John Swinburn

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?

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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.

+++

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

Extraneous sounds. Barely audible shreds of irrelevant noise. Scraps of imaginary whispered debris—the only remaining evidence of the eerily silent echoes that once competed for limited space in the boundless emptiness of his mind. But was it really his mind? Did it belong to him, or was it just trickery, a reflection of a mirror image in that invisible territory at the intersection of sight and sound?

+++

I got a call from Arkansas Hospice yesterday, inquiring as to my interest in exploring hospice and palliative care.  Unless “they”  know something more than I do, I think it’s a bit early yet to delve too deeply into hospice care. But, what the hell, I might as well have a refresher on  the matter. On the other hand, I do not want to give the wrong impression…I have no interest, yet, in accelerating the timeframes involved in this fairly serious issue. Perhaps I should revisit the topic with them…maybe set an appointment for the first week in June 2075 to go over the introductory process in excruciating detail…

+++

Here I am, again, trying to decide what to write. Three hours into the day, I’ve decided not to worry about it. What a brilliant decision. I should make brilliant decisions more often.

+++

Yesterday’s breakfast—biscuits and gravy—was not what I would call an especially healthy breakfast. But it was satisfying…but could have added a bit more sausage to the mix. But…no. A healthy breakfast  is always a better choice. Except when it’s not. A deeply unhealthy breakfast can be delightful in the right circumstances.

We do not know what we are looking for; only that we are looking for something that will become apparent when we find it. But the explanation of the target of our search will be far too convoluted for us to know what we have found…only that we found something that is extremely important, but for reasons that are beyond us. And that’s the way it usually is with us; vitally important stuff that’s crucial for us to understand is absolutely, perpetually, eternally inaccessible. The answers to our questions become more urgent with each passing second…at the same moment the questions become harder to understand…because the languages in which they are written and spoken are completely unrelated. Which leads us to a corner of the universe which has never before been explored; one of those scary spots.

+++

The differences between healthy curiosity and meddlesome intrusion may not be the stark differences you imagine, at all. Instead, point of view might be the driving factor. Simple perspectives often contribute to how a person treats an expression of inquiry. The resident next door may consider his questions of you to be simple and straightforward…intended to be taken as a compliment of  his admiration of your handling of matters at hand. You, on the other hand, might label his apparent curiosity as blatant interference; the behavior of an over-eager nosy neighbor whose brashness you find offensive. What good might it do you if you were to made to understand the true—and perfectly innocuous—motive behind that offensive curiosity? On the other hand, how might your assessment be influenced by the knowledge that sinister motives prompted the neighbor’s interest? In either case, your judgment is colored by paranoia…its influence or lack thereof. Even when paranoia is dismissed as having no responsibility for one’s assessment, the very fact that it was considered a potential factor highlights the fact that it is almost always worth considering. Now, does all of this make sense to you? If it does, do you find that disturbing? Would you rather use much simpler filters to examine the the relative importance of all aspects of your life? And if that facet of existence commands a significant amount of your time, can you hold out any realistic hope that any aspect of your life might eventually become “normal?”

+++

I hold out little hope I will ever have a firm grasp on physics…quantum physics, in particular, but conversations about any regular old physics leaves me confused and embarrassed at the depth of my ignorance. Yet I continue to periodically engage in feeble attempts to understand such matters. Anyone else with even the most basic, crudest, and stunningly unsophisticated appreciation of physics would be judged far more knowledgeable. No matter how hard I try, I cannot fully comprehend the differences between the odor of emotions and the taste of gravity. Similarly, I simply cannot discern any obvious differences between light lavender, and the way numbers—especially prime numbers—smell. The fundamental complexities of the universe are far too elegant to be understood within the confines of a single human brain. Only when multiple brains are working collectively at the same speed and in the same direction as the others in close proximity can people have even a remote hope to truly “know” things that are hidden before us. I would explain these complexities to you if your brain had sufficient powers of concentration to get beyond the fourth level of GIANT UNDERSTANDING. Only at that “crimson” level is it possible to successfully blend colors with different kinds of sheep’s wool, thereby creating casual sounds that mimic hard-rock piano with just a hint of smoked coconut flavor. This is all bullshit, by the way. And I know it, of course.

