Couch Friday

IHOP with teens the other day.

The Dadaism of my life now manifests inside the vortex of this thing called chemo. 

I've learned some things:

1. People who are so unlucky as to have to "do chemo" oh my freaking god there but for the grace of god but please not me - you know, THOSE PEOPLE  - are not actually OTHER people, they are you and me and that cool mom you see at school and the checker at HEB, and the guy that plays basketball pretty nicely in 11th grade. And your neighbor that doesn't bring her trashcan back up in time, and a teacher you know who can sometimes be strict but then sometimes doesn't even notice when the kids turn stuff in or not, and one of your friends you haven't talked to in a while, and your best friend, oh my God and that guy you always see running around Town Lake, and the person folding shirts at The Gap. They are us. Regular boring people. We.

In the words of the Rolling Stones

Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down
Sometimes I'm fallin' on the ground
Now look here, baby, it sure looks sweet.

2. Chemopoisontherapy untherapeutically makes your eyes water using two to seventy seven methods, many of which I've shared but one I am learning now: it/they/evil either irritates or perhaps kills the department of tears or something. In your eyes. The result is a constant stream of water running down my face from mes deux yeux bleu. So if you see me crying I may not be. This may be migrating to my nose so I may become more faucety than normal. Koehlerlike. No I don't have a cold or allergies. Two fun facts: a) I'm the only person in Austin with NO seasonal allergies; b) despite being on immune system-sucking chemo I have not gotten a cold or the flu or the crud so far this fall despite living amongst cruddy folks. I must have a cast-iron immune system. Maybe I should gut out cancer with no meds?

3. Some people cannot handle the word or concept or person of cancer.

4. The actual GETTING of "getting chemo" - the actual day the drips drip into you intravenously is not the important day - it's not a big deal day or event. I mean other than having a two inch spear stabbed into your chest which is banana baobab peel surreal but you get over it - that day does not hurt or sicken. It's the days (and days) after - and the fascinatingly unreal idea that a few cups of liquid can cause agony 11 days in a row - that's what hurts.

5. In between rounds you can catch your breath. Kind of. But then depression sets in. This annoys everyone around you because after all they're human. This is hard on everyone. I am sorry for this - my silly teen/tween daughters and vacuuming cooking driving caring for me 24/7 sweet husband surely did not sign up to cohabitate with a bald super cranky Louis Blacklike creature. Well we shall carry on on our Martian green unmarked Appalachian Trail - if we started at the top we must be at about, oh say, parallel to Concord or so. 

6. Chemo dulls. Medicine does not affect or work very well. Alcohol does not intoxicate. I honestly believe I could snort heroin and it'd not do much. Everything flattens. The ends of my actual nerves are dying - my toes and fingers don't feel, in the active sense, very well. My myelin sheath may be melting. My taste buds are off even now near the tail end of my round where I'm feeling my best (best of this new chemo world - about 73.56 % ok). When I'm hungry it's a little hungry, when food is good it's a small bit good. It's all under glass - a bell jar. Sylvia knew. It's  physical depression. But wait - the mind is physical and the body and mind are the same. You knew that, right? Well then it's depression. I see this. 

7. Many people are deep and wide with empathy and love in a starry way and they are helping me.

Those are some things I've learned. 

Sloping in to the holidays

Well I forgot all about Thanksgiving until two days ago. Well I didn't really exactly forget but I was putting it off and putting it off and putting it off. 

Compartmentalizing. I'm pretty good at that. 

I couldn't think about thinking about it. Then all of a sudden two days ago I started to feel okay-ish and now it's back on! We are making turkey and stuffing and green beans and pie and all the regular stuff and eating here at home with a few friends and a mother-in-law. I am delighted. Yes.

And I started to mentally (ouch) parse the holidays in the days that I will feel okay, and days that I will feel like I wish I could reside underneath the mat at our front door. This means I might have to go Christmas shopping this weekend, which is very kind of disgusting yet oddly appealing to me right now. I fondly yearn for the days of yore and when I would madly and titteringly and glitteringly run around crossroads Mall in Boulder with my Hillary and Blake and Rebecca and Natalie and Annabelle and mom and whoever else was around CHRISTMAS SHOPPING! Or whatever we were doing (truly not much actual shopping but oh were we busy). It really was excellent.

However, you will not see me at any black Friday events. 

