It is the beginning of longer days. December 22nd and we begin crawling into longer hours of daylight. No one has told the temperature fairies however because it is "powerful cold" out there. If the actual air temperature goes into the single digits, its really not even worth mentioning. The alarmist weather people are simply mocking the idea of warmth when they say things like "And including the windchill, it feels like 26 degrees below zero....". Thank you. I'm not leaving my house. Until April.
I can't however. The last round of Chemo happens Christmas Eve, and I need to be there. I'm going to wear my closest approximation of a Holiday Sweater. It's green. Sans reindeer or glittery appliqued elves, but green nonetheless. It will look particularly striking offset by the giant cherry red tubes of Adriamyacin the poor nurse lady will have to administer. What sort of gift do you get someone who manually injects poison into your veins? I bet you Emily Post can't answer that either. If I could I would get every single one of those lovelies a Villa in Niece, a pony, a box of chocolates. Oncology nurses are made of some brass, yo!
So this bit is ending. Though I am insanely glad and want to run about in footy pajamas, I am strangely apprehensive about what happens next. I've got a handle on this chemo thing, these weird poisons running in my veins. I never thought, back in August, that I ever would. Funny what is possible when you have no choice, eh?
So surgery. Surgery? Will I go into fits? Will I play in traffic in its aftermath? I don't know. I will tell you this, however; I want this nasty beast gone, gone, gone!! Away from me and my family and my friends. Gone away so there will be no more fear and awfulness. I just want the thing gone. The thing happens to be dying off in my left breast. My rational brain ferociously wants it gone, cut off, removed, physically not on me anymore, And take the other one too for that matter because I'm not going to dance this dance again.
But then my heart, the same heart that searched out second and third opinions, the same heart that tried to find another solution, that heart...that heart isn't so sure its that strong. To which my rational head says "Get over it, wussy pants. You can't win lying down!!" I think that's true. You can't. Grieve the loss and get on with it. I don't have a cold. I have cancer. Intense navel contemplation is a luxury I cannot afford.
It is a character flaw. Yes. I know. It likely has a name. I see things in black and white. I recognize it. It's possible that it's a defense mechanism I've been mastering my whole life for this exempt purpose. Who knows. Is it healthy? I don't care really if it gets me up in the morning. People fool themselves all the time with far more dangerous excuses.
My resolution for 09' is to not suffer fools.....(and I, in my own silliness, am included). I have very little time for bullshit anymore.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
First Snow
Christmas. A word that strikes fear in the hearts of men.
When I was a kid, the official start of the Christmas season came with a familiar trip down Second Avenue (on the bus) on a day rather like today. My mother was always irrevocably moved by the first New York City snowfall. It didn't happen often, and the snow never stuck around for longer than eight minutes, but it would be on a day like today after I got home from school that we two intrepid souls would venture downtown and engage in the Manhattan Christmas tree buying ritual.
My mother is about five foot three...in a hat. A wee person. I was young, 5,6,7...not much taller. The snow would begin to fall and my mother would wax on about its beauty, winsomely winding a woolen scarf about my neck. Then she'd dig around for her snow boots and her weird, fluffy winter hat. She'd whistle "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" in the elevator downstairs. And together, arm in arm, we would set off into the city's first snow to buy a Christmas tree.
The blissful holiday magic, however, sort of ended there. Usually about the time we got to the bus stop.
My mother was the sort of New Yorker who disdained cabs. Cabs were an extravagance. The subway. The bus. These were the legitimate modes of transport. She usually walked everywhere, but with a six year old in tow she conceded to a bus ride down to Hell's Kitchen. It was cold, I remember. Northeastern winter cold. Her whistling would quiet and I would begin my overtures as to how cold my feet were. But it was Christmastime.
I don't know why all the Christmas trees in New York were sold on 23rd Street but they were so there we would travel with our fellow Midtown dwellers, like we had seen a star or something. We had come to this place, by foot, by bus, by pachyderm, to haggle for the best deal on a live Fraser Fir. And it had to be a Fraser Fir. None of those other trees that lost their needles (!). No, no it was going to be a real live Fraser Fir and she was absolutely not going to pay full price for it and $50... you've got to be kidding and where did you think you were, Westchester? To watch my mother work a tree lot was a thing of beauty.
As a kid, wandering these makeshift evergreen dealerships was like walking through a sidewalk forest circus. They'd go on for blocks, populated by the most wonderful assortment of unsavories trying to sell you one thing or another; a Rolex, a dime bag, a Cabbage Patch Kid. More often than not, wearing a Santa had and sucking on a cigar. I would always stand next to the 14 or 18 foot trees, trying desperately hard to convince her that our apartment was, in fact, as big as The Met. "Yes, yes it will too fit, Mommy!!", lamenting the fact that our measly 8 foot ceilings were going to ruin Christmas. Pouting often ensued.
But finally, as the pretty snow had given way to miserably windy, raw cold, my mother and the tree-dealer would settle on a price not insulting to either of them. The tree man would "tie it up" for free, which is the evergreen equivalent of trussing a turkey. And then, deal done, tree gotten, my tiny mother and I would begin to drag that Fraser Fir the twenty-odd blocks back to our apartment.
This is where the Holiday fun really started.
I was a kid. I wasn't used to being out late in the cold on a school night. (That's my best excuse for ridiculous Holiday behavior). Three blocks into it, I'd start in about how I was so cold I was going to sit down and die of cold to which my mother would respond how she'd hate to leave me on the sidewalk for all the crazy people, but she would if I didn't stop complaining. Not receiving the appropriate response, I would start in on how we'd passed two bus stops already and how the bus was the warmest place ever and that I would personally convince the bus driver to let us have a tree on the bus. My mother would remind me how mean New York City bus drivers were and how our tree was so big the bus wouldn't even stop. Hopeless, desperate, and thinking about nothing but hot chocolate I would start in about how if she really loved me she would get a cab and how other kid's Mom's didn't have weird hang ups about cabs, especially at night when it was so cold with a tree and everything......
It was usually about this point when she would throw up her hands in exhaustion. Flushed and freezing, she'd remind me how Santa was watching to which I'd smart-off something about his reindeer at least having fur coats. At wits end, she'd finally give in and make me sit on the Christmas tree a few feet back from the street (because cabs WILL NOT stop for anyone with a Christmas tree, kid or no kid, snow or no snow), swallow her pride and hail a taxi. After several pulling away with mention of the word "Tree", eventually a kind-hearted cabbie would take pity on us. I would, of course, do my absolute best to look desperate and in need of warm chocolaty beverages. The cabbie would tie the tree to the roof and all the money my poor mother had saved in the haggling would be spent on the tip for the driver who helped drag the tree inside.
Every year. It happened like that every year.
