Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Good bye 2013

New Years resolutions:
To lay in some bed randomly with good friends and laugh ourselves silly while doing totally stupid stuff like drinking weird wine on ice and listening to Peter Frampton records (yes records) and making fun of each others' hilarious shirts / belts / selves /mannerisms...oh wait I just did this - well to do it again x 47.
To drink Tecate with lime and salt and eat pan after pan of my best nachos while talking all at once with 5 friends.
To laugh till I pee and cry.
To break, fold, iron, knead and rename rules till they change color.
To stand up to mean bigots and call them on their antichrist shit.
To cut down on the times I say "come on" to my children.
To continue my special extracurricular program for our special children - which is composed of them not being special but just wonderful as is without special classes or training - to do a 70s parenting paradigm plus a huge pinch of awareness and let's see what happens - I'm not afraid.
To rebel.
To make nice strategically.
To surround our girls with warm wise wonderful adults who will teach them how to be interesting just by being interesting and who will feed them delicious food and ideas and water them with seeds of anarchy and love mixed with a good night's sleep and hundreds of interesting words and outlandish ideas and notes.
To keep my children and their tribe safe.
To help shut up parents and adults who bully kids. 
To continue with my living art installation entitled "Amy's Guide to Ineffective Living" - with guest appearances and no net.
To cook for my cooking cheffing bartendering husband.
To thank him for being so good to me now.
To tell children inappropriate and hilariously awful things out of respect for their intellect.
To lie outrageously on occasion. 
To feed children food.
To contemplate Violet and Fiona's profiles (actual - not online) more thoroughly so I can recall their constellations of freckles more perfectly.
To carefully avoid purposefully or accidentally telling anyone with cancer or a very frightening and horrifying problem or disease that it is their fault - this means paying attention to small nuances and not pushing or thinking of myself as being on a higher level. And to correct others when I see this so I can stop super super bad hurt feelings that need not be. 
To read your blog or novel.
To say hello to everyone who looks a little older, sadder, more scared, or meaner than I do. Especially the super crabby impenetrable nasty mean shut down types - bring me your fortress I shall break it. 
To eat eat eat the most delicious foods and revel revel in them with pure delight - BLT sandwiches, Parisian cheeses, crispy salads, calamari, book club dinners, olives, Clayton spreads, antipasto, Mike's steak, nachos, champagne, crunchy dark chocolatey things, tangerines, love in the form of food. All of it shovel it in delicately.
To be kind.
To get you to visit me again.
To host - I excel at this.
To read more - which is to say - to ingest more of my drug of choice (words) and therefore to learn.
To freaking beat some of my brilliant friends on Words with Friends! I thought I was a good reader and therefore word maker but it's a sham! A fake! A lie! I'm not good at scrabbley games....why? WHY? What? Must flex that muscle. My dad would be horrified.
To share a crossword puzzle with Kris.
To teach rhetoric and composition again - I'm bereft without it now. Who am I?
To thank all of my friends for their loving support during this drat illness, which suggests a preceding goal which is to get beyond this cycle of poison goddamn it - when I do I will go on a thank you tour. If I drove around for 400 days bearing gifts and leading a parade I could not touch the kindness shown me so I won't do that but I do resolve to let you know.
To decorate our upstairs TV room thing - it's bugging me to death. Style freaks come on I'll pay you.
To party with our neighbors - come on I'm supposed to be the fun one and here I came here then splat landed on my ass in the chemo loony bin - gotta uphold my reputation. Or create one.
To squeeze a baby - bring me your fat babies. 
To visit the West Coast and see our peeps. With food.
To take the kids to iFly.
To wash my hair.
To wake up ok.
To not taste heparin in my mouth.
To perfect gazpacho.
To see Lake Tahoe.
To go to Boulder and Gold Hill and tend to the graves of Max and Burnyce and Ray and Emma Lou and Jim and Shari and other mountain love people that I know.
To thank you.
To write something and revise it.
To help a child.
To teach an 8th grade class and a 9th and a 10th and an 11th and a 12th. Or and a 7th.
To party with English teachers.
To decorate my life.
To listen to pop music without prejudgment.
To be a contrarion.
To frame some photos.
To show my girls the power of friendship.
To make French bread.
To hike up whatever.
To wear dresses.
To take an art class - which?
To beat Dave at Scrabble.
To go on tour.
To dance at a great gay bar. 
To unhate the physical objects that have been ruined in my psyche due to the co-stimulation of sickness and the visual input simultaneously. Not sure how. 
To have a pill free day.
To throw a mismatched dinner party.
To read 30 books - ha just kidding! THAT'S RIDICULOUS! What a stupidly tiny number. 
To write a thank you note to you.
To get rid of 25% of my clutter and to not receive gifts. 
To eat jam.
To hear you.
To see you.
To walk with you.
To read you.
To draw you.
To be you.






