How Much It Loves You Back

The house has a scent wreath of meat, wine and garlic wafting from a slow cooker. It's being joined by the setting of brownies topped with walnuts coming to life in the oven (Mark Bittman, "How to Cook Everything"-we don't Duncan Hines in this household). This all in anticipation of my old friend Jerry, who is coming down for the weekend from Fort Wayne.

We are the oldest of friends, having met on the streets of Fort Wayne's tiny "gay block" downtown in 1977. I was 16, and not supposed to be there, Jerry was 15 with a Camaro that I coveted in chocolate brown with tan leather bucket seats--or was that pleather? It could have been, we are talking mid-Seventies. We have know each other since then, with breaks in communication--37 years!  I know he likes pot roast and brownies, as does Charles (as does any Hoosier). And that, I can do.

We haven't seen each other since before the cancer diagnosis and the surgeries and the changes. I'm nervous. I've written to him in my emails and begged him to be sure and not forget that I look different, that inside is still the creamy filling of Mark, but outside is a different story. I likely shouldn't worry. I'm not a circus freak, but if you knew me in 2012 the 2015 version is decidedly less streamlined. There's the bandages, the face mask, the coughing, the dry skin, the chemo jew hair, the weird patches of facial hair I ignore until they absolutely must be shaved (note to radiation: you took away 80% of the hair that grew on my face and I'm good with that, in fact, bravo. Life is much easier that way--but leaving the mustache and two patches on my upper cheeks? Such a bitch move.)

Because it's the holiday season, I've been randomly writing emails to people to say hello and tell them I miss them, which I do. I've grown fond of thinking of my past, and not in a "ein tag war hochzeit" sort of way (apologies, Sally Bowles, but that's real German Expressionism!)--rather, simply that it was better than I knew it to be at the time. This amuses me a great deal. I always felt apart from what I was doing in life, at least most of the time--either too sophisticated or too degenerate to care, too savoir to faire, too bitch to deal. Turns out to have been untrue--I live these moments now because I lived them then. I just didn't allow myself to think I was...

The reason that cancer pisses me off is that it struck me suddenly in the middle of the point of my life where I finally felt I was real, adult, present--at the point where I loved my job despite its shortcomings, and I loved the people I worked with in Washington, DC on the grant that funded it, and I loved my boss and my coworkers. I had a plethora of great friends I could call upon for help or fun or just for shits. I would have told you my ass was too fat but I liked myself, I liked my body, I enjoyed my own sense of humor. Then, boom, clap, all gone.

I thought of that moment, particularly, when the curtain came down as I received an answer to one of my random acts of emailing--from a friend I particularly admire whose mother has received a cancer diagnosis and isn't considered a good candidate for chemo. This is like finding a knife in your side that can't be removed for fear of losing the kidneys and eviscerating the spleen.

I will admit I don't know what to say about that cancer, about this event...knowing that sorry is a small word thrown upon a big wall of shit. That I don't pray for myself so I'll not be praying for her, except in my non-traditional way. I'll send my best most positive thoughts into a universe I know to be grim and hostile but creamy, like me, on the inside. I'll hope they make it through.

To anyone starting this voyage, I can only say it's time to pull your big girl panties up and gird your loins. The one step forward, two steps back thing is an apt description, walking through mud is another. But do this:

1. Let your doctor know you're smart and you want to be engaged:
         Ok, I know this is going to sound awful, but bear with me. On virtually every doctor's visit I've attended, the waiting room is full of people talking about that there sammich at Mickey Dee's made their guts hurt when they crapped. This is the gum smacking, trash talking, shit food eating heart of
'Murica. They've spent a life never exercising, never walking, never attempting a rational diet, hating brussel sprouts and eating lots and lots of Freedom Fries. They'd rather die than figure out a way to do anything but pop pain medication and act like nothing was really happening to them.
          This is what your doctor is seeing more frequently than you--a person who has read, studied, been curious, learned how to satiate that curiosity, acted, thought, theorized. You have rational responses, you know that cancer wasn't just a product of A or B, but like geometry, often enough, there's a C in there, too. You want them to take you seriously? Speak like a grown up. Express like a scholar. Shut up and listen, listen, listen. Often enough, the question you want to ask is contained in the answer to something else. Just shut up. You're back to undergrad, and Cancer U is not for the snotty self-assured A-holes who used to talk about ciphers in literature and New Criticism's application to the rise of Confessionalism in American Poetry circa 1955 onward. Just shut the fuck up. Try it, it's really refreshing. Not to have the smart ass remark, the bon mot, at the ready, but to honestly let your doctor know you WANT to learn. They will quickly see that you mean business and the entire way they treat you will change--for the better;

