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.