Christmas is not about trees or presents or lights or dinner parties. Its not about Jesus or wise men for that matter either. It is about memory.
This day, (some may say arbitrary, some may not) happens at the end of every year where the memories of all the year's past days sort of culminate. It is impossible to escape. It is burned into our collective knowing. Christian, non-Christian, consumer, non-consumer. Where were we last year? It's a benchmark. It isn't as desperate as New Year's Eve. Too much of our childhoods were tangled up in its ribbons, for good or bad. The remembering is deeper. There is more hope in it. Hope in memory.
December 25th is three days after the shortest day of the year. In the darkest part, where the light is weakest, it is a mark of a quiet beginning.
Evergreen.
When I was a kid, the official start of the Christmas season came with a familiar trip down Second Avenue (on the bus) on a day rather like today. My mother was always irrevocably moved by the first New York City snowfall. It didn't happen often, and the snow never stuck around for longer than eight minutes, but it would be on a day like today after I got home from school that we two intrepid souls would venture downtown and engage in the Manhattan Christmas tree buying ritual.
My mother is about five foot three...in a hat. A wee person. I was young, 5,6,7...not much taller. The snow would begin to fall and my mother would wax on about its beauty, winsomely winding a woolen scarf about my neck. Then she'd dig around for her snow boots and her weird, fluffy winter hat. She'd whistle "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" in the elevator downstairs. And together, arm in arm, we would set off into the city's first snow to buy a Christmas tree.
The blissful holiday magic, however, sort of ended there. Usually about the time we got to the bus stop.
My mother was the sort of New Yorker who disdained cabs. Cabs were an extravagance. The subway. The bus. These were the legitimate modes of transport. She usually walked everywhere, but with a six year old in tow she conceded to a bus ride down to Hell's Kitchen. It was cold, I remember. Northeastern winter cold. Her whistling would quiet and I would begin my overtures as to how cold my feet were. But it was Christmastime.
I don't know why all the Christmas trees in New York were sold on 23rd Street but they were so there we would travel with our fellow Midtown dwellers, like we had seen a star or something. We had come to this place, by foot, by bus, by pachyderm, to haggle for the best deal on a live Fraser Fir. And it had to be a Fraser Fir. None of those other trees that lost their needles (!). No, no it was going to be a real live Fraser Fir and she was absolutely not going to pay full price for it and $50... you've got to be kidding and where did you think you were, Westchester? To watch my mother work a tree lot was a thing of beauty.
As a kid, wandering these makeshift evergreen dealerships was like walking through a sidewalk forest circus. They'd go on for blocks, populated by the most wonderful assortment of unsavories trying to sell you one thing or another; a Rolex, a dime bag, a Cabbage Patch Kid. More often than not, wearing a Santa had and sucking on a cigar. I would always stand next to the 14 or 18 foot trees, trying desperately hard to convince her that our apartment was, in fact, as big as The Met. "Yes, yes it will too fit, Mommy!!", lamenting the fact that our measly 8 foot ceilings were going to ruin Christmas. Pouting often ensued.
But finally, as the pretty snow had given way to miserably windy, raw cold, my mother and the tree-dealer would settle on a price not insulting to either of them. The tree man would "tie it up" for free, which is the evergreen equivalent of trussing a turkey. And then, deal done, tree gotten, my tiny mother and I would begin to drag that Fraser Fir the twenty-odd blocks back to our apartment.
This is where the Holiday fun really started.
I was a kid. I wasn't used to being out late in the cold on a school night. (That's my best excuse for ridiculous Holiday behavior). Three blocks into it, I'd start in about how I was so cold I was going to sit down and die of cold to which my mother would respond how she'd hate to leave me on the sidewalk for all the crazy people, but she would if I didn't stop complaining. Not receiving the appropriate response, I would start in on how we'd passed two bus stops already and how the bus was the warmest place ever and that I would personally convince the bus driver to let us have a tree on the bus. My mother would remind me how mean New York City bus drivers were and how our tree was so big the bus wouldn't even stop. Hopeless, desperate, and thinking about nothing but hot chocolate I would start in about how if she really loved me she would get a cab and how other kid's Mom's didn't have weird hang ups about cabs, especially at night when it was so cold with a tree and everything......
It was usually about this point when she would throw up her hands in exhaustion. Flushed and freezing, she'd remind me how Santa was watching to which I'd smart-off something about his reindeer at least having fur coats. At wits end, she'd finally give in and make me sit on the Christmas tree a few feet back from the street (because cabs WILL NOT stop for anyone with a Christmas tree, kid or no kid, snow or no snow), swallow her pride and hail a taxi. After several pulling away with mention of the word "Tree", eventually a kind-hearted cabbie would take pity on us. I would, of course, do my absolute best to look desperate and in need of warm chocolaty beverages. The cabbie would tie the tree to the roof and all the money my poor mother had saved in the haggling would be spent on the tip for the driver who helped drag the tree inside.
Every year. It happened like that every year.
Christmas is not about trees or presents or lights or dinner parties. Its not about Jesus or wise men for that matter either. It is about memory.
This day, (some may say arbitrary, some may not) happens at the end of every year where the memories of all the year's past days sort of culminate. It is impossible to escape. It is burned into our collective knowing. Christian, non-Christian, consumer, non-consumer. Where were we last year? It's a benchmark. It isn't as desperate as New Year's Eve. Too much of our childhoods were tangled up in its ribbons, for good or bad. The remembering is deeper. There is more hope in it. Hope in memory.
December 25th is three days after the shortest day of the year. In the darkest part, where the light is weakest, it is a mark of a quiet beginning.
Evergreen.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
It's (not) Only Temporary
I feel as though I have been failing at the blogging lately. I blame it on the debilitative napping. I can take pain all day. Pain makes me mad. Pain keeps me up. But the accumulative effects of chemo makes me ridiculously TIRED! And tired is really a bitch-ass excuse not to do anything. Which, yes, makes me mad, but then I get very sleepy and the anger fades to dreams. And the dreams are weird too. I feel a little like the mouse at the Alice in Wonderland tea party, sort of round and sleepy and wearing a silly hat.
About the hat. I'm so done with the hat! I'm done with not having any hair. It's cold. I am reminded every time I look at myself that I'm sick. I don't know if I'll actually feel like I'm getting better until I grow some damned hair. The cutest hats in the world can't cover up the fact that I used to have several feet of long blond hair that I miss daily. Yes, I miss it. I miss it like you miss someone who went on a long vacation. I've had long hair my entire life, like I've had green eyes and a funny sneeze. And I know, I know "It's only temporary!" I hear it all the time from the best intending folks. But it's not temporary right now.