+++

More when the time is right.

My thoughts are far from profound this morning. They are merely mundane remnants of incomplete ideas—poorly-formed notions left withering in the absence of fuel to keep them alive and growing. Thinking back on what once almost seemed flashes of near-brilliance, reality becomes clear: more often than not, they were just reflections of the surface scum of a pond of stagnant water.

Trust and hope are built on evidence—not on empty promises and blind confidence. The most successful con-artists, though, create believability by openly challenging their own lies. Using masterful and brazen manipulation, the most skillful schemers offer absolute assurances comprising nothing but vapor. Their convincing delivery of guarantees that have no substance supporting them can lead even the most astute among us to fall victim to their tactics. Their contemptible strategies have become so commonplace that the concepts of trust and hope seem obsolete—notions in which only the thoroughly gullible still believe. Human decency and morality…such desirable, but quaint, philosophies.

At a time in history—now—when trust in human decency and hope for strength in secular morality are so crucial, it is hard to tell whether the display of those attributes is real or not. Caution against being misled has become so vital that it grows into fear and the inability to know what is real and what is artificial. Who or what can we believe? We are advised to “have faith,” but urged to “be careful.” “Trust but verify” is the hallmark of this environment in which nothing can be accepted at face value. A line from Leonard Cohen’s  Hallelujah highlights the enigma: “Your faith was strong, but you needed proof.”

+++

The time between 3AM and 5AM simply vanished this morning. I spent almost all of that time at my desk, but I have not written enough to have filled all of those minutes. Where did those two hours go? How can such a long stretch of seconds and minutes just disappear…without a trace and without a memory?  The same thing can happen with longer periods; the months between starting first grade and my first Christmas break from school, for example. Or my junior year in high school. The entire span of time I spent in college. Adulthood. And old age is zipping by faster than the speed of light. Is it possible, I wonder, for a person to experience reality at different speeds in different dimensions? That might explain the sensation of feeling young and old at the same time. Like learning to talk and learning to drive simultaneously. Or being born and starting my first full-time job just hours apart. It may be just my imagination, but I seem to have a vague memory of planting the first redwood tree in Muir Woods about 1377 years ago, give or take a month or so.

+++

I occasionally find myself awake in the wee hours. Someone from my distant past…or more recent…may enter my mind for just a flash or for several minutes. Almost every time that happens, I wonder whether the person on my my mind at that moment is thinking of me simultaneously. I know the unlikelihood of that coincidence is astronomically high, of course, but I wonder whether it could occur, anyway. When that thought goes through my mind, I am SOOO tempted to try to reach that person (assuming they’re still living). I realize, of course, it would be quite disturbing to the person on the receiving end of my phone call. Disturbing to the point of instilling fear that I might be a stalker or worse. I put myself in their shoes; it could more than a little upsetting, I must admit. Downright scary, actually. But it’s completely innocuous; just a fleeting thought. It could be flattering, actually. I wonder: am I alone in having such a fleeting thought?

+++

Dawn is approaching. I can tell by the very dim blue-grey spots of sky showing through the deep dark forest background.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is one of his prose works from which is drawn this famous quote/poem, No Man Is an Island. The devotional, according to Wikipedia, “covers death, rebirth, and the early modern concept of sickness as a visit from God, reflecting internal sinfulness.” Donne wrote Emergent Occasions while he recovered from a serious sickness. Donne, then, considered his illness constituted a holy message concerning his own sins.

