of performance, but to a blithering attempt at wit, a mordant, dead, and soul-aching long screech of self importance and snipe. I want to beg people who whine about trivialities and dramatize the medical emergencies with no sense of their meaning and possibilities to just shut the fuck up. Too often, too much, I find the same people making their lives a set of drama without even the courtesy of bad soap opera acting. Their statements to the world about who and what they are condensable to poor bitch, or just victim, helplessly little bright buoy tossed in the Sea of Fate. Jesus, what boring shit.

My general rule I propose now is that for every bitch you make, legitimate or not, that every negative event you report, requires two solutions to follow. For example: my mother is in the hospital after a heart attack. That's a legitimate negative, that's a definite spot upon which to pitch the bitch tent. But after the fire is contained, it requires something like--I'm going to examine my diet to mitigate my risk, I'm going to clean my mother's house every couple of weeks to help her out, I'm going to hire a maid service a couple of times a month because I live too far away. After I tell you that I hate that shit happens to good people, if I don't see that you know that 90% of all shit is preventable, I'm not feeding the victimhood. I can't know, of course, all of the threads of circumstance in any other life, given that finding the threads of my own is a full time job. I can though read and see when someone is simply not applying what I think of as the good sense of moderation--that continual snark, bitchiness, pessimism are diseases like anything else--that like obesity, they are social contagions that pull others down into your morass.

Fuck your selfishness, I'm tired of it. Get off your ass and do the hard work, the real work, of making life better. It's so easy to be what you are, it should be easy to cut you off--but that's hardly the answer. I'm just not going to keep rubbing your back and telling you everything is going to be ok every time you're butt hurt. It makes no sense, and frankly, we've all got our own gardens to weed. I'm just going to tell you to change your diaper because it smells in this bitch.

I didn't get better to be mean to others--I got better for myself, because I deserved it, because I could do it. It is hard, and it is continual work. I have less and less time to spend pissing away a good mindset on trivial crap. The closet door is open--I am basically optimistic. I secretly think that if I live long enough, medical science will grow me a new tongue from stem cells, a new jaw, that I'll eat again before I die. I know that if I persist, I'll get rid of the trach tube and a bit of plastic surgery will iron out my face. I know that I'll spend my life being fascinated by what I see and I'll be able to talk about it without an Ipad. I see myself hitting 70 and laughing at the idea that that's enough. I want glory in my life, I want beauty, I want happiness. I want to bitch about it, and snark at it, and feel, at the end of the day, that I win. Because the story is being written by me, and I refuse to do otherwise.

I advise you to start writing your stories and get your mind set to something similar.

A Victory Lap on an Empty Track

Apparently, in space, no one can hear you scream. Neither joy nor terror will be transmitted; the revolution will not be televised.

This is how I feel sometimes, muted, and unable to easily express how I feel in precise terms. I can be happy, but happiness tinged with self awareness is not quite the same as dumb joy happiness. Anger tinged with the desire to laugh is not equivalent to pissed off and murderous. My mute state bothers me when my neighbors talk to me, forgetting that I am unable to speak back. It bothers me when I walk Rally and can't tell him either no or yes, depending on the circumstances. To his credit he knows  my grunted "come on" and moves appropriately. I do love a smart dog.

This mute frustration was never more acutely felt than last week at chemo when, having learned that my latest scan showed no neck or lung cancers, I wanted to leap in the air and scream with joy--damn the kiss and slap, damn the knowledge that bad news always follows good news in my life. I just wanted to tell everyone how much I felt when I heard that. I was that cup, full to the brim, quivering towards the overflow. 

I have wanted to know I would survive, empirically. Bluff as I can be about living to 70, I've kept a box of uncertainty in my mind, and have no intention of being otherwise. As I have said, I want to be ready to live or to die, with equal preparation and equal dignity. As part of my Mark the Rational trip, I recognize the lack of polarity in my existence. I do not operate in absolutes anymore, I am forever moving through levels of meaning and shades of operation and curtains of events. 

Yes, I played Miami Sound Machine's "Conga" and made the nurses dance me out, but what I couldn't do was tell those nurses how much they've contributed to running this race, and making the run so much more pleasant. There's something about an oncology nurse that is just so smart, and they do the best blood draws, and give the best needle sticks. I have been amazed as I entered the machine of American medicine at how little most doctors really know about people, and how much nurses do know. It probably helps that most of the nurses I've dealt with, hospital and infusion center, have been women. Aside from the sex thing, I'd much rather hang with women than most men. 