So I saw the good CAPTAIN Thursday as they shot the last of the crazy-mean platinum stuff in me. Two more rounds and I'm done. But like every light at the end of every tunnel, you can't always be sure its not a train. This was sort of a train. I have two more doses of chemo (yeah) except it will be considerably nastier than the stuff I'm used to. It will make me sicker. I will have both in quick succession, only two weeks apart, so recovery time will be shorter. And to add to the holiday fun, I'll be having my last round on Christmas Eve. Not quite sure how to think of that one. "Honey remember the Christmas Eve we spent in the chemo room? Nothing like some Cytoxin and a 100-calorie snack pack to celebrate the season!" Messed up as that may be, my last chemo was supposed to be on New Year's Day. As far as I'm concerned, the universe can just have my 2008! I'd rather keep all the bullshit squarely in the cosmic vicinity of last year. It would be a bad omen to begin 2009 plugged into a wall.
I had a genetic test done two weeks ago to determine if I have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. For all y'all who are unsure what post-industrial goth band I'm talking about, the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have been marked as hereditary indicators for breast cancers within families. My family tree is riddled with cancer. My aunt died from the disease I have (IBC) before there was a name for it. My mother has been fighting cancer for 15 years. It is a disease I had become acutely familiar with before I was diagnosed. The very nice GENETIC SCIENCE LADY was convinced I had at least one of the genes, as was I, but I can convince myself I have anything if given the chance. Cancer makes you spooky.
I don't have the genes. That's what the fancy pants test showed. I call bullshit! I think I have some special secret mutant gene that hasn't been discovered yet. My genes are just waiting for Columbus or Magellan or Cartier. The GENETIC SCIENCE LADY agreed. I love it when people who possess such a foreign and important knowing agree with me. Makes me feel smart and surly. All of this matters because it comes down to whether or not a double mastectomy is medically necessary. Which leads back to the "Its only temporary..." thing.
This is what happens when time passes, when progress is made. The thing hanging out at the end of this long haul, the surgery bit of this delightful journey, is getting close. It is tangible. People with important titles are clearing blocks of time on hospital schedules. It is real, whether I like it or not. It is real and I have to be there. All I have been wanting is for this miserable chemo-trip to end. Soon it will and what looms at the end of it is not a lot of fun. To paraphrase good old Hunter S., that great white light at the end of a bad trip is sometimes worse. Sometimes that great awfulness is just prep for some serious awfulness. Sometimes the white light has claws.
The CAPTAIN is concerned with the cancer. I am overjoyed that that is what he is concerned with. Wouldn't have it any other way. He informed me that reconstruction will not be discussed for a good long while after surgery, not til my margins were clear and all that. Radiation will follow and I will get all juiced up with Herceptin two weeks after surgery. My hair will kind of come back but it will be thinner. He will radiate the lymph nodes above my collarbone as well as the breast tissue. This sent me into tears.
MOTHERFUCK enough! Enough already! Radiated skin doesn't like to heal. I have seen this with my mother. You burn out the cancer but what's left is confused and really doesn't want to play anymore. That would be cool except its the skin where my new boobs are supposed to go. "This will make the reconstruction more difficult." said the CAPTAIN. Awesome. "But this is only temporary." I'm sorry, darling, but walking around the world without a tit for a year seems awfully fucking permanent. That's when I told him "You're going to take them both." I am off-kilter enough. I certainly don't need any more help.
This entire cancer fiasco is not "only temporary". No. No sir. There is no part of it that is or ever will be. The CAPTAIN's job is to cure me. Cure is a word full of trade-offs. If you are willing to do this than I can cure you. If you are willing to give this up than I can cure you. If you are willing to be afraid, lose your hair, not have kids, walk the earth scarred, hurt like none other, miss yr old life, be burned to a crisp, be shot full of poison, fight every waking moment, have water taste like battery acid, get fat, puke yr guts out, cry, cry more, throw things, send yr husband to sixes and sevens,act like yr fine, make yr friends sad, be stripped of vain comforts like hair and eyebrows, be hungry and never full, get ugly, swallow immeasurable loss, make yr dog worry then, maybe then, I can cure you. Maybe then you get to live.
Well that seems like nothing really when, if you don't, you don't get to be on the planet to bitch about being fat anymore, right? CAPTAIN, I will do whatever it is you need me to do for however long you need me to do it, just don't let me slip off this world. I've got shit to do. It is, however, not temporary. Long after (and it will be long after) the day to day fight is gone, the chemo and the scars and the weird burning smells, I won't ever forget it. It is an ugly thing to know. And, at the moment, its a wretched place to have to hang out. Fuck the edge! I want back into the sweet soft complacent middle. But this is the way it is now.
It is amazing how the universe asks you for incredible energy when all you want to do is take a nap. Wars have rarely ever been won napping, however. Hush now and wake up!
About the hat. I'm so done with the hat! I'm done with not having any hair. It's cold. I am reminded every time I look at myself that I'm sick. I don't know if I'll actually feel like I'm getting better until I grow some damned hair. The cutest hats in the world can't cover up the fact that I used to have several feet of long blond hair that I miss daily. Yes, I miss it. I miss it like you miss someone who went on a long vacation. I've had long hair my entire life, like I've had green eyes and a funny sneeze. And I know, I know "It's only temporary!" I hear it all the time from the best intending folks. But it's not temporary right now.
So I saw the good CAPTAIN Thursday as they shot the last of the crazy-mean platinum stuff in me. Two more rounds and I'm done. But like every light at the end of every tunnel, you can't always be sure its not a train. This was sort of a train. I have two more doses of chemo (yeah) except it will be considerably nastier than the stuff I'm used to. It will make me sicker. I will have both in quick succession, only two weeks apart, so recovery time will be shorter. And to add to the holiday fun, I'll be having my last round on Christmas Eve. Not quite sure how to think of that one. "Honey remember the Christmas Eve we spent in the chemo room? Nothing like some Cytoxin and a 100-calorie snack pack to celebrate the season!" Messed up as that may be, my last chemo was supposed to be on New Year's Day. As far as I'm concerned, the universe can just have my 2008! I'd rather keep all the bullshit squarely in the cosmic vicinity of last year. It would be a bad omen to begin 2009 plugged into a wall.
I had a genetic test done two weeks ago to determine if I have the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. For all y'all who are unsure what post-industrial goth band I'm talking about, the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have been marked as hereditary indicators for breast cancers within families. My family tree is riddled with cancer. My aunt died from the disease I have (IBC) before there was a name for it. My mother has been fighting cancer for 15 years. It is a disease I had become acutely familiar with before I was diagnosed. The very nice GENETIC SCIENCE LADY was convinced I had at least one of the genes, as was I, but I can convince myself I have anything if given the chance. Cancer makes you spooky.
