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.