Here I am in a gondolier at the Swiss Alps, hangin with Kimye, about to ski down a pristine slope. Not really although I did get a new white coat that I rather fancy. And I hear hats like this are all the rage right now, luckily. 

I am going to be skiing down a slope of sorts. A few of them. At the top of one slope will be me, a small figure dressed in a bathrobe and mismatched pants. A rather green countenance. In each hand I will be holding a pen-ski-pole to guide me, and I will slalom down a large stack of final papers that are due on December 5, which happens to be the day that I'm receiving my third injection of death juice. I hope I don't crash into a tree. However, by now, I know that it will work out okay.

Peace to you all and may you have a happy Thanksgiving meal!!!!!

Night

Can't sleep, guess I'll blog.

Food is weird. Annabelle says I use the word weird too much. I guess it's evidence of lazy thinking or talking, or just another bad habit I have like picking on my nails. I am in the mode lately though of just accepting my bad habits instead of changing them. So I like that word right now to describe my relationship with food. The chemical sludge that has entered me in its terribly unfriendly manner has really put in a wrench in my life long love affair with crunchable meltable chewy formerly delicious and life-giving food, which formerly I found truly delicious and life-giving. I did. Now, even though, here at the tail end of round two, where I am starting to re-pixelate into some approximation of Amydom, I find that I am not quite. I am. Not quite. I am eating and drinking (of course - I'd be damn dead if not) but it's still off and that is disconcerting.

A lot of stuff that I used to like to eat feels weird now. Like the sandwiches in the movie The Langoliers. In the film a plane landed with only a few passengers that had been asleep in flight, and when they woke up almost everyone else on the plane had vanished. Anyone who'd been awake was now GONE. The pilot (who luckily had dozed off) woke up and managed to land in Boston - and the stragglers, dazed, got off. Things looked flatter, sounds sounded tinnier, light looked duller, and the air smelled stale. There were no sounds - no birds or truck sounds, no breeze, no other people anywhere. The light was flat and the colors were muted. Little did they know but they had flown through a space time rip accidentally and had landed in the past by about an hour. So all "events" had already occurred and what was leftover was to be obliterated for all time, just like how our tangible past really is. In the mind of Stephen King (the master), in this story, this meant literally, time/the past was literally to be EATEN by these huge awful loud Pac-Man like tubular worm monsters called The Langoliers. They were coming. They are coming. These hapless fliers of course didn't know this yet....(see the movie - it's a campy trip). So they go into the airport, freaked out by the lack of people or anythingness. One guy tried to eat some sandwiches and beer they found in a diner - but they were not "real" anymore because they were part of the past that was about to be obliterated (dontcha love the mind of Stephen King?) so when that guy put the sandwich in his mouth, he immediately screamed and spit it out - IT TASTED LIKE DUST AND DEATH. That's me.

Food is a bit better than a week ago, but the effects still linger. Some stuff is Toxic Dust Langoliers Food, some stuff is Sorta Fair to Partly Cloudy Food that I can choke down, and some stuff is Sorta More Ok Food that can almost be a little bit tasty now and then. This is no way to be for a former oinkster like me.

Toxic Dust Langoliers Food
Cheese
Spaghetti sauce
Coffee
Chocolate
Gin and tonics - oh the humanity
Alcohol of any kind tho I gamely try
Macaroni and cheese
Waffles and pancakes (never liked just put on here to be a pill)
Bread
Sandwiches
Peanut butter
Spaghetti
Butter
Orange juice
Sour cream
Sprite
Water
Pie filling
Cottage cheese
Yogurt
All other things that you would order on a menu or buy at HEB

Sort of Fair to Partly Cloudy Food I Can Choke Down Mostly
Burned toast
Potatoes with nothing on them
Ginger ale
Chicken
The burned edge of a pie crust
Tangerines
Scrambled eggs
Bacon
Oatmeal

Sorta More Ok Food That Can Almost Be a Little Bit Tasty Now and Then
Frosted mini wheats
Pears
Canned peaches
English breakfast tea
Chicken soup homemade
Salmon
Salad
Pork roast

Another thing that is truly bizarre about this whole food thing is that it's a debate about what to eat when you have cancer or when you are getting chemotherapy. Have you ever noticed that when you break apart the word "therapist" in breaks into "the rapist?" Anyway so here's the thing - cancer cells are just your own body's cells that have a mutation in their deoxyribonucleic acid and ribonucleic acid, both of which have jobs inside your cells to make them replicate and grow. "Divide! Go faster! Get moving you lazy son of a bitch!" they yell at the cell as the boss of the cell. So anyway, cancer is not some thing from outside, it is you. I believe I have said this already so if you are following my blog sorry to bore.