Sunday, December 29, 2013

Sweep it away

I want it gone. All my clothes, my books, my sheets and blankets and socks and cups and pills and puzzle pieces and apple juice bottles and towels. The rugs and shoes blow them out the door with my coats and sweaters and papers and pens. Everything rots and the only good is outside the sunshine the dogs barking the airplanes flying over. Today I hate tea and eggs and toast and my bed. I lied about sleep the fucker went away and I'm feeling bleak house without the charm. Yes it will pass. I want to live in a pink quiet wind tunnel of fresh smells and seashells and pine cones and Boulder sunshine. When I was growing up in Boulder we used to drive up into the mountains all the time to go to picnics at Chautauqua Park or Flagstaff or the Flatirons and the ground was always a reddish granity hard surface. You would run out and find your own special tree and smell the bark. Pinetrees to us small children smelled like either chocolate, strawberry, or vanilla. You had to test each one. They really did smell like it. My favorite was a strawberry smelling pine tree. I want that now.
I woke at 11 pm. The core of me was starving for something. I tried to Donnie Darko a round apple juice out of the fridge floating up the stairs to my throat but it did not come. I tried again at 1:15 and 2:34, I just could not get my own body to get up. At 5 I hoped for light - thinking the protons would help raise me, but they did not buoy my arms. I feel ultra pathetic and do not revel in that. At 9:30 I got my wish and feel less dead now. I am liquid and need so much liquid it's a liquid nightmare for me that I despise.

I shall endeavor to be more friendly tomorrow. Don't need anything but time. You're/I am putting up with me. 

Friday, December 27, 2013

Can't wake up

Apparently cycle number four in chemotherapy for me, this time, is starting off at a sleepy pace. I can't seem to do much but lay around, and sleeping feels good. So far that's not too bad. It's a little hard to drink enough water and eat enough food when you're not really awake or hungry, but I did go into the clinic today and get a giant bag full of juicy saline solution injected straight into my heart. So hopefully I won't shrivel up and dry up  too much. And Nurse Annabelle is the perfect combo of bossy and sustaining.

Everyone else is going out to dinner without me, to Julio's, one of our favorite places in Austin. I told Annabelle to try one of their mango margaritas because they are divine. Somewhere else in the country one of my friends is having a celebration of her bat mitzvah, and I wish I were there to have some Prosecco and chocolate cake with her. Later this weekend Annabelle and Dave will go out to a honky-tonk to hear some real Texas music, maybe the Broken Spoke, or the Horseshoe Lounge, or a couple other places we heard about today. I won't be attending any of these things, but I will be imagining them from my bed or maybe the couch if I get adventurous. I don't mind missing any of these events, I have done so many fun things in my life that if I never did any of those again it would be okay. However I know that I will be doing a lot of hella wave things in the future, and yes that I'm lucky to have done and lived what I have done and lived. So far.

My view now: I have reached the summit of my evening goal - to drink a glass of juice and eat half an apple. My goal is dramatically featured in the foreground of my still life "Amy's Basket of Post Chemical Chemicals." 

Right now I can't think of much about the future, like whether I will go to the Lorde concert on March 30, which no less than four people have asked me about. Or whether I will substitute teach at the kids' school the spring, or take an art class, or when I will have my next surgery or when radiation will start, and if that will be five or six or seven weeks. I can't think of any of that right now. I'll just go back to reading my magazines and snoozing my days away.

Just saying hi.

But not everything is about me. Tell me about you. How was your Christmas? What's bothering you right now? What are your New Year's resolutions if you have any? I really would like to know. I'm tired of me.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Four out of six

Boom! Done! Finished my fourth chemo today - two more to go. Annabelle was with me and that was comfort. She got to see the whole kit and kaboodle, meet my doctor Gorrebeeck who she keeps calling Dr. Gorbachev - so much now that I find myself stuttering when I'm talking to my doctor not saying the name right. But it's kind of funny. 

Annabelle was a doll today and she went and fetched tacos for me and one of my sweet nurses - from Taco Deli. I recommend their Carne Asada - all natural beef ribeye, grilled and served with avacado, onion, and a lime wedge. Annabelle and Laverne went all veggie to counteract Christmas overindulgence but I went all protein - knowing I'll be on the bird diet any second.

Right now I'm laying in bed with various girls, winding down down down...

Waiting for the inevitable death trap feeling but buoyed by the knowledge I've done this and can do it again. 

Learned a few new things today - chemo therapeutics do not smile kindly upon, among other things, the liver. The liver is a rather pasty and bad tasting organ that I don't recommend you eat from another species. Don't mess with it I say. However, regarding your own species, and in particular your own self, you rather do need your liver for living. Apparently it does things like filter out poisons, ha HA isn't that funny? And some other important things. It's got a delicate chemical balance of proteins and enzymes and other biological things that are over my head. 

