I've arrived safe and sound, back on the East coast for a few days, for Coltrane's 80th birthday, time in the city, and to see if I can't find a disenchanted princess in the woods of Long Island. All the travel today went off very smoothly, not extra liquids or questionables in my carry on. The Port-o-Cath did not set off any alarms. (It has only done that at one airport, actually, where was it? JFK...from Seattle once? Can't recall.) Today was safe.
Reporting a Franky Scale on a travel day is pretty strange, it was quite high during my naps on the plane, dipped at other times, but really things have been pretty good today, especially for day one after IV chemo. Before the cancer life began I would rarely if ever sleep on planes, just couldn't do it. Now, I get on the plane and the engines are like a lullaby. The plane moves and I'm out. Today, too, same deal. OK, enough travel agent talk. Time to rest up for Joe Lovano tomorrow.
[P.S.] And after catching up on some of the season six Sopranos, I just have to say there is some strange directing going on, around episodes 5-7 or so. I'm partially on the edge of my seat, partially just going "That's it?" More to come.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Thursday, September 21, 2006
9.21.06, To Depart
IV chemo today, a joy as always, but thanks to Mme X for company. Franky Scale maybe 6ish, the usual fatigue and the trivial works. Then I'm getting myself ready for tomorrow's trip. Since I'll be gone for a few days I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to do, but surely there will be something to write about once I return. This is the first travelling I'm doing in the middle of chemo treatments, which might make things interesting, and I plan to take it slow as much as possible. If there are any newsworthy events I'll be sure to post. And if you don't hear, assume the Franky Scale stays in the 6 or 7 range.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
9.20.06, Something like 21 Grams
Is there something that I’m learning? Yesterday’s “Anonymous” (to yesterday’s post) commenter pointed out that I’m doing something along the lines of passing along information, teaching as it were, perhaps from my unconscious somewhere. Teaching without even knowing it. Something about “how to live,” that’s what is was. The without knowing it part I agree with. I was excited to see there might be a “life lesson” in there somewhere, so I had to have to go back to the last post and search it out. I write the blog and now I find myself in reader’s shoes. The ignorant preacher — if there were to be a preacher anywhere, he or she must be ignorant. Or else how could it work? There is no other way.
I’ve been watching 21 Grams this evening, without any foreknowledge, no idea of plot or theme, the stench of death all over the film somewhat of a kick to the head. One’s gone, one’s gone. To watch this film and think “Me. It’s me in a number of weeks or months. Part of it is me.” Except the cigarette jones. Who knows. It’s all allegory, but then like I was suggesting in the post on “Where Truth is to be Found” that’s the truest way to tell a real story. Truth in fiction being the only kind we can rely on. Truth in poetry. And then again . . . it breaks down at some point.
So I’m trying to figure out what it is that’s being taught here, by accident, from this other side of my personality that writes in the blog. Reader’s shoes. Where is the truth there? What are the stories being told? More scattered thinking from the blogging me.
And today, how has it gone? Harsh, actually. After feeling good for a few days, and mildly living with the background fear that it’ll be jinxed, today I woke up in a very different physical state. Not feeling so good. —how to explain this without seeming pitiful, without appearing pitiful, without being unduly, something, about it. What would be the word. Too much of something that will kill the writing. So the day begins on the low side, and then where does it go from there?
Eventually today I started feeling angry about it — there is it. Anger, that natural emotion we are supposed to feel in the process of it all, what is supposed to help get us out of the funk. Me and my natural funk. To be expected, right. It’s in all the books, after all. But the extra pain eventually just became so tedious, today anyway, what was I going to do about it? I took extra pain meds to try and get a handle on it. Think of those raised eyebrows. Eventually it cut down to a more reasonable level, to get me off the bed, off my side, from waiting for something better. Get back into a manageable level of life, then go from there. Just one step forward.
What was curious is how the pain meds cut down the pain to a certain degree, not to the point of elimination, but rather to a heightened sense of where I was, where I am. And this is what got me pissed off. They cut the pain just enough for anger to take hold. I started off just angry about being in pain, about it, the pain, about it not being obedient. It doesn’t listen to me. It’s obdurate. And then the sense spread to larger issues that touch this entire experience. To what I’m doing every day, to facing the same challenges daily. I suppose even the questions that have been slinking around the shadows — the nasty ones without answers like “Why has this happened?” and “How is this supposed to play out?” I’ve known from the start, intellectually at least, that there is no point to it, that these are dead end issues. There is no water in that well. So why even lower the bucket?
I don’t intend to rant. Another well with no water. But I did just want to put out the questions, to say what it is that’s happening, and not to garnish it so that it looks more appealing. Today wasn’t even that much worse than a lot of days, it’s just another one in the deranged series I’ve been assigned. Perhaps the anger is good for me, perhaps it’s another source of strength, perhaps there are, forgive the triteness, lessons to be learned in this too. Shit. It’s all fucked up beyond expression, from the perspective of my little world at least. So here it is, raw blogging, saying the things that might cause concern, saying what’s really going on despite how personal it is, despite what it means to walk through life in this strange state of plurality. The me who wakes up in a singular state of physicality each morning, the different mes who blog and pick what to share, the me who needs to stand up as straight as possible, who walks to the store, the disconnected mes and the mes who are inextricably tied.
I don’t know.
I’ve been watching 21 Grams this evening, without any foreknowledge, no idea of plot or theme, the stench of death all over the film somewhat of a kick to the head. One’s gone, one’s gone. To watch this film and think “Me. It’s me in a number of weeks or months. Part of it is me.” Except the cigarette jones. Who knows. It’s all allegory, but then like I was suggesting in the post on “Where Truth is to be Found” that’s the truest way to tell a real story. Truth in fiction being the only kind we can rely on. Truth in poetry. And then again . . . it breaks down at some point.
So I’m trying to figure out what it is that’s being taught here, by accident, from this other side of my personality that writes in the blog. Reader’s shoes. Where is the truth there? What are the stories being told? More scattered thinking from the blogging me.
And today, how has it gone? Harsh, actually. After feeling good for a few days, and mildly living with the background fear that it’ll be jinxed, today I woke up in a very different physical state. Not feeling so good. —how to explain this without seeming pitiful, without appearing pitiful, without being unduly, something, about it. What would be the word. Too much of something that will kill the writing. So the day begins on the low side, and then where does it go from there?
Eventually today I started feeling angry about it — there is it. Anger, that natural emotion we are supposed to feel in the process of it all, what is supposed to help get us out of the funk. Me and my natural funk. To be expected, right. It’s in all the books, after all. But the extra pain eventually just became so tedious, today anyway, what was I going to do about it? I took extra pain meds to try and get a handle on it. Think of those raised eyebrows. Eventually it cut down to a more reasonable level, to get me off the bed, off my side, from waiting for something better. Get back into a manageable level of life, then go from there. Just one step forward.
What was curious is how the pain meds cut down the pain to a certain degree, not to the point of elimination, but rather to a heightened sense of where I was, where I am. And this is what got me pissed off. They cut the pain just enough for anger to take hold. I started off just angry about being in pain, about it, the pain, about it not being obedient. It doesn’t listen to me. It’s obdurate. And then the sense spread to larger issues that touch this entire experience. To what I’m doing every day, to facing the same challenges daily. I suppose even the questions that have been slinking around the shadows — the nasty ones without answers like “Why has this happened?” and “How is this supposed to play out?” I’ve known from the start, intellectually at least, that there is no point to it, that these are dead end issues. There is no water in that well. So why even lower the bucket?
I don’t intend to rant. Another well with no water. But I did just want to put out the questions, to say what it is that’s happening, and not to garnish it so that it looks more appealing. Today wasn’t even that much worse than a lot of days, it’s just another one in the deranged series I’ve been assigned. Perhaps the anger is good for me, perhaps it’s another source of strength, perhaps there are, forgive the triteness, lessons to be learned in this too. Shit. It’s all fucked up beyond expression, from the perspective of my little world at least. So here it is, raw blogging, saying the things that might cause concern, saying what’s really going on despite how personal it is, despite what it means to walk through life in this strange state of plurality. The me who wakes up in a singular state of physicality each morning, the different mes who blog and pick what to share, the me who needs to stand up as straight as possible, who walks to the store, the disconnected mes and the mes who are inextricably tied.
I don’t know.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
9.19.06, Epistrophy
I thought I'd call it "epiphany" but that seemed too pedestrian on the one hand and just too much on the other. It might not even be a legit revelatory moment into the bargain. Something about "epistrophy," the sound and sight of it, which apart from a Monk which is all I know of it, seems to fit. For the past few days I've felt generally solid, or even good . . . though some superstitious hidden part of my unsuperstitious self tells me to watch such words for jinxing . . . but feeling good. No real problems, some moments of real clarity where I almost forget, or actually do forget for just so long. A great thing — yet it emphasizes upon my mental return that question Frank asked once, so long ago it seems, about how long it takes me every morning before The Thought arrives. But, generally good, that's my point.
So here's the story. It's not a continuation of the talk about truth content (last two days) because this is something that's crept up on me today until it feels like it needs to come out. I've been catching myself having thoughts about "what it's all about" again, about the "big picture," and all the related annoying and existentially servile little questions that accompany one who spends too much time thinking of how it all should make sense. As in, "what's the meaning of life?", for example, would be the most common example; and existential angst would be the most familiar descriptor. It's as if I've found myself in a mental state that I spent altogether too much time in prior to diagnosis and Life Change and all that.
The twist, after a couple of days of such thinking, is this: if thoughts about "what it's all about" are creeping back into my brain, even after all the big realizations of Dumb Fate and Death and Nowness seemed to have set, then wouldn't that possibly be a sign of getting better? If I were to forget some of what I've been learning recently, if I were to slip into my "old ways" (yes, self-consciously deprecating or imprecating there), then maybe that's a sign I'm going in reverse physiologically too . . . ? Crazy, right? A reverse in my thinking habits means a reverse in my physical condition. Probably so.
The logic of it, however, seemed appealing to me at the time. (Does the logic even make any sense to anybody else, or is this just me here in my imaginary closet thinking too loudly?) A turn for the better is all I'm hoping for here, and this is just a potential mental framework to explain it without miracles. The premonition of good fortune without miracles. Or did I secretly, or rather, unconsciously, figure it out before and then start to feel the good-old angst again? Hmm. I ought to simply be glad there have been a few days where the pain is less and most of my body seems to be cooperating. That's all. And I'm about to head to New York for a quick trip in three days, so feeling good and resting up are what the doctor ordered. Good company, good food, good music, and pray no fatigue.
