Be Who You Arent

This Halloween I am donning a costume for the first time in years. I won't preview my choice, but this year chemo and Halloween fall on the same day, and my decision to play dress up is to give my nurses a moment of delight. I love those women. They care for me, fuss over me, celebrate with me, commiserate and soothe.

In my old life, I was too busy trying to be hot and way too over it to dress up for Halloween, and I wouldn't have taken time to notice so acutely that a silly costume might make someone smile. I would have rationalized a different method to achieving something pleasant. It may never have worked so well.

Tonight I'm in agony because Charles is eating one of my favorite trashy dinners, Zatarain's Dirty Rice mix and canned corn, which he's backing up with a baguette. Virtually nothing he has eaten in the past year has bothered me so, made me want so badly or curse my dumb fate harder. I'm not sure I can tell you what kind of crack they sprinkle in that box dinner mix, but it's powerful. I have ignored roast chicken, lasagna, exquisite green salads, meat loaf, steak--this is what kills me.

Despite this bit of throwback envy, I find more and more often that my moorings to my old life are pulling loose and when the pieces fall into the water, they aren't much missed. I don't mean I hate the man I was, far from it. I lived in the way many do, not particularly deeply, not always to the surface but not nearly as perceptively as possible. I more often than not was in the tube river, floating--and who amongst us isn't?

The surprise to me has been how utterly ordinary my life was, when of course it seemed to be such an involving drama to me. What seemed to be great forces bringing change turned out to be typical events; romance of the epic sort was normal in its erectile potential.

This newer life, some think, is a much more heroic venture. One that requires a level of gutsiness to achieve basic results and that's true to a degree. But I operate like an old guy, not a hero with a limp-- I plan my travels and I plan my movements like an astute bingo player. I move with deliberation, trying to scan my horizons for dangers to avoid. Loose dogs, uneven pavements, drunk kids, none of which I could yell at or reason with to save myself. I think a lot in this newer life, and that thinking is a priori disaster management.

Not terribly heroic, is it? At least not in those comic book superhero terms; this is far more pedestrian stuff. The heroism in my life is saved for upper level events. When surgeons tell me people like me live typically two years. When consulting doctors look at me and tell me I have months to live. When they tell me cancer is in my lungs. What I think is heroism is pushing back, saying no, disagreeing when bullshit is spoon fed to me like applesauce. It is a simple matter of preservation: heroism is the act if recognizing you are worth saving.

Nothing revolutionary there, aside from the fact that it can be incredibly difficult to assert that simple little fact. To commit to that idea everyday while utterly necessary to surviving cancer is beyond the scope of usual power to utilize. You wake up, you pick this idea with its prickly skin out of its resting box and you pound it into your brain until there's no way to forget it. The heroism is in the doing. Against all of our modesty conditioning to scream to the ether: "I am, and I plan to continue to be."

I'll be thinking of this on Friday, which promises to be coldish, perfect for the holiday, the time of year. Already the leaves are piled by the road, some trees are bare, orange everywhere, backed by every shade of maple red. I love this time of year. I love being here for it. I'm willing to wear a silly costume for it.

An Afternoon of Autumn Sunshine

If Indiana gets a bad rap for anything, often enough it's for the environment--and we deserve it. We're one of the most industrial and least regulated states, leading to a cornucopia of crap in our air, rivers and land. We're rural, too, and filled with pesticides that leach off into the watershed. Our love of coal power kills forests from here to New England.

But today, ah, today...there was that special sunshine that hits orange leaves, and sets yellow ones alight. I woke to it, after falling asleep for a morning nap that went until Noon. Last night, I was fussing with too much gunk in my throat that wouldn't come out and kept me awake until early morning. Today, I'm fussing with beauty. I'm fussing with my nap buddy, Rally, who loves a nice morning snooze. He, in fact, doesn't mind an afternoon, evening, night or brunch-time snog, either.

I had a rendezvous with Wound Care today, too, and I was in an unusually good mood for it. Along with the bright light as I drove, I reviewed all my good news, from my scan, from the evidence of my life, from how I feel, from how I think--and added to this, the fact that I can see that my chest tumor has shrunk recently, significantly to my eyes, and is expelling tons of grossness into the bandages like the dying wrath of a volcano god with no further believers.

I am cautious these days with too much celebration, wondering if I need to quietly slip by cancer and hope it forgets who I am. I dream of hearing words that they've told me I'll never hear--"cancer-free"--because I want to beat odds and, yes, I love to say I told you so.