I hate being mute, too, when Dr Dayton (smart guy, another great oncologist upon whom I luckily ascended), gave me the great scan news and I typed an excuse me, and got up and butt danced in the examining room. I'd like him to know precisely that his confidence in my optimism is a big part of the reason that optimism thrives; sometimes even a feeling needs a witness to testify that it's not stupid to feel that way. 

Rally makes me walk fast around the neighborhood, which at first was a challenge, and one I worried I'd fail. But a few months of walking and I find the right leg where they harvested the bone for my now dead jaw is stronger and more stable, and I'm able to walk uphill pretty smartly, and I'm able to keep pace with a schnoodle on a mission to find, corner, and kill, any piece of vermin (cat included) that he can. Mute, I'm frustrated when I hear Charles tell him how much he loves him, and mouthless, frustrated when he plays kissy face with that sweet little grey face. So I hang upon him like a 150 pound life preserver and hope that he knows I'm just as committed, if a bit more silent. I'd like to think we understand each other in this reality--though, really, isn't all about treats?

I thought of kiss and slap on my walk with Rally this morning, an early half circle of the neighborhood before I had to leave for chemo at 7:45. Last night, as I was struggling with sleep, my right arm pit hurt--and it was a hurt I felt in California when I discovered lumps that announced Cancer 2.0. It would be perfect, after a clear scan, to find that this shitty cancer had recolonized the right side, a perfect illustration of how I believe that happiness is just a cream and reality is the shit it parfaits. But in a half awake stupor, with a grey dog snoozing by my side, there were no lumps. This morning, it doesn't hurt. It was an ephemeral visitor, a transient stab, a reminder: be grateful and celebrate now.

No one, of course, is guaranteed a thing. Health does not predict longevity any more than illness predicts death, except in the extremes. In this shady life, though, one takes the necessity of staying out of the darkest patches and edging to where the most light is available. For me, the light comes every week when they dump chemicals in me and those chemicals seem to be clearning out a horror story that has been etched in my mind. 

This is a victory lap, make no mistake about it. I have worked hard to stay sane, to keep myself steady, I have put in the effort to be here because I can see no better way to act. I do justice to the incredible resilience of my ancestors by my own. If I am running this lap on an empty track, it's only because so many people who got me to this race are in the stands cheering as I do a slow but creditable jog back to life.

The Wonderful Power of a Little Confusion

Tonight, the Harvest Moon over Bloomington is bright, casting shadows in the backyard one wouldn't expect to see--a black ink over a black matte lawn, even teasing out a tip of green at the end of a black blade of grass. It's the kind of moon I think of when I wonder how the Miami felt on a summer night, near the forest, hearing the unctuous sound of locusts, the late season screw crazy chirping of crickets.

It's a moon of confusion, too--a big round ball of the tidal-empowering energy pulling one this way and that--happiness to madness, sanity to illogic. It seems perfect for me right now: I've been existing between two poles lately, but what to call them, I couldn't say. Not Happy/Unhappy--that's too prosaic; not Sane/Insane, because my head stays screwed on despite what anyone would tell you contrary. Not really OK/Not OK....there's just no easy label to affix.

After my surgical visit, I quieted. I steadied. I rationalized. I accepted. This is the way and the shape of my life, and I have to follow it. It's a path somehow created that insists I step within its bounds--so, ok, I'll play along. I cannot be fixed, I cannot change some of what has happened, I can only change how I deal with it. So how will that be?

For me, the struggle against overwhelming odds is often ridiculous, even if it makes good legends, like the Spartan 300. I'd rather concentrate on being the reed in the windstorm, not the oak. So it has been with cancer--I have tried, at each point, to make the brave choice. I have accepted risky treatment, it didn't work, now it's just put up or shut up time. So that's what I do.

It's in my social genetics. My parents were profound sorts of grimly determined people. My sister faced her version of this cancer with fortitude. My brother Jim soldiers on despite the government's best efforts to deny that he was ever harmed in Viet Nam. My brother Matt died, apparently wordlessly and immediately, from a heart that gave out with a pop. I have examples in my family to look towards when I wonder how to act or react to bad news. Good news has been too scarce on the ground of late to really discuss.

I have been groping towards an acceptance, though, that isn't born of being a victim or feeling victimized. One that is suffused with the grace of, say, a backyard full of moonlight. A lightness of being untouched, untouchable, by negativity. To allow the self to float free of conditions, to simply be, while the body does as it must to get through the course of the day--to accept, in short, that I do have not to be in jail as I have commited no crime.