However some of those things are read tarotically in little black printer symbols we call numbers by laboratory types and doctors as they sit in their pressed white coats with their names embroidered on the chest and they wear their little reading glasses and they look very scholarly and important.  This occurred today. It was reported to me that my ALT or ALZ or Jay-Z and BeyoncĂ© or something liver blah blah numbers are pretty high. I don't remember or even know really what she was talking about but the numbers were pretty chart rocketingly high, like if it was supposed to be between 17 and 35 mine was 212, et cetera. Same sort of scene for number category two. She said, and Annabelle will be happy to repeat this since she accuses me of exaggerating all the time, "numbers like this bounce up and down all the time during chemo and it's pretty common." To which I reply: "How delightful that must be to report." 

I think I failed to mention that I did have some very nice Veuve Cliquot of the pink variety followed by some very nice Silverado wine followed by a few beers last night...but alcohol doesn't hurt your liver right? On Christmas?

Anyway, because of this, and because I still get tingling in the ends of my fingers and toes after more than a week after chemo, Dr. Gorrebeeck decided to reduce the amount of one of my drugs by 25% today. No not the red Devil, darn it. I still get to deal with the devilish side effects of that particular Kool-Aid. She cut my Taxotere to 75% of its original strength, because apparently the neuropathy that it causes can be permanent and can really affect your hands and fingers which I need for typing and picking my cuticles. Taxotere used to be given in the ICU and patients were kept in the hospital for seven days at a time. Nice. Two of my friends in my support group and had to quit chemo altogether because this type of poison was giving them hell in this fashion. So I'm doing pretty well in that regard I suppose.

Right now I'm feeling fully drugged up and kind of weird. 

Physical report: Feel edgy and on the edge of yuck. I see it coming down the turnpike but it's around a corner. Tired and cold mixed with hot spells. I'm wearing a bikini and a parka - alternating. Not really. 

Mental report: Feel kind of depressed and anxious but too tired to muster up a good angst so it manifests in cranktitude. All this is mixed with a melting center due to the kindness that is shown to me constantly by a galaxy of friends and family and strangers - all of them strangle and kind and galactic. Thank you.

Here is Annabelle reading in the chemo room. She made lots of friends and learned a few things - apparently molasses is an old cure for nausea so I may be getting it on my food soon. She's a good caretaker. The best. Right now she's roasting a chicken and making sweet potatoes. And bossing Fifi around. I love having her here.
A few quotes:

"For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather; 
To cheer one on the tedious way, 
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down, 
To strengthen whilst one stands"

Christina Rossetti

"You can kid the world, but not your sister."

Charlotte Gray

And one Annabelle might sometimes say about me, or Violet about Fiona, or any little sister about her older sister:

"Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life."





Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Tidings of comfort and joy

Merry Christmas.

Haven't been blogging but will get back on it. My fourth of six chemical warfare sessions (thanks Katie for the clever semantics) commences tomorrow morning.

But.

Today is Christmas and it's been a celebratory week,
I saw my dearest sweetest relative - Aunt Marilyn - a few weeks before her 90th birthday. We talked about old times and we played cards and laughed.
I ate a hamburger and onion rings at "Health Camp" in Waco.
I saw my adorable brother in law teach Violet how to play Shang Hai - our favorite 7 hand card game passed down to us by my grandma Emma Lou Brady, born in 1898, but still here with us every day. We are going to use her hand painted Christmas plates for dinner.
I saw my eldest daughter play records on a record player from Santa - excellent old vintage records like "Leader of the Pack" - given to her by Uncle Dave - who is currently out accompanying Fifi on her new scooter from Santa.
I see a fun mess.
I see cute little lambie socks from Vicki.
I heard my goddaughter's voice from France on a voicemail on my phone - such a clear, pretty French with a hint of British accent voice. 
I see nice loving gifts for me.
I see a table set with small Burnycisms, tiny funny little pitchers and funny little objets d'art. 
I see a jigsaw puzzle for us all to do.
I see my beautiful sister who knows me.
I see Mike's cinnamon rolls, and see him making apple pies and creamed spinach and prime steak.
I know my doorbell will be ringing soon with neighbors and friends and Nana.
And I feel lucky.
Merry Christmas to you all - in the olde oldest sense of the seasons and the solstice and love.





















Thursday, December 19, 2013

Ominous


The world feels ominous today. People seem to be squinting at me discerningly, mistrustfully. I heard Target may have been breached and accidentally screwed over 40 million customers. (Not in the usual way of just fooling them into thinking they needed stuff but in a new stealy way). I heard a sweet beautiful girl I know was mistreated at school and that her sweet beautiful mother's pleas for help were ignored. I heard that new bloodshed is happening yet again in some other country in the dark continent that bore us all, and that some other ambassador is saying the same things again that every other ambassador has ever said. I heard that 100,000 daughters, best friends, teachers, grandmothers, tea brewers, mommies, frenemies, fathers, clerks, drivers, sons, wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, grandpas and single people have died in Syria, 11,000 of whom were baby children. I heard Sanderson Farms' chickens are buggy, not great for either their eaters or employees or delivery truck drivers. I heard the machine guns in the background of Regina Spektor's "My Dear Acquaintance (Happy New Year)" and I hear under the words her commentary - I get it. 