So, we feed our body fuel to feed the cells - that's how we get energy and live. There's all kinds of hoopla about super food, good food, anti-oxidants, green tea sweet potatoes blueberries Japanese food processed food vegan food real food healthy food acai berries omega three fatty acids and stuff. You know this - you hear it read it see it maybe even practice it.

So here's the rub: since your body is made of cells, and we can  all agree that "good" food is "more good" for your cells than "bad crap" - guess what? When you eat antioxidants and healthy food to SUPPORT YOUR BODY (yay you you think) when you have cancer, then that good stuff SUPPORTS THE CANCER CELLS TOO. They love it! They say yes thank you we shall gobble that up, yummy, in fact, guess what -we get it FIRST! Because we are more rapidly dividing thank you very much! Too bad for you!

Fuck.

This is confusing as all get out. There is a raging debate about this in the ONK world (oncology) with MOST falling on the side that says: DO NOT EAT ANTIOXIDANTS AND SUPER SUPPORTIVE FOOD WHEN YOU HAVE CANCER OR WHEN YOU ARE ON CHEMO.

Is this counterintuitive or what?

However, it hardly matters right now. I never knew that my will to eat well, or eat at all, or to even be, AT ALL, would be so hard to maintain. I slid down Amy's Maslow's food hierarchy from top to bottom (you're kinda supposed to go up his thing) like so:
 
Trying to eat super healthy wonderful oh aren't I wonderful food
Trying to eat some items from the category of the world labeled food
Trying to eat part of the edge of a piece of toast
Trying to try to eat something maybe kind of fast so I won't notice much
Trying to try the idea of trying to eat a crumb
Who cares.

So I may be coasting through the next few months on oatmeal fumes with a few peaches and bits of lettuce on the way and I will be happy just to get to the other side. I'll wash it down with lots of English breakfast tea and I'll try to drink 1/8th of the cup before it gets cold.

Today I feel pretty ok. I have chemo again in 9 days and I am seriously thinking about just taking the Taxotere and the Cytoxin (nice name huh?) and dropping the third drug, called Adriamycin. The doctor says it is up to me - this is not comforting at all. However, the Adriamycin is so nasty that she thinks it is the reason that I get so ill that I have to go into the clinic at Seton Northwest each time to get fluids and special fancy anti-disgustingly-sick drugs, and the reason I am flat out dead for 10 days or more. Being so sick that I can barely function for 12 out of 21 days for months is not ok with me. I am not even sure if any chemotherapy is ok with me. This is a therapist I do not like.

 

Loud music

I'm listening to loud music. Suddenly last night in an Melba toast sunrise Phoenix instant I realized I might sort of feel microscopically O.K. This sea change must have drifted in but my observation of it was shocking. I ate I slept I drank I dreamt I smiled.

Right now Lady Gaga: Just a second it's my favorite song Just a second, its my favorite song they gonna play

And I cannot text you with a drink in my hand, eh?
You should've made some plans with me, you knew that I was free
And now you won't stop calling me, I'm kinda busy

Stop callin', stop callin', I don't wanna think anymore
I left my head and my heart on the dance floor

Sometimes I feel like
I live in Grand Central Station.
Tonight I'm not takin' no calls,
'Cause I'll be dancin'.
K-kinda busy
K-kinda busy
Sorry, I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy.

Right now I am in love with her. And in love with feeling in love.

 

I'm so happy just to feel KIND OF good that I want to do stuff. All of a sudden regular ordinary banal things sound appealing. Going to Staples sounds like an exotic vacation. Target would be the South of France. I want to go out to lunch. I want to go to Japan and go to a tea house and then eat ton katsu and then go to Hanabi on Anderson and see if they hold up and then I want to go Christmas shopping with all the crowds and go to Shrafts and The Plaza I want to run around the lake I want to give a talk on a stage at the flea market I want to go for ice cream sodas and then get oysters and Piesporter at the oyster bar at Grand Central station.