Curious that word-notion, "prayer." It seems to be happening all around me, though in forms that would surprise many who think they've got the low down on prayer. I see it take myriad forms, different incarnations and different practices, dissimilar executions. I'm glad for all of it, from whatever corner.
The Franky Scale then? You know "before" I was sick, or before it got this bad, I never or rarely had days I would say were much over a "7" or maybe "8" so I'm still wary about using the big numbers. But I'll say a solid seven/7, a 7 with plus. Now if sleep will be kind enough to not elude me, the day will close well.
So here's the story. It's not a continuation of the talk about truth content (last two days) because this is something that's crept up on me today until it feels like it needs to come out. I've been catching myself having thoughts about "what it's all about" again, about the "big picture," and all the related annoying and existentially servile little questions that accompany one who spends too much time thinking of how it all should make sense. As in, "what's the meaning of life?", for example, would be the most common example; and existential angst would be the most familiar descriptor. It's as if I've found myself in a mental state that I spent altogether too much time in prior to diagnosis and Life Change and all that.
The twist, after a couple of days of such thinking, is this: if thoughts about "what it's all about" are creeping back into my brain, even after all the big realizations of Dumb Fate and Death and Nowness seemed to have set, then wouldn't that possibly be a sign of getting better? If I were to forget some of what I've been learning recently, if I were to slip into my "old ways" (yes, self-consciously deprecating or imprecating there), then maybe that's a sign I'm going in reverse physiologically too . . . ? Crazy, right? A reverse in my thinking habits means a reverse in my physical condition. Probably so.
The logic of it, however, seemed appealing to me at the time. (Does the logic even make any sense to anybody else, or is this just me here in my imaginary closet thinking too loudly?) A turn for the better is all I'm hoping for here, and this is just a potential mental framework to explain it without miracles. The premonition of good fortune without miracles. Or did I secretly, or rather, unconsciously, figure it out before and then start to feel the good-old angst again? Hmm. I ought to simply be glad there have been a few days where the pain is less and most of my body seems to be cooperating. That's all. And I'm about to head to New York for a quick trip in three days, so feeling good and resting up are what the doctor ordered. Good company, good food, good music, and pray no fatigue.
Curious that word-notion, "prayer." It seems to be happening all around me, though in forms that would surprise many who think they've got the low down on prayer. I see it take myriad forms, different incarnations and different practices, dissimilar executions. I'm glad for all of it, from whatever corner.
The Franky Scale then? You know "before" I was sick, or before it got this bad, I never or rarely had days I would say were much over a "7" or maybe "8" so I'm still wary about using the big numbers. But I'll say a solid seven/7, a 7 with plus. Now if sleep will be kind enough to not elude me, the day will close well.
Monday, September 18, 2006
9.18.06, A Brief Pause in Truth
On the Franky Scale today I probably logged a 6, feeling a moment or two behind myself all day long. There were a few moments, too, when I imagined feeling nauseated — and there is no reason for nausea right now unless it's purely psychosomatic and stems from the fact that chemo starts up again this Thursday. Anticipatory nausea. It's very odd to have the feeling and then almost simultaneously realize what it's about, that my mind produced it so perhaps my mind can eliminate it, and so on. And so I tried working that through. Too early to feel sick, ruins the good days. Otherwise there's little going on physically.
I did decide to try and step up my NCPB procedure, into the last few days of September, but no word yet. Ideally I'll be able to do it on the 27th or 29th, but it looks like I won't know until the scheduler returns tomorrow. It's such a low-risk procedure that I don't feel nervous about any danger. Still it gives me butterflies in anticipation when I wonder about its potential for success. It could be such a boon to have a significant portion of my pain just zipped away, so I quietly go around with my fingers crossed.
As for finishing yesterday's absolutely fascinating post, I'm going to take a cheap way out and only put up one additional paragraph. What follows after that still needs work, especially to be able to explain the notion of the "truth content" of a work of art — as with so many complex ideas, being able to convey it in the simplest possible form is incrdibly demanding. It's an idea I've learned and had kicking around in my head for ten years probably and yet I don't think I've ever really tried to put into very simple terms. Looking at the blank page and knowing that my simple explanation needs to be put down is proving daunting. Thus the fragmented bits and pieces approach to this whole thing. Think of it as a deep thought for the day, just one paragraph so thrilling it might well help you doze off tonight if you see it. With that, it's pasted in below. Till tomorrow.
* * *
Negative aesthetics, then, is the workings and the study of it all not from the point of positivist assertion but from negative critique. Alluded to yesterday. Simply put, the “negative” here is not bad, harmful, or unproductive in the slightest; it’s salutary, good for thinking, open-ended, creative, and tends toward the greatest degree of transparency possible. It’s a type of demystification in the arts, or demythologizing as Weber or Durkheim put talking about Modernity. We progressively shatter the myths and direct claims to truth. The point is not to study and learn “what is beautiful” according to the model of traditional aesthetics, rather it is to understand why a given artwork succeeds or doesn’t, how much truth content it has, and to do that we have to ask questions about historical context, political motivation (qui bono?), economic weight, and ethical value. Most theorists of aesthetics — take Kant as prime example — say that all this is unrelated to beauty, to the sublime, and therefore it must all be ignored and cut out. We're supposed to read a poem or look at a painting in some state of perfect remove, devoid of any personal interest, truly not caring, not being concerned with anything that could be at stake. As a remedy, negative aesthetics works to read all works of art while at the same time remembering how we view the world through a camera obscura. It’s all upside down, inverted, skewed, Alice-and-looking-glass-ed. A methodology, if you will, for getting at the truth content of a work of art.
[again, to be continued]
I did decide to try and step up my NCPB procedure, into the last few days of September, but no word yet. Ideally I'll be able to do it on the 27th or 29th, but it looks like I won't know until the scheduler returns tomorrow. It's such a low-risk procedure that I don't feel nervous about any danger. Still it gives me butterflies in anticipation when I wonder about its potential for success. It could be such a boon to have a significant portion of my pain just zipped away, so I quietly go around with my fingers crossed.
As for finishing yesterday's absolutely fascinating post, I'm going to take a cheap way out and only put up one additional paragraph. What follows after that still needs work, especially to be able to explain the notion of the "truth content" of a work of art — as with so many complex ideas, being able to convey it in the simplest possible form is incrdibly demanding. It's an idea I've learned and had kicking around in my head for ten years probably and yet I don't think I've ever really tried to put into very simple terms. Looking at the blank page and knowing that my simple explanation needs to be put down is proving daunting. Thus the fragmented bits and pieces approach to this whole thing. Think of it as a deep thought for the day, just one paragraph so thrilling it might well help you doze off tonight if you see it. With that, it's pasted in below. Till tomorrow.
* * *
Negative aesthetics, then, is the workings and the study of it all not from the point of positivist assertion but from negative critique. Alluded to yesterday. Simply put, the “negative” here is not bad, harmful, or unproductive in the slightest; it’s salutary, good for thinking, open-ended, creative, and tends toward the greatest degree of transparency possible. It’s a type of demystification in the arts, or demythologizing as Weber or Durkheim put talking about Modernity. We progressively shatter the myths and direct claims to truth. The point is not to study and learn “what is beautiful” according to the model of traditional aesthetics, rather it is to understand why a given artwork succeeds or doesn’t, how much truth content it has, and to do that we have to ask questions about historical context, political motivation (qui bono?), economic weight, and ethical value. Most theorists of aesthetics — take Kant as prime example — say that all this is unrelated to beauty, to the sublime, and therefore it must all be ignored and cut out. We're supposed to read a poem or look at a painting in some state of perfect remove, devoid of any personal interest, truly not caring, not being concerned with anything that could be at stake. As a remedy, negative aesthetics works to read all works of art while at the same time remembering how we view the world through a camera obscura. It’s all upside down, inverted, skewed, Alice-and-looking-glass-ed. A methodology, if you will, for getting at the truth content of a work of art.
[again, to be continued]
Sunday, September 17, 2006
9.17.06, Where Truth is Found, as Promised
OK, this post has been sticking in my brain for months it seems. Part of it just resist being polished and finished and presented publicly. God damn sometimes. Since yesterday I began to explore the Idea of the Negative, or the method worldview approach mode multi-perspective . . . whatever it precisely is, and since I promised to follow up. Here it is. But, about half only. Below I'm pasting in the first half of what I'd written sometime ago about negativity and truth in relation to The Sopranos, and for various reasons it ceased being timely. One big reason was that I re-watched all the previous Sopranos seasons and lacked example material. :-) Soon I will have access to tapes of season six — doesn't that sound illicit? actual old-school "tapes"? I do need to finish up the post, get the final paragraphs straight, tie ideas together, or deliberately let them go their own ways, it's just that now it's being unruly. What's below then is about half, a "to be continued."
Franky Scale today was in the 7 area with my physical condition really seeming decent, psychology a big behind that, and then my sleep was hideously disfigured yesterday and today so that threw me off slightly.
Thanks too, especially, for the comments to yesterday's blog. Even a few months of blogging hasn't given me much insight into what people will respond to. I thought is so strange that yesterday's post seem just off kilter to me, like I was really missing something, but there was a good deal of response on and off blog. Hm.
* * *
“Where Truth is Found: Negative Aesthetics and The Sopranos”
To continue our investigation into the negative, I want to move it into an example a decent number of people will know about; if this is totally foreign to you, think of a personal film substitute. The Sopranos can be swapped out for any other well-made drama, anything made of fiction, a solid work of poetry. I say this because at times people wonder “What is up with all the Sopranos allusions in this blog?” Any cultural production, any artwork, that has a certain degree of truth content, an idea we’ll get into below, works well enough to illustrate the point.
The argument or thesis: The only real truth, the only “thing that is” or “phenomenon that is” and accurately reflects the world is what is expressed indirectly, obtusely, obscurely through allusion, which is all to say, negatively. Once you try to express a thing directly . . . poof. This is what Lacan means in psychoanalytic terms when he defines the Real (big R) as “that which cannot be symbolized.” Yet the Real is something we experience every day, every where, in every aspect of our lives; it is like the air we breath. We just can't symbolize it or express it in any way. And that is a slightly different story.
Let’s put it another way. Somewhere Picasso said “Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.” That’s the crux of it. That is how poetry works, evocative painting, successful film, that is why fictionalized memoirs — which is simply another term for all memoirs really — are more engaging than those that hold vigorously to the straight “facts.” (I suppose the James Frey “memoir”-Oprah incident and the question of [non]facticity provides a timely example for us.) Not all art is true in this sense however it is only through the negative of expression, the indirect, the creative admixture produced by the human mind, that we find anything that really is, that is accurate, that feels universal.