My dear acquaintance
It's so good to know you
For strength of your hand
That is loving and giving
And Happy New Year
With love overflowing

Christmas is coming. I cannot wait to see my my sister - another side of me. But I feel sad today. This is such a deeply sadly beautifully sad time of year. Everyone knows this.

Were those old Christmases really so gay and bright? Or do we just think that now through the haze of nostalgic Polaroids? The plump ladies in their suntan hose and pumps and cat eye glasses, that seemed from another era even then - now smiling up at us from the sticky photo album. On that day were the adults gleeful, or maybe really tired of the kids' shenanigans? Maybe they didn't think it was SO FUNNY when Max and Danny, drunk with excitement, awoke the whole packed household at 3 something am by shrieking and peeing upon the basement wall with delight. 

Maybe we know, underneath, that those olden golden times were just the same as the days are now - and that it's a trick to romanticize the past. That we fool ourselves - our gullible and starved-for-peace selves - and that we buy it, but know it's not true. And that maybe that kernel of knowledge is the source of the little bright feel-good pain. 

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Let your heart be light
From now on,
our troubles will be out of sight

Or maybe those were the good old days. And we are sad that they're gone never to be here again. I miss my babies. Holding their bonny bodies. Never ever again. It's too much to know.

Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more.

Through the years 
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.
And have yourself A merry little Christmas now. 

I miss everyone. And yet.

There are contrasts to this sad ominousness.

Jenna and Terry sent me home from the kids' school today with homemade schnitzel and spaetzle. Two stunningly busy school principals, on the last day of the year, while the entire school is a tornado of hyper excited kids and pizza and music and burp contests and Fritos and Dr. Pepper and chocolate - MADE ME DINNER. 

Fiona's teacher Amy today had an Elf party in her room - complete with quoting along with the movie, eating spaghetti with maple syrup....AND a Coke-chugging burp contest. 6th grade. I think this may be the coolest party I've ever heard of in my entire life.

And the prettiness of nature
The kindness of talking
The safeness of home 
The hilarity of youth 
The security of hearing Mike on the phone talking/working in the other room - taking care of us.
The messy gladness of Violet and Fifi.
My books.
My friends, one of whom is having a bat mitzvah tomorrow. 










Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Floatingswimming

I'm in the midstream between two chemopoison sessions and it feels pretty good here in the middle. Here I am at our local HEB with the usual suspects, shopping for the middle school holiday party/madhouse tomorrow. I'm doing and will be doing the regular - schlepping crappy pizzas to eager untrained palates, baking homemade brownies to be wolfed by shiny faced and braced boy/girls who'll never notice the baker or carrier, finishing up my cards and gifts to teachers who I can never thank enough for holding the weight of teen angst all day every day while imparting knowledge, feeding three kids ravioli, and hanging out in my past sell date bathrobe. 

Right now I can pretend I'm not a cancer patient who looks freaky from behind cuz you can totally tell there's no hair under the hat. I avoid mirrors other than when I carefully sketch in missing brow hairs. With this coldish weather I can almost pretend that I chose to wear a cute hat, but when I get a compliment on my cute hat - like today at Starbuck's - I have a swift desire to scream at the complimenter SHUT UP DON'T HURT ME because it does hurt. I despise the victim feeling and yet I am sort of helplessly pinned onto this bug chart of "cancer person" - oh look at the poor cancer lady. Mostly I don't think this but sometimes it stabs in. 

Anyway I'm floating in the middle . This middle water floating idea is a recurring theme for me in dreams. I'm a cancer - water sign (????). Anyway I often dream that I've come to a shore, often in moonlight (moon child!), and I've waded in, then I'm swimming swimming swimming. More swimming swimming swimming, at which point I am no longer me or a girl or a boy. Maybe more of a boy than a girl, but at any rate I have transformed and changed. At this point I begin to think about breathing under the water as well as above the water, and so I try to, first in little fits and starts to just test it. The first little breath in is a little bit scary, but it works. I breathe in a slow lungful of warm salty water - life. I'm changing into a dolphin, a boy, a pearl, I sea creature, an evolutionary throwback, or as Bjork says - a lynx. I begin to breathe in the water very naturally and calmly, and at some point I stop swimming and just sink, sink, sink, sink, sink. I turn in. 

