Strict Machine

It's Sunday in Bloomington, Indiana. After a few days under the evil spell of a late Spring cold front, we may be closer to normal weather today. I for one could not be happier. I used to be a big fan of Winter, actually--dry, cold, slate grey skies, the lead color of the trees, a snow crunch under the feet as the dogs and I went to the park...heaven. That was another lifetime, another 40 pounds, a lot more muscle, a lot less pharmaceuticals ago. Now, digging up weeds wearing my floppy old man hat in 80+ degree heat is more to my liking. I, who derided snowbirds, may one day rue the fact that I'm not one.

Given that it's early, sort of, I'm goofing on Facebook and reading the New York Times online and avoiding doing anything of real value to the world. My headphones are on, Pandora is playing my Roisin Murphy channel, and I'm truly gearing up to clean up my bedroom, and later to plant some butterfly weed, and perhaps mow...but first, I'm going to have a can of TwoCal. And of course some more tunes. And an Ensure...and some more paper.

Yes, deadly procrastination. As I come back more to life, I recognize that I need to hold myself to the regimentation expected of a more typical modus operandi. That to claim goals, to hold them out as evidence of my worthiness to participate, I actually have to try to accomplish them, and accomplishing them takes discipline and a higher order of regimentation. It's wonderful to splash in the kiddie pool at age 53, I freely admit. As much as it frustrates me, I also find delight in never checking the clock during the day (I typically only make certain I haven't missed making coffee around 5 and to check how long it will be until Wheel of Fortune is on--seriously, it's that bad).

Often enough, my form of regimentation is a response to the animal urges of my body--nap at 10AM? Sure! Extra Ensure at 4pm? No problem, precious. So I envision not so much a fascist dictatorship of time management but the ability and the desire to say "NO" to some of my whims--that nap is ruining the flow of reading a book, studying French or Danish, working in the yard, cleaning the house, finding a job.

And those are all things on my list of to-dos that aren't getting done with the artful grace I envisioned of them in the past few months. I'm not practicing putting sentences together in Danish, I am ignoring my special French emails, and I seem to have hit a patch in "The Bully Pulpit" by Doris Kearns Goodwin that is inexpressibly boring. I need, I know, a strict machine to push my roller coaster car towards the next valley in preparation for the next hill.

There's a great argument to be made that I've only recently and incompletely emerged into Survival Mode, that for a period of time that feels like a decade, I've been told I'm dying. I've earned the goof time I'm having, and I've earned the ability to act as I wish to induce the further healing a satisfied, buddhistic and self indulgent Mark could experience. It's tempting to agree with that. I'd like to but....

Having been without my normal self for what seems like a lifetime, I want some of that back--I want to read my Denise Duhamel poetry books that I bought--when? a year ago, no, more--and then write her yet another fan email (seriously, "Mille et Cent Sentiments" just destroyed me). I want to want to write a grammatically perfect French sentence effortlessly and actually choose the correct verb case and form for each verb without picking up an ungainly Baedecker for the Foreign Language Challenged.

At my back, I now always hear Time's winged chariot scurrying near. And as quickly as my strict machine can accelerate my clown car on rails, it can brake again. I no longer have the luxury to think that I'm exempt from my own expectations. Mark is back in charge, and he still wants to conjugate "etre" and "avoir" from crystalline memory.

Then, there is this--a moment where I talk, and where I connect, and where I still get to communicate, express myself as normal and appreciate where I've been and where I'm going. I keep telling myself that I should wrap this blog project up, but then I think of how much I would miss it, and how much I've yet to tell you. I feel like I can't get inside cancer and make you truly understand how transforming it is, both good and bad. It's as if I were a Leatherback turtle and I was attempting to explain what it is to emerge from a sand nest in the dark and dart toward an ocean where--if I make it there--the odds are firmly stacked against me.

The turtle is too focused on just the facts ahead--yards of beach, swimming out against the tide, avoiding an ocean full of wild life that eats without discrimination. I am too focused on losing functions and not upon the wild life that has been eating at me without discrimination. These days I think of the two little points, centimeter here, bit more than a centimeter there, that sound so small, and yet sit large on my outlook--how many milliions of robot killer cells await in that gashes left in me? how long before it's their time to triumph again?

This is not over, of course it's not. This blog, me, the cancer--we're a trio seeking a wizard, one of us needing a heart, one of us needing a brain, one of us needing to learn to love and forgive. Myself, most of all, for failing at life, for not being able to live without cancer. That there was a hidden beam in me, rotten at its core, that collapsed one day and left me roofless and exposed. That my strict machine is sputtering upon restart, not understanding that I'm a bit hysterical that it work perfectly upon command, that our old life be better implanted in this imperfect body.

Ah, that old life! To be truthful, I'm not certain it ever existed. I think I always simply longed. For efficiency, an effortless mastery that came of the well regulated self. Not the dreamer, who told Denise that her poem changed him, or the devil who hated himself for no real reason whatsoever, merely that he was not red enough, angry enough, snappish enough.

Yes, come to think of it, this music and that Ensure are sounding better and better...