I don't have the genes. That's what the fancy pants test showed. I call bullshit! I think I have some special secret mutant gene that hasn't been discovered yet. My genes are just waiting for Columbus or Magellan or Cartier. The GENETIC SCIENCE LADY agreed. I love it when people who possess such a foreign and important knowing agree with me. Makes me feel smart and surly. All of this matters because it comes down to whether or not a double mastectomy is medically necessary. Which leads back to the "Its only temporary..." thing.
This is what happens when time passes, when progress is made. The thing hanging out at the end of this long haul, the surgery bit of this delightful journey, is getting close. It is tangible. People with important titles are clearing blocks of time on hospital schedules. It is real, whether I like it or not. It is real and I have to be there. All I have been wanting is for this miserable chemo-trip to end. Soon it will and what looms at the end of it is not a lot of fun. To paraphrase good old Hunter S., that great white light at the end of a bad trip is sometimes worse. Sometimes that great awfulness is just prep for some serious awfulness. Sometimes the white light has claws.
The CAPTAIN is concerned with the cancer. I am overjoyed that that is what he is concerned with. Wouldn't have it any other way. He informed me that reconstruction will not be discussed for a good long while after surgery, not til my margins were clear and all that. Radiation will follow and I will get all juiced up with Herceptin two weeks after surgery. My hair will kind of come back but it will be thinner. He will radiate the lymph nodes above my collarbone as well as the breast tissue. This sent me into tears.
MOTHERFUCK enough! Enough already! Radiated skin doesn't like to heal. I have seen this with my mother. You burn out the cancer but what's left is confused and really doesn't want to play anymore. That would be cool except its the skin where my new boobs are supposed to go. "This will make the reconstruction more difficult." said the CAPTAIN. Awesome. "But this is only temporary." I'm sorry, darling, but walking around the world without a tit for a year seems awfully fucking permanent. That's when I told him "You're going to take them both." I am off-kilter enough. I certainly don't need any more help.
This entire cancer fiasco is not "only temporary". No. No sir. There is no part of it that is or ever will be. The CAPTAIN's job is to cure me. Cure is a word full of trade-offs. If you are willing to do this than I can cure you. If you are willing to give this up than I can cure you. If you are willing to be afraid, lose your hair, not have kids, walk the earth scarred, hurt like none other, miss yr old life, be burned to a crisp, be shot full of poison, fight every waking moment, have water taste like battery acid, get fat, puke yr guts out, cry, cry more, throw things, send yr husband to sixes and sevens,act like yr fine, make yr friends sad, be stripped of vain comforts like hair and eyebrows, be hungry and never full, get ugly, swallow immeasurable loss, make yr dog worry then, maybe then, I can cure you. Maybe then you get to live.
Well that seems like nothing really when, if you don't, you don't get to be on the planet to bitch about being fat anymore, right? CAPTAIN, I will do whatever it is you need me to do for however long you need me to do it, just don't let me slip off this world. I've got shit to do. It is, however, not temporary. Long after (and it will be long after) the day to day fight is gone, the chemo and the scars and the weird burning smells, I won't ever forget it. It is an ugly thing to know. And, at the moment, its a wretched place to have to hang out. Fuck the edge! I want back into the sweet soft complacent middle. But this is the way it is now.
It is amazing how the universe asks you for incredible energy when all you want to do is take a nap. Wars have rarely ever been won napping, however. Hush now and wake up!
Thursday, November 13, 2008
The New World
There are words in the world. I understand this. I cannot find the right ones.
I have been staring at this screen for an hour ( actually, I've been staring at it for a week), trying to figure out what to say about the last weekend, the last week, and I cannot find the words. Rendering my smart-ass speechless says volumes.
First of all, as of November 4th, I don't have to learn Portuguese. I can almost be sick in my own country now and that is a huge relief. The part that worried me most, (other than Sarah Palin, a hundred year war, the possibility of a further privatization of health care, and the ridiculous $5000 health care credit idea) was the pet quarantine. How does that work? Can you go visit? Can you bring roast beef? Doesn't matter now.
I have a friend who still cries when she sees pictures of Election Day. I understand. I am reminded by the young and the beautiful crowding outside the White House telling a certain man to "Get the fuck out!" that not everyone lived through the Reagan Years. These last decades those of us who were "trickled down" on have watched our country morph into something ugly, gaudy, and sick. Self-serving and self-indulgent. That "shining city on a hill" had become some awful tan-and-taupe gated community. The rest of us weren't welcome anymore.
On November 4th we beat the gate down.
The following weekend was Apocalypse Meow.
If November 4th did not bring hope enough, the weekend that followed sealed the deal. I am a doe-eyed cynic, a worst-case scenario sweetheart, an Eeyore who sings. For all of my want for things to be better, I am tempered by the fact that things rarely cooperate the way one may want them to. But as of the late, late evening of November 9th, several shots of bourbon ahead of myself, I realized that I'm a changed person. Cynic be damned. I've been broken. Built again. My gate was beat down too.
Thank you is not not full of enough to begin to express the depth and breadth of this. Thank you is what you say after someone has given you a blender.
Community and family. I keep going back to community and family. Howard said it best on Friday night, "This is community. This is family". You all built me a barn and as soon as I possibly can I will return the favor. I'll build you a bajillion barns and sing in all of them. And make chicken.
When the idea of a benefit came up my first response was "No!" which was greeted with a resounding "Too fucking bad, get over it, we're doing it anyway, buck up!" But I was reminded by a man who has known me a good many years that all the good in the world that you do doesn't mean shit unless you let other people return the favor. Otherwise its just selfishness. I had to remind myself quite a few times that The Rev. was right. If good can come of this bullshit cancer thing than let good come of it. Let good come of it!! There is no better way of telling it to go to hell!
I will find the right words soon. Right now I can offer up the awkward-not-making-much-sense ones. The ones that don't seem to express what I mean. I'd take bullets; give all I had left.
Thank you.
Thank you....
We're living in a different world now.
I have been staring at this screen for an hour ( actually, I've been staring at it for a week), trying to figure out what to say about the last weekend, the last week, and I cannot find the words. Rendering my smart-ass speechless says volumes.
First of all, as of November 4th, I don't have to learn Portuguese. I can almost be sick in my own country now and that is a huge relief. The part that worried me most, (other than Sarah Palin, a hundred year war, the possibility of a further privatization of health care, and the ridiculous $5000 health care credit idea) was the pet quarantine. How does that work? Can you go visit? Can you bring roast beef? Doesn't matter now.
I have a friend who still cries when she sees pictures of Election Day. I understand. I am reminded by the young and the beautiful crowding outside the White House telling a certain man to "Get the fuck out!" that not everyone lived through the Reagan Years. These last decades those of us who were "trickled down" on have watched our country morph into something ugly, gaudy, and sick. Self-serving and self-indulgent. That "shining city on a hill" had become some awful tan-and-taupe gated community. The rest of us weren't welcome anymore.