My dreams change, sometimes I end up on another shore in another time. Far in the future and in fact on another planet. In other dreams I begin floating not down down down toward the bottom of the ocean but out out out into black space, fast and cold. No matter how the dream takes shape, I always become one with the water and it transforms me, either literally into another kind of creature, or metaphorically into another place or time or space. It's a memory of the future.

Right now I'm still swming slowly, considering that first water breath.


I Can't Swim

BY HEATHER CHRISTLE
I can’t swim because I can’t fit
into the water

                         I am
two million feet tall

but thank you for inviting me

I am standing in line
inside my giant shirt

If someone wanted to weaponize me
they would tell me to lie down on New York

and the city I destroyed
would hurt me back

I eat stars
                        It’s a riot

I know
                        my big mouth
full of  their light
Source: Poetry (October 2013)

There is a Community of Spirit
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.  I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

- Rumi

Goodnight for now and thank you for reading.



Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Team

I love all the new music, the technology of it and the pure crystalline production quality. It turns me on and it connects me and it is my transcendence. Never been afraid of the new stuff, never got stuck in the 70s or 80s - I love the newest loudest most tripped out groove there is and I wake up each day hoping to hear a new tasty bit of swaggerific jambuzz. I am plugged in to it. I've always been all about electronica - I swooned over my dad's Switched on Bach moog recordings in the 60s as a little Amy. I think we are electric underneath and that the swoopy repetitive beats now reverberating throughout the universe (literally) call out to us in an evolutional way and we feel them physically - they feel good. Our brains work with electric jolts constantly and our hearts. Little tiny plugs in there and wet juicy chemicals that transmits the signals - we are constantly being electrocuted over and over till we die. Music plugs you in to this. The new dubby stuff is superb.

Living in ruins of the palace within my dreams
And you know we're on each other's team


Sang Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O'Connor (born 7 November 1996), known by her stage name Lorde

And I say
yeah
yeah
yeah
yeah
yeah

I hear it. We are on each other's team.

Are we not all stars made into little clay people baked on the dark continent and then scattered out to the one continent after it broke apart? I wonder why we little tiny men are so discontented with our boxes and our lines on those funny little paper things we made called maps. Are we not all the same? What a dumbly divinely repeated question. It has been answered a million times by every religion and creed and even the Band Aid song: Yes. Yes we are. All one team.

You mean we actually are all
One, one, one, one?


Alanis Morissette this time.

So then why do we keep asking that question:

Are we not all the same?

I wonder if we are all in some future creep's stupid video game, destined to play out the same problems and wars and diseases and questions over and over till we cross the Buddhist GO and collect our $200 worth of karma. Maybe this today is the only time that really is, and we are all just groundhogdaying it along one timelessly pixelated byte at a time? It seems ludricrous to me that we (as in we humans - our "kind") are still asking questions, like "are we all one?" and lots of other questions, that have been discussed by masters and brilliant philsophers for millennia. We seem no closer to agreement or understanding now than at any time in recorded history.

To put it in corporate lingo - why can we not learn from "best practices" and continue to do things in a more intelligent way? Like, say: not KILL each other over dirt and oil, or perhaps: not RAPE women just for the fun of it, or how about, say: NOT BUTCHER people who don't look like us, or how about: NOT HATE people because of their ideas? We have been over this damn it.

Here are some of those "best practices" ideas from past thinkers or supposed thinkers:

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war and until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.” - Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia

"He who rules his spirit has won a greater victory than the taking of a city." - Jesus
 
"No leader should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no leader should fight a battle simply out of pique. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life. Hence the enlightened leader is heedful, and the good leader full of caution." - Sun Tzu quotes

"Just be ordinary and nothing special.  Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you're tired, go and lie down.  The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand." - Bruce Lee
 
"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?" - Abraham Lincoln
 
"The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men."  - Plato
 
"No armies are needed, no weapons are needed, no nations are needed, no religions are needed. All that is needed is a little meditativeness, a little silence, a little love, a little more humanity... just a little more, and existence will become fragrant with something so totally unique and new that you will have to find a new category for it." - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
 
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
 
"Love is all you need." The Beatles

What can I add to those ideas? They are pretty damn good if you ask me.

Here I am on day 12 of my chemotherapy cycle and I realize that I have felt mostly livable for more than three days, which is definitely different than the first time. And the second one. This is progress I think.

And thank god the clock is progressing along at its usually 60 seconds per minute right now too. Last week it got up to a thousand million hundred seconds per minute and that was taxing me out dude. Time is the 4th dimension and has to do with the weight of heavy objects as they bend space/time. So I am not making  this stuff up - time really does move along at different speeds under certain conditions. Some of those conditions have to do with the coalescing of great bits of mass in deep space, and some of them have to do with the coalescing of no mass or matter in the inner space of a mind that is vexed with pain. I don't know a lot but I know that when I feel my worst that time is not on my side, it's a killer that stabs me repeatedly and sucks me inside out. And now when I am feeling ok, it's fleeting again. 

