John Swinburn

I try to combat the natural…well, I suppose it’s natural… tendency to allow my cancer diagnosis to wreck my emotional state. When I was first diagnosed with lung cancer in late 2018, I entered the fray with the assumption I would win the battle. From the start, I fully expected to conquer the disease; almost to the point that I viewed the diagnosis as little more than an annoyance that would deliver some irritating experiences. I considered the idea that it would kill me as only remotely possible—and overly dramatic. I assumed I would join the legions of people who have overcome the diagnosis to live many years of happy and fulfilling lives. After a year of treatments, my assumption were proven correct. The disease went into remission, as far as anyone could tell, and stayed there for five years after the original diagnosis. But after its recurrence was discovered in late 2023, my confidence that I would “win” began to evaporate.  With its return, I learned the disease was no longer curable. It ultimately would kill me, but treatments could prolong my life—perhaps by a lot. The treatment plan was based on the expectation that a limited number of chemotherapy treatments, followed by two years of weekly infusions of Keytruda immunotherapy. After almost two years of treatment following its recurrence, the initial treatment plan has long since been replaced. None of this is new information in this blog. I’ve repeated it so many times…maybe in an attempt to make my brain accept reality. Maybe, though, it is because I have not been as successful as I had hoped in preventing the disease from overwhelming my emotions.  I’ve considered that possibility before. An online article I read this morning on the NPR website might reinforce that idea.

Coping with cancer is rarely easy for anyone, but men tend to fare worse — emotionally and physically — than women. Evidence shows male survivors isolate more, seek less peer and other support and, alarmingly, die earlier.

Yuki Noguchi, NPR

The NPR article addressed the emotional toll cancer takes on young men. While my youth is far behind me, I share some of the emotions described in the article: “You feel so beat up and powerless;” “So much of cancer is the loss of the self and loss of control…that’s probably the hardest thing.” The article focuses on age and sex, but I suspect sex is the attribute contributing most to the emotional toll of a cancer diagnosis. The article notes that women tend to go to treatments in the company of friends and family, while men tend to go alone (not in my case, though, at mi novia’s insistence). Our culture, which expects men to conform to strong, silent type images, discourages men from seeking help in confronting their fears. In my case, it’s not fear of death that is debilitating, but I am not sure exactly what it is that has led me to isolate myself from an already limited network of friends. That having been said, it may be fear of another kind; fear of being unable to control my emotions if I allow them to crack the veneer of practical realism. But that’s just a guess. The idea of participating in a “support group,” in which I can remain anonymous may have some merit.

I pride myself on refusing to be taken in by the nonsensical mythology of masculinity, yet that very independence may be just for show. An aspiration, not really an attribute.

My attitude about my diagnosis and about my emotional state of mind may go through a dozen changes before noon today. That possibility bothers me. It provides evidence that my “take what comes” approach to this challenge in my life may be a counterfeit $223 bill featuring a portrait of Clarence Thomas. Oh well, maybe laughter is not the best medicine, after all. Maybe cyanide, instead, can claim its rightful place in that metaphor.

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Today’s visit with the oncologist probably will be a brief one: a blood draw for labs, a short conversation with my oncologist, and (depending on the results of the labs) an injection to address either anemia or bone-related issues.

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The time is closing in on 7:00 a.m. Before the morning is out, I’ll make myself clean and presentable so I can sit in the oncology treatment room, where I will attempt to be invisible.

I get it. I understand the motivation. In fact, the quest for ideal isolation may be the only thing I truly comprehend. Everything else is distraction…maddening interference that gets in the way of achieving serenity. Not just achieving serenity, but even pursuing it. Sometimes, it is hard to differentiate between isolation and insulation, but the two are not the same. The objective of isolation is permanence—severing the connections between now and then—fully embracing then. Insulation is brief; a temporary reprieve, just long enough to stem the hemorrhaging of hope. Insulation is a two-week vacation to a remote island. Isolation is the permanent relocation to an uninhabited planet.

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Sitting in a black office chair, rocking back and forth, and listening intently to sounds emanating from somewhere deep within my body. The source of the noise may be artificial—my brain convincing itself that the sounds arise from blood cells slamming into the inner walls of arteries. But the sounds could be real. Evidence of tissues being torn by force from underlying strata. Repetitive thump, thump, thump noises might be coming through the skin, amplified by big, empty lungs. But the high-pitched voice of a little girl interrupts my analyses; a neighbor taking her granddaughter for a walk in front of my house on this lonely, almost-empty cul-de-sac. Evidence of inadequate insulation.

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I’ve reached deep inside myself, only to find more of the same emptiness. Not conducive to writing. Another planet, perhaps.

Drawing Hands by M.C. Escher, © Cordon Art-Baarn-the Netherlands.

I remember the overwhelming sense of awe I felt when, as a teenager, my brain permitted me to fully understand that my body was mine; and mine alone. As I remember the circumstances, nothing in particular triggered the sense of reverential amazement that I was in such astonishing control of my body—especially my hands. The clearly visible blood vessels and tendons in my hands and forearms struck me, somehow, as miraculous. I have never shared with anyone my sense of wonder at my own hands. I thought fascination with my own body and, in particular, my hands was strange and inexplicable—an embarrassingly narcissistic appreciation of something so plain and so common. Instances of being enthralled with my own “ownership” of my body declined in frequency as I grew older, but they have never completely disappeared. To this day, I do not understand the source of this esteem and veneration. I wonder whether I am alone in attributing such intense appreciation for my own physicality? Obviously, this narcissistic tribute is not based on exceptionalism. Maybe, instead, it arose from my admiration for the image produced here; I have always loved the work of M.C. Escher, ever since my oldest brother gave me a copy of a coffee table book of Escher’s drawings.

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I’ve been sitting at my desk for half an hour or so, laughing quietly to myself over stories I doubt I ever heard before. Despite having never heard them—to my knowledge—my artificial memories seem very real. One of the stories, told to me in my oldest brother’s voice in my head, had to do with my mother preferring to have a Staffordshire Terrier as a pet, as opposed to a Mexican free-tailed bat. Somehow, the story incorporated some erroneous embellishments that changed the nature of the story entirely. My mother had once favored the bat over the dog because of the bat’s superior skills at catching and killing mosquitoes but, because the bat had accidentally flown into my mother’s glass of wine, her preference had changed. The dog subsequently was outfitted with a set of artificial wings that enabled it to fly around the sun porch to capture mosquitoes. I do not remember this story first-hand, but the telling of it convinced me it was real.  Another story that flitted through my mind involved my sister returning from a summer traveling in Europe, with a reindeer in tow. The reindeer could not be transported in the aircraft cargo hold due to space limitations, so my sister had to buy a seat for it in the first-class cabin. The animal over-imbibed on the flight back to the U.S….to the extent that it had to be escorted off the plane by security guards to control the drunken beast. My father posted bail for the creature; unfortunately, the intoxicated boozer fled after being released from jail, so my father forfeited the bail money.

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I believe it was Dorothy Parker who was quoted as saying, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”

James Ussher, an Irish priest and religious scholar, asserted the creation of the universe took place on October 22, 4004 BCE, just 4057 years and a day before my birthday. Georgi Gospodinov, a Bulgarian writer, wrote in his novel, Time Shelter (which won the 2023 International Booker Prize), that some people suggest creation took place at around 6:00 in the afternoon. Naturally, I am curious about world events that occurred from 4057 years before I was born to the present. But I am especially interested about what occurred in the days and weeks and months before Creation: October 22, 4004 BCE. Time, as we imagine it today, would have been impossible before October 22, 4004 BCE. In fact, nothing would have been possible before that date. Except, of course, the creation of the universe. But, wait, that can’t be right. At some moment before the impossible event took place, the impossible had become possible, even if only for a fraction of what we now call a second. Yet, if time began at roughly 6:00 p.m. on October 22, 2004 BCE, possibilities did not exist before that moment because possibilities are based on time. Before and during and after. Generic time. The existence of time is a necessary requisite for everything. Time cannot exist in the absence of life and death, either. Yet that assertion makes life an impossibility, too, because life is the absence of death…or is it the precursor? But there it is again…generic time (like an attribute owned by a word like “precursor) intruding on my ability to understand anything, because all things depend on time for their very existence. Rocks could not be formed without the passage of time. Planning would go by the wayside if time did not exist as a measure against progress toward a plan. Leaves on trees…and the other parts of trees, as well, require time to grow; so, no time, no trees. What of the indescribable moments before 6:00 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BCE? Am I expected to believe there was NOTHING?  No air, no Earth, no moon, stars, no pre-existent bones of dinosaurs that died long before time commenced its never-ending prelude to everything? And how could there have been a “tomorrow” on October 21, 4004 BCE…since there was no “today” during that slice of non-existent duration? Every living being dies without getting answers to fundamental questions about life, so what’s the point of living? Apparently, it’s not to get answers to questions that go unanswered for hundreds of generations.