On November 4th we beat the gate down.
The following weekend was Apocalypse Meow.
If November 4th did not bring hope enough, the weekend that followed sealed the deal. I am a doe-eyed cynic, a worst-case scenario sweetheart, an Eeyore who sings. For all of my want for things to be better, I am tempered by the fact that things rarely cooperate the way one may want them to. But as of the late, late evening of November 9th, several shots of bourbon ahead of myself, I realized that I'm a changed person. Cynic be damned. I've been broken. Built again. My gate was beat down too.
Thank you is not not full of enough to begin to express the depth and breadth of this. Thank you is what you say after someone has given you a blender.
Community and family. I keep going back to community and family. Howard said it best on Friday night, "This is community. This is family". You all built me a barn and as soon as I possibly can I will return the favor. I'll build you a bajillion barns and sing in all of them. And make chicken.
When the idea of a benefit came up my first response was "No!" which was greeted with a resounding "Too fucking bad, get over it, we're doing it anyway, buck up!" But I was reminded by a man who has known me a good many years that all the good in the world that you do doesn't mean shit unless you let other people return the favor. Otherwise its just selfishness. I had to remind myself quite a few times that The Rev. was right. If good can come of this bullshit cancer thing than let good come of it. Let good come of it!! There is no better way of telling it to go to hell!
I will find the right words soon. Right now I can offer up the awkward-not-making-much-sense ones. The ones that don't seem to express what I mean. I'd take bullets; give all I had left.
Thank you.
Thank you....
We're living in a different world now.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Standing at the Mailbox
I don't recall a more perfect fall, slipping slowly by degrees to winter. Usually, or has been the case over the last years , it's 98 degrees on Wednesday and by Friday there's snow on the ground. Summer ends and winter starts. Maybe its all the rain we had that sets the trees on fire. I know, I know.. waxing poetic about the switch of seasons is cheesy. I have cancer, ha! I shall muse as I damn well please.
I haven't really thought about cancer lately. It comes in flashes now, which means one of two things; I've learned to reckon with it or I have a wicked case of denial. I can't help but think about it when the damned bills come. I now know why the insurance industry is so expensive. Everything they do involves an envelope and paper. The overhead for mailings alone must reach into the bajillions of dollars. And its not even the bills, it's the lead-up to the bills. I have received a piece of paper that tells me "Hang on we're just looking to see if you need to pay us" every day (cept Sundays of course) for four months. Everyday. Now, lets do the math. I've been rolling in and out of Dr.'s offices pretty steadily since July 22nd. If we assume a mailing once a day (and that's a low assumption) at .35 each for 84 days I'm running the company about $30 in paper so far. This is only the beginning. I'm going to cost them, baseline, one hundred dollars a year in paper THAT DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING! I am excluding from my equations and calculations the paper that actually does say something, like "You owe us $16,457.09". (I love the .09 part). And I can't be the only one getting these letters of nothingness. Even if there were, say, 8 of us (and I believe more cancer-folks than that are under insured by my insurance company), that would be $800 a year in paper that says nothing. That's like half a bag of Herceptin, 2 scripts for Oxycodone, an eighth of an MRI. I'm just saying...you know, man on the moon craziness here, but maybe insurance giants could learn how to cut a few corners. Those of us on the receiving end most certainly do. These are hard times.
Its a funny thing when items show up in your mailbox asking you for three quarters of the money you've made over the last year. It pulls into question yr chosen career path. A typical day at the mailbox often includes a quick review of the moments in my life where I could have made the decision to be a millionaire. "Hmmmm, if I had taken Advanced Economics or Computer Programming in college instead of Girlhood in America or Advanced Creative Writing would I be looking down the barrel of the same gun?" Considering the state of the economy the answer is likely yes. But this whole episode, this whole cancer bit, has got me thinking about art and artists and songs and poems and their real validity versus their perceived validity as a major component in culture.
On several "music" message boards in the area there seems to be a standing belief that pursuing music or songwriting as a viable career is misguided to say the least. There is a feeling that those of us who have tried and achieved varying degrees of success in music are living out some adolescent fantasy and why don't we just go get "real jobs"? Real jobs? The implication here is if I had a "real job" than I wouldn't have to worry about health coverage, financial stability, the future. Some of the nastier inferences seem to suggest that if I'd just shaped up maybe I wouldn't even have cancer. Wowsers!
A group of people are stepping up to help me, the folks from Apocalypse Meow. I have played benefits for musicians, too, as a way of offering support when they've been faced with the financial harpship of a medical emergency. We are a benefit having people. I have always believed musicians as important as HVAC folk or programmers or schoolteachers. I beleived that before I got cancer. I believed that before I ever got on a stage or strung a guitar. Songs make up memory. What played at yr wedding? What played at yr first kiss? What played when you lost yr first love? Songs did. The people who made them are important. As far as I'm concerned, writing the soundtrack of the world is a pretty "real" job.
"But yr not making money off it!" "But yr not doing a stadium tour!" "Yr not really a musician because you don't have a video on MTV! " "Are you on the radio??" Ahhhhhh!!
Perhaps it is because I am the daughter of a working actress that all that malarkey drives me to drink. My mother was an actress who never starred in a major motion picture. She never dated Colin Farrell or made the cover on InTouch magazine. She quietly worked hard and made enough money to keep a (Manhattan, and not Kansas) roof over our heads and send me to the best school she could afford. As an actress. Her union is taking care of her now. Working musicians are worth the same respect, deserving of the same securities as any other performing folk. And I'm not just talking about the chamber music people or the orchestra lovelies. The people making music night after night in bars across the country, across this city, are worthy of respect and security. If they are out there, night after night, year after year, with little return on their investment of time, they did not choose it, it chose them. There is nothing romantic or glamorous about sleeping in the van, living with your band mates, eating beans and rice, or working 3 part-time jobs to support yr full-time job. Their work is worth preserving and they are worth protecting. If no one else will do it, damn it, I will.
I was reminded last week that music is a game of attrition by someone who knows a thing or two about all that. A career is not hits or videos or money. All those things are nice. (Especially when standing at the mailbox with a $16,000 bill in yr hand). Staying in the game long enough to make great records and sell a few, put on good shows, sell a couple songs, and not give up. That's a job. Not a fucking J-O-B, but a life's work. That's worth pursuing, sacrificing, and believing in.
It's worth kicking cancer in the motherscratching teeth so I can get back to figuring it out.