Today, as part of my plan to operate in full light, in fullness of knowledge, in recognition of my reality, I had a port placed in my chest. This is a permanent placement that allows for far easier infusions and IVs, that gives the poor veins in my arms a rest from their weekly poking. Right now, I'm a bit sore, there's a bump under the skin on the right side of my chest--formerly unclaimed real estate is now colonized with value-added building. A pole barn, a place to milk the cancer cow.

I have taken what was the only part of my torso untouched by cancer, no tumor, no holes, no scars from tissue reconstruction, no damage from radiation, and given it to the practicality of fighting cancer each week--I have allowed the last part of my upper body that looked almost Mark-like to be perverted, as everything has been, to fight this shit. Needless to say, I find it worth the cost, but it's sad nonetheless to see the last old piece of me go.

The surgeon said I was rational, and I am. There is no one to fight and no one to blame and no one who really needs me to cry on them, and frankly, I'm not a crier. I find very little release in crying, and with a trach and a screwed up neck, and no drainage, crying is uncomfortable sport. Fuck crying. That's what you do when you find your glass future has met its hammer contemporary and you've made no allowance for that happening. Me, I make allowances for every bad thing--I just always do. Mostly this makes me overly prepared, but sometimes it makes me amazingly prescient. Like now.

It's a little confusing, though, to not be able to tell you how I feel--and not because I don't want to, but because I don't know how to--there's no word that encapsulates me right now. I think sometimes I'm angry and yet I don't feel angry, and I think sometimes I'm lucky, but I certainly don't feel that way. Often I'm confounded or embarassed by encountering people who stare at me, but sometimes that really makes me laugh. Dogs, surprisingly, are often futzed by me--who is this entity and what is that on his face? They look at me so quizzically that I just want to hug them.

I have lately spent my days floating on a cloud of thinking that has no shape or form--I just daydream, I suppose that's the word for it. I see myself jogging, which won't happen again, I see myself working, which I think isn't going to happen, I see myself in groups of people laughing, which I can't really do. What I see is normal me in normal situations that are no longer normal. And I feel nothing about them--they are simply visions.

A life has passed and another life has stolen in to take its place, and it did so in dark on darkness, with a yellow light behind it, casting yet another pitch of black as its shadow. But in its halo I perceive that this new life, as quiescent, as peaceful, as zen as it wishes to be, is still mine, and is still me, and there's some ass kicking motherfucker still left in it.

A little confusion can lead to a lot of good, in other words--it's a corollary to those best laid plans, to "man proposes, god disposes". What you cannot be, simply cannot be--let it go. What you can be, grab like a bitch at a tag sale and don't let go. When things leave, wave them off, hopefully fondly. When they arrive, on cat feet, through the dark green late summer, welcome them as the friends they will be.

Routeless, Mapless, Preferably Shoeless

I find that it isn't that my life lacks meaning, it simply has a meaning for which I did no planning. I don't recognize its shape as anything of my making, and it wasn't, other than the fact that I'm the host to a murderous bunch of cells.

I pondered this in the cold waiting room at the Wound Care Clinic today. Why we must refrigerate indoor space is beyond me, but this is especially difficult. The chest tumor that needs oversight has to sit open to the cold air while it's lidocained, poked and discussed. For about an hour I have no shirt on in a room that feels like it's stacked with ice cubes...and I forgot to take my hoodie today.

With Dr. Wilkins, I discussed all the news of the surgeon visit. We laughed because--let me tell you--the way to get a specialist to laugh is to crack on surgeons. As a group, surgeons are the cowboys of medicine, and anything that gets in the way of a clean cut into a well-prepped limb or torso is just static to them. They are right, you are uninformed, thanks for playing. They are easy to revile.

The surgeon is right though in one way we all three agree upon--the chest tumor isn't bacterial or fungal in nature--this is just shitty cancer, a Tower of Babel rooted deeply into my chest wall. Damn I hate my clear eyed view. I hate my practicality and my ability to accept deeply evil shit as just another condition with which to deal. While it makes giving me bad news easier, it doesn't make processing it any more fun, just more facile.

It isn't that my life lacks emotion, it's that I'm saving emotion for constructing better events--I'm saving emotion for visiting my relatives, I'm storing it for when good things happen for Charles, and an Attaboy with feeling would be appreciated. I keep some for hugging the dog, which alarms him, because a face mask and a trach tube and a pair of glasses wrapped around the small neck of a 17 pound dog is a lot to hang upon a little target. I'm just not going to waste this on the spilled milk of cancer, or its tumors, or its gnawing away at me. Fuck it. I know it will eventually win, but I place that victory well into the future and I intend to make that accomplishment the most grinding, exacerbating bitch work cancer has ever had to do.