But I am staying home
It's been my own kind of grand central here today
120 visitors
One brought the best chicken soup
One let me photograph him
One drew a mind map
One filled out applications for hours
One told me about yelling at a principal about a vice principal Dolores Umbridge
I made bizarre challah bread grilled cheese
One made a pile of clothes 2 feet tall
One said she was a boy and a girl
One dropped off some freshman essays none too good
One wore little round red glasses and a red scarf
One shrunk over an inch
One made tea two times
One said she was going to a ding dong event later if I heard her right
One wore a pink hat all the time
One was a Diva
One or more of these people are the same one

I'm helping Mike design his wall of album covers in his cave. He's been a darling.

I am taking it easy mostly yes but very excited about just being at half mast. I am back to goofing off. I did not go to any exotic locales today except in my head but I am planning I am planning.

Not sure about this whole chemo thing sometimes. I have been reading and reading as you know I do and across the seas things are so very different than here. I am thinking. I am thinking. Soon they say there will be little tiny robots that travel in little light seafoam green pillships (I made up the color) that go in through in to your metro tube system and travel travel around from station to station and when they get to the metro stop with the gang of psychotically ill gangsters with its black sooty steps and cracked walls full of piss they stop. Only there. Even if the signs have been graffitied over or if they are written in Russian or Chinese, they find find find just the right station. The right ekki. And then. And then little sweet white avenger killer murderers in faux fur hooded shiny pale violet coats step out and then just stomp and trash and wreck and kill the little bad soot sprites. Only them. Then they leave politely. No carpet bombing. I'm doing what the future doctors will call barbaric. 

I'm helping Violet steam fry pot stickers. With music.

 

Reception

People keep telling me to just give in to feeling bad. To receive it. Ok.

So today I am still in bed and I have barely moved. It is 11:15 am.

I keep thinking each day I'll feel a little bit better but this has not happened yet and in fact it's going the other way. I'm asking my colleague friends to help me with grading papers, I'm asking my family to bring me food, and I'm letting my house settle around me.

Kindness is coming in from every crack and door and window. And ether. I have received so much love that it's just overwhelming. Thank you. Just in the last few days here are some of the things I have received:

Nail polish in the color Peach Daquiri
A heart shaped rock from the Rocky Mountains

A hand made ikebana (Japanese word for art made of natural objects) made from a piece of driftwood found near a mountain lake in the Rocky Mountains

A bowl of Lucky Charms

Sweet love notes

An adorable little make up bag

Salmon pasta and a salad made with avocados and pomegranate

A baguette

Martinelli's apple cider

A salad from Lucy's Fried Chicken

A hand massage

Cherry juice mixed with Sprite to just the right proportion

Fancy-schmancy eyebrow makeup

Words

Love

Robot stickers

A ride to my class and home

re·cep·tion

/rɪˈsɛpʃən/ Show Spelled [ri-sep-shuhn] Show IPA

noun

1. the act of receiving or the state of being received.

2. a manner of being received: The book met with a favorable reception. 

3. a function or occasion when persons are formally received: a wedding reception. 

4. the quality or fidelity attained in receiving radio or television broadcasts under given circumstances.

---

Origin:
1350–1400; Middle English recepcion  < Latin receptiōn-  (stem of receptiō ), equivalent to recept ( us ) (past participle of recipere  to receive) + -iōn- -ion

And now I am to go in to a room in a hospital to receive water mixed with alchemy into my body to heal me from my cure. I am learning to accept the things I don't want to be given but why don't I? I want to be well and clean and be the one cooking the Burnyce apple omelet that no one but us has ever heard of here let me show you this marvel, not the one wishing for it at 4 am but no one knows what it is so don't even bother asking. I have thrown a multitude of receptions and I do it well so well and I kind of hate this, this act of receiving, maybe this is the therapy.

Song
by Frank Bidart

You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.

Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist

Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but 

now you sniff

the season when you must cease 

to exist.

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.

It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.

The human condition

"Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition." - Michel de Montaigne

Remember this book: The Family of Man?