2. Advocate, and cuss:
          I have never said "fuck that" to so many doctors with so much good effect--because that's me, that's how Mark used to talk when he could talk. I don't know why I love vulgarity so much, but I do. Sue me.
          I advocate for myself by allowing my doctors to know who I actually am behind all this cancer--and that Mark is still very much alive and very much wants to stay that way. I advocate for myself by a process of concatenation of our last visit, our last theoretical discussion, our last possible future plan. For example--in my last visit with Dr. Dayton, my Oncologist, he was discussing the chest wall tumor we've been fighting. He believes that chemo will not completely destroy it this time, and we'll have to excise some of it surgically, and follow that with a skin graft, because this tumor occurs in a patch of my chest that was so damaged by radiation that the skin doesn't heal well, and abraids and forms open sores easily. (I know, so sexy to think about that, right?)  Last time I simply asked where the skin graft would come from, we talked about the importance of gaining weight to support the skin harvest, to maintain my relative health. I've been thinking of this everyday, asking myself what I want to know of this plan. I want to know how long the surgery will take, whom he will suggest should perform it (and then of course look up their credentials), where, what recovery time in the hospital would be necessary, what Plan B is if the skin graft doesn't take, who does the follow up care, and is he still my point guard on Team Mark, varsity Cancer Fighters.
          I advocate for myself by establishing that I've paid attention and done what is asked of me, and made it my own routine. As Dr. Wilkins told Terri the nurse at Wound Care last week:  I'm just the doctor, he's running the show.

3. I allow myself to feel
         Finally, and most simply, I allow myself to feel. I cry a lot. Sweet videos tear me up, baby animals affect me, people amaze me, beauty astounds me. I absorb as much of the universe as will tear through me in a day, every day.
          Words that have moved me: "fixed stars govern a life" (Plath); "Live or die, but don't poison everything" (said to Anne Sexton); "I'm Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, I came out two days on your tail/Those two bald headed days in November/Before the first snowflakes sail." (Joni "Goddess" Mitchell); "No voice divine the storm allayed/No light propitious shone/As snatched from all effectual aid/We perished, each alone;/But I beneath a rougher sea and whelmed in deeper gulfs than he." (William Cowper).  There are so many of these...
          To be in gratitude of the bounty of incredible things requires an innocence we are often bullied out of--a simpleness in the face of grace that we are told is semi-retarded. Hardly. That has it fully backward and half assed to boot. Yet how often we are talked out of our goodness and how frequently our mercy is never spent upon ourselves...

To my friend's mother: Good luck and welcome. Please decide you'll board the S.S. Survivor. Please set a goal--mine is live to 70. I like to think big--yours can be feel better by May, or just be of good cheer. One's goal within Cancerville need not be lofty, it just feels necessary to have an end point to the work.

Spend the time to find out why you're not a good fit for chemo, and what sort of chemo that is--there are all kinds of formulas and mixes and perhaps your oncologist is overlooking an older therapy that is not currently vogue that might work for you. For me, they pulled me in a very old cancer fighter that helped me for many months--in fact, it was part of bringing me back from concentration camp Mark to almost pink faced Mark. My oncologist at the time dug deep to think outside the reigning paradigm and it worked. Make sure your oncologist knows you believe in his/her ability to do the same, and to be a bit daring if you will be too.

My oncologist knows my goal, and he thinks I can do it. That's because I have told him I want to, and he has seen that I have a certain power to getting what I want. Mark A. Price, the honey badger of cancer fighting. Your oncologist should know yours, and why you want it, and who you are, and why you are worth assisting, rising, to meet that goal you've set. You must convince them you are ready to survive because survival is not just something that happens--it is something that you make happen.

It is Sisyphean to survive, because it is done and redone every single day. There is no let up. Once you commit to the merry go round, that bitch goes round and you do not get off. You believe in yourself or you slide off. You act like an adult or your grip loosens. You love what you have because you hate to have lost what you lost.

Now, look around you. It's beautiful, the yellow light of a sun, the diffused light through a cloud. The composition of color as you look out the window--here, early winter, it's yellows and browns and grays with some small weeds in my old shade garden tossing red in a leaf or two. The maple tree has gradients of grey and black, streaks of moldy green and rust. How could you leave this? How could you not want to learn to love this and see, finally, as an adult, as a survivor, as someone special as you are, how much it loves you back?

Who are you, anyway?

It's Sunday and I've been up since 4am, victim to misplaced fluids which refuse to leave my throat, and refuse to move, and won't respond to my attempts to dislodge it. I can breathe, but it's in the way, and I can feel it, and that irritates me. I made a pineapple upside down cake at 5:30am because my nephew and his partner, girl partner, woman, his "sex", are coming over in the late morning and his birthday is quickly approaching on the 12th.