I went 70 mph down 37 South past Bloomington's answer to the strip mall dingys that someone believes every city requires. Headed to see Dr. Wilkins, with whom I'd also celebrate the fact that we won't have a treatment interruption because of insurance issues--marriage is here! I mused upon the fact that everywhere I turned recently, things seem to be...working. They seem to be ok.

It's times like this that I allow myself to think of survival, and how sweet it is to do so, but also what shape that survival takes in the near and further future. Lately, I've had terrible issues with drainage. I work and work to get this stuff out of me but I lack the natural power of a throat and mouth that help one expel so efficiently. Recently, gunk has started to shoot out of my trach tube when I cough--thick, snotty threads that are, sorry, gross to the touch. If I could save this stuff, one could build with it, I swear. Roman concrete.

Though, it's kind of fun to see how far this stuff will shoot, and what kind of cough it takes to really work up a nice arc of a few feet's duration. You have to make your fun, often enough, and find it where it lives. This is my odd fun. Just to let you know, I've mastered hitting the bathroom wall from standing at the sink--a good couple of feet.

I am reworking my social graces because this year, I'm hosting with the help of IU's wonderful Political Science Department Ladies (Jan, Amanda and Jessica), a birthday celebration on November the 20th when I'm 54...54!  Imagine that. Just a few years ago I worked out like a fool to not look 50; I worried about my tummy and my ass, I hoped I'd keep getting erections forever. I thought of everything like I believe a typical man does, hoping the rest of my life had good food, hot sex, cute dogs, warm rooms.

So, the cute dog and the warm room remains, and the rest of the ideas have changed. I could give less than a boner for how much tail I get from here on out, I am learning how to deal without food better and better (while keeping hopes alive!...). I see survival as a power that overweens the incredible smallness of who I was, the little hopes, the modest wants. Survival has demanded of me that I grow bigger than what I'm fighting, such that in looking down, I can see in physical fashion that the greater entity rules my world. I can keep going.

As I keep going, and keep finding new tricks to do with my trach tube, and new ways to ignore how good that chili smells, I hope I become better, too. Better not as in vital signs, but better as in moral signs--that when I care, I care more and more because of who I am; that as I grieve, it is with the true sense of loss, and not an ersatz cry for attention. That I continue to see how small my problems are in the sight of the world.

At my birthday lunch, with--hopefully--20 or so of my favorite people around, I hope to type the word fuck about twenty times on my Ipad, and laugh, and maybe even tear up a bit--I haven't seen some of my IU friends since the great change happened. I want them to feel a bit of what I felt today as sunlight came into the room, hitting Rally's face, warming my leg, waking us up to what was a terrific day. I want them to know how readily these days are available. 

A Snark and Two Bitches

Snark: noun Combination of "snide" and "remark". Sarcastic comment(s). Also snarky (adj.) and snarkily (adv.)

Like most I know, I prefer my life with snark embedded within it. I enjoy the wit that often turns the mundanely stupid into the sublimely ignorant by dint of a snarky comment. The world revolves in such a way to merit snark frequently; the educational system which is turning out STEM test achievers and humanities idiots in droves makes the life of a snarkmeister easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But what I'm learning more and more, about everything it seems, is that moderation is not a bad thing.

Unlike many people, I love the word bitch--it has multiple, complex meanings depending upon how I use it and where. I don't hesitate to call my best friends "bitch"--a term of penultimate endearment, the top being usually "hon" in my Baltimorese or "whore" or "Miss Thing." I am not, I suppose, for the faint of heart. When I apply it to situations though, when it is a verb, I think of it in two ways--one, the ideation of annoyance within a situation to a describable state of frustration, and two, the pitching of a bitch, a moaning often "poor me" sentiment into which the generally privileged are forced to be temporarily put out of sorts.

I've pulled in many times, in many situations, both types of bitches. I have without reservation elevated simple irritation to a state of nuclear alert, I have ignored all notions of my general well being to be over-antagonized at small irritants. I have enjoyed the sound of my own snark, I have loved the pitch of my outrage, I have disdained moderation to my own, I know now, disadvantage. I am a bitch, no doubt about it.

