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.