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Wearing a self-designed parachute, Franz Reichelt jumped off the Eifel Tower on February 4, 1912 to prove the viability of his invention, plunging to his death. A scratchy video of the tragic event, widely available online, brings to mind the question that invariably arises when driver slow to a crawl as they roll by accidents on the highway: are the watchers slowing in the interest of safety, or are they voyeurs yielding to their morbid curiosity?

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Phaedra is slightly more tolerant of me now than she was the day we brought her home from the recycling center…you know, the place that receives recyclable paper and plastics and so on in exchange for delivering already-pregnant sexually-active kittens. My tolerance of her has increased during that time, as well. My tolerance would grow dramatically, though, if she were to magically transform into a self-watering, self-walking, self-feeding dog whose devotion to me were obvious with every step and every wag of her tail. Speaking of tails…dogs wag, cats swish. We cannot say with certainty why they behave the way they do; we can surmise (based on questionable observable criteria), but cannot KNOW. Our respective languages are separated in the same way that sonic differences exist between car engines and motorcycle engines. When a person screams and flips his finger at you, you can know with some confidence the person is upset with you. But when a dog wags her tail and smiles and you, she could be thinking about biting off your arm…and you would not know it until you feel her teeth rip into your flesh. We pretend we know what dogs and cats are thinking or saying, but we don’t. If, in human years, your Dobermann is 14 years old, he’s like an unpredictable 13 year-old child who treats you with admiration and love and respect, all while plotting your demise with the help of his closest friends. Don’t turn your back on the beast.

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There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

Carl Jung

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Traces of who I used to be slip away every night, when I dream. Memories wander into the darkness, replaced by imaginary moments. The people I wish I had become get lost among the crowds of people who occupy my mind. I remember the members of those crowds, but most of them do not remember me…at least not who I am now.

The sub-head displayed for an image on the New York Times website shatters the hope for optimism:

Matt Chase, New York Times

In a pessimistic era, a temporary, tenuous pause to fighting has become the most anyone is trying to achieve.

A brief interruption. A misleading respite from the brutality of warfare, meant to convince observers that the initiators of the conflict are—at their core—gentle pacifists who crave the placidity of tolerance and embrace.

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Misguided. Misdirected Misinformed. Sent into battle with a single objective and only one acceptable alternative: kill or be killed. Trained to view death on the battlefield as the only acceptable way to die. Taught that old age is the province of cowards who retreat from the glory of battle. The embrace of spiritual culpability, they say, is the only path to righteous indignation. For reasons unknown to me, I have used various forms of the word “repository” in several pieces I have written for this blog of the years. And here is it again:

“…strong enough to carry them to the edge of the widest valley and the deepest repositories of thunder.”

Who can explain for me where I can find “repositories of thunder?” I think I can find multiple answers to innumerable questions if only I can locate these “repositories of thunder.”

Finally, in closing, I want to clarify that, yes, I posted on Facebook this morning, “Her only other unusual feature was a nine-foot-long tail that was infested with yellow thermomagnetic scorpions.” You know, in case there was any question.

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Short posts, laden with absurd gibberish, are more demanding than you might think. But you probably knew that, didn’t you?

I took the opportunity during yesterday’s chemo treatment to inquire, again, about my prognosis. The oncologist’s response was, again, just as expected: we want to keep you alive for as long as you are content with the quality of your life. I asked for a specific date I might give to the crematorium. She demurred. I understand her position. She really does not know. But she did suggest I would have died before now if I had opted to refuse chemo treatment when I was diagnosed with a recurrence of lung cancer.  I agreed to continue treatment for the foreseeable future, provided my quality of life does not get appreciably worse. Oh, she called me “frail.” The man I was fifteen years ago would have slapped her. But, having turned into a frail old man with a completely different personality, I chose not to; I probably would have lost my balance and fallen to the floor, breaking a hip, dislocating my shoulder, and yanking the Infuse-a-Port from my chest in the process.  As for my prognosis, I’m assigning myself enough time to allow an as-yet-undiscovered-cure for my form of cancer to be found and successfully administered to me. In other words, I have as much time left as I have time left.

I’m returning today and again tomorrow for another infusion of IV fluid. I cancelled my physical therapy sessions (except for the final “summary” session in a week). My intent is to retrieve some of the time I have given over to treatments that do no measurable good. Nice guys, my physical therapists, but they can do more good elsewhere.

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The highway is an expanse of mottled tan sand, embedded with threatening fragments of beige and brown and off-white pebbles. Visible from my vantage point, walls of the nearest building and its roof are similar in color, though darker, as if chosen from a companion palette that share density and tone. The combined color schemes seem designed as the perfect setting for a scene of hopeless emotional rubble. The only elements missing are blowing sand and tumbleweeds. Give them time and the harshness of the environment will adjust accordingly. Before long, a swirl of poison and dangerous ideas will merge to create an atmosphere of ominous perversity.  But that may be just a nightmare, crippled when it was struck by a malevolent locomotive that derailed as it slammed into a a ghost-town left on the tracks by irresponsible dream-weavers.

Where is this place? There are no rattlesnakes here…none that are visible. But the palpable shame in the streets is more dangerous and deadly, anyway. I can’t make out whether the scenery around me is real or simply an ugly fantasy in the midst of transformation into an eternity one step down from Purgatory and one step up from Hell. I’ve heard of this place before. My grandmother taunted me with predictions I would end up here—my body on fire in perpetually excruciating pain. A demon—with a massive belly and hair coiled into horns—will approach me, holding a can of gasoline he will use to douse the flames. Oh, my grandmother. She was a brutal old gal, an evangelical television newsreader who attempted suicide on live TV before I was born. When she babysat me for my parents, she spent the entire time in their absence poking me with an ice pick she had heated over an open flame on the gas stove-top. Ah, but this place cannot be the one my grandmother described to me, can it? Where are the high-rise buildings expelling thick smoke and burning corpses from the windows? Where are the promotional signs offering cigarettes, self-study courses in burglary, and parental torture…all without charge? No, this is not the place the old woman talked about. Unlike that repository of unspeakable iniquity, this place has vague hints that its toxicity may not last forever…hospitals that occasionally discharge patients, rare “not guilty” verdicts rendered by judges assumed to be in the pockets of corrupt politicians, and other uncommon actions by individuals and entities long since assumed to exemplify the face of wanton injustice and unnecessary vengeance.

Those shreds of evidence that all is not lost, though, constitute intentional misdirection… promises of hope in an environment in which hope simply cannot survive. After being misled by two or three shattered promises, even people who most fervently cling to the slimmest hopes surrender to despair. The tiny filaments of optimism that illuminate their confidence dim, at first, and then fade into complete darkness. Belief erodes into doubt. Doubt shrivels into bleak certainty. Bleak certainty erupts into the darkest of despair. And from there on, it just gets worse.

Forlorn highways always lead away from ugly places. That’s as positive a perspective as one can have about such circumstances. At the other end of the spectrum, though, is recognition that those same highways lead toward worse places…places where the damage has already been done and will only decline further into a place where “worst” is only an interim step into a bottomless abyss.

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I haven’t taken my meds yet this morning. I woke up late, after sleeping for roughly 12 hours, and decided to jump right into the real world…rather than spend 10-15 minutes eating and drinking medicine. I’ve spent almost an hour blogging. Time to return to reality. I’m still tired, though. I could sleep another 3-4 hours, if given the opportunity.