We are all in it together. This thing. Starts with a bloody birth that's pretty rough on everyone involved but joyful. From there we all pretty much have the same thing going on - we want the same things whether we are a Muslim boy in a Talaban camp, a Fort Worth debutante, a Parisian model eating crepes and the verte, a Bedouin shepherd, an aboriginal grandmother, a Papua New Guniea set of twin girls, an Irish grandma, a Mexican cartel secretary, a tinker, tailor, soldier or spy. Here's what we want: love, acceptance, belonging, to get through the day, to get through life, connection, purpose, to wonder why and seek an answer. We all experience curiosity, hope, desire, maybe love and surely pain and loss, crushing loss. No one will escape this. Ok well maybe if you are struck simultaneously from the back by a huge and silent meteor from nowhere, together, with all of your loved ones - maybe you'll escape it.

"No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa." -Eugene Ionesco

But really the truth is waiting for you. It's just time that stands between you and the fact that either you, or your beloved someone, will, for sure, either suffer or die. Dead. Loss is coming. This is so monster scary, so ancient collective consciousness motherfucking horrible, so un-holy, so tyrannosaursly  terrifying that ancient scholars could barely wrap their heads around it. I swear I read somewhere but cannot now find the source...damn! Well...something along these lines: a famous brilliant mind of ancient time said that all human drama (meaning art - music, plays, myths, tales, songs, stories, legends, even religions, politics, in short, all of our "busy-ness") is nothing more than a frantic and frenetic and desperate attempt to distract ourselves from the knowledge of our own mortality. 

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

David Eagleman

Once we reach the age of reason (around 5?) we GET IT - death is coming. You'll see children this age constantly ask mommy will you die? Daddy when will I die? What if we die? When will my friends die? I don't want you to die! Parents...remember this? It seems out of place but it's not. What's happened is that our social structure immediately CLAMPS down on this actual truth and begins shoveling mountains of dirt and sand at it - trying to bury death. Thus the drama begins:

Oh no that's a VERY long time away!

Don't worry!

And continues as we act out and dramatize and literarize and step very far away from while wearing HAZMAT suits and metaphohorize and sanitize and bleachify and tame and drain and euphemize DELUXE this one human condition thing we share - we lie:

Uncle Fred passed on

She went to a better place

You will have a long wonderful life and it'll all be great 

He's no longer with us

Enjoy this !

Work hard for your goals 

Everything is ok

You're not alone 

It's all a plan you don't have to worry about

God is in control

You'll see everyone again later and it'll be so wonderful and there'll be pie and coffee and angels and soft clouds 

He's ok don't worry

Et cetera

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not against kindness and I'm not saying we should walk around thinking of our imminent death 24/7. What I'm saying is that we sometimes are so fearful of what's REAL, that we shy away from it - and from each other. We are scared.

I am scaring you.

My last few posts put some people off. For some crazy reason our culture has created this huge pink cloud bubble myth about breast cancer, and I think it's actually harming our ability to understand the experience. I am not sugarcoating it. Nor am I trying to be frightening. Chemotherapy is extremely painful and it's ugly and it's mean. Why not say so? I'm pretty smart and I was GOBSMACKED right off the side of a skyscraper into a pile of pig mud by the sheer shock of how truly dread-FULL it was. After reading and researching. Why? Because most people don't really say...they (shhh) cover it up with (shhh) "nice" things, "pink" things, euphemisms like words like "discomfort" or "fatigue" which are patently false. I'm not patently false.

So I truly apologize if I scared you. At the same time I invite you to wake up and just see what is. I will be ok. I think. For now. You will be ok. I think. For now.

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

Chuck Palahniuk

"I thought if I could create a convincing cat I could say and do anything I wanted on the human condition."

Jim Davis

Just the facts

Ma'am 

This is what I look like

I weigh 136 pounds

My mouth tastes like the hoof of a horse that stepped in death

Every hour my stomach twirls into a cinnamon swirl knot of pain and I jump up ready for nothing

The room I'm in is making me sick

I'm hungry

The thought of food makes me want to be in a coma or be not awake or be dead

My left eye is twitching uncontrollably, what if the nerve there was damaged and I have a permanent eye twitch?

That thing I just said, I don't care about that

I don't care about breast cancer

I'm not motivated to be cured

My hands and feet are dry

My hedgehog hair has neither fallen out or budged, it's black and prickly like dirt

I'm starting to hate life

Sometimes I think about next spring and it seems like it might be good

I feel mad some

I feel sad or I want to feel sad like I want to cry but I can't because I can't feel it enough, because I'm behind a wall of glass that's covered with fogging oil. I can't feel much of anything.