I haven't really thought about cancer lately. It comes in flashes now, which means one of two things; I've learned to reckon with it or I have a wicked case of denial. I can't help but think about it when the damned bills come. I now know why the insurance industry is so expensive. Everything they do involves an envelope and paper. The overhead for mailings alone must reach into the bajillions of dollars. And its not even the bills, it's the lead-up to the bills. I have received a piece of paper that tells me "Hang on we're just looking to see if you need to pay us" every day (cept Sundays of course) for four months. Everyday. Now, lets do the math. I've been rolling in and out of Dr.'s offices pretty steadily since July 22nd. If we assume a mailing once a day (and that's a low assumption) at .35 each for 84 days I'm running the company about $30 in paper so far. This is only the beginning. I'm going to cost them, baseline, one hundred dollars a year in paper THAT DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING! I am excluding from my equations and calculations the paper that actually does say something, like "You owe us $16,457.09". (I love the .09 part). And I can't be the only one getting these letters of nothingness. Even if there were, say, 8 of us (and I believe more cancer-folks than that are under insured by my insurance company), that would be $800 a year in paper that says nothing. That's like half a bag of Herceptin, 2 scripts for Oxycodone, an eighth of an MRI. I'm just saying...you know, man on the moon craziness here, but maybe insurance giants could learn how to cut a few corners. Those of us on the receiving end most certainly do. These are hard times.
Its a funny thing when items show up in your mailbox asking you for three quarters of the money you've made over the last year. It pulls into question yr chosen career path. A typical day at the mailbox often includes a quick review of the moments in my life where I could have made the decision to be a millionaire. "Hmmmm, if I had taken Advanced Economics or Computer Programming in college instead of Girlhood in America or Advanced Creative Writing would I be looking down the barrel of the same gun?" Considering the state of the economy the answer is likely yes. But this whole episode, this whole cancer bit, has got me thinking about art and artists and songs and poems and their real validity versus their perceived validity as a major component in culture.
On several "music" message boards in the area there seems to be a standing belief that pursuing music or songwriting as a viable career is misguided to say the least. There is a feeling that those of us who have tried and achieved varying degrees of success in music are living out some adolescent fantasy and why don't we just go get "real jobs"? Real jobs? The implication here is if I had a "real job" than I wouldn't have to worry about health coverage, financial stability, the future. Some of the nastier inferences seem to suggest that if I'd just shaped up maybe I wouldn't even have cancer. Wowsers!
A group of people are stepping up to help me, the folks from Apocalypse Meow. I have played benefits for musicians, too, as a way of offering support when they've been faced with the financial harpship of a medical emergency. We are a benefit having people. I have always believed musicians as important as HVAC folk or programmers or schoolteachers. I beleived that before I got cancer. I believed that before I ever got on a stage or strung a guitar. Songs make up memory. What played at yr wedding? What played at yr first kiss? What played when you lost yr first love? Songs did. The people who made them are important. As far as I'm concerned, writing the soundtrack of the world is a pretty "real" job.
"But yr not making money off it!" "But yr not doing a stadium tour!" "Yr not really a musician because you don't have a video on MTV! " "Are you on the radio??" Ahhhhhh!!
Perhaps it is because I am the daughter of a working actress that all that malarkey drives me to drink. My mother was an actress who never starred in a major motion picture. She never dated Colin Farrell or made the cover on InTouch magazine. She quietly worked hard and made enough money to keep a (Manhattan, and not Kansas) roof over our heads and send me to the best school she could afford. As an actress. Her union is taking care of her now. Working musicians are worth the same respect, deserving of the same securities as any other performing folk. And I'm not just talking about the chamber music people or the orchestra lovelies. The people making music night after night in bars across the country, across this city, are worthy of respect and security. If they are out there, night after night, year after year, with little return on their investment of time, they did not choose it, it chose them. There is nothing romantic or glamorous about sleeping in the van, living with your band mates, eating beans and rice, or working 3 part-time jobs to support yr full-time job. Their work is worth preserving and they are worth protecting. If no one else will do it, damn it, I will.
I was reminded last week that music is a game of attrition by someone who knows a thing or two about all that. A career is not hits or videos or money. All those things are nice. (Especially when standing at the mailbox with a $16,000 bill in yr hand). Staying in the game long enough to make great records and sell a few, put on good shows, sell a couple songs, and not give up. That's a job. Not a fucking J-O-B, but a life's work. That's worth pursuing, sacrificing, and believing in.
It's worth kicking cancer in the motherscratching teeth so I can get back to figuring it out.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Go S-P-O-R-T-S!
In a fourth floor office on July 22 a game plan was formulated with the distinguished CAPTAIN and myself along with my offensive line. A methodology was set forth. There were charts, visual aids, Sharpies. A plan of attack was conceived, a playbook issued. We got uniforms. I showed up for the first quarter and there were cheerleaders....a lot of bad ass cheerleaders! I am not quite sure why I'm using a sports analogy except to declare that we've reached HALFTIME folks! Snacks!!
As my mode of treatment was explained to me I was to have eight rounds of delightful and invigorating chemotherapy followed by surgery (Superbowl) and then radiation (post-season nonsense). I got through the fourth round on Thursday. Its time for the halftime show. Why aren't Bob Seger and Beyonce doing a confusing duet in my living room?
July seems like a hundred years ago. I halfway expected to be some sad shell of myself at this point, having to be carried in and out of cars wrapped in an old checkered blanket, sipping Ensure out of a straw, having adopted some post-Dickensian mode of speech ("Thanks Gov'nr. R'membr you 'n 'Eaven, they will.."). No. All has changed and every thing's the same....
I have a super militant haircut, but I was super-militant anyway.
I still scream at the television, loudly! Just because I have cancer does not change the fact that I am a super political fringy "elitist" lefty, who, if left to my own devices would not only nationalize health care but also put kittens in every airport. Cancer did not bring on some toned-down, even-handed, deeply contemplative version of myself. Not so much. Loud and confrontational is sort of in my blood. Cancer did not make Sarah Palin anything less than insulting.
Cancer did not make me a grudge less individual. I wish it had. Maybe it will. I'm still one of these black or white sorts of folks. If someone wrongs my family my friends or my band, forget it. Its not intentional. I come from hot-under-the-collar people. I have a memory long as an elephants. Cancer won't fix that, time will.
I have read a lot about this disease and a lot from people dealing with this disease. Having reached halftime I feel I can report on my findings. Cancer-talk still deals in a language of quiet desperation, of resignation, of "the end". Even the stuff that's supposed to be inspirational is rather, shall we say, down at the mouth. The word is so imbued with fear and loss and awfulness, a certain end-of-the-worldness. I am not making light of its severity. Please don't misunderstand. But language has power. Words have power. They represent things, concepts, identities. Spoon. Rascal. Kitten. Cancer. No one is deathly afraid of spoon. Spoons don't kill you. Well, cancer doesn't have to either!! That seems ridiculously simple and naive and immature but I say the word everyday now. I say the word and the whole shebang it entails pops up and floats about, shedding its nastiness in drifts like dog hair all over the room. I'm over it. Good lord I'm over it!!