As mentioned yesterday, science, being in a sense the summa of positivism, might be invoked as a counter argument (now here I’m talking about science as in “hard science” or the physical sciences) — “How can you dispute gravity or a rocket to the moon?” And yet this proves the point by failing to hold true forever. A more accurate theory, method, or technique will always be found, to challenge it, modify it, replace it. Newton to Einstein to quantum physics. Art, on the other hand, does live eternally, it only needs continual transmission and translation. The translation of a work becomes its immortality (a borrowed line). Science’s job is to fail repeatedly; good art continually pretends to fail but never really does.
A poem, a novel, a film — these forms tell you up front “I am a lie. I claim no truth value. I am imaginary,” and then they proceed to haunt us with the accuracy of their expression. So The Sopranos portrays the most dysfunctional and unrealistic of families: it’s only HBO, it’s entertainment, even the mob exists this is all make-believe. Still we find mother-son or brother-sister relationships we can identify with; we find expressions of anger that call up something within us; there are familiar lusts and passions; and the morals of the stories often make us nod in agreement — or shake our heads in denial. Both reactions, however, represent the same deep identification / recognition. It starts out with “I’m a lie” and in the end we’re disconcerted and have to keep trying to remind ourselves, “Right, this is a lie. It’s not true. That would never happen.” Why do we do that?
[to be continued]
Franky Scale today was in the 7 area with my physical condition really seeming decent, psychology a big behind that, and then my sleep was hideously disfigured yesterday and today so that threw me off slightly.
Thanks too, especially, for the comments to yesterday's blog. Even a few months of blogging hasn't given me much insight into what people will respond to. I thought is so strange that yesterday's post seem just off kilter to me, like I was really missing something, but there was a good deal of response on and off blog. Hm.
* * *
“Where Truth is Found: Negative Aesthetics and The Sopranos”
To continue our investigation into the negative, I want to move it into an example a decent number of people will know about; if this is totally foreign to you, think of a personal film substitute. The Sopranos can be swapped out for any other well-made drama, anything made of fiction, a solid work of poetry. I say this because at times people wonder “What is up with all the Sopranos allusions in this blog?” Any cultural production, any artwork, that has a certain degree of truth content, an idea we’ll get into below, works well enough to illustrate the point.
The argument or thesis: The only real truth, the only “thing that is” or “phenomenon that is” and accurately reflects the world is what is expressed indirectly, obtusely, obscurely through allusion, which is all to say, negatively. Once you try to express a thing directly . . . poof. This is what Lacan means in psychoanalytic terms when he defines the Real (big R) as “that which cannot be symbolized.” Yet the Real is something we experience every day, every where, in every aspect of our lives; it is like the air we breath. We just can't symbolize it or express it in any way. And that is a slightly different story.
Let’s put it another way. Somewhere Picasso said “Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.” That’s the crux of it. That is how poetry works, evocative painting, successful film, that is why fictionalized memoirs — which is simply another term for all memoirs really — are more engaging than those that hold vigorously to the straight “facts.” (I suppose the James Frey “memoir”-Oprah incident and the question of [non]facticity provides a timely example for us.) Not all art is true in this sense however it is only through the negative of expression, the indirect, the creative admixture produced by the human mind, that we find anything that really is, that is accurate, that feels universal.
As mentioned yesterday, science, being in a sense the summa of positivism, might be invoked as a counter argument (now here I’m talking about science as in “hard science” or the physical sciences) — “How can you dispute gravity or a rocket to the moon?” And yet this proves the point by failing to hold true forever. A more accurate theory, method, or technique will always be found, to challenge it, modify it, replace it. Newton to Einstein to quantum physics. Art, on the other hand, does live eternally, it only needs continual transmission and translation. The translation of a work becomes its immortality (a borrowed line). Science’s job is to fail repeatedly; good art continually pretends to fail but never really does.
A poem, a novel, a film — these forms tell you up front “I am a lie. I claim no truth value. I am imaginary,” and then they proceed to haunt us with the accuracy of their expression. So The Sopranos portrays the most dysfunctional and unrealistic of families: it’s only HBO, it’s entertainment, even the mob exists this is all make-believe. Still we find mother-son or brother-sister relationships we can identify with; we find expressions of anger that call up something within us; there are familiar lusts and passions; and the morals of the stories often make us nod in agreement — or shake our heads in denial. Both reactions, however, represent the same deep identification / recognition. It starts out with “I’m a lie” and in the end we’re disconcerted and have to keep trying to remind ourselves, “Right, this is a lie. It’s not true. That would never happen.” Why do we do that?
[to be continued]
Saturday, September 16, 2006
9.16.06, Revised Schedule, & On (Mis)Understanding
[the second post, rather long and rambly, appears right after paragraph three below]
I got some really good news a couple of days ago, although it has nothing to do with cancer, at least not directly. I found out that Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out, "biggest" of them all so far, weighing in at 1120 pages (so says Penguin and Amazon; it's already sales ranked at about #1,900-something), and called Against the Day. Don't know the plot or many details except that it's set in the decades before and through WW I, has a markedly international sweep, and I also know that I'm excited. And I think this means I will have to reschedule some things. Like dying. OK, I've never scheduled it, granted, but I figure this way I won't even be able to die before the book comes out and I get a chance to read it. Appears sometime around November 21st, I won't be able to get through it, say, till December sometime at the earliest. Then my birthday is right around the corner, so I should wait for that. The way I figure, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be "OK" until about mid-January.
Breath a sigh of relief. Read slowly. I always do, I can't help it.
Yesterday I skipped over my blog responsibilities, I admit, but this was in part because the day felt basically good and I didn't want to interrupt it with too much "cancer thinking." You know? When you've had quite enough of something on your mind and for some inexplicable reason you then find yourself in a zone, just somewhere else and able to be away from that Big Thinking Thing. . . ? Like that, you might say. I just wanted to go through the day and not necessarily evaluate myself for life fitness. That said, it was probably a 7, and today's Franky Scale seems to be shaping up about the same.
[new addition]
On (Mis)Understanding, Communication, and the Negative
Part of this post has to do with truth, or more accurately truths in the plural, and where we find them. I have another post written during The Sopranos period (I’m waiting on season 6 so I can continue that soon), that I’d like to add into this since it might be timely again now. I’d missed the moment before, but tomorrow it might be a good follow up to this. So “this” is a round-about kind of essay into where I am usually, where I go sometimes, where I write from, and what’s behind it all. It rambles, such is the form.
Part of this post and this whole blog has to do with my writing too: how it comes across, how you read it, how I come across through the writing of posts and comments. I forget sometimes that I can come across as opinionated, at times closed-minded, and to some even I might seem, that dirtiest of dirty words, “negative.” Negativity’s story should be retold, though, to be fair. This will help to explain where I’m coming from. As I see it, the Negative is not always something “bad” or “destructive” or “harmful” — it is, rather, a tool closely and inextricably linked to critique and to the possibility improvement. Whether it be improvement of a discussion, a system, an organization, or a self. Myself not excluded, of course.
It’s been a pet project of mine since before grad school, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Later I learned that “critical philosophy” is one name for it, that people like Spinoza and Nietzsche and Marx and Adorno have all been known to use this tool, this engage in this type of philosophy. For clarity, it can be contrasted quite directly with positivist philosophy (one term any dictionary of philosophy will gloss adequately). The critical or negative approach means asking hard questions and performing critiques of all claims to knowledge and truth. All positivist claims break down at some point, even in the hard sciences, knowledge is put forward and assumed, too often, to be timeless and unchangeable. Even a common sense understanding of the sciences tells us this isn’t true (e.g., Thomas Kuhn has written on this). New knowledge is produced, paradigms change, and we correct what was incorrect about our thinking (Foucault is another one). Critical or negative philosophy takes as its task to ask the question “What is wrong with, or what structures, this claim to knowledge?”
As an rule, note what Spinoza writes: “Omnis determinatio est negatio (All things are determined by negation).” From his Epistula. I think that the more we critically analyze and think through this statement, the more truth we can find in it. That is, the more accurate we’ll find it to be. Presented with any knowledge we find flaws in logic, cracks in a rhetorical edifice, etc. and only then can we work to correct them. (An aside, I took this as a point of departure for a theory of aesthetics in grad school, in my dissertation, a thing I’m still desultorily working through it in a book manuscript.)
It relates back to being understood or misunderstood, and to my coming off as harsh sometimes — in posts, comments, emails, etc. — on an interpersonal level, in that I take this as a rule for myself, and too often I forget that not everyone does so. An error I hope I’ll be forgiven for, if I’ve offended. There’s no malice intended, just a desire to get at the core of the matter. Sometimes my brain goes on through a matter more quickly than my heart. I realize, too, there are “on” times and “off” times for this, depending on the parties involved and emotional conditions. The realization isn’t always instantaneous.
Back to the philosophical aspect, I’m hitting very basic points, so I beg the indulgence of some of you who know this too well already. : ) Knowledge is contingent, context based, determined in large part by other knowledge and experience possessed by a subject / person. Each particular situation colors a given knowledge. So we always have to analyze the context in order to understand the rightness or less rightness of a concept, idea, theory, or strategy. In communication we have to work through the contingency, or rather, through a thousand little contingencies. Truism. Still, sometimes a tall order.
Again, why rehash all this? Because I assume all it before I write anything, before I approach any situation. It’s why I’m always skeptical, or if you like, critical. It’s a positive (salutary) approach, in my view. It might come out in the form of critiques of multi-level marketing, new age-ism, religion, or alternative treatments to a disease like cancer. It might also come out in disguised form in the basics of how I try to deal with the latter every day. So, while I want all the help in the world, on the one hand, on the other, I tend toward radical skepticism and often plunge when I’m thinking it through. The critical edge is not an attempt to push anyone away, to break down the community that’s been established here.
Another aspect of what I think and go through every day, aside from the physical realities, is an intense psychological battle. How good do I feel? Or bad? Why? Am I getting better? Or, how much worse? Isn’t the clock still ticking away toward that last ding? If I feel better, is that a safe feeling, or should I lay low and be quiet about it? Will I jinx it? A former poet laureate of Utah (they have them!) died fairly recently of pancreatic cancer, and there was a news article where he told of how he feared going to bed at night because he didn’t know if it was the last time, if he’d die in his sleep. Fortunately, that’s not a fear I have, though it is an indication of what the mind can do.
There are a million such questions. They take time to work through, or to avoid, as the mood dictates. Normally I like to face them, a facing that can produce tone shifts or mood swings in the blog, which I know some of you notice. Some even worry. It might keep me from taking calls at certain times also. That kind of thing. People have been wonderful to me through this and I thank everyone for that. I can’t say it enough. Yet with all the help in the world there are still times of profound shock, disbelief, frustration, and sadness. There is a feeling where I’m preparing to miss something: life itself. Even though I don’t believe there will be a mind “on the other side” to do the “missing,” it’s hard to avoid living in moments and wondering “Will this one be repeated? Is this the last time?”