My weight began to creep back up during the past weekend, barely topping 150 pounds for two consecutive days. Mi novia…and others…urge me to eat more. Protein-laden foods, especially, but anything that will pump calories into me. I understand their concerns and I share them, but I doubt anyone who hasn’t experienced my specific set of circumstances can fully appreciate that “just eating more” is not a matter of simple choice. Most foods usually have no appeal whatsoever; those that do are acceptable only in very limited amounts. Cancer probably is not to blame; I suspect the treatments are responsible, though skipping recently-scheduled treatments has not yet improved my appetite. The chemicals involved in attacking cancer, I am told, stay active in one’s body for quite some time. So, even without the regular infusions, they continue performing—the functions of both treatments and side-effects keep going for a while after they are stopped. My reactions to food are not easy to explain. It’s not that food is actually intolerable, physically, but that my body sends me messages that suggest the results of eating more would be contrary to all the hopes and expectations that drive people to encourage me to consume more food. It’s impossible to explain in a way that is understandable…even to myself.

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This afternoon, I go into town for a brain MRI, a procedure intended to determine whether there’s evidence that cancer might have metastasized to that vital organ. No one thinks it has, they say; it’s only to rule it out…the fact that I tend to “wobble” a bit when I walk could conceivably indicate such metastasis. Tomorrow, I’ll go back to the oncologist for the treatment that was to be given last week (but was withheld for reasons that are no longer clear to me). And one week from Thursday I will get a massage, courtesy of the generosity of mi novia’s ex-husband. I haven’t had a massage in so very, very long—I’ve forgotten the protocols associated with the practice. I do remember, though, how relaxed I usually felt after getting a massage…except when the therapist placed heated stones on my back before they had cooled enough that the risk of second-degree burns had dissipated.

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I hibernated again yesterday, off and on, which had the unintended side-effect of keeping me from sleeping for as long as I would have liked last night. I woke just before 3:00 a.m. this morning. It’s now almost 5 and I finally am beginning to feel like I could get some sleep again. I suppose I could try to find a movie that would hold my interests, but my efforts along those lines have not been especially productive of late…other than No Country for Old Men. A film that might transport me to an era before my time…a time when the grittiness of life was unavoidably educational…might be what I need. Something that would thrust me back to a place and time I’ve not endured—living again through experiences I’ve never had. In spite of the welcome attention and loving support I regularly receive from family and friends, I sometimes feel very lonely, as if I spend all my time at the bottom of an inaccessible well, miles from…something. But that loneliness is almost soothing, an anchor I can count on if I find myself in need of absolute solitude. Describing a unique, unshared emotion for which no descriptive language exists is impossible.

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I could keep thinking and writing for days if I let myself do it. But there seems to be no point in documenting confusion, misunderstanding, chaos, and repetitive mistakes. So, instead, I will finish my Miralax and swill my Ensure and celebrate the impending end of a dark and disappointing night.  I will consider the night a success, though, if I avoid spending time before it ends by filtering the air through a wet Brillo pad.

This morning’s My Unsung Hero on the NPR website triggered in me a flood of memories and emotions. The piece told the story of a neighbor helping a woman facing growing obligations while dealing with her husband’s brain injury. One of those obligations—clearing leaves on the lawn in time for a looming city collection—found her crying and under stress as she began to undertake the task. Just as she began, a neighbor stepped in and advised her to go rest while he took over the task. Her neighbor’s kind gesture remains an emotional memory for her eight years later. A similar memory of mine causes emotions in me. Shortly after my late wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and advised to have a total mastectomy, I planned to go home from work one day to mow the lawn, which I had neglected for weeks. When I pushed my lawnmower out of the garage, I heard another gas-powered mower and saw one of my neighbors pushing his mower through my yard. He knew about my wife’s condition and wanted to do something to help alleviate some of the pressures facing me. I remember approaching him that afternoon to try to thank him, unable to articulate my appreciation through the tide of tears running down my cheeks. I wonder, this morning, how much longer NPR will be able to continue distributing My Unsung Hero and other moving programs. My emotions this morning comprise a mixture of gratitude for compassionate humanity and rage at cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

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Yesterday morning’s nap evolved into something else. Something resembling hibernation. Feeling fatigue and fighting a sense of general malaise, I decided to rest while mi novia went to church. I got back in bed about 9:40 a.m.  I slept…soundly, for the most part…until 4:00 p.m. I have not slept so long—during the daytime—for quite some time. On one hand, I relish the serenity of largely uninterrupted sleep; on the other, the experience seems wasteful of precious and irretrievable conscious living.

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I might find life in Malmö, Sweden to my liking. I’ve already found an apartment there that I like. It’s in a high-rise (54-story) residential building called the Turning Torso. The only significant downside, I think, would involve living in a human-laden environment. People tend to create everlasting disturbing chaos wherever they go. We scatter broken glass like seeds and tend to the shards like professional gardeners, celebrating as each piece of sharp debris evolves into a million tiny glass knives that spread their destructive capabilities far and wide.

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Never. That word suggests a relationship with Time, but refuses to be explicit about the nature of any such relationship. The reason? The relationship…if there is one…is implied, but when confronted with demands for evidence, is denied. Never is the half-sister of Always. She is Eternal’s cousin, as well, but is related to her daughter’s incestuous grand-uncle, Occasional, solely on the basis of forged certificates of authenticity. None of them have even remotely similar parentage. Like Never, though, Always hints at a familial connection with Time. The closest they ever came to a blood relationship was during a custody battle between Before and After, when Never testified on behalf of Infrequent, who claimed to have been involved in an intimate relationship with Perpetual. Who knows enough about Long Shortcomings to be able to untangle her imperfect flaws? Does any of this sound remotely familiar…like the whining musical notes created by arrows as they pierce fully-inflated helium balloons…or the eerie spoonerisms that erupt from burping chirds as they neather their fests?

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Enough absurdity. I thought it might ease my entry into the work-week but, alas, I forgot I am unemployed. “Retired” sounds so much more civilized; but “unemployed” is so much more descriptive.

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Last night, we began watching a 2007 film that I think I watched when it first came out; No Country for Old Men. It’s the sort of gritty film the Coen brothers are known for and the kind of film that, according to Wikipedia, “revisits the themes of fate, conscience, and circumstance” that I find so intriguing. I had been thinking for days about finding and watching the film, but we stopped watching in mid-film last night because I was not feeling well. We’ll finish it tonight…soon, anyway. And I might look for opportunities to stream some other Coen brothers films, like Blood Simple, Fargo, and Miller’s Crossing. Maybe I just need a break from a steady diet of Scandinavian Nordic noir films, though the departure from one genre to the other is not especially wide.

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If I were considerably younger, I might invest my youthful energy in promoting and supporting a rebellion against what is now clearly a fascist dictatorship fueled by a narcissistic cult of power-hungry sociopaths and psychopaths. Sadly, though, my youth is long gone. Left to me now are just rage, righteous cunning, and little left to lose. Those attributes blossom late in one’s life when the wisdom of experience confronts the opportunity to do battle with injustice and cruelty. Old age may rob a person of the ability to engage in hand-to-hand revolt, but it provides a planning platform that might be employed to vanquish authoritarian despotism. There is little realistic hope that the actions or leadership of just one person, though, could pave the way for triumph. A large-scale elder resistance, committed to victory at all costs, would be necessary to offer suggestions about strategies and to encourage and support action by a youthful insurgency. Perhaps an existing organization might form a secret division, devoted to defiance? The Grey Berets?

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A few years ago, I met a guy who told me he wanted to write some fiction, based loosely on his experiences as an architect, based in Japan, for an international hotel company. He and I talked several times about writing, but as far as I know he never delved into it the way I hoped he would. The stories he told about his experiences in Japan fascinated me. If memory serves me, I think he had met his ex-wife while living in Japan. I met him when he joined his sister as part of a group in which I participated that regularly attended a local wine dinner. He and I had a fair amount in common and I looked forward to getting to know him better and to discussing writing with him. Unfortunately, during a routine colonoscopy his colon was punctured; he landed in the hospital for quite a while as a result. During that hospital stay, he experienced problems with pulmonary fibrosis; the problems stayed with him and grew far worse after he was discharged. I saw him only once or twice after his hospital discharge; he died several months later. My limited interactions with Paul were among hundreds I have had with various people over the years that could serve as the springboard for fiction stories. A story that grows out of my brief exposure to Paul might feature an American architect who moves to Japan and becomes enamored with Japanese cuisine. Another story, based on a married woman with whom I worked while I lived in Chicago, could focus on her (whose name escapes me) traumatic experiences dealing with a diagnosis of breast cancer at the same time she began a series of affairs with married men. For reasons unknown, she confided in me about her dalliances. I moved away from Chicago before breast cancer claimed her life a year or so later. Yet another character could be based on a woman who tries to hide her low self-esteem by adopting the offensive persona of a non-stop braggard whose behavior suggests her contempt for almost everyone around her…who she considers to be less intelligent and far less interesting than she perceives herself to be. Her name, by the way, is Veronika. All of these modified real-life characters could launch many more fictional people. If I follow my usual path in writing about them, though, I will not reveal much about any of them; broad and shallow is, unfortunately, my style…a river two miles wide and two inches deep.