As I drove home with the car windows open, trying to stuff the car with the hot humid air that felt so good after the Arctic doctor's office, I thought about lacking meaning, and lacking emotion, and how at least the latter kept the former from being much of a bother. I'm having a Lewis and Clark moment, I suppose--consider that Lewis and Clark had some badly rough idea of where they were headed, a sliver's view of what it might be like getting there, and a lot of reality bites to wake them as they moved along.

I ponder these things because if you want to stay, if you truly want to keep engaged with life, you have to work like a cheap whore who's behind on rent money; a disabled person, a guy who can't speak, who can't eat, is superfluous. Too difficult to engage with, too tired to engage, distant from the easy methods of interacting, sharing an appetizer and a drink, having dinner. There is always another voice, a whisper from the dreams I have where I talk and eat as I used to, have sex like pornstar, and feel, I just feel everything.

I like the sunlight, and I like the sunlight in my dreams, and it's tempting to chase that sun. It is however being rotated upon by a planet that doesn't have so much of what I want...my family, my dog, the emotion I save for when I listen to Fleetwood Mac and remember where I was and what I was doing when I first noticed that Stevie Nicks sounds like a goat.

People, more than one in fact, have told me that the afterlife that awaits me is similar to these dreams, a dimension where this present cancerous me is replaced by the me I wish to be, the 35 year old vision in the floor through Brooklyn Heights adjacent apartment. On the sunny corner near Cammareri Brothers Bakery and the Italian Deli with the huge unindentifiable meats hanging in the window. The man who could breath deeply and run between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Verrazano, and back. The one who occasionally danced in the basement of the Monster.

Yet it's sweeter right now, here. It is sweeter with Christine McVie, it is wonderful to feel the jolt of a schnoodle jumping on my bed at 6am because he doesn't give a damn that I don't have to get up, he wants me up. It's wonderful fun to see how lives click into place around me, how people advance, watching as they change while walking through life. Even routeless and mapless, I know life, I can projec the continent I haven't seen by what I've experienced, and delight as I meander and discover how much I didn't guess and didn't know.

But it is work to want all of those things, when I hear that once I've crossed over, there's a great deal of ease, there's food, there's a cigarette without disease, that there is, no fact, no disease.

I resolve to travel shoeless in this adventure, to slough off my vanities and give up my love of DSW, to focus my desires elsewhere--to hook my desires to more productive goals--know more, feel more, accept more, want less.

An hour at Wound Care in the blue cold of an air conditioner gone wrong. There's a lot to think about when you're looking at an ugly tumor climbing off your chest, trying not to shiver from cold or fear. To look dispassionately at this ugliness and only wonder how to defeat it. You see, it's not that my life lacks meaning, indeed not. I occasionally lack the tools to understand what it is, or how to construct, or how to explain what it is like to build this machine that no one has ever seen, that no one wants or needs.

This is Now, or Forever, or Both

In order to make sense of the world I live in, I accept a linear, finite, time. I acknowledge a start and end point, a series of post-its that propose the near term, a series of cards to hold dates in a future that is anchored to a series of numbers under a collection of days in a longer series by which I age. I know now, I know then, I suspect forever.

I think of this against my meeting yesterday with the surgeon,  Dr. Brigance. The extremely bright examining room, the poking of my hole, the examination of the new tumor, the continuing metastatation of my personal cancer. That now, virtually none of it went as I hoped, barring the fact that we were both pleased that this time around, I weighed 152 pounds.

We spoke of the potential healing effects of hyperbaric treatment, which he has reservations about. We spoke of this redeveloping chest wall tumor which confuses me but is a sign of the power of cancer to him. We spoke of Surgery 2.

That oft-thought-of future event, the giant mental card in my head with two weeks blocked off here or there, my birthday? A Thanksgiving in the hospital? Why not--it's not like I'll be enjoying turkey dinner anyway. I'd give thanks to be fixed. I'd give thanks to wake and be Mark A. Price, again. To haul him into my now, reanimated, whatever zombie state I'd have to put up with just to see him again.

Yet, for all the anticipation, there will be no Surgery 2. Our forthright discussion went into a distressingly short list of potential postives from the surgery and a distressing long list of the risks I'd engage by having it. Surgery 2 was the plan to take the right pectoral muscle and pull it up under the skin to create a new covering for the hole in my neck; it was to reform what was so effectively slaughtered under the great hot eye of the Radiation God. It was the future and the forever to me, it was the promise that a normal was returning. It was a thought I planted as much as I planted the yard this Spring, that I drifted from, allowing it to grow as it would.