I got some really good news a couple of days ago, although it has nothing to do with cancer, at least not directly. I found out that Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out, "biggest" of them all so far, weighing in at 1120 pages (so says Penguin and Amazon; it's already sales ranked at about #1,900-something), and called Against the Day. Don't know the plot or many details except that it's set in the decades before and through WW I, has a markedly international sweep, and I also know that I'm excited. And I think this means I will have to reschedule some things. Like dying. OK, I've never scheduled it, granted, but I figure this way I won't even be able to die before the book comes out and I get a chance to read it. Appears sometime around November 21st, I won't be able to get through it, say, till December sometime at the earliest. Then my birthday is right around the corner, so I should wait for that. The way I figure, I'm pretty much guaranteed to be "OK" until about mid-January.
Breath a sigh of relief. Read slowly. I always do, I can't help it.
Yesterday I skipped over my blog responsibilities, I admit, but this was in part because the day felt basically good and I didn't want to interrupt it with too much "cancer thinking." You know? When you've had quite enough of something on your mind and for some inexplicable reason you then find yourself in a zone, just somewhere else and able to be away from that Big Thinking Thing. . . ? Like that, you might say. I just wanted to go through the day and not necessarily evaluate myself for life fitness. That said, it was probably a 7, and today's Franky Scale seems to be shaping up about the same.
[new addition]
On (Mis)Understanding, Communication, and the Negative
Part of this post has to do with truth, or more accurately truths in the plural, and where we find them. I have another post written during The Sopranos period (I’m waiting on season 6 so I can continue that soon), that I’d like to add into this since it might be timely again now. I’d missed the moment before, but tomorrow it might be a good follow up to this. So “this” is a round-about kind of essay into where I am usually, where I go sometimes, where I write from, and what’s behind it all. It rambles, such is the form.
Part of this post and this whole blog has to do with my writing too: how it comes across, how you read it, how I come across through the writing of posts and comments. I forget sometimes that I can come across as opinionated, at times closed-minded, and to some even I might seem, that dirtiest of dirty words, “negative.” Negativity’s story should be retold, though, to be fair. This will help to explain where I’m coming from. As I see it, the Negative is not always something “bad” or “destructive” or “harmful” — it is, rather, a tool closely and inextricably linked to critique and to the possibility improvement. Whether it be improvement of a discussion, a system, an organization, or a self. Myself not excluded, of course.
It’s been a pet project of mine since before grad school, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Later I learned that “critical philosophy” is one name for it, that people like Spinoza and Nietzsche and Marx and Adorno have all been known to use this tool, this engage in this type of philosophy. For clarity, it can be contrasted quite directly with positivist philosophy (one term any dictionary of philosophy will gloss adequately). The critical or negative approach means asking hard questions and performing critiques of all claims to knowledge and truth. All positivist claims break down at some point, even in the hard sciences, knowledge is put forward and assumed, too often, to be timeless and unchangeable. Even a common sense understanding of the sciences tells us this isn’t true (e.g., Thomas Kuhn has written on this). New knowledge is produced, paradigms change, and we correct what was incorrect about our thinking (Foucault is another one). Critical or negative philosophy takes as its task to ask the question “What is wrong with, or what structures, this claim to knowledge?”
As an rule, note what Spinoza writes: “Omnis determinatio est negatio (All things are determined by negation).” From his Epistula. I think that the more we critically analyze and think through this statement, the more truth we can find in it. That is, the more accurate we’ll find it to be. Presented with any knowledge we find flaws in logic, cracks in a rhetorical edifice, etc. and only then can we work to correct them. (An aside, I took this as a point of departure for a theory of aesthetics in grad school, in my dissertation, a thing I’m still desultorily working through it in a book manuscript.)
It relates back to being understood or misunderstood, and to my coming off as harsh sometimes — in posts, comments, emails, etc. — on an interpersonal level, in that I take this as a rule for myself, and too often I forget that not everyone does so. An error I hope I’ll be forgiven for, if I’ve offended. There’s no malice intended, just a desire to get at the core of the matter. Sometimes my brain goes on through a matter more quickly than my heart. I realize, too, there are “on” times and “off” times for this, depending on the parties involved and emotional conditions. The realization isn’t always instantaneous.
Back to the philosophical aspect, I’m hitting very basic points, so I beg the indulgence of some of you who know this too well already. : ) Knowledge is contingent, context based, determined in large part by other knowledge and experience possessed by a subject / person. Each particular situation colors a given knowledge. So we always have to analyze the context in order to understand the rightness or less rightness of a concept, idea, theory, or strategy. In communication we have to work through the contingency, or rather, through a thousand little contingencies. Truism. Still, sometimes a tall order.
Again, why rehash all this? Because I assume all it before I write anything, before I approach any situation. It’s why I’m always skeptical, or if you like, critical. It’s a positive (salutary) approach, in my view. It might come out in the form of critiques of multi-level marketing, new age-ism, religion, or alternative treatments to a disease like cancer. It might also come out in disguised form in the basics of how I try to deal with the latter every day. So, while I want all the help in the world, on the one hand, on the other, I tend toward radical skepticism and often plunge when I’m thinking it through. The critical edge is not an attempt to push anyone away, to break down the community that’s been established here.
Another aspect of what I think and go through every day, aside from the physical realities, is an intense psychological battle. How good do I feel? Or bad? Why? Am I getting better? Or, how much worse? Isn’t the clock still ticking away toward that last ding? If I feel better, is that a safe feeling, or should I lay low and be quiet about it? Will I jinx it? A former poet laureate of Utah (they have them!) died fairly recently of pancreatic cancer, and there was a news article where he told of how he feared going to bed at night because he didn’t know if it was the last time, if he’d die in his sleep. Fortunately, that’s not a fear I have, though it is an indication of what the mind can do.
There are a million such questions. They take time to work through, or to avoid, as the mood dictates. Normally I like to face them, a facing that can produce tone shifts or mood swings in the blog, which I know some of you notice. Some even worry. It might keep me from taking calls at certain times also. That kind of thing. People have been wonderful to me through this and I thank everyone for that. I can’t say it enough. Yet with all the help in the world there are still times of profound shock, disbelief, frustration, and sadness. There is a feeling where I’m preparing to miss something: life itself. Even though I don’t believe there will be a mind “on the other side” to do the “missing,” it’s hard to avoid living in moments and wondering “Will this one be repeated? Is this the last time?”
Thursday, September 14, 2006
9.14.06, Cont'd Disconnection and Upcoming NCPB
Blog.
[Background music tonight: Monk’s later years work under the 2001 title Thelonious Monk: The Columbia Years, ’62-68. I’m going to give it a few good listens and see if there’s anything to some of the critiques some people have made about his later work being too tame. Too, there’s a historical angle, too, in that it jives with music, culture, politics, etc. that was around when I was born—something I’m trying to work into a sketch of the historical moment into which I was born. 1968.]
To respond on Disconnection. (The hot chocolate was at Vivace, btw, never had it at Bauhaus.) The emotional states or states of being I feel alienated from—a very apt term because I do feel I’ve been a life-laborer and now my time-work has been put in and someone else is getting the profit and/or utility from it, but if life is a metaphor for capitalism, who are the capitalists? Hmm—those states seem to be the so-called normal ones for most people. I’ve always felt like a nonconformist inside; not to claim I’ve always or simply unthinkingly been one, but rather that I think there’s an inherent value of thinking like one. At least. So in a sense my alienation isn’t new. It is, however, extreme these days.
Seeing the daily routines people have can be horrifying at times. And thinking of death so much more presently than ever before exacerbates this for me. Whether it’s materialistic attachment, ambition for ambition’s sake or for power’s sake, or all the fronting. Trivial matters also occupy so much of people’s lives, simple priorities. Now when I’m “out there” watching or dealing with people, I just feel like I see more. It all sounds trite to put it into words, but the experience is real and all I can say is that nothing in the world looks like it used to. Work, for example, is just that. Work. And I spent a hell of a lot of time “working,” and sadly doing a lot of work I thought I should be doing. When that normative superego of Work takes over, for me, the pleasure of it gets lost. Worries over superiors, evaluations, the power of the masses or “customers,” all of these become tyrannical. Seeing all this more clearly is in large part what disconnects me. (Feel like I’m spinning my wheels here, trying to get this out…)
As for the wanting of conversations to end, of mouthing certain words and thinking others or simply waiting waiting waiting for it all to end, this is clearly something I’ve felt too. Part of good old fashioned misanthropy, on the one hand. (Which, B. you should get a lot of in anthro now…no?) On the other, it’s another testament to the fact that we do live in a camera obscura world, just like Uncle Karl says.
On a different note, I wanted to follow up on the pain management issue. I’ve decided to go through with the NCPB (the neurolytic celiac plexus block) procedure, and have it scheduled currently for early October. I might switch this up to late September but we’ll see. This means I get one more hose shoved down my throat and they inject absolute alcohol into the celiac plexus. Then it dies. The theory, in three out of four cases, is that when it dies, most of the pain in that area dies. Fingers crossed, I move ahead.
Also, I’m moving into a new place come October. Very close to my old place so the neighborhood routines can continue, even though I’m much less of a bon vivant than before. It means more space and numerous other good things. More on this as it comes. For today that’s enough from me, in my little disconnected world.
Franky Scale today was pretty good, let’s say 7; though I spent half the day at school (thus “work”) and there’s an odd physical feeling about being “out and about” that I haven’t fully adjusted to. I’m realizing again, too, that it might be good to get myself doing this more regularly because the values of the distraction seem valuable.
A P.S. The comments the other day in the post "Writing Your Own Eulogy," and this might be a hairsplitting point, but this title was only metaphor. Though I am working on a memoir, I'm not trying to write my own eulogy. There's a lot tied up with eulogies, and eulogies are for the living, so when it's time for that it will be somebody else's job. Not mine.
[Background music tonight: Monk’s later years work under the 2001 title Thelonious Monk: The Columbia Years, ’62-68. I’m going to give it a few good listens and see if there’s anything to some of the critiques some people have made about his later work being too tame. Too, there’s a historical angle, too, in that it jives with music, culture, politics, etc. that was around when I was born—something I’m trying to work into a sketch of the historical moment into which I was born. 1968.]