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Kung-Fu Watkins collected a salary from Bayview County, which employed him as a 911 operator. In his spare time, Kung-Fu volunteered at a rescue center for abandoned standard poodles. When not working or volunteering, he either slept, watched silent movies, or drank shots of jagermeister at the Pliant Steel Bar. Kung-Fu’s wife, Madelaine Patel, had spent sixteen years as a flight attendant for Cloud’s Edge Airlines before she was dismissed for “erratic behavior” in an airport restaurant in Berlin. Though the “erratic behavior” was not specified, it was widely assumed to have involved what a patron had captured on a video camera: Madelaine, stark naked at the restaurant’s hostess stand while slurring the words to Everybody Knows. After that incident, she found a part-time job as a housecleaner for the Throbbing Thrills Motel and Lounge, a licensed pleasure palace on property owned by the Bayview County Country Club. Both Kung-Fu’s and Madelaine’s brief and pointless lives came to a meaningless end on that bright and sunny afternoon when the Bayview County Emergency Services Director accidentally triggered a nuclear explosion that vaporized the county.

Answers to every question ever posed can be found in a microscopically thin atmospheric layer surrounding our home planet. All the information ever collected is stored there, as well. Each conversation, every fit of anger, every step taken by every soldier in every war, all the handwritten notes, each email sent and received, the flavors of every food ever eaten, every pet that has been a companion to humans, every person ever born, and the aromas of every flower that ever blossomed and every perfume dabbed on every neck, every insect that crawled on every surface, and every raindrop that ever fell —all of it exists in The Repository, that thin band of atmospheric magic. The Repository encircles Earth just beyond the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. Atmospheric scientists do not know about The Repository, simply because it is so incredibly thin and transparent. No one really needs to know about The Repository; when its capabilities are needed, its functions will commence automatically. And when that happens, its next new cycle will begin. It will replicate forever…until it collapses on itself in recognition of the pointlessness of existence. Recent developments suggest that point may be reached sooner, rather than later. But that will eliminate only The Repository for our planet; identical functions exist in various forms for every planet in our solar system and every other celestial body, so we can assume the process will continue through all eternity. 

Religious scholars and spiritual explorers have long sought something to which they can assign (for want of a better term) “supernatural powers.” The Repository, as it happens, may be that something. But, unlike the entities manufactured in the minds of clerics and alchemists, The Repository is not an all-knowing, all-powerful, supremely compassionate, monstrously evil source of all things great and small. Instead, it is a practical and incomprehensibly powerful component of celestial memory. It is the equivalent of a computer whose storage capacity and speeds will be forever impossible-to-obtain by humans (or our servants who are trained to think and do for us).

The Repository is composed of tiny pieces of incredibly thin silicone-like material. Each piece has a surface area no greater than a fraction of a miniscule portion of a tiny piece of glitter that has been torn into a thousand pieces. Each silicone-like wafter contains a comprehensive record of an event or an attribute or an idea or a being, along with the equivalent of a numerically-coded link to all other related experiences and entities. Basically, each wafer is capable of performing several billion functions simultaneously. It is like today’s most powerful super-computer, amplified on an exponential scale far greater than any number thus far conceived by the mind of humankind. This may help to understand a wafer a bit better: a single wafer holds enough information to enable it (if it “chose”) to train a dust-mite to design and construct all cities with a population of more than 10 million worldwide.

Ponder that, if you will.

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Finally, I’ve received my first hard-copy issue (July 2025) of The Atlantic magazine. The cover article, Witness by Elizabeth Bruenig, addresses her experience in being a witness to executions, including what she has learned in her years of covering the death penalty. The article comes at a time in our nation when executions are making a “comeback,” thanks in large part I think to the degradation of our society’s compassion, civility, and human decency. I have not read the article word-for-word; it is quite long and is not uplifting in the least. But what I’ve read thus far is intriguing, informative, and flush with observations that make me question how people come to the conclusion that the death penalty is ever appropriate. Yet once, long ago, I was a death penalty proponent. The questions I was inspired to ask about the practice, though, changed my attitudes and made me feel ashamed to ever have supported it.

I found another article from the July issue surprisingly fascinating. The author, Jason Anthony, writes about an odd game called mheibes that involves teams trying to guess which members of an opposing team are  holding a silver ring and in which hand that player is holding it. The article, The World’s Hardest Bluffing Game, describes the game’s process. As simple (and as improbable) as the game sounds, it apparently teaches participants to apply their experiences in the game to determine whether an “opponent” is lying to them. Something as seemingly innocuous as seeing sweat on a brow or hearing stress in a voice can make the difference between “guessing” and “knowing.” Anthony notes that there are many bluffing games throughout the world, with different cultures favoring difference approaches to the process. I was surprised to learn how frequent the team captains are right in their determinations about who hold the ring and in which hand. The game Anthony writes about was held in India; I may explore whether there are any such games nearby. Poker, the most popular “bluffing” game, has never interested me much, but I might learn to appreciate it. First, though, I’ll look into mheibes.

Though I enjoy The Atlantic quite a lot, I think it is intended for people who are far more intellectual than I. My intellectual interests are quite broad, but rarely deep. I might be considered a semi-pretentious subscriber, rather than a semi-literate subscriber.

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It’s closing in on  9:00 a.m. I woke many times during the night, which I blame for sleeping late (until around 7:00 a.m.). I’m still wrestling with stomach pains. The painkillers tend to cause constipation, which can be more annoying and almost as painful as the pain the drugs are intended to quell. Perhaps sleeping pills will not produce the same side-effects. Another possibility to explore.

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Seconds after the morning sky begins to absorb the sun’s light, dozens of birds, each visible for just a fraction of a second, flitter from branch to branch. Only by staring intently at the tree for several minutes at a time can I see them. They are invisible  except when they fly between branches. Otherwise, I would miss viewing the frenetic activity taking place behind a thick crust of leafy green camouflage and dark brown and grey bark.  Like those birds, the moon remains hidden behind a privacy barrier most nights.

If  I leave my house on the right cloudless night, I can look upward and see where the moon hides. But I rarely leave my house at night…cloudless or clear. I stay inside, deceiving myself that a roof over my head will protect me from meteors and asteroids and birds that die in mid-flight, plummeting to unsuspecting targets below.

Standing outside in front of my house, day or night, I cannot see much of the sky…thanks to trees blocking my view. Is it only the trees, though, that hide the sky? If I cannot see the sky, what assurances do I have that it is actually “there?” How can I be sure, too, all the stars have not disappeared with it into a portion of space that remains invisible to my eyes?

A composite image of the far side of the Sun was acquired at 18:16 Universal Time (Greenwich Time) on February 14, 2011. I remember that momentous occasion as clearly as I recall the sound of the Liberty Bell cracking, sometime after the year 1840. Important events take their importance from the context in which they occur. One is probably safe to say the crack in the Liberty Bell would have been overlooked entirely if—when the crack took place—a massive extinction event in which dinosaurs disappeared from Earth was occurring. And the importance of the image of the far side of the sun would have dimmed in comparison to a photograph of newborn baby Destiny Whitney published in her family’s album at the same moment. Saddam Hussein’s execution by hanging did not make newspaper headlines on Christmas Day in 2001 because he did not die until a few days past five years later.

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Pagan rituals must have fulfilled a need at one time. To the extent they are practiced today by people who take them seriously, they may still fulfill a need. Not for me, though.