And it did grow, back there, in the mind's corner it occupied, a clematis, a bean stalk, a milkweed against the black railing of what is. It took on shapes and characteristics no patched skin ever could fill: happiness, hope, deniability, possibility.

In the incredibly annoying overhead lighting of that University Hospital examining room, though, what became clear is that somewhere along the path of this walk, I've changed in ways I've hardly acknowledged well. That I am no longer willing to risk, that the casino which never tempted me is now repugnant, with its smoke, its manipulation, its booze and old hope. I listened to that list of risks and half way through knew that I could not, would not, will not, engage it. There will be no more of the man who took on this cancer with the idea that he would not be an exception to the rule. He was. There will be no more of the man who walked into radiation believing he would not be an exception to the ability of the protocol to staunch what ailed him. He was. There will be no more of the man who trusted the chemicals to treat him as they done for some many others. He's not.

I've known in other ways, in other gardens, in my better mind, that there will be no remission, there will be no old normals, that I won't sing again, that I won't speak again, that I won't eat again, but I've agitated against that knowledge in darkness, and secret, and squattted in the corner of that reality with petulance. I could have moved on already, and inculcated that my face will remain distorted and my neck will have a hole, and the snots will annoy me. I could have just fucking done that like any reasonable adult, but my boy had to have his moment.

What finally moved me? The truth, the polar vortex of it. The fact that a covered neck hole would funnel all the crap that drains out of me to the throat that doesn't work, that I would run the risk of aspiration pneumonia on an on-going basis, that my voicebox would then absolutely have to go, that it would open the possibility of further complicated surgeries that would involve more risks I've yet to be horrified by, that I would choke, forever, on what I could not get rid of, and could not process.

I hate the hole in my neck, and I'm alarmed that I can live with one, but I can. The inside of the hole has healed in a way the exterior skin, traumatized into votive submission, could not. It's a trap door, a way for me to control my panic when I believe I'm choking--I change the dressing, pull out the gunk that is frightening me, and I feel better.

So, what is now is forever. The changes that come to me near term will be those I make within, if any. The future arrived and it looked like yesterday, so I ignored it until I realized what it was.

And, I'm ok with this. I hate the conditions, but I play the game. Because the world still amazes me, I want to stay with it awhile longer. Because I'm curious how long I can balance, I walk a tightrope even though I've never trained for it. As though I had game, I play to see how far I go. Will it be 70? Is it possible I make it there as I've promised myself?

Last night I thought of how the world has changed in my lifetime, how much is different, how much discovery and innovation has laid havoc and joy upon me. I see that now and forever being no different are at least part of a process by which movement is neither forward, backward, up or down, but a march to the power of mind willing to take responsibility for the world it marches in.

I do not know, by the numbers of five years, what might be possible for me. If by then the truly splendid fake bone appears that makes a jaw for me, that the neuro-net allows my thoughts to be spoken as if by my old voice, if the nutrition I pour into my tube comes in flavors I crave like pot roast or burger and fries, peanut butter and honey.

The doctor thinks I'm rational. It was a great compliment from a fellow who has not complimented me overly much, but has delivered a series of shit bulletins to my cornucopia of fantasy. How little he knows of what is going on inside here! How I am hopeful, how I skip to the continual music of a universe that promises me joy, how I refuse to allow cancer to eat Mark A. Price, how I protect him even if I cannot save his various organs.

He just doesn't know how I love this, and why, and how could I tell him? That what I want is to be greater than where I am and how I am and why. For no one but myself.

The Summer of My Discontent

The wound care nurses enjoy a gay guy with a sense of humor--and minus the gay part, as do most people. I've tried to hang onto to my humor quirk without resorting to beating it for cancer gags. I don't want to be the guy you have to avoid because the end of everything he says, or types for that matter, is accompanied by the classic stand-up drum roll.  I limit myself to two self-referential moments a day, one eye roll, unless what you are saying demands such a response.

So when I told the WC nurses and the good doctor that this was the summer of my discontent, they laughed, because of Shakespeare and the ludicrousness of THIS summer being the cause of anything but gratitude. My garden hasn't required watering because the rain has been regular, and plenty. The heat has been under control, the sun hurts, but it hurts less than I expect.

But discontent--I have it. Maybe my inner or not so inner perfectionist bitch can't continually cope with the limited eye rolls allowed, the lack of signage for tourists to my suffering. I do suffer, yes. Yet, I rarely think of it that way given that I live in a world where an untold number of people suffer worse and more. There's no sense entering the public lottery of victimhood, but yes, I suffer.