To respond on Disconnection. (The hot chocolate was at Vivace, btw, never had it at Bauhaus.) The emotional states or states of being I feel alienated from—a very apt term because I do feel I’ve been a life-laborer and now my time-work has been put in and someone else is getting the profit and/or utility from it, but if life is a metaphor for capitalism, who are the capitalists? Hmm—those states seem to be the so-called normal ones for most people. I’ve always felt like a nonconformist inside; not to claim I’ve always or simply unthinkingly been one, but rather that I think there’s an inherent value of thinking like one. At least. So in a sense my alienation isn’t new. It is, however, extreme these days.
Seeing the daily routines people have can be horrifying at times. And thinking of death so much more presently than ever before exacerbates this for me. Whether it’s materialistic attachment, ambition for ambition’s sake or for power’s sake, or all the fronting. Trivial matters also occupy so much of people’s lives, simple priorities. Now when I’m “out there” watching or dealing with people, I just feel like I see more. It all sounds trite to put it into words, but the experience is real and all I can say is that nothing in the world looks like it used to. Work, for example, is just that. Work. And I spent a hell of a lot of time “working,” and sadly doing a lot of work I thought I should be doing. When that normative superego of Work takes over, for me, the pleasure of it gets lost. Worries over superiors, evaluations, the power of the masses or “customers,” all of these become tyrannical. Seeing all this more clearly is in large part what disconnects me. (Feel like I’m spinning my wheels here, trying to get this out…)
As for the wanting of conversations to end, of mouthing certain words and thinking others or simply waiting waiting waiting for it all to end, this is clearly something I’ve felt too. Part of good old fashioned misanthropy, on the one hand. (Which, B. you should get a lot of in anthro now…no?) On the other, it’s another testament to the fact that we do live in a camera obscura world, just like Uncle Karl says.
On a different note, I wanted to follow up on the pain management issue. I’ve decided to go through with the NCPB (the neurolytic celiac plexus block) procedure, and have it scheduled currently for early October. I might switch this up to late September but we’ll see. This means I get one more hose shoved down my throat and they inject absolute alcohol into the celiac plexus. Then it dies. The theory, in three out of four cases, is that when it dies, most of the pain in that area dies. Fingers crossed, I move ahead.
Also, I’m moving into a new place come October. Very close to my old place so the neighborhood routines can continue, even though I’m much less of a bon vivant than before. It means more space and numerous other good things. More on this as it comes. For today that’s enough from me, in my little disconnected world.
Franky Scale today was pretty good, let’s say 7; though I spent half the day at school (thus “work”) and there’s an odd physical feeling about being “out and about” that I haven’t fully adjusted to. I’m realizing again, too, that it might be good to get myself doing this more regularly because the values of the distraction seem valuable.
A P.S. The comments the other day in the post "Writing Your Own Eulogy," and this might be a hairsplitting point, but this title was only metaphor. Though I am working on a memoir, I'm not trying to write my own eulogy. There's a lot tied up with eulogies, and eulogies are for the living, so when it's time for that it will be somebody else's job. Not mine.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
9.13.06 Disconnect and Float
Disconnection. If one were to ask what I’ve been experiencing emotionally for the past week or so, this would be my answer. Many have asked, in fact. There is no etiology, no set of identifiable experiences that have culminated in this. It’s just a destination I myself have only realized after, apparently, arriving here. It’s disconnection from all kinds of things: people, past, place, certain emotions, states of being, time-oriented thinking, routines. I don’t know, it feels like it might even be from words, too, in some respect. At this moment, even the words feel strange in my mouth, at my finger tips. New, unfamiliar, foreign. Though I can’t say whether it was from genuine hankering or an unconscious desire to act it all out, I even ordered hot chocolate in the café today instead of coffee. Little and symbolic.
Floating. What I’ve been feeling in the streets, when I’m in public, in a crowd, a line at the store or café, in the bank. It goes along with what I already described above, as if it were the physical accompaniment. From very early on after my diagnosis I felt some degree of disconnect in the streets. I kept seeing people doing their everyday things and it would strike me as totally absurd. How important a certain small occurrence was, the over-earnestness of a certain person, spurts of anger, exuberance to the point of being obnoxious, fronting of every kind, the telling of tall tales, putting the make on someone — every thing I saw looked transparent. If not, then insignificant. Very Buddhist.
Disconnection. Floating. Transparency. Almost from the start I felt the latter, but the floating has been more recent, as if my being is slowly desubstantializing. Where is it going? No, scratch that — sounds too metaphysical or transcendent. But losing one’s solidity is legit, isn’t it? Have you never walked down the street and felt like a specter? Like you look the same, move in the same way, probably even sound the same but you’re one step out or aside. It’s all going on at some different speed. Again I’m kind of stuck describing, just that out there something seems amiss.
So the disconnection is nearly like paranoia, it is a state of intensity where “my thinking,” at least, is different. Or is it really? I won’t go into all the permutations of this. Those who have ears.
Physically I’ve been recouping from the last four weeks of toxic infusions, the pills, all the pharmacological love. In the respect the scale should go a little higher, but as the baser needs are met we become increasingly able to point out everything else that seems out of joint, right? Still, I feel better now as the drugs start to leave my system. So there is a little less on my body and a little more on my mind.
Franky Scale = 6.
Floating. What I’ve been feeling in the streets, when I’m in public, in a crowd, a line at the store or café, in the bank. It goes along with what I already described above, as if it were the physical accompaniment. From very early on after my diagnosis I felt some degree of disconnect in the streets. I kept seeing people doing their everyday things and it would strike me as totally absurd. How important a certain small occurrence was, the over-earnestness of a certain person, spurts of anger, exuberance to the point of being obnoxious, fronting of every kind, the telling of tall tales, putting the make on someone — every thing I saw looked transparent. If not, then insignificant. Very Buddhist.
Disconnection. Floating. Transparency. Almost from the start I felt the latter, but the floating has been more recent, as if my being is slowly desubstantializing. Where is it going? No, scratch that — sounds too metaphysical or transcendent. But losing one’s solidity is legit, isn’t it? Have you never walked down the street and felt like a specter? Like you look the same, move in the same way, probably even sound the same but you’re one step out or aside. It’s all going on at some different speed. Again I’m kind of stuck describing, just that out there something seems amiss.
So the disconnection is nearly like paranoia, it is a state of intensity where “my thinking,” at least, is different. Or is it really? I won’t go into all the permutations of this. Those who have ears.
Physically I’ve been recouping from the last four weeks of toxic infusions, the pills, all the pharmacological love. In the respect the scale should go a little higher, but as the baser needs are met we become increasingly able to point out everything else that seems out of joint, right? Still, I feel better now as the drugs start to leave my system. So there is a little less on my body and a little more on my mind.
Franky Scale = 6.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
9.12.06 Not a Jip
Don't feel jipped, those of you who follow the blog regularly. Today just wasn't very writerly. Though if I had any intuition I might predict insomnia and much gets written in the wee sleepless hours. Just, also, that today's Franky Scale was about a 5, never quite got on an even keel. Most of the day was spent between a couple of DVDs I promised to watch on nutritional supplements (related question below), and reading Bertrand Russell's autobiography and then part of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateuas: Capitalism & Schosophrenia. (A day spent with those two means, perhaps, either "ooh, bad sign" or contrariwise "he must be feeling sassy." I won't tell.)
So, has anyone heard of "glyconutrients" and if so what do you know? (Besides the giver of the DVD; but thank you for thinking of me.) A related question: the health-renewing properties of aloe vera?
More later, but the immediate saddening aspect, and one that decreases the credibility of such a company as produced the DVDs and sells the glyconutrients, is that it's an MLM, multi-level marketing company. They never mention the company name and keep a lot of information hidden throughout their presentation. I don't get that approach, like people won't notice...?
OK, I'm for more food and then rest. And while I eat I'm going to watch either Caddyshack, Animal House, or LA Story. So there.
So, has anyone heard of "glyconutrients" and if so what do you know? (Besides the giver of the DVD; but thank you for thinking of me.) A related question: the health-renewing properties of aloe vera?
More later, but the immediate saddening aspect, and one that decreases the credibility of such a company as produced the DVDs and sells the glyconutrients, is that it's an MLM, multi-level marketing company. They never mention the company name and keep a lot of information hidden throughout their presentation. I don't get that approach, like people won't notice...?
OK, I'm for more food and then rest. And while I eat I'm going to watch either Caddyshack, Animal House, or LA Story. So there.
Monday, September 11, 2006
9.11.06, Writing Your Own Eulogy
Franky Scale today rides in about a 6. I've been warring with my GI functions, one of those too-much-information pieces of news that highlights how real this whole fucking mess is. So TMI, so be it. It's what I live with here.
I've been working desultorily on my memoir, and though I haven't sat to plan out this blog, it's what I want to talk about. I recall things. Stories come to mind. Long lost feelings and events I thought were lost. Little stories of my own and others making that I work with, I have all this to try and roll into a ball. My question to the universe. Or rather, it's all shaping up into the grand narrative of my life. To think, I'm involved with a diachronic tale of life about someone, myself, who other critics at least might throw into the postmodern box and throw away the key. A grand narrative to explain it all.
Or, I'm writing my own eulogy. That's also how I see it. I've been given all the time in the world (there's a bad pun for you!) and as many pages as I can crank out. My audience is forced to sit there and hear it, or so I imagine. I've been reading some pieces of narrative I've gathered along the way. There is the classic letter of excommunication from the Mormon church, the recent letter of rejection from my father, there are emails and comments from friends and family. I have boxes with letters and adolescent memories. I have a story of my birth that was recently sent to me by my birth mother. That was is unique.
It's not the content or the story itself, it's more the fact of it, of looking at it and reading through this simply told tale and thinking "Is this what happens when you die? You collect the stories you and others have and then try to piece them all together? You try to dovetail it all into some sense?" Nah. I don't care much if it makes sense. The birth story itself is actually just one puzzle piece that holds just as much weight as the stories of my birth with which I was raised, despite the difference in perspective and even in factual content.
So that's how the memoir opens for now. I was born into conflict, conflicting stories of where I came from, who I am, how mundane or miraculous was my birth. You choose. One version is highly religious, spiritual, even mythical in its proportions; the other is straightforward and matter-of-fact. I don't mind this conflict, in fact, I relish it. It's as if I were given a trope from which to begin the grand narrative, a device by which I start to tell this long story that takes themes of conflict and paradox and (cosmic) irony and expands them out from a basic difference in "take" on how I came to be. Or how I almost didn't come to be. It's just about right. Remember, there are no counterfactuals.