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It’s 6:01 a.m. Time for me to return to a horizontal position…more suitable for sleeping than sitting in a chair.

The world is spinning around me, the top and bottom halves and right and left spheres moving in opposite directions. Connections between its quadrants—top and left…bottom and right…left and bottom…right and top—are chaotically tangled in perfect harmony.  Sound can be seen and not heard; blindness is the sole illumination in the unbalanced symmetry between fact and fiction.  An obvious pattern in the pandemonium reveals nothing but raw disorder. Yet in this twisted nest of impossibly complex knots of frayed rope and malevolent live electrical wire, we seek  comfort. Our lives are rigidly ordered in tumultuous disarray. This, we surmise, must be sanity. And serenity is a sickness to be cured. So we employ governments to starve citizens into prosperity. We launch economic warfare in the name of peace. Because information and knowledge are so vast and overwhelming to the “common folk,” we allow our elected autocrats—our oppressors of choice—to limit our access to ideas. We permit them to change the definition of truth and falsehood at will; sometimes reversing them in mid-sentence. When the actions of our chosen despots conflict with our principles, we condemn the tyrants and, in defiance, promptly imitate their behaviors. Someone once said it, and I believe it to be true: “We’re all perfect, but we could use a little work.”

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Sharing one’s secrets is a temptation that’s difficult to avoid, but one that can be deadly dangerous. Information is both a beautiful tool and a monstrous weapon…simultaneously, at times. Serial killers who proudly leave complex clues about their identities might wonder how they ended up on a gurney in an execution chamber, a needle ready to deliver a final measure of vengeance.  The detectives who unraveled the clues, asked by a prison official to view the killers’ last living moments, might consider the invitation to be a supreme form of flattery. The “faithful husband” who invites his secretary to take her vacation at the same time he takes a “business trip” can be stunned to find his wife and his secretary waiting for him in his hotel room at his destination. The doctor who over-prescribes opioids in return for a portion of the “take” should not be taken by surprise when her patient agrees to testify against her in a plea arrangement.  A housewife—who shares with her best friend suspicions that her husband is having an affair—probably does not realize she may have just launched a murder plot between two paramours. Trust can be so very hard to develop; but it can be the only thing keeping one sane. Yet it can be lost in an instant, triggering a set of circumstances that change the landscape of one’s life. “Innocent bystanders” can become victims of misplaced trust, just as can the parties to undeserved trust. Somewhere along trust’s pendulum swing, its “bob” can become a guillotine’s blade.

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For the past week or two, I’ve been wondering whether the pains I’ve been feeling (and for which I am being treated) are temporary. Or, I wonder, are they likely to continue and simply get worse as time goes by? Inasmuch as no one seems certain what’s causing them, no one is prepared to give me an answer. But the vagueness I sense in the replies I get to my questions suggests to me the latter scenario may be likely. My retiring primary care doctor suggested, during a visit to this officer earlier this week, the problems might be connected to issues with my gall bladder…and that addressing those problems (either by “fixing” the problem or removing the offending organ) might cure the pain. I did not see my oncologist yesterday (only the nurse practitioner), but I hope to see her next week. If so, I will ask her for her opinion about my primary care doctor’s thoughts. Today, I will be visited by a representative of Arkansas Hospice, who will discuss with me the palliative care services the organization offers (as I have written before, I’m not ready for hospice). Minimizing pain and discomfort while enabling me to live as “normal” a life as possible would be my objective. I do not want to be tethered to pain meds, etc. that would effectively make me permanently stuck at home. God, this is getting to be so damn old! The recurrence of my lung cancer was found around the end of the year in 2023. At what point, I wonder, do the limitations on my daily life reach the point where I do not  want to keep dealing with them? I am not there yet; I know that. But is that a stage of the evolution of this experience that I can expect “soon?” And what, by the way, is “soon?” Nobody knows.

Yesterday, again, the nurse practitioner decided not to administer chemo—only IV fluids and injections to address nausea and to protect bone density.  The last time I had a chemo treatment was July 2. I wonder what effect, if any, skipping several treatments might have on me. I will ask next week…if I remember.

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My weight is down to 153 pounds or thereabouts, around 100 pounds below my maximum a few years ago. The nurse practitioner (and various others) emphasize the need for me to eat more protein-rich food and more food, in general. No one wants to read about these ongoing issues; I mention them here, though, as a record of what’s going on during  the course of my cancer experience. Not that this record will have any significant value. As much as anything else, keeping a  record seems both like a function I can perform and one that has “potential” (but not much) value.

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My sister-in-law lost both of her pets…a cat and a dog…within the past week. What a difficult set of circumstances to face. Both of them were old and ill and it’s good that they are out of their miseries…but to have them both go within just days of each other has to be extremely tough to take. Ach! Living isn’t easy;  death adds emphasis to that unfortunate reality.

Peace begins with oneself. I read several paragraphs from several sources about that motto—and the symbol said to represent it—this morning. A quick review of various sources led me to conclude that no one among us is likely to be privy to indisputable “facts” about them. Instead, we should be satisfied to appreciate the philosophies that drive us to place such enormous value on the fundamental concepts of peace. Focusing on the paint or chisel marks or letters or lines that define the concept or appearance of peace is sure to confound and confuse us, rather than illuminate the ideas that serve as the foundation for peace.

The third image here is not a universally accepted symbol for peace, but it suggests (to me) the symmetry of peace. That statement, though, raises a question: What is the “symmetry of peace?” Is it a collection of syllables meant to be thought-provoking or simply a meaningless concept nicely-arranged and illustrated by a set of designer rocks?

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More than two weeks ago, we began watching a Nordic crime noir series (The Bridge). It remains just as intriguing as it was at the beginning. We are closing in on the end of the series, something that’s always a disappointment when watching good films. However, several Scandinavian actors we’ve seen in other series are in this one, so it has confirmed that other films/series in which they play a part might be just as interesting. The character of the female lead (Sofia Helin) in The Bridge is on the autism spectrum. Initially, I thought the idea impractical and unlikely, but it has grown on me. Other actors with whom I have seen in other Swedish and Danish series include Kim Bodnia, Sarah Boberg, Dar Salim, Lars Ranthe, among others.

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I’ve had some odd…downright strange…morbid thoughts lately. For example, as I watched some of the later episodes of The Bridge, it occurred to me that my cancer might be progressing a faster pace than my film-watching. Which could mean I might not finish watching the series unless I hurry and finish before I die. That’s morbid for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it won’t matter whether I watched the full series or not…but it seemed to me that  I might be wasting my time if I did not complete the series. I doubt my medical prognosis is quite so immediately dire, but it must be on my mind from time to time, considering how those thoughts have so easily slipped into my “routine” thoughts.

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Potentially dangerous high levels of potassium in my blood are being treated with a drug that is intended to remove excess potassium from the intestines before it is absorbed into the body. I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow, during my weekly blood work, whether the treatment is working. Superficial evidence of its effectiveness is not obvious, so something else may be necessary. Ach! I am getting so tired of infusions of minerals, etc. that are too low and extractions of those that are too high.

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I’ll try to get another 15 to 45 minutes of sleep now. No reason not to do it.

The New York Times published online on July 28 a piece about the few remaining Japanese survivors of World War II. Tetsuo Sato is quoted in the article, giving this advice to young Japanese: “They wasted our lives like pieces of scrap paper,” he said. “Never die for Emperor or country.” That war is said to have killed 60 million people worldwide. Yet the so-called “leaders” of many nations today are so lacking in morality and/or intellect to understand how fundamentally crucial that advice is, if humankind is to survive.

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Clear night skies, when neither clouds nor atmospheric haze and dust impede the view, are stunning in their simple beauty. Despite astronomy’s enormous contributions to our understanding of the mysteries of black night skies—riddled with twinkling microscopic lights—viewing the bewitching grandeur of space is a magical experience. Our relative paucity of understanding the universe reenforces its beauty, I think. I wonder how our experience of mystery might be changed if the skies were utterly clear—no clouds, no stars, no planets, no meteorites, no satellites; nothing but empty space? Assuming Earth-bound organisms had no need for rain nor wind nor wireless communications, would the emptiness surrounding our planet hold so much allure? To what extent do we depend on the unknown to fuel our creativity and our sense of wonder? Early mornings fill me with wonder as I await daylight to reveal whether the sky is still there…whether the trees I saw yesterday remain…whether the world as I knew it when I went to sleep will appear the same if I awake. Does the acknowledgement that our assumptions are not guarantees fuel our capacity to imagine how lifelong understanding of existence could change in the blink of an eye? So many questions…valid answers to which probably can never be found.