Washed away by the sea. That simple phrase, alone, is poetic. It summons a wide array of emotions, from loneliness to emptiness to grief to regret…to a swirling combination of them all that will not release us from its grip.  And it recognizes the extent to which something of overwhelming significance can be expunged, its remnants disappearing beneath the waves as if it never mattered.

My mother, who was an English teacher, used Donne’s words and his insights in her classes and in her conversations with me. I do not recall our conversations addressing any religious overtones in Donne’s work. In fact, I recall very little about those conversations… only that they took place and they prompted me to think about the intersections between language and emotion.  I doubt I ever questioned her about whether either one could thrive without the other. But I remember thinking that language might languish without emotion—and emotion would remain grey and hidden without language.

+++

That year, 2020, was the point at which the spokes rusted through. The axles broke. The tires’ knotted steel treads began showing through where the rubber had worn away. Humankind would have been wise to have floored the accelerator and turned the steering wheel—hard—just as we approached the most dangerous curve above the highest cliff. The freedom we would have felt, just before smashing into the rocks where they meet the sea, could have left an eternal imprint on our souls. If we had souls.

+++

The view from my windows is odd this morning. Like I am looking at trees through dirty panes of glass, smudged and unwashed for decades.

A short set of radiology treatments for me is in the planning stages. As soon as the radiologist completes the necessary calculations, etc., they will begin a 2-week (two consecutive 5-day sessions) series of treatments in an effort to eliminate or minimize pain associated with the spots on my spine. Yesterday, the oncologist’s nurse prescribed some very low-dose fentanyl patches that are applied to the skin and left for 3 days, then replaced with another patch for another 3 days. Laws (and/or treatment protocols) limit the strength of the initial prescriptions, but if necessary the strength can be increased over time. I hope the patches, which can be used to supplement the painkiller pills (or vice versa) prove effective. Time will tell.

+++

The post I began writing early this morning remains unfinished. It began as an effort to use comedic fiction to deaden the unpleasantness swirling around in my head. Instead, it evolved into a verbal Rorschach test that took a wide array of disconcerting directions. Two hours or more into it, I set it aside in the hope my head would clear, allowing a more appealing voice to leave its linguistic emotional mark on the screen. When I returned to it later this morning, my attempts to replace the dark smudges I had abandoned earlier grew into an even more dense and ominous layer. So, I gave up, surrendering to the reality that beating one’s head against the sharp edge of a guillotine blade is not a shortcut to serenity. And here I am. So, what can I say? Well, mi novia is at the pharmacy right now, picking up my pain-reduction patches. Earlier today, she took my car to have its windshield—damaged by a rock on the first of our unsuccessful trips to M.D. Anderson—replaced. And we’re expecting someone to come by later this afternoon to install our dishwasher, which could not be installed when delivered by Lowe’s because its original installation was considerably more involved than most “slide in” dishwasher installations. The installation is one of the dozens of things we need to have done by someone else because I am no longer sufficiently strong and agile to do it myself. The sense of worth that comes with the feeling that one can figure it out and get it done by oneself becomes vapor. I have never been the world’s most skilled handyman, but I’ve been able to wing it fairly well for most of my life. My confidence in my perseverance and in my physical capabilities has gone by the wayside. That’s the way of the world. There may have been a time when I mocked old men who were bitter about being unable to tie their own shoes without help. Now I think I am one.

+++

I saw some posts on Facebook this morning…or yesterday…about fresh, sweet Georgia peaches. Now, when I think about those posts, the glands in my neck urge me to drive to “peach country” to pick some peaches off the tree. But I might fall off the ladder while trying. Maybe I’ll order them online.

“If we were honest with ourselves, we would admit our lives are fictions, narrative yarns we spin from experiences as we witness them, not necessarily as they are. We write the stories of our lives on the fly, stitching together thin fibers of personal interpretation into whole cloth.  We dress ourselves in clothing of our own making; some wear gossamer gowns, others wear costumes made of canvas.”

