I learned once again that I'm like the Love Canal for toxicity. If you have a chemo drug you need to dump in a guy who won't automatically glow, I'm your man. I've now been at this chemo stuff for over a year and a half and the only problem I've really had is that I once had trouble breathing during a taxol infusion--allergic reaction, I think. They just slowed the drip down and I got over it. Case closed.
My newer drug, 5FU (5 times Fuck You), has a possible side effect of something called hand and foot syndrome, where the skin cracks, and it can cause nails to become brittle--and both of these have now happened to me--in fact, typing is somewhat painful because I have fissures in my nail beds that are annoying and prone to infection. My nails are breaking up into pieces, somewhat abstracted by my habit of picking at them. I was a nail biter all my life, and when nail biting was taken away from me, I turned into a nail picker. I am, after all, not a new Mark but a McGuyvered version of the old model.
As I look at what I wrote about this year, I learned about the importance of other people in my life, how much deflection they provide me, how much love, the type of support they give that I cannot replicate. I learned how fortunate I am in the people I have around me, closely, or distantly orbiting. I have an interesting family that finds me interesting. I learned that I'm not really all that needy, but I need them, and I need the friends I have, and I need to hear their voices occasionally, on Facebook, as I read what they write in the voice I know of them. In person, as this past weekend when Jerry the Doll came calling, and spent time glorying in the idea that we are survivors.
I have, too, a bro-crush, a admiration so absolute that it remains a pillar of my existence--my old India Studies boss, Dr. Sumit Ganguly. I know so few people that I believe are geniuses--actually, do I know any others? Some very close...perhaps just Katy Borner at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center....anyway, Dr. G., as I call him, is my completely nonsexual brain crush. Recently, he's had a serious health challenge of his own and I've been trying to get him to talk to me about it--and he defers on the basis that I'm dealing with enough of my own. Arrgh! I cannot get him to understand that focusing outside myself is what I most want to do. I can't change his diagnosis or prognosis, but I can offer a lot of perspective on dealing with the healthcare system, on how the mind twists to escape the illness the body presents it, how to stay yourself when nobody thinks you can do that anymore.
I recently saw a segment on 60 minutes with Anderson Cooper exploring mindfulness and going on a retreat and walking around deliberately and chewing in silence and what not. That's mindfulness? You see, to me, mindfulness is what I'm trying to do with Dr. G., what I encourage myself to do with all my friends--mindfulness is living the experience of others, understanding through their perspective, melding that with your own to learn of a new way of viewing, thinking, feeling. Mindfulness is not how I am to me, it's how you are. I suppose I learned in 2014 that all my life I've tried to do this--and that's one of the best parts of me that I'm glad is still here. It's not empathy I'm speaking of, but a real effort to retrain one's thinking to enculturate another perspective, and to then feel and think from that new geography. I understand what Anderson's mindfulness was trying to achieve, but to me, it's just stealth narcissism--and don't we have enough of self fascination?
I'm perfectly ok with myself, and these days I only occasionally have moments of depression over how much cancer has changed me--yeah, it changed me, boo hoo. I'm not cute anymore, if I was cute before--my body is a map of big surgery and subsequent adjustments. My skin is dry and thin, my ass (what's left of it) hangs and isn't pert. But damn if I'm not sexy beautiful in my own head--a man who works for his good, fights, thinks, advocates, loves and occasionally stoops to charm.
I learned this year to have a different sort of respect for belief and what power that represents. The parishioners of Charles' Catholic parish have been unfailingly lovely about my illness--they pray for me, they send me blessed oil and blessed water--and I drink the water and apply the oil, because I've learned that just as I have agency, so too do they, Belief, for them, is an act of sincerity, not attrition, not a lowest common denominator way to hate others, but a level playing field upon which to love, and even to heal. I've had my problems with Christianity, and with some of the cultists and Dominionists, I still do--but I've come to see the fact that others believe as a positive force.
I thought of this the other night when I watched a PBS show about wounded soliders congregating yearly at Lourdes, men and women with horrific injuries and even worse memories, seeking not a cure but a healing, not absolution, but a cessation of the worst after effects of bombs and suicide bombers and IEDs. It was moving, it was a profound statement to me of the mind's power to effectuate a better life, and belief's powers to move the unmovable. So if I am less overtly anti-Christian, consider the lessons of 2014 well learned.
I stopped reading horoscopes for the most part in 2014--I used to read them fairly regularly, and while I didn't think they predicted my life, I did sometimes hope they did when they seemed more interesting than my existence merited. I do still receive a weekly horoscope and newsletter from Rob Brezsny's Free Will Astrology which I enjoy because his writing is so intelligent and entertaining. But this week's offering also was one that spoke directly to me:
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): You may already know what I'm about to tell
you. It's a core principle at the root of your Scorpio heritage. But I want
to focus your attention on it. In the coming months, you'll be wise to
keep it at the forefront of your conscious awareness. Here it is, courtesy
of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "You have it in your power to invest
everything you have lived through -- your experiments, false starts,
errors, delusions, passions, your love and your hope -- into your goal, with
nothing left over."
That was 2104 to me--a time when I committed everything and thought always of my goal--to live, to
live gloriously and fully, mindfully, with belief. In 2014, I started telling people, more people
at least, the truth I see, and how I see it, and why I see it that way. I used to fear that my
perspective was too off-putting, now I see how harmless I've been all along. I was rarely
out to hurt anyone, I rarely felt threatened, and 2014 was the year I decided I could be me,
because I don't have enough time to be anyone else.
I don't particularly need mindfulness or Jesus or Buddha, Mohammad or whoever, and I
don't need to know when Pluto is transiting an impatient Mars. I need to know when Charles is
coming home, so I can open the garage door. I need to know that Rally gets that Daddy loves him.
I need the people in my life. I need to do what I can to be as normal as possible without
fooling myself that I'm normal. Of course I'm not. I fought every day in 2014, I'm going to fight
my way through 2015. You see, I have a goal, and I'm saving nothing to reach it. Nothing left over.
Or, as the Goddess Tori would say: Pretty good year.
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