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My creativity sometimes can explode as if a fuse had been lit to unleash my imagination, causing it to explode from an enclosed, pressurized space. What causes that potential power is beyond me. I know of circumstances that cause that fuse to burn slowly or die, though. Discomfort, either physical or emotional/mental can douse that fuse and rob me of my creativity. Pain tends to smother the spark of my imagination. I think fear can have the same effect—which makes sense, in that fear can drive mental or emotional pain. There is no shortage of examples of creative people—painters, sculptors, novelists, actors, etc.—whose creativity seems to have died after they experienced some kind of powerful trauma. None of those numerous examples, of course, come to mind at the moment. But they exist. And they serve as evidence of the power of pain to quell the imagination. I wonder whether, though, the memory of pain can have the same impact on one’s life? The pain may have softened enough to be tolerable, but not enough to stop its memory from extinguishing creativity.

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My November 25, 2014: Thoughts for the Day

When trees shed their leaves, they reveal beauty inaccessible in full leaf.  People do the same when they shed their clothes. It doesn’t matter whether the tree is gnarled and imperfect, any more than whether the person is wrinkled and worn.

The heartwood of the trunk is as perfect and pristine as it was a hundred years earlier, just as the person’s heart is clean and pure and unmolested by the ravages of time.

And, when a person sheds the protective layers of emotional armor developed over a lifetime of responses to pain and uncertainty, the beauty that remains is stunning.

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I will deal with today in the same way I have dealt with so many days before: I will take it as it comes and ponder how I might overcome the shame of allowing the decay of humanity without a fight.

Death is a lonely experience—one that raises countless questions that cannot be answered. One cannot ask questions of people who can respond on the basis of personal experience. I find it hard to understand the concept that death is simply the cessation of all experience. But without relying on the “spiritual” or “supernatural,” I cannot understand what else it could be. And I do not accept the premise that acknowledgements of magic might trend toward  understanding. I suspect these matters increasingly will be on my mind.

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My cancer-related pains have not become constant, nor excruciating, but they have become considerably more noticeable and more frequent. Fortunately, the pain management drugs have thus far been able to make pain manageable. But the speed with which levels of pain  have increased in recent weeks is worrisome. My next visit with the oncologist will give me the opportunity to again ask about how rapidly may pains might worsen and what, if anything, that might tell us about how long I might have to live while pain is still tolerable.

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We have had visitors recently, a welcome divergence from getting too used to hours-long naps. Friends from Oklahoma arrived Thursday night and we have enjoyed conversations with them, ranging from discussions of current events to social and financial philosophies to travel to…on and on! It’s nice to be able to talk with people who understand the challenges we faced in the “old days” of one’s career…and whose interests and philosophies are so similar to our own. I have allowed myself to ignore my blog for many days during the past few weeks; I appreciate the patience of people who follow my writing…letting me have some time to back away from what has become a daily and occasionally unwelcome chore.

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I want to emerge from the depression that seems to have taken hold lately. It may not be depression, though; it may just be anxiety. Whatever it is, it paints most days a little too grey. Fortunately, mi novia is here to help me wade through it and make it better. I think the recent uptick in the frequency of medical visits may be responsible in part for my “bluesy” mood. That surge may be scaled back soon, though, after upcoming brain MRI scans, CT scans, PET scans, etc.  These damn pains, though, keep requiring stronger drugs; the drugs apparently work, but they do not maintain their ability to alleviate pain without stronger and stronger prescriptions.

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It’s just a quarter after six. I think I’ll try to get some more sleep. I feel like the last two hours have been wasted on this blog post; I would have been more productive had I just stayed in bed.

Every year, within a day or two of my father’s birthday, my thoughts wander into a poem written by Rudyard Kipling. The poem—If— is said to have been among my father’s favorite poems.  I did not know my father very well, despite having spent more than half of what was then the first half of what was then my entire life in his presence. Being told he had a favorite poem, though, introduced me to a side of him that I had not known previously. The same thing happened when I was told he could play the piano. Who was this man with whom I had spent so much of my life? I should have known more about him…especially in light of the fact that he kept a copy of Kipling’s poem pinned to the wall above his desk. Two lines from that poem are forever etched into the corridors of my mind:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim…

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Just shy of an hour from now, three of us (mi novia, mi sobrina, y  yo) will leave the house in search of radiologists. The radiological team will direct magical rays at my chest in an effort to eliminate the cáncer. I wish them well in their endeavors.

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The evidence is clear; Phaedra spent time on my desktop. She left physical testimony that she wandered about my keyboard, depositando pelo de gato in her wake. I could use those depósitos de pelo de gato as proof of her actos criminales. Podríamos publicar fotos policiales de la gata descarriada en las oficinas de correos cercanas. La Oficina Federal de Detención de Gatos emitiría un Boletín de Puntos de Control para ella. Pronto, la pondrían encadenada. ¡Justicia!

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Dajcie mi waszych zmęczonych, waszych biednych,
Wasze stłoczone masy pragnące swobodnie oddychać,
Nędzne odpady z waszego rojnego brzegu.
Przyślijcie tych bezdomnych, miotanych burzą, do mnie,
Unoszę moją lampę obok złotych drzwi!

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氷の入ったマルガリータをください!

Much of my pliable energy—the strengths on which I have relied for most of the last 70+ years—have become hard and brittle over time. Now, all the forms’ energies—including physical, mental, and emotional—starve for oxygen beneath years of thick accumulated grit and dust. The heat and desiccation of time has scorched and dried every layer of my experience into impermeable protective coatings, each one as hard as diamonds and as strong as steel. When once I could look into a mirror and see someone young and strong and aching for wisdom, today, I see an old man at the nadir of weakness and in the full bloom of stupidity. I see someone whose seeds of intellect have dried in disuse and whose power has been replaced by infirmity. I am not alone in squandering my potential and maximizing the damages caused by my most egregious flaws. It seems to me most human beings allow themselves to wither and decay as they approach their peaks, effectively giving up on themselves at precisely the point when their misspent energies are most needed. They waste their accrued stockpiles of money, time, knowledge, capabilities, and all their remaining resources just moments before those collections could have enabled them to avoid complete ruin. The rest of us—who have yet to reach that point of no return—watch in pity as we, too, unknowingly cross that brutal threshold that cannot easily be crossed twice. But the fact that it is not easy does not mean it is impossible. It means only that the odds are against us and that—probably—we will not try to avoid crossing it a second time.

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The clock on my computer screen reads a quarter past two in the morning. I have been awake for at least forty-five minutes and out of bed for half an hour.  I hoped, when I decided to get up and sit at my computer, I would succeed in documenting the thoughts on my mind; a success I have not enjoyed for the last several days. I tried on a few occasions, but to no avail. Here I am though, trying again. Hoping I might be able to slash away some of the underbrush I have let accumulate…replacing it with at least a few thoughts worth having and even fewer worth sharing. The value of my words might be considerably greater, I realize, were I to discard the negative thoughts they c0ntain. But a shroud of positivity remains a shroud. No matter how  much thought I give it, I am unable to replace a negative shroud with a positive veil…or a positive sheet…or even a neutral thumbprint on a large white blanket. Fifteen minutes of clear liquid…flavorless juice…from a piece of translucent citrus fruit. Blandness, I suppose, is more appealing than annoying or threatening. And that is a useless observation; if, indeed, it can be called an observation. It may be more appropriate to call it useless label or a transitory judgment. Or a tomato. It might be just as useful to call it a cake pan or a circular saw. Or an  introductory course in portraiture with oils.

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My niece is coming for a visit late today. That knowledge should help improve my mood. My mood really should not need improvement, though. But reading what I just wrote tells me the mood needs some work. Once she gets here, though, I suspect my mood will improve of its own accord. That’s just how it works.

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The thing to do, I think, is to try to get back to sleep. Maybe I’ll give that a shot. And maybe I’ll write more later today or tomorrow or some other time.