I have had to twist his arm to allow me to make him a lunch, which I had hoped would be a dinner, which I believe he will enjoy if he allows himself to do so. He will, he informs me, forgoe the joy of White Castle for the privilege of the strip steak I have in soy dijon marinade in the refrigerator. For the honor of allowing me to make him some roasted potatoes, roasted brussel sprouts with walnuts and a small bit of fresh corn cut off the cob.

Jesus Christ, I'm like my mother.

This is the way she was--a bit snarky, everything an event horizon. My poor little nephew is probably ready to sneak out of Bloomington and drive back home, and I'm gluing his ass to a seat at my janky dining room table (it really is janky), and listen to me pontificate for an hour as politely as he can before he escapes. His girlfriend (I truly don't think that's quite the word, but I don't know what to call her) doesn't like me and has made that obvious on several occasions of being semi-rude to me; I care little. If my nephew likes banging her, it's not my business. We can be frenemies over all, as long as the boy is happy.

I am not quite as bad as my mother about cleaning the house this time around. I'm learning. Usually when someone is coming over for virtually any reason, I'm dusting the baseboards and freaking out about pubes. Today, not so much--Breathing is not normal, snot is not flowing as it should, I'm tired. Fuck it. If there's dust on the television and that traumatizes you, I pity the life you are forced to lead.

Thank you cancer, I'm not just like my mother.

But she too with her cancer had to step down a bit from her tornado of housefrauing. Once my father had died and she no longer felt compelled to wipe down the toilet with antibacterial after every visit he made in there, she looked about herself and understood she wasn't made to keep it up. It couldn't all run like Mussolini's trains. She wasn't young, she had cancer, and it was killing her, and she knew it.

I am like my mother when her practicality switched on. I'm tired, and I'll be tired. I have lower event horizon reactions. I wait longer to do things. I do them in smaller batches. I avoid up and down, up and down, and hope for long periods of interaction, not action.

Yet, I am like my father, which is a damnable thing. As established here earlier, the man just didn't like me, and never did. In my early years, he took delight in telling me what a disappointment I was; in later years, he simply ignored me as best he could. I in turn couldn't stand being in the same room with him, feared him, disliked him, and only put that aside for the last ten years or so of his life for the sake of my own sanity, to explore whether we had anything in common at all.

It turns out we have plenty in common, probably the biggest problem between us. My father never liked himself all that well, and he certainly didn't like encountering himself in me. He didn't like my smartass mouth, he didn't like my verbalness, he certainly was never in favor of my fagness, though he kept that to himself. But we both had stubborness. and intelligence and perseverance and intuitiveness and a belief that whatever we felt about ourselves personally, we were worthy of respect, and dignity, and by god if you didn't give it to us, we'd knife you as fast as look at you.

Those traits, benighted as they often are, are useful in fighting cancer, in fighting insurance companies, in demanding to be treated as a person of skill and agency and intelligence. You may not know but once you are marked for death in the system, a lot of people simply write you off--you become the ghost who watches as your spouse is consulted, the shadow who breathes while others sign forms, you are not the king anymore. Once in such a position you have to fight your way back, prove yourself, yell, declare your agency. You have to be rational but firm, you have to question your doctors and direct your treatment and demand that you be given the full range of options and information.

Then it becomes easier, as my mother would have had it.

Apparently, my mother was very popular at her infusion center because of her good nature, and she certainly had one. She was not tempted to blame anyone for her condition or make their lives more difficult because of it, and I've consciously tried to pattern myself that way because I respected that about her so much. Like me, her sentence to chemo was life long from the point of diagnosis. It went on for years, she was quite tough. I have that from her, her utter resilience, my sister had it. We three cancer victims learned from one another like water cascading down a smart hill. I am the fortunate recipient.

Today, I'm trying as best I can to be Mark, but Barb is poking out of me when I look at the pineapple upside down cake and second guess me decision to not use those gross cherries on it (ugh, maraschinos, so Fifties). Jim is sticking me in the ribs and telling me I'm a failure because I can't get my nephew to dinner, so he must think I'm stupid. Hardly, I tell Jim, the boy has his own life. Calm down, Barb, I say to her as she stands fretting, looking at the cake tray. Mark is here, the coffee is ready when I need it to brew, the steaks are prepared, the potatoes are roasting.