The god of small things, this summer, has set up a altar in my home and expects to be laved. I, being at best a half-hearted devotee of any deity, lack the laving skill. So the punishments, the errant pains that erupt in my mouth, the sliding down of my skin, the fact that walking completely upright is difficult for me as my neck is bent 20 degrees forward. The god of small things speaks in a soft voice when it tells me this will never change.

Summer is regenerative and privileges one to witness the cycle of maturation, desire, fruiting, fecundity. I ask these things of my body, but it's unable to give them to me. I'm discontented because the body has never failed me like this before. I wasn't almost 54 when I asked it regenerate before of course and I wasn't chopped up by cancer, surgery to excise cancer, cancer that won't go away, and the cycle of surgery to excise the leavings of a cancer that will not fucking leave. The palliative drugs, the bags of Benadryl followed by anti growth agents, followed by a push of something the color of urine. The Summer of My Discontent.

I cringe when I have to shower because most of my body can't be scrubbed, and the water hurts. It doesn't feel good, but the heat of the water is nice, I will give you that. I don't experience hot and cold in sane ways anymore. The air conditioner is set at 75 or 76 and when it kicks on during Wheel of Fortune, you'll find me in a hoodie. I wish you had tried to tell me this would happen say two years ago--I would have scoffed.

Discontent happens when I drop things and have to bend over and pick them up. There's something special about that movement with a trach tube and a throat full of gunk that won't choke me dead and yet won't leave, perpetually petulant guests. I can't bend my head back to look in the cupboards above me, so I feel for things, or for the food cabinet, I hold the door handles and lean back bodily, seeing all the labels from 15 degrees toward flat on my back.

Because there is no known end point, there are plenty of cracks in my façade for discontent to creep in, cat-footed, blasphemous little asshole that it is. Discontent--it's such an enemy. It makes sense to sit inside the ugly dimensions of its ill-fit house for tea listening to how awful everything is....and as you sit there drinking undrinkable tea, you begin to think, yes, it is awful.

At Discontent's tea, I unload about how I can't run anymore, how I labor to breathe in humidity, how I used to be, how tired I am of walking around with a face mask, with a tissue stuffed in me as if I were simply a freak. By cup two, I am talking about sleeping until I wake myself coughing because of what's in my throat--that again, won't leave--and how I wish I could sleep full hours as I used to do so effortlessly.

Such a creepy life.

The god of small things punishes with the Fury named Discontent and I am under interdiction.,

So, I am trying to stop this, knowing that Tuesday is my surgeon day, and I cling to the unsupported belief that he'll tell me I can be fixed. Changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born!  I try to fight Discontent with the truth, that the purple dahlia that opened in the garden this week is so beautiful it was worth being here to see it, and I planted that, and I chose it. I choose it now.

I participate in the singular joy of peanut butter on a saltine cracker, as experienced through the lens of a dog. A dog for whom it is love to be given such a thing, and the fact that it is love that gives it.

I roll myself in plaudits for the spaghetti sauce I made for Charles this week, which he will need because his schedule is madness. There are four dinner's worth sitting in the refrigerator, and I understand it is good. I included fresh tomatoes from just outside the front door, planted by me, chosen by me, and which I choose back. I smell the distinctness of the plants and that is the smell that I've known all of my life. I am still here smelling, and I remember.

Discontent is a profligate slut for loneliness, and I am lonely. Not so much for company, or visitors, but for the person, the one or two people, to whom I could sit for an hour and type out exactly how I live and how it feels and they would understand it entirely and would see without judgment why I'm discontented. Who these people are I don't know, because I can think of no one I hate enough to do that to.

It is not at all Mendelsohnian to wait upon the god of small things to move out. One has to mind the manners, after all, and the thing is a god, of sorts. The small horrors magnified, the small triumphs savored. What I've learned in the summer with this idol is less about how to be than it is of savoring the now. If I cannot ever be fixed, to learn how to work around. To take my own advice, so often given, which is to shut the fuck up and get on with it.

The nurses at wound care are jolly, but they are keen; it merely breaks up the pernicious march of gimpy legs and tumors and holes where they ought no be to laugh. They enjoy my Duolingo French lessons, they think it's funny that a guy who can't talk does French lessons online. I do too. But on the off chance that Paris calls, and I find myself somewhat patched, I'll need to read my way around. Allowing for small things that go wrong, and the mind that sometimes trips over its own bullshit, I think I can hope for that.

Waiting on Brigance

Dr. Brigance is the guy who sawed some bone from my right calf and transplanted it into my jaw in March of 2013. He's the guy who is the go-to for closing the hole in my throat. He is the fellow who, in my worst moments, I curse, and the one who--upon reflection--I thank for saving my life. My feelings about him are as conflicted as any I have toward any one person. Goat or king, it depends upon my mood and how I'm feeling that day.