Yet again, I’ve been up since 3, but unable to write anything of consequence. Everything I’ve written thus far has collapsed into scraps of damaged letters and malformed syllables. Fragments of incomplete ideas lay scattered across the monitor in front of me; thoughts shredded into a thousand pieces—unable to coalesce into coherent, meaningful expressions. My fingers rest on the keyboard; paralyzed. Incapable of reacting to instructions from my brain, they await commands that never reach them. Those mandates go off in different directions, instead, adhering to guidance better suited to circumstances utterly unlike those in which I find myself. I strain to listen to the colors of the trees, rustling in the wind. I feel the sounds of fruit ripening beneath the soil under my feet. I smell the flavor of wind rushing through the bare branches of shrubs torn from the sky. Destiny spills emphatically from ruptured pipes, demanding answers to questions posed in languages no one can understand. Confusion stands at the ready, with explanations nobody wants….or needs. All the solutions to none of the problems are laid bare on mounds of queries, hungry for answers to questions that could be doppelgängers to insistent answers. All of this is the price of misunderstanding and truth. And so it goes. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man crazy and pondering his demise. A reinterpretation of these thoughts could lead to absolute understanding or endless confusion. So it’s pointless to try figure it out. No point in it at all.

The question, ultimately, is this: do chains represent gentle, flexible tethers or unyielding hardened steel traps? Even more important questions: who set them? And for what purpose? The answers are not as important as the people who provide them. Some answers leave scars—disfigured trails of cruelty. The words can be identical, but their meaning often depends on the facial expression of the person providing the response. Grins and grimaces convey distorted messages…ideas as different as thunder and grapefruit juice. It does not have to make sense; it requires us only to think in colors with radically different densities.

The wee hours of the morning are conducive to introspection. The mysteries of silence and darkness in the early hours coincide with dimensions of self that hide behind curtains of anonymity. Thoughts that one can share only with oneself—no matter how they try to hide in those dark moments—rise to the surface of consciousness, revealing aspects of personality both fascinating and troubling. Yet I wonder whether those revelations really are components of personality but are, instead, features of one’s self-portrait that remain hidden beneath layers of discarded paint that conceal the artist’s fears and passions. I often return to a concept whose magnetism is so powerful that it overwhelms any concerns I might have about what the idea might say about me. Regardless of what it may divulge about me, I cannot help but explore it; open it up and let the masks fall away. Instead of answering questions, though, stripping away the masks creates more lines of inquiry. Simple questions grow into quests. Daylight, though, will interrupt the inquisition. The sun’s intrusive rays will not infringe on my solitude for an hour and a half, but that brief delay is insufficient to ensure success. I need more control over daylight and darkness. I need powers that normally are reserved for fantasies.  Not “need.” “Want.” I’ve heard it called a hunger for power. A thirst for control. Greedy desire for for unchecked influence.

Years ago, I wrote about my wishes:

I like the idea of writing the autobiography of fire. The concept suits me. Fire draws us in, pulling us closer. But fire refuses to let us get too close. We cannot be close enough to safely understand the rage of combustion; we can only guess at how fire feels, what occurs at the precise moment when something solid becomes a superheated gas that disappears into smoke. Fire embodies passion. Raw, unbridled passion.

But it’s more than that. Suddenly, though, I am tired. I have no energy to overcome this damn radiology fatigue. I will just sleep my way through it.

I changed the configuration of my study yesterday. The transformation, relatively minor, reminded me there is only so much I can do with my “retreat” space. Oh, I could do more if I had an unlimited budget and access to talented architects and skilled craftsmen, but I have neither. I did what I could do with no money, severely limited skills and abilities, and impatience driven by reality. If time and resources did not constrain me, I might have added a few hundred square feet of floor space, floor-to-ceiling windows (with views of the Chicago skyline on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other), and an endless array of luxuries…like an espresso maker connected to a water line, a full-time massage therapist, and a grand piano (plus the ability to play it flawlessly). Impractical does not begin to describe my wishes. In my heart-of-hearts, I am a fantasist. Instead of all those unfulfilled wishes, though, my reconfiguration amounted to this: I turned the desk by 90°, moved my computer and a small table, and shredded  or otherwise discarded a considerable amount 0f paper that had hidden my desktop.

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For what purpose, I have to ask myself, did I want to rearrange my study? No special reason, I have to admit. Just change. A different view. An attempt to distract myself from a somewhat depressing reality. What the effort did, instead, was to focus my attention more keenly on how little control we have over the world and our place in it. I learned nothing new, of course; I just refreshed my perspective. Each of us experiences an incredibly short span of time in which we have consciousness. We have no way to compare the vast stretches of time before we became conscious and after that consciousness ceases to exist. We existed before we knew we existed. And we know we will exist in some form after our conscious existence ends, but we know little else. Perhaps it is impossible to know anything beyond what we already know about the before and after periods. Maybe that’s why we spend so little of our conscious time contemplating what was and what will be? Perhaps we should not even be asking questions for which there are no answers. Instead, maybe we should devote our energies to seeking questions that CAN be answered. Yet what good would that do us? We may or may not ever know. Billions of people have come and gone before us; probably asking the same questions and cursing our curiosity when we realize the answers have never been f0rmulated.

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My pain does not adhere to a scale devised by people who feel and think only in small whole numbers. My pain can be legitimately compared to the discomfort that causes a giraffe with a broken ankle to grimace…or to the anguish an antelope feels as a lion’s claws rips through its flesh. In the first case, “4” on a scale of 0 to 10 might be a gross exaggeration. But a “10” would be entirely insufficient to describe the level of an antelope’s agony in the second. A physical state that causes pain many times worse than unanesthetized vivisection can be described only by using exponents of no less than 10 to the power of 99 (10⁹⁹). So why is it that nurses insist on patients limiting their pain levels to a wholly inadequate scale? I feel guilty of whining if I assign a “7” to the pain in my gut, because I try to compare that pain to how it might feel to be torn to pieces by the blades of a rusted chain saw. My gut may hurt mightily, but is it only 3 whole numbers less than the unimaginable agony of having one’s limbs sliced off with poorly-maintained tree-trimming equipment?

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I opened my eyes, expecting darkness. Instead, soft light—dim enough that it cast no shadows but bright enough to expel every shred of darkness—filled the room. Somehow, daybreak had come and gone without announcing its arrival or departure. Yet here it…something…was, an indescribable day-part that had swallowed a piece of time to which I had grown accustomed over more than seventy-one years. I had awakened to the realization that I had missed unrecoverable moments. Never would I know, with certainty, what the experience would have been like, had I been awake. The probability was high that the missing moments would have been virtually indistinguishable from hundreds and hundreds of other moments I had experienced…but likelihood and certainty can be as different as night and day. I had no way of knowing exactly how this experience differed from all those other experiences. Memory was the only clue available to me, but we all know how utterly unreliable memory can be. And memory is of no use whatsoever when its switch is set to “off.” So, in reality, I could rely on no clues. None. If I had been able to dredge up a memory, it might have been something artificial; a dream crafted by a mind operating at less-than-capacity. My sub-par, barely functioning brain probably could not be trusted to replicate an experience I had never had. I could rely on it only to create almost inaudible conversations taking place in distant rooms, behind closed bank-vault doors. I recognized those voices, but not all the words they used. They whispered, as if lowering the volume of their indistinct utterances would disguise the sounds. They were right, of course. I could only make out a few of the words; enough, though, to realize they were planning on performing an illegal surgery on me, without my consent. I could hear one of the speakers slide on a pair of leather welder’s gloves, her voice getting giddy with excitement over what she was about to do. Her companion, who I surmised was a forensic accountant, tapped the number keys of an ancient calculator. My concern, experienced through a foggy mist of anesthesia, was that neither of them had been properly trained in the administration of anesthetics; and that I would be fully awake and able to feel excruciating pain for the full duration of the surgical procedure. That procedure, I learned from listening to their banter, would involve replacing my right kidney with a mechanical device that had kept Sergio Mendez alive during his battle with long COVID. This was nonsense, of course, but it was so damn vivid I could not dismiss it as simple hallucination. There are no “simple” hallucinations, by the way. Hallucinations are, by their very nature, complex reconfigurations of a labyrinthine web of pre-experiential nerve adjustments. But that is neither here nor there. The point is this: light and darkness belong in the same chapter as the prologue, which competes with theft and altruism.