My bathrobe and my blankets smell like chemicals and I can't stand them

If I were to drink 10 shots of tequila I wouldn't get drunk

I feel so dull and dullness is my nemesis

Even the special things I have to make me feel better make me feel sick

I feel so ugly and I didn't know how much that would hurt

School, boys, masks

I got schooled today. I tried to teach my classes and act one went off fairly well. Act two was a major flop. Luckily I had my intrepid Vicki with me to drive me and walk me and get tea for me and guide me. Here we are sitting in the back of a lecture class where I was supposed to be intelligently participating and getting my students all enflamed with philo-sophy. I mean the literal translation of the word, an all-consuming lusting love for knowledge and  facts and more and more and more.

I was mainly focused on trying to sit upright and trying not to think about a particular animal cracker that had tried to go in to my mouth a few minutes previously. Its prosthetic processed dust glueness was still bothering me mentally and physically. 

Dr. Payne was illuminating all of us about the globalization of the economy but I could not cohere. Then I committed an act of treason, I grabbed Vicki and we got up and walked out of the lecture, something he has forbidden anyone ever to do during his lecture. Dr. Payne please forgive me, I know you will. We did not slam. I had to go.

I felt pretty good last night but that is gone away. I was just rereading my history from the last cycle and it seems like after about 12 or 13 days I might start to feel pretty good. This is not necessarily making me happy, this is not necessarily happy making. 

This is truly preposterous and ridiculous and unreported. It harkens back to the mommy myth. When mothers always pretend to each other and in this way hurt each other. Pretty little moms wear a big fat sick sharp metal blind cool mask and they strap it on motherfucking tight. Through clenched teeth and pointy teeth and slit eyes they lie through the mouth of that mask. They brag brag lie lie brag that YES! their baby YES! sleeps through the night, and their baby YES! eats oakra raw, don't you know it, and YES! he visibly shuns Keeblers and literally gets off on broccoli and READS-n-FEEDS-n-HEEDS remarkably. Yes the babe is breezy easy summers eve, a piece of fuckin cake - just everything is going Tony the Tiger Grrrrrrrreeeeeeeeaaatttt. 

This mother mask- donning is a  form of civil warfare, in which the troops are all on the same side, yet they are so stupid and blind that they lash out with their weapons and accidentally chop off each other's heads and stab each other in the eyes and the hearts, their masks and their weapons are the same things. I deplore this war

There's a good book I recommend called the Mask of Motherhood. I encourage you to read it if you're a motherhood or live in a society that has any mothers in it:

The premise is the same as with any bullying, or just the whole schadenfreude thing, or just maybe human nature where we want to feel like we are better than everyone else: 

We put on a false front so that we can look like we have our act together NO WAIT A SEC - I MEAN SO WE CAN LOOK BETTER THAN THE OTHER LAME MOMS, but the result is that it makes all the other whatever-you-ares everywhere feel badly. Is the same thing going on with chemotherapy?  

I mean like people say "Yeah chemotherapy was just dreadfully dull and somewhat uncomfortable, kiss kiss, good luck!" or "oh I was so fatigued" or "I just wanted to lay around and rest all day," but they don't say "I felt like a melting pool of drooling vomit that's not clean enough for toxic waste pollywogs to inhabit." Or "my tummy was pressed in six inches and then twisted by a mean freakishly large Indian-burning bully second-grader that was 8 feet tall with cheese breathe." Or "you'll not want to be present during your own chemotherapy or possibly after." 

They really just don't say that. They don't. Which leads me to several conclusions: one, I am an inferior chemotherapy participant, although I can make a fairly good spectator. Two, the mask strapped on. Three, something in the middle. 

My doctor remains rather unexcited about all this and just keeps repeating things like, stay on top of the meds, come in for fluids if you feel dehydrated as advised. As advised. As advised. As advised .

Even this blog is sickening to me now. I don't even have anything interesting to say, I just want to float away and wake up another day. Bet some of you want me to also

I've been thinking a lot lately about David Foster Wallace. A tres bien writer. Reader. Knower. A loss to you and you may not even know it.

"Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being."