My mother didn't like most of her daughters-in-law when she first met them. They were just never quite up to her snuff, not perhaps good enough for her two heterosexual sons. My dates or relationships she was invariably nice to, but they weren't permanent to her (or, mostly, to me). She had no expectations. My father sat smoking in the earlier years, on oxygen later, and said little, preferring to act as if what was on television was much more engrossing that I or we could ever be.

And, I am all of that, all of them, all of me. Waiting for Jason, waiting to chat, and feed and fuss, and even love, a bit. Unlike Barb I'm not lovey, and unlike Jim I'm not distant. I am Mark, I have cancer, I am surviving it every day a little bit, and I am all of us.

Thankful!

Of course I'm thankful to be alive and here, watching the dog watch Charles eat pizza. I'm thankful for the meta categories, friends, family, relative health. I spent the first part of this week fighting an errant bug that led me to sleep about 16 hours a day. Today, I spent the first part of the day at chemo as my nurses get a day off on my usual Friday--isn't that good? I figured my pals would have to work and I'd show up to oppress them on Friday but they get to be human and real, and I'm thankful for that.

In considering thankfulness, most of mine is rather specifically focused. So here's a partial list, and by  far not exhaustive:

Bridget

I'm thnakful my niece decided to lose weight for herself. I'm happy she's grown up to like herself, everything else is either cake or static. She bangs out her makeup like a pro, and looks like a model. No mere boy is going to be good enough.

Amanda

My little niece has two adorable children and a husband I like to fuck with. I really couldn't ask for much more. Well, I would like to eat when I go to her house, but I do get to bitch about everything, which she encourages, because she is a bitch and I'm proud. In our family, we own it.

Kathy and Chano

My niece used to just be irritated by me, but we've both grown up. I enjoy her eye popping bitchiness and she enjoys mine. I like her husband, a sensitive intellectual traveler. Kathy was the first of my nieces and nephews, my sister Barb's first. She carries her mother well, and I miss her less when I'm around KJ.

Jim and Debbie

My oldest brother doesn't let me down. He took me to the drive-in in his cool Mustang in the Sixties, fed me potato soup when my mother couldn't make it home to fix dinner. He married a quiet woman named Debbie who turned out to have a wicked sense of humor and the biggest heart. I love them both because my life at every step has been better with them in it.

Jason, Jeremy, Jennifer

Jim and Debbie brought this tribe to life. They are foul mouthed, vulgar, loving, fabulous people. I couldn't enumerate the number of times they have amused the hell out of me. Like their parents, they've only made my life better . They continue to fascinate me, Jason with his beautiful daughter and his two sons, Jeremy in his first house, Jennifer who married my sweet Roller, a Debbie-level addition to the family, their boy Logan who is polite and sweet and 15-and I can't wait until he goes as wild as his uncle...

Dale

When my sister married Dale in 1966, I thought he was a tool. Well, however a six year old thinks an adult is a tool, I thought it. Growing up, Dale would say things like "practice makes perfect" that made me want to smack him, but as I grew more, I came to appreciate the qualities that drew my sister to him: steady, predictable, knowable. Further, I came to know the greatness of Dale's heart, and i am still amazed by it. We often say we don't know the heroes amongst us. I do. Dale is one of mine.

Charles

18 years after meeting a long haired, wire rimmed glasses wearing organ student at The Other Bar in Bloomington,  there's still no one I'd rather bitch talk with, sit in front of the television and scream at commercials with, criticize grammar in the Times with, or have sit with me when I'm in chemo. I don't think everyone gets to meet the person with whom they have compatibility, empathy, and a great deal of love. I did.

Friends

I don't predict I'll like people, but I usually instantly know that I do. I knew it the first day of SLIS 505 when I sat next to Galadriel and Donna came in wearing a sweet dress and heels to class when the rest of looked like denim warmed over. I loved Karen in 503, who studied Farsi because she dug Iranian guys and was a mess who was a genius. I worked with Katie but that was because in her interview she was awesome and I just wanted to KNOW that woman. In my India Studies interview with Dr. G and Lil Jan, I wanted the job, but I wanted the people more--Dr. G because he's international level brilliant and Jan because she has international level love for others, and it shines through her, and you can see it and feel it.

Healh is wondrful, happiness is great,  Without people, these people, and alot of others,  I wouldn't have survived my first round of cancer. I had moments of intense doubt, intense grief, I felt intensely how much I'd lost and thought I didn't want to live without those things. But I thought of how much the people in my life would be disappointed that I went down like a bitch, without a fight. I thought of how I told them I was though--was I now going to be a liar?

Well, no. And I love you all, and I'm thankful for that.

54!

Richard tells me I've been quiet. This might be true. Lately I've been dealing with weird sleep patterns due to effluvia, coughing due to effluvia, effluvia due to effluvia. I seem to be a teeming mess of snottiness that has nowhere to go and only me to bother.