Cancer is not my guru, my teacher, my defining moment. I am no better or worse for it, stronger or weaker or smarter or more psycologically scarred in its wake. It does not allow me to wear sweatpants to the grocery store or to become an anti-smoking Nazi. It does not excuse bad behavior, nor does it automatically turn me into some Mother Theresa sort who gives up all her worldly goods to sit in silence on a mountaintop. It just needs to have its ass kicked to the curb so I might endeavor to worry about something more important and, may I venture to say, more interesting!
It has, however, put a fire under me, an urgency, a this-won't-wait-anymore-Abigail sort of thing. I am sort of a high strung person, depending on who you talk to, so what may be the end for cancer may very well be the beginning of hypertension but that is another blog entirely. The world, no matter what you believe about later, is, at the moment, finite. It is this moment-full of love or chemo or cocaine or stress or buttercups or breakups or any number of finite, accountable, real life things. We are not existing in some existentialist Oliver Stone version of our own lives. No one's gonna make a fucking movie, sweetheart.
So that concludes this halftime show...the second half starts now.
As my mode of treatment was explained to me I was to have eight rounds of delightful and invigorating chemotherapy followed by surgery (Superbowl) and then radiation (post-season nonsense). I got through the fourth round on Thursday. Its time for the halftime show. Why aren't Bob Seger and Beyonce doing a confusing duet in my living room?
July seems like a hundred years ago. I halfway expected to be some sad shell of myself at this point, having to be carried in and out of cars wrapped in an old checkered blanket, sipping Ensure out of a straw, having adopted some post-Dickensian mode of speech ("Thanks Gov'nr. R'membr you 'n 'Eaven, they will.."). No. All has changed and every thing's the same....
I have a super militant haircut, but I was super-militant anyway.
I still scream at the television, loudly! Just because I have cancer does not change the fact that I am a super political fringy "elitist" lefty, who, if left to my own devices would not only nationalize health care but also put kittens in every airport. Cancer did not bring on some toned-down, even-handed, deeply contemplative version of myself. Not so much. Loud and confrontational is sort of in my blood. Cancer did not make Sarah Palin anything less than insulting.
Cancer did not make me a grudge less individual. I wish it had. Maybe it will. I'm still one of these black or white sorts of folks. If someone wrongs my family my friends or my band, forget it. Its not intentional. I come from hot-under-the-collar people. I have a memory long as an elephants. Cancer won't fix that, time will.
I have read a lot about this disease and a lot from people dealing with this disease. Having reached halftime I feel I can report on my findings. Cancer-talk still deals in a language of quiet desperation, of resignation, of "the end". Even the stuff that's supposed to be inspirational is rather, shall we say, down at the mouth. The word is so imbued with fear and loss and awfulness, a certain end-of-the-worldness. I am not making light of its severity. Please don't misunderstand. But language has power. Words have power. They represent things, concepts, identities. Spoon. Rascal. Kitten. Cancer. No one is deathly afraid of spoon. Spoons don't kill you. Well, cancer doesn't have to either!! That seems ridiculously simple and naive and immature but I say the word everyday now. I say the word and the whole shebang it entails pops up and floats about, shedding its nastiness in drifts like dog hair all over the room. I'm over it. Good lord I'm over it!!
Cancer is not my guru, my teacher, my defining moment. I am no better or worse for it, stronger or weaker or smarter or more psycologically scarred in its wake. It does not allow me to wear sweatpants to the grocery store or to become an anti-smoking Nazi. It does not excuse bad behavior, nor does it automatically turn me into some Mother Theresa sort who gives up all her worldly goods to sit in silence on a mountaintop. It just needs to have its ass kicked to the curb so I might endeavor to worry about something more important and, may I venture to say, more interesting!
It has, however, put a fire under me, an urgency, a this-won't-wait-anymore-Abigail sort of thing. I am sort of a high strung person, depending on who you talk to, so what may be the end for cancer may very well be the beginning of hypertension but that is another blog entirely. The world, no matter what you believe about later, is, at the moment, finite. It is this moment-full of love or chemo or cocaine or stress or buttercups or breakups or any number of finite, accountable, real life things. We are not existing in some existentialist Oliver Stone version of our own lives. No one's gonna make a fucking movie, sweetheart.
So that concludes this halftime show...the second half starts now.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Tiny Amish Ponies Cure Cancer
I had forgotten how good it felt to sleep on the ground. I had forgotten how uncomplicated time is when the only thing governing it is the sun. It rises, you rise. It sets, you fall to sleep without strange lights or meddling ringtones to tell you otherwise. A fire is infinitely more interesting to watch than Hardball.
We went camping this weekend in northern Missouri in an area called the Green Hills, a collection of glacial deposits that are uncharacteristically hilly and beautiful for that part of the state. We were also in close proximity to Jamesport, an Amish community established in the 50's if I remember correctly. It had been a small forever since I had left the J-O-B and the city behind for an excursion beyond the state line that didn't require an amplifier. The winter is bound to get complicated and this trip was to be a little vacation before the cold and the medical B.S. hemmed me in to town for a good long while. It could not have been more perfect. I was half prepared to come back to KC having someone in my party gored by the last living Grizzly in Missouri (I've been so lucky lately), but we all returned unscathed.
The most dangerous thing that happened the whole weekend was the continual menagerie of cute and small animals that kept turning up; several kittens, a puppy, a small collection of doe-eyed calves, a precocious Jack Russell, a pack of stray hound dogs, and to top it all off, a pair of miniature Amish ponies pulling a cart. Really, miniature ponies? Does the universe just revel in fucking with me? The fact that I am not harboring the puppy, the kittens, the pack of hounds, the Jack Russell, the miniature ponies and their tiny little cart are testament to my rock-like inner strength. Or it could very well have been my husband, unmoved by my pleas, shaking his head and laying down an unsympathetic "NO". He apparently does not believe that tiny Amish ponies cure cancer.
I lived in a tent for awhile, what seems a hundred years ago, while I was getting ready to go Buddha school in Colorado. It was an incredible and uncomplicated time. There were no high-flung-back-to-nature-Gary-Snyder-on-a-mountaintop reasons for it. I just didn't have any money so I lived in the woods. My telephone was a quarter operated affair at a four way stop in Nederland, a four mile walk. Forget the Internet, TV, a coffee maker. We cooked outside on greasy stones and hung our wood smoked clothes and snacks in trees to keep the real live bears away. There were no walls.