Within the world that I've been constructing from day one of cancer to now, I have begun to lean more heavily upon optimism and a generally uplifted outlook, and to be less ashamed of it as I go along. I've always been susceptible to the allure of optimism. It was the idea of it that got me through four years of high school, through the daily fag torments, through the hatred of a small farming town for anyone of difference, that the future would be better, that college would be fun, that I'd get laid a lot. And it was better and I did get laid a lot, and that cemented for me a place for optimism to be. I didn't let it be known that I was a closet optimist--amongst my acquaintance there was a certain elegance in an exhaustion with happiness, a sneer toward middle class satisfactions, the admission of pedestrian entertainment as an exercise in slumming. An optimist was, to the crowd I ran in, an idiot.
And frankly, without moderation, optimism is a very stupid thing.

The power of the mind stuns in a world that places faith in physical action. The idea that a patient can be as responsible for their recovery as the drugs prescribed for it is treated somewhere between 9/11 truthers and touched by an angel-ites. Everyone nods belief at it and everyone discounts it heavily. But I am opening my closet door to proclaim it as critical--in moderation. Last Autumn, several doctors gave me a period of months to live. At first, this was very depressing--for an hour or two. And then it pissed me off. After that, it was simply a challenge and anyone who does know me well knows that I love nothing more than proving to a smart person that I am way smarter than they could ever hope to be. Fuck you, dumbass, I thought, just watch. That is, I admit, a twisted beginning to optimism, one that grows out of the roots of stubbornness and pride, but hey, often enough good things deracinated reveal less exalted beginnings. Yet I know that even my talented and optimistic oncologist in San Francisco could not have gotten me to a point of improvement alone. That without my active straining towards betterment and without my belief that it was a possibility, and without my belief that the world is a fascinating place of which I've seen and experienced too little, I wouldn't be here now typing. I do not doubt it.

In an act of fair admission, though, optimism wasn't a straight arrow up my chart of better--I had moments, hours, a day here and there where I wanted to die. At 120 pounds, feeling useless to the world, an expensive burden, unattractive, unloveable, unimprovable, I occasionally hoped I'd just quit, choke on a snot ball, what have you. Each time, each moment of that, I climbed out, I kept going, I changed my thinking. I may not have felt that I had a choice in surviving, but I felt I had a choice in how I did so. It is, to me, Midwestern to the core to understand that your obligations do not end at your desires. They are part of a great network into which you were inserted at birth. Your obligations to your family are legion; as a young person, you're a handyman, a gardener, a housecleaner, a caregiver. As an adult you are an economic engine, a pattern to your younger relatives, a moral exemplar, a participant in group decisions that are, ultimately, just North Korean votes for your parents' wishes. As an older family member, you are the dispenser of gifts, and wisdom and unconditional love--your eminence gris is fulfilled by smiling, somewhat mysteriously, as the children run by you like sugar crazed freaks.

I have thought about optimism, pessimism, bitchiness, snarkiness, in various combinations, in various ways, because I am all of those things, in various combinations and ways, their general influences waxing and waning as moons around Planet Mark. I am, by habit as much as birthright, a snark. I am, by practice and hard work, a bitch. I am pessimistic because it's so supported in our culture, and so easy. But I am optimistic because I see that nothing is possible without it. I should be clear and say that optimism, to me, is a far more inclusive concept than just placing a wreath of niceness around events. I think that sort of optimism, "little house on the prairie fuckery" as I call it, is just as lazy as pessimism, and worse, totally fake. It's the kind of optimism that has the face of Southern Hospitality which is often just a way to say fuck you without having the balls to actually say it. My connotation of optimism is that when leaves fall, they make great garden mulch; that when snow comes, it means we aren't in a drought; that a dog sleeping next to me is an expression of confidence; that I deserve to live; that I deserve to be happy; that my life, for all its weird bumps, permutations, and losses, is a statement of how good overcomes bullshit; that whatever I face, others face much worse, and I'm obligated as much now as always, to ameliorate that when I can; and, when I cannot, to understand that acknowledging the fact is an obligation to placing my own shit in perspective.

I have thought of these things, too, because of social networking, Facebook in particular. I find myself engaging my snark there because it's fun, pessimism occasionally because it's easy, and bitchery, well, that is highly popular on social media. Optimism, though, at least in these public spaces, is often canned and trite--it comes out as a response to a negative post about an event in someone's life. One can't fix the problem, one can't offer the recipe for improvement, but one can say: "that's shit and you don't deserve it," and in that way, trite makes the reason of its existence known--the power of recognition overweens the repetition of its stated sentiments.

