To say that I have off days is to put it mildly: I can veer between barely contained optimism and Karl-style gloom on the subject of my cancer with the rapidity of weather change in Indiana.
I have tried, from day one of this journey, to keep an acorn of hope consistently and quietly within. Something that I don't express outwardly, that is just mine, a spiritual eternal flame. It has helped to have it, to allow it voice when I'm otherwise exasperated. A small firm and very predictable voice that is good to hear.
Wild voices take over when bad heaps on bad like a bum offense bounced on its ass by an incredible defense. I, ashamed as I am to admit this, once sat in a doctor's office and said: "I wonder why god hates me so much." And it felt good to wallow in it, just as joyous as the squish of cool mud to hot swine. I swam in that muck that day and I can see it clearly, can see the consternation on the doctor's face who was probably dialing the suicide hotline in her mind as a just in case.
It's a dumb thing to say, especially if you don't believe in "god" as a singular concept from which all flows. It's dumb enough if you do believe in that god. I have expressed the same idea using "the universe", a neo-atheistic code phrase that a sufferer who doesn't believe in a singular Islamic or Christian god-head, but doesn't know what else to believe would use. I liked that one--and when I used it in San Francisco it did seem that I fit in a bit better than I would otherwise have believed. I am hippie, hear me equivocate.
Suffering, my young Methodist self was taught, was a by-product of sin. Touch your penis? Suffer. Curse your luck? Suffer. The point was to recreate the world into a predictable pinball machine--if you aim for virtue and miss, well, at least you aimed in the correct direction--your punishment from the cosmic machine might be that your school lunch milk was soured. True sinners though paid big. They fell from the monkey bars onto the asphalt and broke bones. Their parents divorced. They scored the skin from their feet with lawn mower accidents.
That old scorecard flashes up at me every once in awhile. I know my sins pretty well, and the one area where traditional Methodist cosmology and late 20th Century cyncial Earth-based evolution-theory-tinged guilt come together well is the interpretation of right versus wrong, good versus evil and well-intentioned versus ugly self-serving selfish bullshit evil. They seem almost indistinguishable at times. The only difference is no jesus in one and no mercy in the other.
I do suffer sometimes. Like today, my mouth really hurts and the pain meds aren't cutting it. If I sit quietly, it's just a dull roar to me; if I move about, it seems so much more concentrated. The problem with sitting quietly is that I tend to think loudly at those times--and I do wonder if I've punched the cosmic payback machine for triple time with this cancer. I cannot speak or eat, two functions that are so taken for granted as to be wallpaper in our lives.
There is surprisingly very little thought given in doctor's offices to dealing with patients who can't speak. Even nurses who deal with me on a constant basis will tell me to call the office for A, B or C, ask if they can call me to discuss a test result. Try getting them to email or text--oh hell no. Those activities might compromise my privacy and lead to a lawsuit, though the last I heard of it, dragnetting cell phone calls seems to be just as easy for anyone who truly wants to know my last postassium level reading. I'm sure the NSA is not wringing its hands over the possibility that I might read my next appointment time--they've already logged it from the reminder phone call. The verbiage and bits would simply duplicate and clog an already burdened system.
On a sunny, beautiful day like today I wonder if I'm the sun or the snow it's bouncing from--if I'm the shade that protects or the eye that gets the glare full on. I conclude too easily that that I'm the latter in each example--and without any proof that I'm stuck in the payback machine that was magically produced from a dissolute life.
I do bad things but I don't undo them. I relive them. I find them in the middle of a dream I'm having where underwear models find me irrestible. That frog I killed for funsies when I was kid is still floating by me in the creek--and I still feel the moment I killed it and knew that was truly a wastrel horrible thing to do. There are things I consider worse, and too personal to confess, but trust that none of that has left me. These are the quarters with which righteousness is pulling the lever on the one-armed bandit that is dedicated to making me suffer for my awfulness. Today is simply a three cherry day in the casino.
Do we suffer as a result of what we've done? Of course we do--just as we exult from the results of what seems good and true and honest within ourselves. The awful truth that guides both missles to their target is that these armaments are home-grown, from the same factory, and equally misguided. To do well in the world should be an unconscious act, one that simply grows from the goodness of one's soul, intentions, outlook upon the equality and dignity of others. To do evil is to simply place the self above the good of all other components, no matter the argument against that act. To exult in the first is to indulge the outer limits of the second. To wallow in the second is to ignore the impulse to improve that is provided by the first.
To refuse to see that biology is guiding the real missle through the system is as sinful as being willfully stupid to the suffering of others. That cancer is the enemy, not the self, not that self's history. Any time the acorn of hope is overcome by the noise of the doubt is a moment of evil--the true fight is the effect of higher thinking, beauty and love against the machinations and grind of pure unthinking physical biology and chemistry. The universe within doesn't hate anyone, but it can be highjacked to produce some ugly results. That's what's making my mouth hurt right now, not the fact that I was an asshole to Susie Kemery in elementary school.
Myth though is powerful--and why shouldn't it be? It has a story, a history, place, character, and like the best of fiction, a plot, a motive, a raison d'expliquer. It offers a bit of dignity to one's worst impulses to dress them in these ancient robes, to participate in a Greek drama where chorus, protagonist and villain are economically cast from one actor. Someone recently asked me to remember him--I'm very unlikely to forget. I'm still spouting lines from the play that was written when I had sex for the first time, and I'm still wondering how much pain I've got left to pay for the lies I told my parents. I wonder when the real ball will drop on my head from the 90's--I pulled a lot of shit in that decade. My psyche is writing the torture monologue from these more recent remembrances as we speak.
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