We don't see one another often. The last time I encountered him was in April, early, when I was shivering, weighing 125 pounds, wondering what the heck I was going to do with my life, myself. Now our August rendezvous is approaching, I'm 152 pounds, and still shivering in air conditioning. Yes, my internal temperature controls are not what they used to be, and the layer of fat on my ass and tummy, while welcome, have done precious little to insulate me.

This August meeting has become fraught with deferrals. I've recently been attending wound care sessions with the IU Health Wound Care specialists--Dr. Wilkins, the wonderfully arcane doctor with the longest grey-haired braid I've ever seen in my life. Normally, this would worry me: I would ponder why someone wouldn't cut their hair. Religion? Denial? Cult? But she makes me laugh, I need her expertise, and ultimately, who cares? I haven't cut my crazy hair lately either, but of course it doesn't hang down to my butt, either.

Dr. Wilkins believes I'm a great candidate for hyperbaric treatment, wherein one sits in a chamber filled with 100% oxygen for a couple of hours at a stretch, daily, for a series of, say, 20 treatments, sometimes as much as 40. The oxygen, the pressurized environment, this is pushed into the body to regenerate blood flow to radiation-damaged tissue, which I definitely have. In the meantime my wound care friends are also taking care of Krakatoa, the newly re-emerged tumor on my chest. Krakatoa likes to bleed at off times, and its caldera is slowly growing. It fronts a small area of exposed sub-dermal tissue that has never healed properly--another great indication that hyperbarics may be of help.

Dr. Dayton is in favor, Dr. Wilkins is in favor--but what of Dr. Brigance? We await, all of us, an opinion that bashes or elevates the option. As a surgeon, we have to suspect that improved blood flow would be helpful to his plan. Or not. Myself, I don't know. I'd suspect that he'll be in favor, but it will further put off surgery 2; something he may be in no hurry for, anyway. Or perhaps he will be, considering I've made a prime comeback in the past months. Or maybe not, considering a tumor has redeveloped. Or maybe yes, because at this point, throwing anything at the wall is simply a way to see what will stick.

These may be the hidden emotions of Dorothy on her way into Oz, trailed by those co-dependent creatures she acquired. Wondering how the wizard will react, wondering what a wizard looks like, hoping only for positivity and wisdom. I find myself wondering, similarly, about returning home, which to me is code for recovering normalcies, clawing toward and hanging onto small acts that I used to perform without thinking: blowing my nose, clearing my throat, eating. It seems like I don't want much but each of those normals are surgeries, reconditioning, readjusting, relearning, away.

I put a lot upon Brigance, of course, and so does the system we engage in. The surgeon sits at the apex of the specialist pyramid in some cases, this being one. To answer some of my return to normal, to address some of the infections I get, to allow me more control, and more comfort, over my destiny, Surgery 2 is necessary. Thus Brigance has a serious power of veto over how the next step happens, when, if I will sit in a pressurized chamber for a couple of hours a day breathing pure oxygen, and hoping nothing explodes. If I'll sit there thinking of National Enquirer cover photos from the 80's showing Michael Jackson, his chimp, and the hyperbaric chamber he was said to sleep in.

I have another week to find out, or being to unravel what the next few months will look like--either a boot camp for improvement, or an extended wait for an operating table, or a combination of both. I suspect if hyperbarics are approved, and my insurance company agrees, that pushes Surgery 2 into November. A birthday gift, a happy 54th, here is your neck, patched up. Frankly, nothing would please me more, even if it will take my right side out of commision for a bit, and require those awful surgical staples, and worse, keep me in University Hospital for a week...only ok if they put me in surgical ICU. I love those nurses.

In the meantime, there's life. Rally burrows ever deeper into my heart, I am awakened most mornings with a face full of grey fur that has just landed with an unceremonious thump on the bed. For 16 pounds, he has the force of conviction behind his leaps. He's discovered that being carried about is pleasant as it assures that hands must be placed upon your body, which is the logical outcome he seeks for 99.9% of his waking experience. This is a dog that takes physical contact seriously and pursues it single-mindedly. He applies a level of manipulation to its achievement that, while crude, is admirably effective.

The tomatoes are ripening in the front yard, some of the cosmos are five feet tall, and this has been one of the best summers I've experienced in the Midwest. Wet enough, rarely too hot, often not even humid as one expects--is this global warming? If so, we are in the sweet spot, in the sweet season of it.