- David Foster Wallace

I mean the end of his life was so sad, he could not function, he could not eat, he could not write, he could not be, he could not read . He could enjoy the house being clean. He went to 140 pounds sans the will to live. Just from depression. I don't mean the word "just" (I take it back) - depression is a Grand Canyon that you literally have never visited if you have never visited. 

He had a whole team of people trying to keep him alive, including his wife. He said "it's not going to get better" and he went. The thing I was wondering is, who was on the team of people trying to keep him alive? I mean he had quit taking antidepressants that was devastating for him. I just wonder if they had put him back on antidepressants, or under some kind of awesome ecstatic drugs you can put someone on to make them happy at least temporarily? Why didn't they put him on LSD, morphine, opium, ecstasy, pot, whatever it takes to make you happy just for the day or the minute? Demerol? Just so you can get a little bit better? Are we so terribly barbaric in the way we treat horrible illnesses? I just really wonder about all the stuff. 

"Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

- David Foster Wallace

Our brains are so delicate in their chemical balance. A few ounces of this or that can kill you or ruin you or elevate you. Why didn't somebody fucking elevate David Foster Wallace? 

I am not really mad, I'm just simply ignorant, I simply don't know. But it's horrifically sad that he is not here. 

Good boys. Gone.

Same thing with Jeff Buckley - drowned in the Mississippi but but not before bestowing grace upon the earth. Go seek him out and listen, here's one set of lyrics:

GRACE

There's the moon asking to stay 

Long enough for the clouds to fly me away 

Well it's my time coming, i'm not afraid to die 

My fading voice sings of love, 

But she cries to the clicking of time 

Of time 

Wait in the fire... 

And she weeps on my arm 

Walking to the bright lights in sorrow 

Oh drink a bit of wine we both might go tomorrow 

Oh my love 

And the rain is falling and i believe 

My time has come 

It reminds me of the pain 

I might leave 

Leave behind 

Wait in the fire... 

And I feel them drown my name 

So easy to know and forget with this kiss 

I'm not afraid to go but it goes so slow

Paragraphs

A paragraph is a square. A state. A Colorado, a Utah, an Arizona, a New Mexico. A Montana. But when you put them all together it's not a continent, but instead, a log jam floating jostling all together loosely or tightly all going downriver. All going down down down to the sea. The primordial sea. The C. There, they break loose for an eonic second and form into their continental selves, rippling around the edges before sealing and conjoining into the essays and manifestos and books that create. They harden and sink, some cracking on the bottom, never to be seen under mud.

Yesterday was one of the worst days I have ever experienced on this planet. Every minute was a day and the day was pain 

"You know the day destroys the night 

Night divides the day 

Tried to run 

Tried to hide 

Break on through to the other side"

(The Doors)

and it was midnight and it was 11 AM. I never felt so I never felt so I never felt so bad. People came and went and I was prone. They asked if I wanted a lavender Epsom salt bath. They asked if I wanted soup. They asked if I wanted juice. I tried to say yes to everything but I wasn't listening at all to any words. 

"The days are bright and filled with pain" (The Doors)

This morning I'm afraid to get out of bed and afraid to stay in bed. Everything irritates. Kindness is a knife. Smeared.

My aunt sent me a tiny Bassett hound. When I was growing up we had two Bassett hounds named Molly and Mary Jane. They were horrible pets, low to the ground, crocodile-like to we three little kids, with short lizardly out-arching feet that scratched us with their long horny nails, and huge mean angry nursemaid mouths that barked lowly at us. They did not like us children. They were Ottomans. They were set pieces. They were my mother's idea of a joke, and a bit of antique furniture. Molly had 13 puppies and we made the front page of the Boulder Daily Camera in 1966. I was afraid of her. But looking back on it I now see how droll it was to have basset hounds and now this little Bassett now is comforting to me.

See how I've spread out into an amalgomous menace blob of bathrobe and hat and pillow and sickness and miasma and ooze? I am revolting I am revolting. I revolt I revolt I revolt. I result. Underneath that mountain of fuzz I'm melting.

The word nausea is based on the Greek nautia for "sailor" - and the feeling that comes with it. I'm in a chamber. Get me out please. 

A "miracle" drug failed me this weekend - the Sancuso patch - a dreadful sticky wicket of headache blur and cash that I ripped off after 16 hours of seasick royal. Where is my 21st century? 