I look back now and remember it being perfect but it was also full of difficulties, and if memory serves me a food poisoning episode without a bathroom finally moved me from the woods into a cabin I could afford. But worries were basic then; will it rain, will it snow, will there be enough wood to keep us warm? I did a lot of walking in the woods alone and the silence of that was an incredible listening tool. Away from the noise and chatter and general electrical hum of the life we know as normal is another life, another way of knowing and thinking that is sharpened only when the layers of all of this "civilized living" are shrugged away. Now that sounds ridiculous coming from a bourbon-swilling expletive-spewing CNN devotee such as myself. Hippie bullshit, right? But we've all lived strange lives to get to where we are now.
So the dog and I left our napping cohorts this weekend for a walk alone in the woods. After about ten minutes of manic snuffling she settled into walking on ahead of me at a measured pace. The woods were not as dense as up in Colorado. They've been cleared, tilled, and reclaimed several times since the Oto Indians were run out west, but the Missouri parks folks are trying to restore them to their native state. Billie and I half ran down a rocky hillside and across a dry creekbed where we poked around in the dirt, turning over rocks to see what was underneath. We moved on to a clearing and out of the right side of my peripheral vision came a white tailed deer bounding across the trail and on up the hillside. The dog and I both stopped and watched it disappear. It was like some sort of Disney movie and I half expected the birds to start talking and dwarfs to start marching out of the shadows. Billie didn't run. She just sort of looked back at me and then back to the hill where the really big and bouncy dog went. We kept walking.
We build walls and put things inside them, build fences around them, and call them our own. We surround ourselves with distractions, levels of technology that can keep us from interacting with people for days at a time, and then we wonder why we're lonely. I don't know why camping this weekend (at a relatively well-appointed campsite mind you) got me thinking about all this stuff. Things just seem more precious now. Laughing with four of my favorite people around a fire seemed surreal, stolen from time. The dog almost getting hit by a deer on a trail in the woods goes completely against my seemingly normal ways of thinking. Not being on a 24-hour-news-cycle schedule punctuated by electric light and important incoming messages for just 48 hours righted me a little bit, snapped the bigger picture into focus and steeled me for the bullshit fixing to rain down soon. I wasn't sick this weekend. I was just some anonymous piece of a bigger thing spinning from sunset to sunset, unencumbered by appointments and second opinions, diagnoses or projected outcomes of treatment. No one stuck me with a needle or measured a damned thing and there were no mirrors to remind me that I don't look the way I feel. There were no walls to hide in.
We went camping this weekend in northern Missouri in an area called the Green Hills, a collection of glacial deposits that are uncharacteristically hilly and beautiful for that part of the state. We were also in close proximity to Jamesport, an Amish community established in the 50's if I remember correctly. It had been a small forever since I had left the J-O-B and the city behind for an excursion beyond the state line that didn't require an amplifier. The winter is bound to get complicated and this trip was to be a little vacation before the cold and the medical B.S. hemmed me in to town for a good long while. It could not have been more perfect. I was half prepared to come back to KC having someone in my party gored by the last living Grizzly in Missouri (I've been so lucky lately), but we all returned unscathed.
The most dangerous thing that happened the whole weekend was the continual menagerie of cute and small animals that kept turning up; several kittens, a puppy, a small collection of doe-eyed calves, a precocious Jack Russell, a pack of stray hound dogs, and to top it all off, a pair of miniature Amish ponies pulling a cart. Really, miniature ponies? Does the universe just revel in fucking with me? The fact that I am not harboring the puppy, the kittens, the pack of hounds, the Jack Russell, the miniature ponies and their tiny little cart are testament to my rock-like inner strength. Or it could very well have been my husband, unmoved by my pleas, shaking his head and laying down an unsympathetic "NO". He apparently does not believe that tiny Amish ponies cure cancer.
I lived in a tent for awhile, what seems a hundred years ago, while I was getting ready to go Buddha school in Colorado. It was an incredible and uncomplicated time. There were no high-flung-back-to-nature-Gary-Snyder-on-a-mountaintop reasons for it. I just didn't have any money so I lived in the woods. My telephone was a quarter operated affair at a four way stop in Nederland, a four mile walk. Forget the Internet, TV, a coffee maker. We cooked outside on greasy stones and hung our wood smoked clothes and snacks in trees to keep the real live bears away. There were no walls.
I look back now and remember it being perfect but it was also full of difficulties, and if memory serves me a food poisoning episode without a bathroom finally moved me from the woods into a cabin I could afford. But worries were basic then; will it rain, will it snow, will there be enough wood to keep us warm? I did a lot of walking in the woods alone and the silence of that was an incredible listening tool. Away from the noise and chatter and general electrical hum of the life we know as normal is another life, another way of knowing and thinking that is sharpened only when the layers of all of this "civilized living" are shrugged away. Now that sounds ridiculous coming from a bourbon-swilling expletive-spewing CNN devotee such as myself. Hippie bullshit, right? But we've all lived strange lives to get to where we are now.
So the dog and I left our napping cohorts this weekend for a walk alone in the woods. After about ten minutes of manic snuffling she settled into walking on ahead of me at a measured pace. The woods were not as dense as up in Colorado. They've been cleared, tilled, and reclaimed several times since the Oto Indians were run out west, but the Missouri parks folks are trying to restore them to their native state. Billie and I half ran down a rocky hillside and across a dry creekbed where we poked around in the dirt, turning over rocks to see what was underneath. We moved on to a clearing and out of the right side of my peripheral vision came a white tailed deer bounding across the trail and on up the hillside. The dog and I both stopped and watched it disappear. It was like some sort of Disney movie and I half expected the birds to start talking and dwarfs to start marching out of the shadows. Billie didn't run. She just sort of looked back at me and then back to the hill where the really big and bouncy dog went. We kept walking.
We build walls and put things inside them, build fences around them, and call them our own. We surround ourselves with distractions, levels of technology that can keep us from interacting with people for days at a time, and then we wonder why we're lonely. I don't know why camping this weekend (at a relatively well-appointed campsite mind you) got me thinking about all this stuff. Things just seem more precious now. Laughing with four of my favorite people around a fire seemed surreal, stolen from time. The dog almost getting hit by a deer on a trail in the woods goes completely against my seemingly normal ways of thinking. Not being on a 24-hour-news-cycle schedule punctuated by electric light and important incoming messages for just 48 hours righted me a little bit, snapped the bigger picture into focus and steeled me for the bullshit fixing to rain down soon. I wasn't sick this weekend. I was just some anonymous piece of a bigger thing spinning from sunset to sunset, unencumbered by appointments and second opinions, diagnoses or projected outcomes of treatment. No one stuck me with a needle or measured a damned thing and there were no mirrors to remind me that I don't look the way I feel. There were no walls to hide in.
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