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.
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