God I've got to stop complaining. Burnyce would be mortified - actually at any of my public confession here. My mother the iconoclast - was secretly ravishingly private and would balk at this journal, but I have to express. Times had changed, have, and she didn't notice. I miss her so much. I want her to tuck me in. But I'm relieved that she can miss this worry - that's better I think.  

That generation of rose colored glasses - were they on to something? Maybe just a little bit? Shall I try? Ok here goes: I'm going to be ok, I have felt better but I'll be fine, not to worry. That does sound better I'll admit. For the public. And it's true but not the whole truth. Even I can't fathom this. Poison to cure?

And another piece sinks to mud.

Where

Where are my children? Where is my family? I can feel them swirling around behind me. Last night I felt a little arm pull a cover up for me. Over a cold part. I think that was Fiona. I'm not sure. Later I felt a little warm leg on my back. I think that was her. I don't know. I don't know where anyone is, or anything. I'm in a rice paddy. The rice paddy of pain, a rice paddy of death, the death paddy, rice paddy rice paddy rice paddy. I cannot eat anything and I'm starving. I'm so hungry my stomach is turning inside out and it is imploding. This is worse. This should be better. This is worse.

I can't see them.

I'm trying to try. I don't want to. I'm not wild. The word wild means willed, as in the creature or object or entity at its most supremely willed state of being - its essence. It is necessary for the creature to have a strong will in order to be able to accomplish this. Animals are wild, they are acting out who they are purely and openly with no regrets or thoughts or feelings or knowledge even. I have too much knowledge and no will. I am not wild right now.

My plate lies upon me. My eggs lie upon the plate. My hand lies upon the quilt. Nothing goes in.

A poem I found:

On Hearing Your News

BY KATE BUCKLEY

My eyes lie flat in my skull,

darkened, bruised

 

lashes whip-stitched to swollen lids –

sleep has once again been elusive.

 

My organs weigh more

than they did the day before,

 

swollen with unhappiness,

gorged on regret:

 

tiny fists in my stomach pummeling

the hanging ball of my heart.

Kate Buckley, "On Hearing Your News" from A Wild Region. Copyright © 2008 by Kate Buckley.  Reprinted by permission of Moon Tide Press.

Time is shrinking

Well here I am on day two after chemo, and it's happening again. The hours in the minutes and seconds are shrinking down to heartbeats. Glug. Glug. Baboom. Boom. Ugh. Ugh. Beat. Beat. Rebeat. Re.

It's a painful and anti zen way to get through the day when you get through it one heartbeat at a time. 

I read somewhere that each living organism that has a heart has about two billion heartbeats in it before it dies. I guess the muscle tires out. Can you imagine doing two billion arm curls or sit ups or steps in a row WITHOUT EVER STOPPING? It's enough of a thought to put you into a psychotic break. That's why animals that are tiny with rapid heartbeats like humminhbirds have such short ethereal lives, while the slow booming gigantor creatures like whales can live for many many years while their hearts beat very slowly. I read this in one of the best essays that I've ever read called "Joyas Voladoras," by Brian Doyle.

Here's where he talks about this:

"Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old."

But you should read his whole essay, it's much better than anything I could say about it. Please read it here:

http://nowimjustashotinthedark.blogspot.com/2008/02/joyas-voladoras-by-brian-doyle.html?m=1

Anyway right now I'm just kind of existing from one heartbeat to the next. I don't think I feel quite as badly as I did on my last cycle on this particular day. Not sure. I can't know. But I do not feel good. I do not feel that I can concentrate on a book or a movie or a piece of toast. Eating is very difficult. I endeavored to eat a tangerine today and had three snail entrail segments. 

I feel rather dejected with my scratchy child-repelling head and my slime coated tongue and my queasy fixing pills that don't quite work and my lumpy lumps of mountain boulder pillows that don't satisfy and my desires to eat to fill my hunger but no good goes in. 

Why is it that I'm so good at finding distraction when I'm living life well, but right now and I need distraction more than anything else I find myself looking inward and counting and feeling every painful heartbeat? I can't even read a paragraph in my mystery novel (perhaps the title W is for Wasted is too much now. Yes.) or watch a bad television show, which is been advised to me by many who know. What is wrong with me?

Not well enough to go to acupuncture. Canceled. Will try later. 

And my looks deceive me, I can look presentable, but I am not presentable.