No matter how tightly I close my eyes, the monochromatic images remain—as if they are permanently etched on polished spheres that spin at high speed inside my eyelids. The dark forest green figures—thousands of distinct, unique items—fill my entire field of vision. They move so fast I can barely register one collection of images before the next one flashes past my consciousness. Though unique, each item has a commonality with the others. They mostly are typographical symbols one might find on a computer keyboard: dollar signs, pound symbols, punctuation marks, ampersands, parentheses, commas, question marks, asterisks, tildes, apostrophes, and so on. I cannot focus my attention on any one symbol for more than a microsecond before it has been replaced many times over. I am confident the combinations of images carry with them a complex assortment of messages; not mysterious concepts nor mystical enigmas—just communiqués designed exclusively to enlighten me about matters I have yet to understand. The source of these messages is unclear, but the longer I am exposed to them, the more likely it seems to me I am both their source and their target. I do not want to be misunderstood about these images, though. I realize these visions could be random space-fillers in my brain; completely devoid of “meaning” or relevance. Or they could be symptoms of a neurological disorder that has been with me for almost all of my 71+ years. They might even be fantasies that do not exist in the real world…only in my imagination. That is unlikely, though. They are too consistent, too predictable.
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Today, I will spend quite a while at my oncologist’s office. Whether today will involve chemotherapy infusions or not, I do not know. I’ve lost track of whether today is just another day of lab work and hydration and injections or whether I will be pumped full of cancer-killing chemicals, etc. If my post-recurrence treatment had gone as originally planned, I would be approaching the end of two years of immunosuppression drug therapy. But plans got derailed early on when I developed an allergic reaction to one of the primary chemo components. I’ve said this already, haven’t I? I just repeat myself, it seems.
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When a person has little or nothing left to lose, he can become either heroic or deadly dangerous or otherwise transform into someone new and unpredictable. What, I wonder, determines whether “nothing to lose” leads to philanthropy or, instead, to murderous pathology? Those are not the only options, of course, but they are among the most impactful. Wealth and hopelessness can lead in entirely different directions, of course, but poverty and optimism can spur the same….or radically different…responses, too. We’re too complex for anyone to be able to “read” us. That’s one of the delights and dangers of humanity.
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And now I will sally forth into what the world holds for me today.