I've been working desultorily on my memoir, and though I haven't sat to plan out this blog, it's what I want to talk about. I recall things. Stories come to mind. Long lost feelings and events I thought were lost. Little stories of my own and others making that I work with, I have all this to try and roll into a ball. My question to the universe. Or rather, it's all shaping up into the grand narrative of my life. To think, I'm involved with a diachronic tale of life about someone, myself, who other critics at least might throw into the postmodern box and throw away the key. A grand narrative to explain it all.
Or, I'm writing my own eulogy. That's also how I see it. I've been given all the time in the world (there's a bad pun for you!) and as many pages as I can crank out. My audience is forced to sit there and hear it, or so I imagine. I've been reading some pieces of narrative I've gathered along the way. There is the classic letter of excommunication from the Mormon church, the recent letter of rejection from my father, there are emails and comments from friends and family. I have boxes with letters and adolescent memories. I have a story of my birth that was recently sent to me by my birth mother. That was is unique.
It's not the content or the story itself, it's more the fact of it, of looking at it and reading through this simply told tale and thinking "Is this what happens when you die? You collect the stories you and others have and then try to piece them all together? You try to dovetail it all into some sense?" Nah. I don't care much if it makes sense. The birth story itself is actually just one puzzle piece that holds just as much weight as the stories of my birth with which I was raised, despite the difference in perspective and even in factual content.
So that's how the memoir opens for now. I was born into conflict, conflicting stories of where I came from, who I am, how mundane or miraculous was my birth. You choose. One version is highly religious, spiritual, even mythical in its proportions; the other is straightforward and matter-of-fact. I don't mind this conflict, in fact, I relish it. It's as if I were given a trope from which to begin the grand narrative, a device by which I start to tell this long story that takes themes of conflict and paradox and (cosmic) irony and expands them out from a basic difference in "take" on how I came to be. Or how I almost didn't come to be. It's just about right. Remember, there are no counterfactuals.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
9.10.06, A Political Interruption
While what I'm suggesting might not be a revolution, big banners, tear gas, thrown stones, I do hope everyone is paying the very closest attention today and tomorrow. We need to think hard and critically listen, to see through the cock-n-bull political stories that will be fed to the public as anniversary gifts of 9-11. I can't not write this hearing what I am in the news.
We will see the mendacious forces of an illegitimate administration — its Bushes, Cheneys, Rices, Rumsfelds, and Roves — take full and cynical advantage of a five-year old world tragedy. Not merely a US event. They will spin the tragedy of thousands and thousands of people in the US, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds, in other countries, to their own domestic political advantage. The US constitution paralyzed, the Geneva Convention gutted, any sensible conception of human rights and international law mocked through hypocritical and selective manipulation. But Bush and his friends will talk of Iraq, and Iran don't forget, of Nazi Germany, of fascism (the form of political state of affairs which the Bush administration most closely resembles [if you honestly doubt or don't know it, look up "Fascism" in the Int'l Encyclopedia of Social & Behaioral Sciences]), and so on ad nauseum. So disgusting I could spit.
I just know that this morning it begins, on the Sunday morning TV circuit. What kind of nightmare administration do we live under? What kind of legacy are we passively perpetuating? Today and tomorrow, I can't help but think, will embody the twisted highlight of a sickening logic to their political power run amok. A ethically lascivious peep-show, the anti-reality hour for oligarchs, soldiers of fortune, and neo-fascists who will stand in a circle watching, their feet continually shifting on the sticky floor.
And you can see it for FREE, just turn on the tube.
We will see the mendacious forces of an illegitimate administration — its Bushes, Cheneys, Rices, Rumsfelds, and Roves — take full and cynical advantage of a five-year old world tragedy. Not merely a US event. They will spin the tragedy of thousands and thousands of people in the US, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds, in other countries, to their own domestic political advantage. The US constitution paralyzed, the Geneva Convention gutted, any sensible conception of human rights and international law mocked through hypocritical and selective manipulation. But Bush and his friends will talk of Iraq, and Iran don't forget, of Nazi Germany, of fascism (the form of political state of affairs which the Bush administration most closely resembles [if you honestly doubt or don't know it, look up "Fascism" in the Int'l Encyclopedia of Social & Behaioral Sciences]), and so on ad nauseum. So disgusting I could spit.
I just know that this morning it begins, on the Sunday morning TV circuit. What kind of nightmare administration do we live under? What kind of legacy are we passively perpetuating? Today and tomorrow, I can't help but think, will embody the twisted highlight of a sickening logic to their political power run amok. A ethically lascivious peep-show, the anti-reality hour for oligarchs, soldiers of fortune, and neo-fascists who will stand in a circle watching, their feet continually shifting on the sticky floor.
And you can see it for FREE, just turn on the tube.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
9.09.06, Eve's Ramblings (disconnected thoughts)
[more rambling, b/f 10 pm]
Before I ramble too much more, a request. I know I have three sisters who read this blog, so is it possible to have one of you get these posts to mom? Or take turns? Would someone mind doing that for me? Nearly every time I talk to her she says she’s not heard of anything on the blog, no news, no details. Since I talk to her pretty much daily it’s not a huge issue, but I would imagine she’d like to see the blog.
All this searching about and studying about Being probably looks like it had some teleology in the light of the present “study” of it. While I grant that the two are related, even more closely than I would have thought before, the one is not just an extension of the other acclimated to death and short-term being. I’m surprised, however, by how all of the high philosophical attempts to work it out, though extremely wordy and too often burdened down with a scholarly tradition and apparatus, are at center the same as trying to get up every morning and face mortality. Knowing you’re facing death sooner than most people you know narrows those Big Question discussions down to a number of key everyday questions.
What is my desire? What is all the chaff in life? What can be eliminated without detriment? What do my actions mean, and, how screwed up are my priorities? On actions, what is left of them after I’m gone? What’s the value of social interaction? Ethical behavior? Etc. But now I feel like I’m I the laboratory and it’s possible to test theories daily. You can feel what some questions mean, whether some assertions hold water, whether some propositions are simply shit. I don’t if it’s coming out well, but I feel like Hegel’s concerns in his “Preface” are the same ones we deal with daily if we’re honest and thoughtful. Or it that feels pretentious, reverse the order, “Our simplest honest everyday concerns are actually . . .”
Death, or foreshortened life, forces all this. It's not so much about how long every morning till I think "cancer" so much as how long till I think "How much longer?" My head rattles with it all. And this is what happens mentally between bouts of various physical annoyances. It rambles, I can’t guarantee it’s entertaining, but it’s real.
[eve’s ramblings]
To blog out of nothing. Today. A 5 or a 6 for the numerically oriented. The Franky Scale (. . . where is St. Francis tonight, a cocktail in hand for me?). Feeling late. Always late, but this is all happening too early so what would I be late for? For what? Apparently last week I was late for a procedure that involved one version of “me,” but the version of me that maintains my body, governs or is governed by fatigue, experiences bouts of energy, never fully manic any-more though, this version of me was unaware of being late for anything. So the appointment made without me, the doctor scrubbed without me, the tan overconfident somewhat lacking in bedside mannerist there without me, while I was living my life and making sure I wasn’t late for anything. Till the administrator called and informed me there were two me’s, and one of them was scheduled, it’s just that the other didn’t know.
There is a parable in here somewhere? If it’s true that “because I could not wait for Death, . . .” then perhaps I’ll get lucky and be late again sometime in the near future. Death with wait in agitation, looking at his Swiss watch, wondering “What gall? What nerve?” while I’m off somewhere else writing him into a parable where he is the butt. I hope his administrator is the same as the one who called me to apologize and say I guess we assumed we had you on board for this. Nope. Not this me. Must be someone else. So Death will run around checking my usual haunts, to no avail. I’ll be sitting elsewhere with a good book, and no watch . . .
Growing inside me like knowledge. This is the thought that comes to me tonight. Wisdom — no, too high falutin. Some would have us think though that knowledge must inevitably lead somewhere, like wisdom. Hmph. Just knowing certain things and thinking them through these days. These Days, caps. What is it like . . . calls come, messages, over wireless, or through the net. But tonight too is solitary, more at this same day today. Sometimes often there is little to talk about. Times of patience, or simply, being. So much of Being accentuated these days, precisely because they stand out as being precisely “these days.” Keeps coming back, little returns of phrase. And, just being, for a little longer. No Blue Cliff Records, Dharma Bums, or else metropolitan or colonial fictions so much the less. Applicable. Not today thank you. The Stranger, Twenty Love Poems, Flower Garland Sutra / Hwaom, Satan Says, Three Poems, Tender Buttons. Philosophy and Truth and scads of other notebooks.
There — in growth, knowledge, tumors — is a strained simile. Still it serves. Sometimes even a cliché serves just right. It’s all tied through some backmountain trails and desert plateaus and long wash walks to the recent concerns I’ve had: no, let’s call it obsession. Being. The one uncanny fact is how I was obsessed before these days. For the past few years I’ve been studying through this maze on the side, the deepest philosophical problem, or question ala Camus, through Hegel and Marx, through Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, some other places. Put this on hold, there is a sound and sight afoot.
Interruptive image: A breeze flowing right through my kitchen window, with some force, and a tree sits just inside my eighth floor window, what kind, I don’t know, while I cook. When is the last time you could hear the sound of tree leaves rustling and breeze wind flowing while you stood in front of your stove. Next room the blinds sometimes reach just the right windspeed to imitate cicadas. Perfectly. Who did this? When was the last time? Now I sit to eat. There is one cup for tea, given to me by a poet named Hwang. Where is he eating tonight? There are two cups in the set. Or is he asleep in the midst of friends and hangers on, cigarette burning dangerously down to the drunk sleeping quick while one friend, who is a radical journalist and freerange intellectual, will catch it before the end. Then Hwang will wake up, laugh in small at a joke two minutes old, light another. So it goes. Eternal return. (Was it two years ago I was there grabbing the cigarette?)
More later…. That’s why it’s rambling…
Before I ramble too much more, a request. I know I have three sisters who read this blog, so is it possible to have one of you get these posts to mom? Or take turns? Would someone mind doing that for me? Nearly every time I talk to her she says she’s not heard of anything on the blog, no news, no details. Since I talk to her pretty much daily it’s not a huge issue, but I would imagine she’d like to see the blog.
All this searching about and studying about Being probably looks like it had some teleology in the light of the present “study” of it. While I grant that the two are related, even more closely than I would have thought before, the one is not just an extension of the other acclimated to death and short-term being. I’m surprised, however, by how all of the high philosophical attempts to work it out, though extremely wordy and too often burdened down with a scholarly tradition and apparatus, are at center the same as trying to get up every morning and face mortality. Knowing you’re facing death sooner than most people you know narrows those Big Question discussions down to a number of key everyday questions.