There are those whose feeds are full of their personal woes. That's ok to a point: some lives are more problematic than others. Some people less proactive, less motivated, less idealistic, less optimistic--some people love their problems more than the difficult puzzle of their solutions. In fact, often enough, the solution is quite simple, but perhaps emotionally expensive. Your husband treats you like dirt? get rid of your husband--easy enough for the peanut gallery, not so easy for the burdened spouse. Economics, both visceral and real, ties both emotional and practical, facts not in evidence in a two line wail online demand, probably, less ideation and more balance than that with which we typically react.

Cancerwise, my feed is probably full of it--I don't think much about that. I do not, though, try to bitch about it. Like guests and fish, there's a limit to how much any bitch or snark should be posted before it smells. There's a limit to how much woe is me. There's a limit to fuck-my-life, shoulder-shrugging this-is-how-life-treats-me stuff. In optimism, factually, I find a lot about my situation that is fascinating, and for which I'm actually grateful. I've been slapped and forced to examine myself, unpack my psyche, admit my errors, and celebrate my strenght. I found that I am tough, in ways that many people can't or won't be, that I can shoulder loads that I thought would stagger me and don't. I found that I take to surgery like a duck to water, and I pop up after that delightful knockout sleep feeling refreshed and happy. I think more now that I can't talk, I express better without words, I see and hear more in acts and movements and pauses than I ever did as a speaking snarky bitch. I am becoming more and more aware of what my value is, who I am, and while age is helpful here, it's been jet charged by events in my life. I can't hate cancer for that.

I do find, though, a creeping indifference to the constant bitchery and snark around me, a feeling that optimism is degraded while pessimism is exalted to a point that even my cohort in the Eighties, and my friends in the Nineties, would find disturbing. That the only acceptable way to express oneself is to criticize, not to a fine point of performance, but to a blithering attempt at wit, a mordant, dead, and soul-aching long screech of self importance and snipe. I want to beg people who whine about trivialities and dramatize the medical emergencies with no sense of their meaning and possibilities to just shut the fuck up. Too often, too much, I find the same people making their lives a set of drama without even the courtesy of bad soap opera acting. Their statements to the world about who and what they are condensable to poor bitch, or just victim, helplessly little bright buoy tossed in the Sea of Fate. Jesus, what boring shit.

My general rule I propose now is that for every bitch you make, legitimate or not, that every negative event you report, requires two solutions to follow. For example: my mother is in the hospital after a heart attack. That's a legitimate negative, that's a definite spot upon which to pitch the bitch tent. But after the fire is contained, it requires something like--I'm going to examine my diet to mitigate my risk, I'm going to clean my mother's house every couple of weeks to help her out, I'm going to hire a maid service a couple of times a month because I live too far away. After I tell you that I hate that shit happens to good people, if I don't see that you know that 90% of all shit is preventable, I'm not feeding the victimhood. I can't know, of course, all of the threads of circumstance in any other life, given that finding the threads of my own is a full time job. I can though read and see when someone is simply not applying what I think of as the good sense of moderation--that continual snark, bitchiness, pessimism are diseases like anything else--that like obesity, they are social contagions that pull others down into your morass.

Fuck your selfishness, I'm tired of it. Get off your ass and do the hard work, the real work, of making life better. It's so easy to be what you are, it should be easy to cut you off--but that's hardly the answer. I'm just not going to keep rubbing your back and telling you everything is going to be ok every time you're butt hurt. It makes no sense, and frankly, we've all got our own gardens to weed. I'm just going to tell you to change your diaper because it smells in this bitch.

I didn't get better to be mean to others--I got better for myself, because I deserved it, because I could do it. It is hard, and it is continual work. I have less and less time to spend pissing away a good mindset on trivial crap. The closet door is open--I am basically optimistic. I secretly think that if I live long enough, medical science will grow me a new tongue from stem cells, a new jaw, that I'll eat again before I die. I know that if I persist, I'll get rid of the trach tube and a bit of plastic surgery will iron out my face. I know that I'll spend my life being fascinated by what I see and I'll be able to talk about it without an Ipad. I see myself hitting 70 and laughing at the idea that that's enough. I want glory in my life, I want beauty, I want happiness. I want to bitch about it, and snark at it, and feel, at the end of the day, that I win. Because the story is being written by me, and I refuse to do otherwise.

I advise you to start writing your stories and get your mind set to something similar.