I am wearing my good luck horseshoe necklace.
I am texting my friend who just had her port installed into her chest wall yesterday at noon, and telling her YES this excruciating pain that is much worse than having your breast sliced open and scooped out is normal.
I am planning on a huge Christmas meal and then wondering how to digest it and a gravy boatfull of anxiety and get to chemotherapy the next morning in a halfway decent mood and oh yeah while on steroids and wondering if I should get really drunk on champagne, I mean the expensive shit, no reason to be skimpy now - and will the drugs obliterate or worsen any potentional hangover.
I am planning to be sicker than a dead cat between xmas and new year's and we don't need a babysitter for that.
I am kicking my baby girl out of her room for the aunt/uncle stay and she is peeved but will get over it. Someone here is always mad at me and I just bat it away with my shield on.
I am wondering when a potato chip might taste good again. I am having dreams of food that I like, I mean REALLY like, like crushin' on and I am wondering WHEN WHEN WHEN will that be? I am hungry for being hungry.
I am sending out a few Christmas cards here and there in a meagerly weak fashion and we did not get it together this time despite have such a cute new house to show off and a new address to blast out to our peeps oh well.
I am staring the countdown again and I hate it.
I am digging this beat:









Monday, December 16, 2013

I'm here

Feeling better
Xmas shopping 
Finalized grades for my class - ALL DONE. I'm done out off null 


You know what's weird? I'm unemployed unconnected unexpected unanticipated unplanned. As of 12:16 pm today when I typed on my 21 student final grades to the great computer brain in the St. Edwards sky I became untethered unencumbered and thoroughly unremarkable to the university where I have pledged my love. I am in love with my leafy hilly topped university even if they only like me. We sort of broke up - or taking a break - till the fall. I feel aimless and sad not to be looking forward to a Spring class of 22 new and returning students whose minds I could warp and freak out and blow - those were always my goals.

I'm on day 11 or so of my chemo cycle three and feeling pretty ok. I'm getting the hang of this a little but don't enjoy the skill or knowledge. Feel about 80%. Leaning in to the holidays and loving them. Shove all of your ornaments and cookies and shopping crowds at me while I wrap and gift and sing all at once - I want it all all at once. I gorge while I can and will not complain again. Those unsick are truly the gifted. I take it in delicious fragments.

When I feel my most sick (days 2-10 of the toxic-stream body ruination infusion) I feel removed from life. My bathrobe is not my own and it feels old and scuddy and smells chlorine inside out. I am alone and there is no other person on the street or in my house or if I see one it's not real. I cannot relate to my human family or community and only feel a vague string back to some ancestral hearth embodied by a dying death rattling elder. I'm unrelated to my home or my surroundings and when I open a window things could suck out as on a plane, roughing up backwards over my head. It wouldn't hurt, it would be ok. That's how not I am there. I am not there or of the scene. I'm only alone inside a gravity pulled space ship - close and nonoriented claustrophobic inward spinning ship - unable to communicate with or touch the outer world. The poison obliterates not just me, but you too. You're not there then. I'm sorry. You so rotate back as Saturm turns me back slowly from stone to human. I welcome you. Now I realize I missed you.

Cyclicalness is nature but this is not. This cycle has it's death and rebirth yes, but no fertility or sexuality and in that way it's terrible in its falseness. It's an oncological  human construct.

Annabelle and Dave December 22
Christmas December 25
Chemo #4 December 26
So happy Annabelle will be with me
And so sorry 

Read a wonderful story today in The Best Short Stories 2013 called "Bravery" by Charles Baxter, (writer I love),
that poses a good question near the end:

What will you do with another day?


Saturday, December 14, 2013

Relax don't do it

Yeah yeah I know.

Hmmm....I'm awake and warm in my bed with my youngest baby snoozling and snurgling right next to me and I feel...almost comfortable. The engine room may be righting itself. Homeostasis, that long longed-for shore, may be seen in patches through the fog. I hear wind chimes and I see sun trickling in through the blinds. It's quiet and peaceful and I want to CRASH the peace and DO something. I think. I'll wait and check the other sections of this ship. But it feels cautiously nice, I dare say, to consider a day?

To keep myself from going fruitcakey during times where I'm too splatt to watch TV or read a book or magazine
- yes Virginia those times exist, I engage in thought experiments. My dear tumbling dice friend Hillary has the good skill and fortune to host a Friday night radio show in Sonoma County called Beyond and Back where she plays a few hours of music with some kind of theme - like rule breaking women, 60s blues, mother daughter tunes, or WHATEVER she wants. It's totally tubularly horribly amazingly sparklingly AMAZINGLY superb - in other words I'm insanely jealous and in love with her show. 