What is my desire? What is all the chaff in life? What can be eliminated without detriment? What do my actions mean, and, how screwed up are my priorities? On actions, what is left of them after I’m gone? What’s the value of social interaction? Ethical behavior? Etc. But now I feel like I’m I the laboratory and it’s possible to test theories daily. You can feel what some questions mean, whether some assertions hold water, whether some propositions are simply shit. I don’t if it’s coming out well, but I feel like Hegel’s concerns in his “Preface” are the same ones we deal with daily if we’re honest and thoughtful. Or it that feels pretentious, reverse the order, “Our simplest honest everyday concerns are actually . . .”
Death, or foreshortened life, forces all this. It's not so much about how long every morning till I think "cancer" so much as how long till I think "How much longer?" My head rattles with it all. And this is what happens mentally between bouts of various physical annoyances. It rambles, I can’t guarantee it’s entertaining, but it’s real.
[eve’s ramblings]
To blog out of nothing. Today. A 5 or a 6 for the numerically oriented. The Franky Scale (. . . where is St. Francis tonight, a cocktail in hand for me?). Feeling late. Always late, but this is all happening too early so what would I be late for? For what? Apparently last week I was late for a procedure that involved one version of “me,” but the version of me that maintains my body, governs or is governed by fatigue, experiences bouts of energy, never fully manic any-more though, this version of me was unaware of being late for anything. So the appointment made without me, the doctor scrubbed without me, the tan overconfident somewhat lacking in bedside mannerist there without me, while I was living my life and making sure I wasn’t late for anything. Till the administrator called and informed me there were two me’s, and one of them was scheduled, it’s just that the other didn’t know.
There is a parable in here somewhere? If it’s true that “because I could not wait for Death, . . .” then perhaps I’ll get lucky and be late again sometime in the near future. Death with wait in agitation, looking at his Swiss watch, wondering “What gall? What nerve?” while I’m off somewhere else writing him into a parable where he is the butt. I hope his administrator is the same as the one who called me to apologize and say I guess we assumed we had you on board for this. Nope. Not this me. Must be someone else. So Death will run around checking my usual haunts, to no avail. I’ll be sitting elsewhere with a good book, and no watch . . .
Growing inside me like knowledge. This is the thought that comes to me tonight. Wisdom — no, too high falutin. Some would have us think though that knowledge must inevitably lead somewhere, like wisdom. Hmph. Just knowing certain things and thinking them through these days. These Days, caps. What is it like . . . calls come, messages, over wireless, or through the net. But tonight too is solitary, more at this same day today. Sometimes often there is little to talk about. Times of patience, or simply, being. So much of Being accentuated these days, precisely because they stand out as being precisely “these days.” Keeps coming back, little returns of phrase. And, just being, for a little longer. No Blue Cliff Records, Dharma Bums, or else metropolitan or colonial fictions so much the less. Applicable. Not today thank you. The Stranger, Twenty Love Poems, Flower Garland Sutra / Hwaom, Satan Says, Three Poems, Tender Buttons. Philosophy and Truth and scads of other notebooks.
There — in growth, knowledge, tumors — is a strained simile. Still it serves. Sometimes even a cliché serves just right. It’s all tied through some backmountain trails and desert plateaus and long wash walks to the recent concerns I’ve had: no, let’s call it obsession. Being. The one uncanny fact is how I was obsessed before these days. For the past few years I’ve been studying through this maze on the side, the deepest philosophical problem, or question ala Camus, through Hegel and Marx, through Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, some other places. Put this on hold, there is a sound and sight afoot.
Interruptive image: A breeze flowing right through my kitchen window, with some force, and a tree sits just inside my eighth floor window, what kind, I don’t know, while I cook. When is the last time you could hear the sound of tree leaves rustling and breeze wind flowing while you stood in front of your stove. Next room the blinds sometimes reach just the right windspeed to imitate cicadas. Perfectly. Who did this? When was the last time? Now I sit to eat. There is one cup for tea, given to me by a poet named Hwang. Where is he eating tonight? There are two cups in the set. Or is he asleep in the midst of friends and hangers on, cigarette burning dangerously down to the drunk sleeping quick while one friend, who is a radical journalist and freerange intellectual, will catch it before the end. Then Hwang will wake up, laugh in small at a joke two minutes old, light another. So it goes. Eternal return. (Was it two years ago I was there grabbing the cigarette?)
More later…. That’s why it’s rambling…
Friday, September 08, 2006
9.08.06, Slow Waves
Friday hasn't brought much excitment, just some fatigue and tiredness (the former I mean technically after the chemo side effect) after a rough night's sleep last night. Franky Scale would clock in around 5. It's so arbitrary, as we've said, but on average I'll drop one right in the middle. It's mostly nausea, the coming and going of a stomach that rises up the throat, or that flips over one way and then the other.
For now, to alleviate these annoyances I'm going to talk some poems with a friend. Get away in the mind. Maybe something spontaneous and guest-bloglike will occur.
For now, to alleviate these annoyances I'm going to talk some poems with a friend. Get away in the mind. Maybe something spontaneous and guest-bloglike will occur.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
9.07.06, Chemo Just Keeps Happening
[3:22 am]
Ambien works, on occasion. Temazepam seemed to work for a while. But not lately. So there are times when midnight bathroom, water, or popsicle breaks turn into more than I had planned. Like now. Nothing to report, no dreams, no impressions, no epiphanies. Just simple insomnia with a splash of nausea. Just a record of life's simplest events. Does is bore you to tears? It does me, though those tears I can usually hold back. What constitutes boredom? I used to feel very confident that boredom was impossible for me to experience. There was simply too much, always, to do. Now with my future out of joint, boredom does seem to hold its place occasionally. It's a surprise. Life's curves. It's rife with deep thinking, sructured around the avoidance of other thoughts, too often. It's often what brings me here after I've had my water, once my popsicle is finished.
So what does it all mean? Nothing, still. (You see, it's not just questions only, but answers too.) That remains the fact to face, the one that requires the most courage. And thinking of what I'll miss, this is part of the "boredom" thinking I experience sometimes now. If I'm feeling more buddhistic and enlightened then I can tell myself my attachments are mostly taken care of. That I'm close. The trivia having become just trivia, miinutiae minutiae. The days continue to roll out however. From a day of freedom to the next when my body is disciplined with toxic anti-cancer drugs. The days in between when my mind turns at times to wondering whether . . . whether it's working, how much it's working, whether it matters, or it's just a time-filler.
Yesterday I spoke with a good friend who's been out of the loop for a while, one with whom I share quite a few values, and it was odd to hear — don't look too hard for a seque here — her take on immortality. Not any religious kind, I assure you, but rather a good old-fashioned literary kind. Also a kind I've not held much faith in lately since I question the good of what's left behind that you as subject will not be able to read or evaluate. If there is any response you won't know. Is that a kind of immortality? No next life means, quite simply, lots of silence. Despite her confidence, and there's no reason to overestimate my abilities in this regard. This is not lament, nor metaphor, just observation, the return to a question that had slipped off-stage for quite some time. Why does it arise now? Because the strangest things come to fill the sleepless brain.
Enough somnambulant wandering on my part. It's only just a bit entertainment for those moments stolen from your work. Pieces of the random thrown into the record, if record this becomes. Other than that, life is still suffering, as if was before cancer too, and we just try to alleviate it as best we know how. Tomorrow day what, 22 of the chemo cycle, or 23, or does it matter? Another day it keeps moving. Hopefully with a little sleep between now and then. I hope no one's up to read this now.
BTW, a book recommendation in Korean. There is a newish book of poetry out in Korea called "Anak'ist'u (The Anarchist)" by Chang Sogwon, published this year by Munji. The latest in their unofficial "Wangtta" series. Go read it, those friends who are in Korea or have access otherwise. It points the way for much of what's solid and forward among the newest Korean poetic voices. And Sogwon is a great guy, too, which doesn't hurt. (Minjok Kodae!)
* * *
Every Thursday — was Tuesdays previously — the same thing happens. I wake up and wonder "Do I want to eat? Well I really should." and then "Do I want to get up? Not really, but what choice?" and I ask some similar questions as means of slowly getting my brain to work, my body clean enough to go out in public, then myself clothed and packed up so I can have that last five minutes to wait before Mme X comes to get me in her superhero car. Chemo just keeps on going, every week, seemingly with or without me.
It becomes habitual, as it feels it has already, but whenever that happens a surprise is usually waiting right around the corner, no? Hm. Better be good.
* * *
Lethargy sets in. Fatigue might be a better word for it, a benzodizapine induced physical whammy. I think there is no help for me but a serious spell checking and sleep. Bringing the Franky Scale somewhere off 5.
* * *
Not a lot to add today, in terms of today events, however I did have a conversation with the GI people from the UW Medical Center the day before that's worth recounting. They called to tell me I missed my EUS procedure for the NCPB, the nerve block to reduce my "belly" pain, as they kept putting it. I said "What procedure?" And realized that the size of the UW hospital and its nature due to that size unavoidably cause Kafka-esque problems. If I were quicker to think on my feet, I would have replied like K, "Ah yes, my procedure. How did it go? Do I feel better now? Was it successful?" Just to taunt the scheduler who processed "me," and decided my appt time, and scheduled me into the doctor's morning schedule without ever consulting the real me. Very interesting.
I informed her of this, to her confusion. Then we started over and I suggested that maybe if they actually planned it with me and found out if I wanted to do the procedure than we might get somewhere. So later I was called and it started over. I am pencilled in for Oct 2, Monday late morning. I refused the 7:20 slot since I want my doctor to be fully caffeinated and to be able to practice on a few people before he gets to me. Which means I think I'm going through with it. Low risk, relatively high success rate. All to the reduction of pain.
Ambien works, on occasion. Temazepam seemed to work for a while. But not lately. So there are times when midnight bathroom, water, or popsicle breaks turn into more than I had planned. Like now. Nothing to report, no dreams, no impressions, no epiphanies. Just simple insomnia with a splash of nausea. Just a record of life's simplest events. Does is bore you to tears? It does me, though those tears I can usually hold back. What constitutes boredom? I used to feel very confident that boredom was impossible for me to experience. There was simply too much, always, to do. Now with my future out of joint, boredom does seem to hold its place occasionally. It's a surprise. Life's curves. It's rife with deep thinking, sructured around the avoidance of other thoughts, too often. It's often what brings me here after I've had my water, once my popsicle is finished.
