Hello, Russia

I occasionally look at the stats of this blog to see what's going on. One of my favorites is "audience", which identifies where people are viewing this work.

I've been a bit popular, relatively speaking, in Ukraine, I have one consistent reader in Germany (Hi, Donna) and in Denmark (Hi, Stefan), and often France, Spain, and other European countries show up. Lately, though, I have had a lot of page hits from Russia--in fact, lately, the most page hits have come from there.

This of course might be people trying to back end my personal information through the blog, but I prefer to think it's someone who is dealing with, or dealing with someone with cancer. Looking for ideas, thoughts, a way to express the long moan of oh fuck that comes with this disease.

Ideally, this blog is for me, my family, my friends, to keep up on what's relevant in my treatment, to understand what's going on in my brain, to see that I'm still as I was, irascible and unlikely to let a piece of shit like cancer ruin my dancing shoes. Secondly, though, I hope someone reads it who is suffering and decides they don't have to suffer. I hope it sticks around the internet after I'm gone as an introduction to Mark Priceism, the fuck this religion of the future.

I do not know my future, at all. I ponder it sometimes, wondering about 60, about 70 about going beyond and still having all the problems I have now. Do I have the strength to live 20 years without eating or speaking? Will science solve at least one of those problems? (please let it be eating--I don't need to talk but I desperately want a hamburger.) I have tried to think optimistically but sometimes when I wake up coughing at 4am because the gunk is gathering in my tube, I wonder if I won't just drown in a river of snot. Rather John Waterish of me, I think...

One reason I like to write this is that writing releases a lot of the toxins I store up on a daily basis. Most of my worries are placed into perspective when I force myself to think outwards--and the conditions I worry about are usually put into place this way too. When I write, I think of people who have it worse that I do, and there are certainly people who do. They help me understand that whatever strength I think I have is pretty minimal to what it takes to be them. I dislike scales of suffering, generally, I don't believe in them, but I do know there's an echelon of fiber it takes each of us to create.

So, in Russia, what does this all sound like? They have a modern medical system, whether funded or not, they have, I'll wager, fairly similar technologies to deal with fast, aggressive oral cancers. Is what I'm writing being wrung through a towel of Orthodoxy? (If so, I don't know how the fucks are translating). I'm thinking of a flat in Moscow, somewhat updated, somewhat not, a holdover from those vast Soviet apartment blocks. A person wrapped in blankets like I am often enough, in a face mask, wondering how and when normal will ever reappear once it has been surgically excised. Their winter is wilder, longer, and colder.

In "Twilight of the Eastern Gods", Ismail Kadare writes in a semi-autobiographical way of a student in the Gorky Institute in Moscow in the Fifties. A time of Soviet Nationalism and Nikita-ism, a place already starting to peel, buildings sitting in grim situations under an endless sky. It evokes what I thought of Russia growing up--a sad place we were told, where you had to work months just to buy a pair of shoes!  Did you ever see those charts in school? I think you'd have to be my age or older, to remember those Cold War artifacts--how Russians were far more likely to be alcoholics, how Russians had to shift their poorly-made cars into neutral and glide downhill to save gas, how no one owned anything there, how long one waited to get an apartment. Sounds a lot like America, 2015, to me...at least the America that I see on the rare occasions that I'm out.

I have given up thoughts of travel, much as I have given up thoughts of meandering around town, In the Winter, leaving the house means doctors or grocery store; in Summer, it means walking the schnoodle. It no longer means adventure, or seeking, or discovery. I read an article about how Milan is so cheap to visit, the airfares they quoted were shockingly good, the pictures of the arcades of Milan, the cathedral, the food, the people--all of that was vintage porn to me: it would have turned Mark on three years ago, now it just makes him a bit sad. No, there's no way I can sit in an aircraft crowded and uncomfortable for 9 hours. It simply won't happen. I'm no longer a pretzel.

I'll never go to Russia, and that's a shame. I'm a big fan of Russian history, and culture, though I dislike their government. I've always wanted to see St. Petersburg particularly and watch the shades of Peter stride over boardwalks in the swampy muck and see Catherine glide about in her Baroque gowns festooned with doubled-headed eagles. It would be fascinating to see where the massacre of 1905 took place, in that Winter Palace courtyard--and to walk the backstreets where Left Social Revolutionaries fought Bolsheviks, and White Russians silently packed up and headed west to join the insurrection. It would be incredible to experience the day of the Romanov's execution, as news came in from Ekaterinburg on wire.  But, not to be...

Many things aren't to be, but many things are--exchanging your past dreams for new dreams often feels too compromised, but frankly, it's not so bad. It's rather good to let go of unrealistic expectations and engender new thinking based upon the possible, the doable, the now. My next dream is a successful surgery on my chest wall tumor, where I'm sitting in the hospital having fun with the nurses and enjoying a warm room and a comfortable bed and good drugs. It's not Milan by a long shot but it's really possible.

I dream that prosthetics will be approved for me that will reshape what's left of my mouth and allow me not to wear face masks or drool. Seems possible, seems like a small desire, given that I could ask to win the lottery.

I hope to find that someone in Russia has read this and decided to live, damn it, live, in spite of the shit looking mouth, the muscle soreness in the tempo-mandibular joints, the teeth getting pushed together, the amount of body run off running through a useless orifice. Fuck that stuff, fuck those conditions, you are alive.

I dream that it's 2085 and in researching the quaintness of the internet in the early part of the century, someone finds this and decides I was right, interesting, a decent person. Someone who will remember me when they don't even know me, who understands why this is all a buzzkill and how much I tried to make it not.