Hillary knows and loves music, like me, and we can and do, talk for hours about it. It glues us and we mark our lives, and our lives together by it. We will recount times by what song was on, and send each other lists - like this one from over 9-10 years ago - which I still have on my wall and read every single day:
Lists like these are commonplace for me, and her. I've got one in my head now for my chick cd. I think in music. There's always a song underneath the melody of my thought and another one under my speech, and a third beating in my heart. I think it's my religion. All genres invited. 

Which brings me back to my thought experiment. For Hillary and her show. I've been lucky enough to help co host her show - as have our kids - and I love it. JOHN AEILLI I WANT YOUR JOB. 

So in times lately where I can't sleep eat read watch TV talk or do anything visible, I've been turning inward and thought experimenting. One such endeavor was dreaming up a difficult theme for Hillary's radio show. The music world is so rich that there are an infinite number of easy themes for a two hour show - songs about dogs, songs Elvis redid but by the original, Icelandic pop, Australian country, worst 80s, father and son rockers, rockers who went country (Robert Plant), and on and on. And Hillary is super creative and every show has a really cool idea. (She needs not my help!) However, I'm always with her in thought anyway . Oh! Here's another one of my favorite song sub sub sub genres - (another thought experiment) - songs that SAMPLE another song, even by the same artist, at the END of a song. Or say something. Examples:

1. At the end of "Band on the Run" as it's fading out Paul says "She loves you yeah yeah yeah!"
2. At the end of "Love Will Keep Us Together" Tony Tenille says "Ahhhh, Sedaka is back!"
3. In Joni Mitchell's "River" she throws in a few bars of "Jingle Bells"
4. Madonna sampled herself singing a bit of "Vogue" on her song "Erotica" from Bedtime Stories
And many more...Gordon Sumner does this a lot. Who thinks about this stuff? I do.

Anyway here's my latest fantasy idea for a DIFFICULT show theme for Hillary's show: She would have to play GOOD "pop" music! Has to be current top 40 or if that's too hard maybe from last few years plus current. Why choose this? Because the truly OPEN minded audiophile is open to even this shudder-producing genre. I say it's EASY to blow off top 40, it's fashionable for adults to say "Oh I have no idea what those kids are listening to now! It's all garbagiola! ALL OF IT!!!" we shriek, not even realizing we sound like close minded Republicans who hate Obama so much they can't even consider anything intelligently. "Oh he cured cancer - I HATE HIM!!!!!" 

Don't be a Don't Bee.

Spinning right now in my fantasy show?

Safe and Sound by Capital Cities - jam loud this song is quite good

Royal by Lorde - even better is her song Team - maybe it'll release big soon off Pure Heroine

Radioactive by Imagine Dragons

We're Going Home by Drake - damn this is straight up good

I dunno yet rest. It's a fun thought experiment. I'm working on it. Not Roar by Katy Perry - that should be changed to Bore. Ideas? I'm open. Hillary? 

Where will I be today? 
Book Prople?
Genie?
Terra Toys?
Home?

I could show you what you wanna see
And take you where you wanna be
You could be my luck
Even if the sky is falling down
I know that we'll be safe and sound
We're safe and sound!

I could fill your cup
You know my river won't evaporate
This world we still appreciate
You could be my luck
Even in a hurricane of frowns
I know that we'll be safe and sound!

(Safe and sound)
We're safe and sound
(Safe and sound)
We're safe and sound
(Hold your ground)
We're safe and sound
(Safe and sound)

I could show you love
In a tidal wave of mystery
You'll still be standing next to me
You could be my luck
Even if we're six feet underground
I know that we'll be safe and sound
We're safe and sound!

Safe and sound
Safe and sound
Hold your ground
Safe and sound

We're safe and sound
We're safe and sound
We're safe and sound
We're safe and sound




Friday, December 13, 2013

Observations

If you slow down, or if your life has to slow down, you tend to observe more things. If you are still you notice more things around you. Mothers of new babies know this. The exact shape of Australia in a kitchen sponge sponge-dent, the Orion's Belt of freckles on the back of a knee.

I am noticing a lot lately. Like today a black and white police car has driven by my front porch about five times in the last 20 minutes. A black car has backed in and out of the same seeming driveway or alley about five or six times too. Related?

The helpful man at the post office looks to be in his late 60s yet he has bleached hair that is a careful combination of red and platinum blonde and it's brushed forward in a vogue stylish way. He is 

very very friendly and helpful and wants to talk to me about all the stamps. He helped me picked some stamps that were of gingerbread houses, and he pointed out there were actual photographs of the real gingerbread houses. We looked at the icing eaves together. We had time. I enjoyed it. He has on a big clunky platinum wedding ring on his left ring finger. The other postal lady working next to him had on and atrociously bad wig, almost like it was campy or something from a costume show. But she was wearing it earnestly. Something going on at that PO in the hair department. But I like my little Blackson Lane hidden postal office. You never heard of it. I know it well.