Changed by a few minor editorial decisions over the years, the preceding words reflected my thinking of nearly nine years ago. Looking back at those syllables and sentences, I realize my words may not have quite conveyed the essence of their intended meaning. Had my mood been slightly different when I wrote them, originally, I might have phrased the message in another way:

“We do not know ourselves, so we peek through a veil of ignorance, looking for clues that might help define us. We then mold our personalities around impressions of how others see us—or how we want to be seen—creating characters who bear little resemblance to the person behind the mask as we look into a mirror.”

A lot has changed over the last nine years, though. The fragility of life has been emphatically asserted, more than once.  That fragility, though, has been counterbalanced by the steadfast, unyielding, and irrevocable permanence of death. Life is not assured, but death is guaranteed to follow life. Pain tends to interrupt the clarity of philosophies, except when emotions are anesthetized, which is a rarity.

+++

My visit with the radiologist yesterday confirmed for me that my cancer has metastasized to two vertebral structures, in addition to several lymph nodes. The good news…that some existing spots improved with the first new chemo…was counterbalanced by the bad news of the expanding reach of the cancer. I knew from the start that a recurrence of lung cancer usually means the disease is incurably terminal, but I’ve held out hope that I might be among those “one in a million” to prove that certainty is unreliable. That hope must be an emotional reaction to such news. Today, I return to the oncologist for a visit to follow-up on last week’s chemo session. I will inquire about alternative pain meds; the ones I’ve started taking increasingly over the last few weeks are not as effective as I’d like and they can cause some side-effects that can be worse in some ways than the pain they are meant to combat. For the last few weeks, the usual fatigue has been increasingly accompanied by bouts of pain.  In recent days, the pain in my gut/chest has become more frequent, to the point of being almost constant. It is not excruciating, but seems to be making incremental progress in that direction, as if it is approaching pain as a desirable objective. Sleeping through it would be nice, but it awakens me sometimes, which is more than a little annoying. Last night, I woke in the wee hours, drenched in sweat. When I returned to bed after the obligatory pee, the cold, wet sheets made me feel like I was crawling into an icy tent, its Gore-Tex floor sitting atop a snow drift. I’ve never actually crawled into an icy Gore-Tex tent floor sitting atop a snow drift, but I think I know how it would feel, now.

+++

It’s hard to maintain a good mood when in pain. And when I’m in a bad mood, I do not want to be around myself. Pain makes it worse. Even moderate pain. More severe pain degrades my mood even more, making living with myself yet more difficult. If I were someone else, I would not tolerate my presence in a particularly bad mood…but when it’s me, I have little choice. It’s best to isolate myself until my mood passes…or I do. That’s intended to be a little dark humor, by the way.

+++

Mi novia says caring for me is not a burden; that she knows I would do the same for her. And I would. But I also know it’s stressful and nerve-wracking and tiring. My appreciation of what she is dealing with is immense, but not enough to make it any more appealing for her. And the likely progression of the disease is apt to make it even more difficult. That is one of the reasons I’ve always said I would like to build a stash of medications. Ach, never mind. It’s too late now to gather enough to accomplish the desired objective. Unless, of course, anyone reading this diatribe would anonymously provide me with 15 grams of sodium pentobarbital in injectable liquid solution and access to a physician willing to do the deed. More dark humor.

+++

Enough typing for this morning. I have to get ready to go out and about.

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As a child, I learned that sounds arise from vibrations of an object that disturb the media surrounding the object. These disturbances create variations in pressure that propagate as waves that our brains interpret as sounds upon reaching our ears.  Well, that’s not exactly what I learned, but it’s close…yet not sufficiently accurate to be classified as a fact. Our ears implies that non-humans reading these words do not hear sounds. If we examine the assertion more closely, the statement suggests some non-humans are capable of reading the words on this screen. Beyond those fantasies, the claim that our brains interpret media disturbances as sounds is sheer folly. However, that claim happens to be entirely accurate to the extent that listeners to Fox News insist that the noises they process from their radio and television and computer speakers carry information. In truth, those noises are cleverly disguised right-wing propaganda designed to mold brains that are as malleable as lime-flavored gelatine in a hot bowl.