I thought this would improve after we had a few good freezes and the moldiness and dust of Autumn was behind us, and perhaps it is better. My nose runs less, that's true. But my recent effluviamania seems to simply be a new wrinkle in what proves to be a dynamic, not static, system. We learn to our disadvantage, kids, that cancer isn't a one-shot, one-trick, one-act fuck up: it just morphs itself to new problems, new ways that effluvia gathers.

I've been staying at home a lot, and I've missed a bunch of lectures I would have liked going to, but it's rude to cough as loudly as I cough in lectures, sometimes the echo of throat gunk sounds like a bullet shot through my trach tube. I can't predict it, I can't control it. At least not yet.

If that all sounds bad, it's not really so terrible. I like being at home, and Rally likes it too. We enjoy flagrant, long afternoon naps, light late morning power naps, heavy late afternoon fuck-this-shit naps, and any other nap we can think of to have. Effluvia, if I may again, typically wakes me up a few times during the night, hauling me to the bathroom to check the neck hole, the tube, to clean up or out, change the tissue in my mouth, sop out the face mask. Interrupted sleep is not happy sleep, and thus, the naps.

This year, I gave myself an early birthday present of an electric blanket. This thing is awesome--ten settings, ten hour run span, soft, pretty, and warm. This was the very best thing I could have done for myself, considering it's already in the teens here, and the snow has already arrived. I like winter, and last night when Charles and I made a late run to the grocery store, the air was fifteen degrees, still, and wonderful. That's when I like Winter best--without  the wind. The snow? love it. The cold? enjoy it. The wind? fuck it.

I tell people that I'm made of chemicals, and without blood I have no hopes of being warm. I'm only half joking. I truly don't warm up the way other people do, and once I've caught a chill, you might as well get the hot water bottle because I'll stay that way until I'm warmed. I have my older electric throw in the living room for watching TV because I get cold sitting there doing nothing, I get cold when I drink cold water, my whole body taking in the temperature of what runs down my tube. When I pound hot coffee in the summer, I sweat; when I dump a cold bottle of water in the tube I freeze.

But listen--the worst I've been dealing with is an ongoing battle to get rid of snot that is annoying and cloying--but it's not killing me. Occasionally, especially lately, my face has hurt--and that's a real problem. Can you imagine your face hurting? and when I say hurting, I mean it feels like someone has smacked the shit out of me, everywhere, and then pinched me for good measure. When I was a civilian, I'm sure I never once thought of my face hurting, and I don't remember that it ever did.

Now, gravity pulls on what skin has no bone to support it, the system changes, my upper teeth are pushed together, sores form in my mouth, a film coats the mouth that has to be chipped off, nothing is quite where it was yesterday. My mouth, which hangs a bit, now hangs more askew, so that I truly do look more and more like a Scream mask. I could do Munch, and be famous for the uncanny resemblance.

But listen--that sucks hard but I take some Lortab Elixir and it's fixed for a few hours. If it's terrible, a bit of morphine sulfate and bitch just goes to sleep, and dreams of fried chicken.

As I'm writing, my 54th birthday is tomorrow. I'm going to celebrate it with a lunch with friends--the chili is concatenating in the kitchen right now, the potatoes for the potato salad are about to be boiled and marinated. I'm happy.

Happy is a construct, true, but it feels like a place. This place, now, here. This is happiness. The dog, the shitty old kitchen that I love, the shitty old ranch house that is one year younger than me--I liked this place the minute I walked into it that fateful day the realtor showed it to us. It was the first house we saw, and we went and saw others, but none of them had the least interest to me. This place, where it is in Bloomington, the yard, the neighborhood, it was exactly what I hoped for, and it has never let me down.

Happiness is a construct, of course, but it's also a choice. I choose it. On a wall of options this is what I most want--to understand what is happening to me, how it effects me, and still know that I'm here, I'm ok, that it will never touch what is truly me--I choose that.

I have decided, as I might have mentioned before, that I will at least make it to 70. After 70, all bets are off--by then my man tits should be somewhere around my waist and my dick might have shriveled to the silhouette of a peanut, but by hook or by crook, I want to see me there. I think I'll be a jolly old fellow--maybe I'll be talking again by then, eating again, celebrating my birthday with a fat slice of cake, one that would choke a pit bull, but no problem for me.

I hope, 16 birthdays from now, that I will have mastered happiness. I'm working at it diligently, I have hope of my achievement. To laugh the great laugh I'll have earned remembering that they told me people like me live 22 months on average after diagnosis. Oh, you silly doctors.

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.