I do not want to eat but there is a pit in my stomach that is actually hurting me and I am observing that it tells me that I need food. I am now going to find some food to eat. 

Canned peaches it is.

A few more observations in list form:

Linda Ronstadt's version of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel is shockingly heartbreakingly beautiful, from a little known 2000 recording. It'll break your heart in the good way.

If the fates allow as a lyric also does this

Candles don't hold up

It's not the slightest bit difficult to be kind and in fact doesn't need to be thought of as special - it's just normal decent behavior. Somehow that's gotten mixed up and people get called amazing or special or heroes for simply being human. Normal.

People worry too much about their hair. Or my child's hair. This was a time to drop a topic and I feel sorry for those who did not listen, could not hear. Those who could not hear the words. Every choice you make, said the late wonderful teacher Edward Shirley, brings you one step closer or one step farther away from connection - with others. And in the middle of the Hell that Dante described there is not fire, but ice, and the frozen alone man who cannot move, cannot speak, cannot reach, cannot touch, cannot speak, cannot connect. That is hell. I learned a lot from Dr. Shirley and miss him. Namaste.

Some people fuss too much and I think this, like I thought about the other day, gets down to the small things. Salad dressing. Timing for a dermatologist check up. Whether or not someone forgot what you said. A rule. What shoes. What hair. These can be pleasures too but when fixfussfixated on make the fusser a fussbudget. And steps them away. I don't know why yet but I'm working on it.

Joni Mitchell is a genius.

It's good to wash your prickly hair with dandruff shampoo that has little scrubbing beads in it and salicylic acid in in. And hey those sneaky sneakers put 3% salicylic acid in it - getting away with breaking the OTC rule of only 2% allowed in face products without a prescription. Could be good and cheaper for you acne prone types.

Roz Chast is a genius. 

Other people I know have cancer and had it and some have died. I'm not the only one and I'm not special. Powell. Bill. Michael. Stacy. Doris. 

Xicochi is a beautiful name.

Elizabeth Strout is right about voice in writing - it's what gets the reader to stay, it compels. I think she will prove to be a good editor for this year's round of best short stories. 

The little forest of hairs on my body has literally stopped - time warp frozen in time - an unnatural and frightening thing to see. They do not grow or change. Nor do the fall out or rub off. Are they dead? More than dead? Hair hell? They are like a photograph of a war field, shown up on a wall, never changing to the eyes that walk by.

Green is maybe the best color but murderously easy to get wrong.

People are drawn to nature and its best personality characteristics: warmth, beauty, grace, sunniness, an easy breeze. It's instinct. So if you want people to be drawn to you, be sunny and easy, have grace and show your beauty, be warm. I think that's very plain.

I like the scent of pine.

Augusten Burroughs knows a lot. About how to be. How to be fat. Stuck on an elevator, fired, ugly. How to have cancer. To die. To lose someone. I'm learning. He writes it beautifully and easily and warmly and brightly like nature,

My friends are good. My goods are friends.

Writing feels normal to me and is not hard. That does not mean anything at all about what's written - I'm only speaking of the physical act of pouring it out of the pitcher onto the milkglass.


 River

by Joni Mitchell   

It's coming on Christmas 
They're cutting down trees 
They're putting up reindeer 
And singing songs of joy and peace 
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on 

But it don't snow here 
It stays pretty green 
I'm going to make a lot of money 
Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene 
Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on 

I wish I had a river so long 
I would teach my feet to fly 
I wish I had a river I could skate away on 
I made my baby cry

He tried hard to help me 
You know, he put me at ease 
And he loved me so naughty 
Made me weak in the knees 
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I'm so hard to handle 
I'm selfish and I'm sad 
Now I've gone and lost the best baby 
That I ever had 
I wish I had a river I could skate away on 

Oh, I wish I had a river so long 
I would teach my feet to fly 
I wish I had a river 
I could skate away on 
I made my baby say goodbye 

It's coming on Christmas 
They're cutting down trees 
They're putting up reindeer 
And singing songs of joy and peace 
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

© 1970; Joni Mitchell 


Maybe Sparrow by Neko Case
Maybe sparrow you should wait
The hawks alight til morning
You'll never pass
Beyond the gate
If you dont hear my warning

Notes are hung so effortless
With the rise and fall of sparrows breast
Its a drowning diving
Back to the chorus
La di da di da di dum
La di da di da di dum

Oh my sparrow
Its too late
Your body limp beneath my feet
Your dusty eyes
As cold as clay
You didnt hear my warning
You didnt hear my warning

Maybe sparrow
Its too late
The moonlight glanced off metal wings
In a thunderstorm above the clouds
The engine hums a sparrows phrase
Those who cannot hear the words
Those who cannot hear the words
Those who will not hear the words