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My conversation with the hospice nurse yesterday was not particularly informative. He was a nice guy, but I remain unsure why he was referred to me and he was unable to enlighten me. Before he left, he set up an appointment for me with a palliative care nurse. With each passing day, I become less certain of what the future holds. That’s probably a good thing. I measure time by the number of pills left in the bottle. Time is refreshed with each prescription, whether new or refilled. Yet time is a finite resource…if, indeed, it is either finite or a resource. I still wonder about the purpose of time and how we would cope with the world around us in the absence of all the measures of time. Would we notice its absence? Do we notice when we have “too much time on our hands?” Do we know what, exactly, that phrase means? We live in an eternal state of confusion…until we die, at which point we can no longer communicate the extent to which we are perpetually confused.

We are here and it is now.
Further than that,
all human knowledge
is moonshine.

~ H. L. Mencken ~

I am not quite sure what to expect this morning, when one or more representatives of Arkansas Hospice will come to the house to educate me. The visit, I assume,  probably will be purely informative; clarifying for me the concepts of hospice and palliative care. Having arranged for both levels of care for my late wife in her final days, I think I have a reasonably good understanding of the concept. However, I was in a state of shock and confusion during the waning weeks and days of the five-month period between her initial hospitalization and her transfer to in-patient hospice care. My “reasonably good understanding” might have been labeled “bewildered denial” by the doctors and nurses and mental health professionals who surrounded us during those wretched months-long moments. Still, I am familiar with—and deeply support—the notion of minimizing patients’ pain and discomfort when the approaching outcome of those conditions is inarguable. Prolonging patients’ physical pain and stoking their unjustifiable emotional hope is, in my opinion, the epitome of selfish cruelty. That having been said, though, I have not been given a time-dependent prognosis…so, it may be a bit early to begin a process that’s equivalent to “picking out a coffin.”  But I am operating in the dark; I may be alone in my ignorance of what “everybody knows.” The situation may echo the one in which my wife’s surgeon, thinking I already had been told the results of the biopsy of her breast tumor, said to me, “This (referring to my wife’s diagnosis) is a horrible disease. All we can do is to do our best to try to win the next battle so we do not lose the war.” She won that war, but lost the next one. The triumph in my first skirmish with lung cancer was a temporary win. Maybe Arkansas Hospice will be in a position to share what they know of my future. We shall see.

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We abandoned Ballard, the television series that was sold as a riveting follow-on to Bosch. We remain entranced by The Bridge, which began with the discovery of a body found on the Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden. The Bridge was first distributed in 2011; it’s just as intriguing 14 years later, I think, as it must have been when it was first broadcast.

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After the visit with Hospice, I’m off to my second (of this round) radiation therapy around noon today. I do SOOO love all this attention. Now, if only someone would perform a vivisection that I could watch later, on replay, that would make my day!

Under this tree, where light and shade
Speckle the grass like a Thrush’s breast,
Here, in this green and quiet place,
I give myself to peace and rest.

~ W.H. Davis ~

I willingly bought into the sales pitch for the new Amazon Prime television series. The promotional teasers did not do a good job of selling the show to me; I did that myself. I believed what the marketers told me I would get. Despite evidence to the contrary, I allowed my anticipation to build—I convinced myself the show would be at least as interesting as the marketing spots led me to believe. The new series would readily fill the emptiness left in my entertainment schedule with the demise of Bosch. Three back-to-back episodes of the new show—Ballard—did not fulfill the promise. I found myself harshly judging the script writers, as I listened to actors try and fail to deliver lines that could have been (and probably were) written by unemployable highway weed crews. These so-called “writers,” I imagined, were thirteen years old and immensely proud of their profound stupidity. But I might be unfairly relentless in my condemnation of their literary skills. Probably not. But maybe. Now, though, I question whether my appreciation of Bosch was entirely unearned. Was my adoration of Bosch a side-effect of my chemo-induced catatonia? Should I be embarrassed that I recommend Bosch to people who might consider my high esteem of the show a sign of irreparable mental decay? Or should I give it one more shot? I doubt I’ll be able to put myself through another of its mind-numbingly stupid and deeply improbable storylines again. The Dukes of Hazzard probably was more intellectually stimulating and emotionally riveting than Ballard can ever hope to be. Yet another reason to stick with the Scandinavian Crime Noir genre. I suspect I would get more out of a revival of Sunday morning church sermon re-runs that I would get from Ballard. Dammit. I just wanted to experience mindless entertainment. At least it was mindless. The production cast has considerably more work to do to make it entertaining.

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I could return to my old standby topics: cancer and other such downers. But I won’t. Not for now, anyway. Instead, I’ll pretend I am emerging from a cocoon suspended by a single silken thread from the highest point in the atrium of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. Below me, last night’s crowds left a mess of cigarette butts and wine stems and nearly-empty cocktail glasses reeking of whiskey. A few scraps of police “crime scene” tape litter the floor, as well, and cover elevator doors…warning guests to stay clear of the drunk, disorderly, and deceased who clog the clear-glass passenger cars. The $1400 Brooks Brothers suit I am wearing will be wrinkle-free when I leave the cocoon, as if it had just been pressed. Theatre-style spotlights, trained on me from the floor, will draw attention to me, but most guests will be staring instead at the magnificent magenta costumes worn by a flock of wingéd racoons soaring in formation from one balcony to the next. San Francisco is a city absorbed with itself; the only West Coast city known to have written its own fictionalized autobiography. The book’s publisher, Liquid Serpent, has published only one other book, Latter Day Saints and Sinners: Diving for Taffy in the Great Salt Lake. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, but the nominations were later withdrawn without explanation. Oh, the SF book’s title is Fermenting Okra on Telegraph Hill.

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I’ve been awake far too long today. Three hours so far this morning. I crave sleep and conversation, but not at the same time. My gut prefers sleep; something to take my mind off the pain that slipped back into me without warning. I imagine the pain will dissolve into the sheets…or into the creamy white leather of the sofa.

Food is not the answer. Pharmaceutical products do not provide the answer. Exercise offers answers, but not to the questions posed. Meditation offers advice, but in a language only ascetics can understand. There is danger in asking the wrong questions; especially when all the answers come in packages suitable only for perfume and falsehoods. You are not the right person to listen for an answer and now is not the right time to hear it. No one wants to rely on the wrong advice given one hundred years too early or one second too late. Timing is a pointless exercise when the faceless watch has no hands.

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I plan to write the unauthorized autobiography of a political assassin. The book will begin to take shape ten years after death, thereby giving me a more accurate perspective on what my life and death were like. Autobiographies are written far too early and they are penned by the wrong people. Only after the commotion surrounding a person’s death is a measured perspective of the deceased person’s life possible. And the author of an autobiography often is too close to the subject. Distance, both with respect to both time and the relationship with the writer, is necessary if the published product is to be as open and  honest as one would hope. Autobiographies drafted by the author often omit unflattering portrayals of the writer. Conversely, those same books frequently contain bald-faced lies, stories manufactured to make the author seem more intelligent, better looking, taller, and more stable financially. In many cases, the autobiographer describes an entirely different person than the one he/she ostensibly is writing about. For example, a baker who has worked as an icing-maker for his father’s cake-decorating shop may present himself (in his autobiographical work) as an accomplished big game hunter and president of several small European countries. He may augment that artificial experience by telling lies about his time in the Kansas State Navy, when he was awarded the Multi-Dimensional Heroism Trophy for saving the lives of several hundred Kansan sailors whose submarines were under attack by flocks of rabid piranhas. In fact he never served in the Kansas Navy; during the time he says he served, he actually was in prison for running a fentanyl smuggling ring between the Vatican and the Confederate States of America. The lesson? Fact check before you find yourself awaiting execution by guillotine for a crime you may not have committed.

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Why write this absurd drivel? Why not? I base these stories on the time I spent in Federal prison in the Achilles. I had been convicted of money laundering, sex trafficking, and counterfeit stamp collecting for a Pachedermalian gun runner named Lucinda Popcorn. The money was good, but the jobs were few and far between, so I took on some side gigs for a banjo counterfeiter, Bubba Stradivarius. Bubba was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

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There’s more than one way to skin a cat.