My intent, when I started writing this morning, was to explore the sounds of thunder. Which, as we know, are noises that arise when lightning bolts rapidly (almost instantly) heat the surrounding air to almost inconceivably high temperatures. This heating, followed by rapid cooling, causes the surrounding air to expand and then contract, producing a sound wave we hear as thunder. Again, though, the question arose in my mind: what is the identity of this we who hears the thunder?  Obviously, this simplistic explanation of the sound of thunder fails to account for the millions of realities the scientists decide to omit from their explanations.  Who, by the way, are these scientists? Are they the same group of people who practice the special version of voodoo we call meteorology? In the name of all that’s holy, I hereby assert that meteorologists are simply practitioners of the occult pseudo-science called weather-forecasting. Believe me, I know whereof I write. I have actually engaged in dialogues with meteorologists—conversations that raise the hairs on the back of my neck and in the curves of my knees.

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I would continue to document my exploratory pseudo-journalistic discoveries, but I am scheduled to appear before another “ologist,” this morning. A radiologist…a man who, ostensibly, may be able to aim tiny beams of invisible light at microscopic cancer cells, causing those demonic cells to explode in bursts of magic and supernatural transmogrification unequaled in modern times.

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By the way, I want to thank Meg and Patty and Hope for their words of encouragement for yesterday’s post. Their actions just show how one’s world can change by employing the right medium for one’s begging endeavors.

I do not look forward to the home-nurse visit today. I’d rather go back to bed. In fact, I do not know whether she will come today, but I suspect she will. I knew better than to get up so damn early, but the other option would have been to stay in bed with my eyes open and my gut behaving badly…pain, but not bad enough to warrant taking hydrocodone. At some point, the pain either will slip away for awhile or will merit giving in to those damn little pills. And I should take my “morning” pills, too. And the other stuff. I am not delighted by needing pills to make the day moderately tolerable. I’ll sleep later; that’s certain…I was up just after 2. Again. Three+ hours ago. And still futzing around with the blog.

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I may return to this blog later today. Or post this one, then write another one. The following paragraph will appear to have been written by a man in the throes of drinking a few pints of unicorn blood. I do not consume unicorn blood before 6:00 AM; so, no worries. I’ll feed the cat. Maybe that will turn the day into a winner.

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Tomorrow—July 1, 2025—is the first day of the downward spiral toward the conclusion of the final six months of a year that ushered in the demise of the first quarter of a dying century. Put in other ways, that same moment marks both the commencement of a once-in-a-lifetime calendar experience—a celebration of an eternal new beginning and the mourning of the disappearance of a moment in time that can never again be captured. Yet never has there been a moment in time that could be captured. Time can be lost. It can escape. Moments can slip away, but they cannot return…undamaged. Time cannot be retrieved. It cannot be preserved. Time cannot be bottled or canned or pickled or otherwise maintained for eternity. Time is an immeasurable commodity. Clocks and calendars can can measure what was, but not what is—because, once measured, it is gone. Future moments of time can be estimated, but not measured. In fact, time is simply a prediction—or a memory—an imprecise estimate of beliefs, presented as if they were immutable facts. The same is true of wealth, thirst, hunger…and so much more. All things…places…times…temperatures…circumstances…represent comparisons. Today versus tomorrow. Here versus there. Then versus now. Hot versus cold. Hunger versus satiation.  Contexts. Spectra. Continua. But comparisons and contrasts grow weaker and weaker with each expression. Every iteration becomes more difficult to defend. Eventually, our efforts to identify relationships between time, temperature, and taste become sordid and meaningless.

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If you did not read this, I will understand. It’s not worth reading.