If there is a theme, it's waiting, just as it's been from the beginning of this blog. Always, a horizon just a bit off focus, but out there, a beacon light. I'm on a ship awaiting harbor clearnace, bobbing as if shifting foot to foot. I know the place I'm going to, I've been there before. I used to live in it, complaining of it, never satisfied with it. Now, it's the drug I most crave.

Love Will Tear Us Apart, Again

It's probably a safe theory that Amazon Prime Music was designed with late-stage baby boomers in mind. A bit too young for the Beatles wave, we got full on smacked with Joni Mitchell's Jazz Period, Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt--and now we stream them, recapturing or remembering where we were and who we were doing as Carly warbled "Coming Around Again."  That song takes me to my best friend's lake house, a joint, and the dark walls and low lighting of his delightful home.

It's good, too, for those of us who advanced into college practicing serious Smiths worship, and loving Joy Division, even if we didn't have that hair.

Among my cohort, I've read that oral cancer is on the rise, as it is throughout the population. This has been mentioned to me with the hopeful comment that more and more money is being spent on research and treatment development to handle the high tide. This does not make me feel good, but I try to take it for the bully comment it was meant to be. If more money is being spent now, doesn't that mean it might pan out to new treatment in, say, five years? I can't imagine where I'll be with this shit next month, Slick, but nice try.

One reason for the oral cancer tsunami is the implication of HPV in its development; there are a high number of patients who can pair that virus with their cancer, having no other genesis, no especial history of smoking, and no apparent genetic propensity such as runs in my family. Given that a high proportion of sexually active adults have HPV in their systems, these cancers are no kind of accident.

Somehow, amazingly, I appear to not have HPV. I know, it's amazing. I'm a first class slut and I'd be the first to admit it. I've had a significant number of partners in a significant percentage of the kama sutra for boys, and I enjoyed the hell out of myself.  Given the dodge on those odds, I should always buy a lottery ticket.

I've wondered, of course, many times and in many conversations as to why I'm such an easy lay. Some people have simply written off that behavior as part of being gay, a man, a gay man, double jeopardy, doubly slutty. Of course that's a total cop out, a way to excuse away one's whorish proclivities. I'm no more slutty for being gay than a blonde is dumb by nature, and no less of a man for being gay: I'm just a horndog.

I say that without self rancor. I've known plenty of gay men who weren't, apparently, quite as dickmatized as me (sorry, but I love that word). They may have been serially involved, but they tended to one partner at a time, for several years. I had my period of that sort of life, but for me it was just a cover for the fact that I was screwing my brains out while no one was looking.

I used to live in moral terror that I'd be called out for my behavior, decidedly un-Price, according to my parents, decidedly downmarket from the strictly monogamous, married, life they extolled. I excused myself by referencing my inability to commit under the seal of legal approval--another example of high level bullshit. Had I been married at, say, 30, I'd be an adulterer instead of a slut. I at least dodged that bullet; sex will bring you together, but love will tear you apart--even Joy Division knew the truth of that.

Jerry, the lake house owner and I, under the influence of Carly Simon's best on the stereo and a few fatty joints between the tunes, have had serious discussions of these points--whether the oppression of homophobia which kept our compatriots in the closet drove us to meeting older men who were looking to meet younger guys--or not meet them so much as have sex with them. An institutionalized pedophilia that manifested in gay kids who had to find gay life on the streets meeting up with the bridge trolls who monitored access to those magical streets. Did I start my adult life as a big 'ole slut or was that how I paid the cover charge? Was it the fact that we're talking mid-Seventies, height of the Sexual Revolution that spread me like I can't believe those legs aren't butter?

Honestly, who gives a fuck? Sure, it's good to know why you are the way you are, how you got there, by what route--but sometimes you're talking as the car moves along, you miss the landmarks, you can't remember the sequence of turns. Ultimately, it ends up as it ends up: Me, minus a tongue and a bunch of tissue from here and there. Those cigarettes never helped matters for me, sure, but even without them, my sister had a scary match to my cancer, or I have the carbon copy of hers, a situation that screams genes to my doctors, who look no further.

On Amazon Prime, if you type in Joy Division in the search box, the big hit comes up first--and if you listen to satellite radio, the alternative channel will feature it too. We are, some of us, surrounded by memories--so much so that we don't have to venture into the world as it is today. We can listen to the 80's, dance to it in specialty clubs, indulge in the 90's as it pleases us. Only when the present day obtrudes upon us do we have to consult the calendar. The mouth pain, the diagnosis, the doctor's appointments--if only love was the only thing tearing us apart.