So what does it all mean? Nothing, still. (You see, it's not just questions only, but answers too.) That remains the fact to face, the one that requires the most courage. And thinking of what I'll miss, this is part of the "boredom" thinking I experience sometimes now. If I'm feeling more buddhistic and enlightened then I can tell myself my attachments are mostly taken care of. That I'm close. The trivia having become just trivia, miinutiae minutiae. The days continue to roll out however. From a day of freedom to the next when my body is disciplined with toxic anti-cancer drugs. The days in between when my mind turns at times to wondering whether . . . whether it's working, how much it's working, whether it matters, or it's just a time-filler.
Yesterday I spoke with a good friend who's been out of the loop for a while, one with whom I share quite a few values, and it was odd to hear — don't look too hard for a seque here — her take on immortality. Not any religious kind, I assure you, but rather a good old-fashioned literary kind. Also a kind I've not held much faith in lately since I question the good of what's left behind that you as subject will not be able to read or evaluate. If there is any response you won't know. Is that a kind of immortality? No next life means, quite simply, lots of silence. Despite her confidence, and there's no reason to overestimate my abilities in this regard. This is not lament, nor metaphor, just observation, the return to a question that had slipped off-stage for quite some time. Why does it arise now? Because the strangest things come to fill the sleepless brain.
Enough somnambulant wandering on my part. It's only just a bit entertainment for those moments stolen from your work. Pieces of the random thrown into the record, if record this becomes. Other than that, life is still suffering, as if was before cancer too, and we just try to alleviate it as best we know how. Tomorrow day what, 22 of the chemo cycle, or 23, or does it matter? Another day it keeps moving. Hopefully with a little sleep between now and then. I hope no one's up to read this now.
BTW, a book recommendation in Korean. There is a newish book of poetry out in Korea called "Anak'ist'u (The Anarchist)" by Chang Sogwon, published this year by Munji. The latest in their unofficial "Wangtta" series. Go read it, those friends who are in Korea or have access otherwise. It points the way for much of what's solid and forward among the newest Korean poetic voices. And Sogwon is a great guy, too, which doesn't hurt. (Minjok Kodae!)
* * *
Every Thursday — was Tuesdays previously — the same thing happens. I wake up and wonder "Do I want to eat? Well I really should." and then "Do I want to get up? Not really, but what choice?" and I ask some similar questions as means of slowly getting my brain to work, my body clean enough to go out in public, then myself clothed and packed up so I can have that last five minutes to wait before Mme X comes to get me in her superhero car. Chemo just keeps on going, every week, seemingly with or without me.
It becomes habitual, as it feels it has already, but whenever that happens a surprise is usually waiting right around the corner, no? Hm. Better be good.
* * *
Lethargy sets in. Fatigue might be a better word for it, a benzodizapine induced physical whammy. I think there is no help for me but a serious spell checking and sleep. Bringing the Franky Scale somewhere off 5.
* * *
Not a lot to add today, in terms of today events, however I did have a conversation with the GI people from the UW Medical Center the day before that's worth recounting. They called to tell me I missed my EUS procedure for the NCPB, the nerve block to reduce my "belly" pain, as they kept putting it. I said "What procedure?" And realized that the size of the UW hospital and its nature due to that size unavoidably cause Kafka-esque problems. If I were quicker to think on my feet, I would have replied like K, "Ah yes, my procedure. How did it go? Do I feel better now? Was it successful?" Just to taunt the scheduler who processed "me," and decided my appt time, and scheduled me into the doctor's morning schedule without ever consulting the real me. Very interesting.
I informed her of this, to her confusion. Then we started over and I suggested that maybe if they actually planned it with me and found out if I wanted to do the procedure than we might get somewhere. So later I was called and it started over. I am pencilled in for Oct 2, Monday late morning. I refused the 7:20 slot since I want my doctor to be fully caffeinated and to be able to practice on a few people before he gets to me. Which means I think I'm going through with it. Low risk, relatively high success rate. All to the reduction of pain.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
9.06.06, Creation & Criticism, Another Poem
Franky Scale 6.73482. IV chemotherapy tomorrow again, early a.m., plug me in and let me go, drip drip recline drip drip dose. It's all a very tiring routine, but this is the final of four weeks in this immediate cycle. Enough said. "Tiring" because it is so much the same, but the sameness is not really what will "save" me. Which means it's just time removal and the Other Big Clock keeps moving. Ineluctable.
* * *
Slarry, you asked about my poetic process, the act of creation regarding that two-day old sonnet. Assuming you're asking seriously, here's a serious answer. My answer deals both with writing and with my cancer experience. I wrote it at night on 8/30. The occasion should be obvious in the broad sense; more specifically, I suppose the poem lends support to my theory that "a writer writes." Again, broad sense, every piece I write presently becomes a standstill image of the larger process I'm undergoing. Back to process, I don't ever sit down and think "OK, time to write a poem." It just wouldn't happen even if I did. I do, however, try to write whenever I get the chance, diaries, essays, problems, small fictions, whatever. It's part of my life theory and my therapy — it's probably a large part of what's kept me alive so far.
If I haven't done it already on a given day, I'll sit down before my keyboard at day's end, and then I'll begin recording events, feelings, whatever hits me. It will start to flow, so long as the mind is open to a choppy flow, verbose flow, disconnected flow, chiastic flow, etc., any kind of flow. Almost always a small narrative emerges. At times, like on 8/30, the lines about a given theme start to thicken, they condense into more economic form, the break in certain places — the lineation often happens of itself. Rhyming almost never happens of itself. Although, a poem's form might just "happen," like the near 14-line form that poem found all by itself. To push it into a rhyme scheme and sonnet form was merely a small puzzle after it was all written. A self-contained "piece" of creation will emerge and my responsibility is to See it, Extract it, and then Rework it. The latter might take one or a hundred times.
Below is another piece. I'm not big on explaining any piece, especially before it's read, . . . so, here is another piece, that's all. All I will say is that the idea came before the content did, which is why you can read it like a written record, which is why actual records could be worked into it—in that sense it is all historical and true. That being said, this piece is still only mostly done; something is still off with it. I just can't identify it yet. It's called "The Premonitioner." Note, the first stanza took place, and I wrote what I wrote, weeks before I was tested or diagnosed.
* * *
“The Premonitioner”
[Premonition]
Before Daniel’s birthday after he died: I began to write on death and beauty, two concepts, no facts, always correlate in my brain. The ellipses in the original:
[Image]
Reversing the direction, of death’s coming, is like hearing Monk play, really hearing. Piano keys are never pushed, they are not hit, they are not struck however gently — Monk rests his hands above the keyboard and lets them fall. Myopic naysayers could not see how he would wait, in full control,
how he would let,
[Records]
Every year I rename my journal. Two thousand six on New Year’s Day was titled “Small Steps in Death’s Shadow.”
3 January 2006 untitled day
“. . . I don’t know if stress it the cause or not but my stomach fucking killed last night, right when I was about to sleep.
“Pain tonight too on the 4th, next day.”
“— pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 61) Not that we would otherwise forget. . .
[Memories]
4/5 January 2006 slow life dull pains
“. . . Next morning, the 5th, my stomach hurts still. Like this highwire tension, it seems like it won’t go away.”
I would run 6 miles a day. My halfway point a work of public, community art beneath the University Drawbridge, perhaps an anti-war piece, 14-feet tall, encircular, grey & red, in any event called “The Wall of Death.”
8 January 2006 why stay awake
“Sunday morning. Briefly, before the sun was up, sitting at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I thought, ‘This is not too bad, I feel pretty good being alive.’”
Consolation, there is no consolation in premonitions. Just one more ringing echo return of dumb fate speaking against the boundless sky. Deaf fate awaiting her return. A clownshow communication you can only watch if you turn on the subtitles.
Morning of 9 February:
“I woke up today and my stomach was hurting again — that nervy and painful feeling that I’ve had nearly every day for months now, and spend hundreds on for bullhsit no medical help.”
[Tender Buttons]
2 March 2006
“In the morning I got a ride from Kim to have my endoscopy done, I lived.”
5 March 2006 cannot wait
“I keep waking up at about 5 every day — now . . . 5:21 and I finally . . . 'fuck it,' more insomnia coming . . . the summertime curse? . . . some other reason . . . stomach feels nervous all the time at night, that . . . pain upper left since last fall?”
10 March 2006 Dr. Peppin bad news
“6:02 PM, Dr. Craig Peppin just called me, at home, at about 5:50, which I’m taking as a sign that he’s concerned.
“Somehow even the line that it could be a kind of cancer just doesn’t bowl me over, but rather seems somehow appropriate, like it was only a matter of time until I would learn that in my life. Why do I feel that way? Will it all be cut short? And more strange however, when I piss and moan about my existential angst all the time, how life is so unsatisfying and I feel almost nothing but of the soul riven by lack then why should that be a worry to me?”
* * *
Slarry, you asked about my poetic process, the act of creation regarding that two-day old sonnet. Assuming you're asking seriously, here's a serious answer. My answer deals both with writing and with my cancer experience. I wrote it at night on 8/30. The occasion should be obvious in the broad sense; more specifically, I suppose the poem lends support to my theory that "a writer writes." Again, broad sense, every piece I write presently becomes a standstill image of the larger process I'm undergoing. Back to process, I don't ever sit down and think "OK, time to write a poem." It just wouldn't happen even if I did. I do, however, try to write whenever I get the chance, diaries, essays, problems, small fictions, whatever. It's part of my life theory and my therapy — it's probably a large part of what's kept me alive so far.
If I haven't done it already on a given day, I'll sit down before my keyboard at day's end, and then I'll begin recording events, feelings, whatever hits me. It will start to flow, so long as the mind is open to a choppy flow, verbose flow, disconnected flow, chiastic flow, etc., any kind of flow. Almost always a small narrative emerges. At times, like on 8/30, the lines about a given theme start to thicken, they condense into more economic form, the break in certain places — the lineation often happens of itself. Rhyming almost never happens of itself. Although, a poem's form might just "happen," like the near 14-line form that poem found all by itself. To push it into a rhyme scheme and sonnet form was merely a small puzzle after it was all written. A self-contained "piece" of creation will emerge and my responsibility is to See it, Extract it, and then Rework it. The latter might take one or a hundred times.
Below is another piece. I'm not big on explaining any piece, especially before it's read, . . . so, here is another piece, that's all. All I will say is that the idea came before the content did, which is why you can read it like a written record, which is why actual records could be worked into it—in that sense it is all historical and true. That being said, this piece is still only mostly done; something is still off with it. I just can't identify it yet. It's called "The Premonitioner." Note, the first stanza took place, and I wrote what I wrote, weeks before I was tested or diagnosed.
* * *
“The Premonitioner”
[Premonition]
Before Daniel’s birthday after he died: I began to write on death and beauty, two concepts, no facts, always correlate in my brain. The ellipses in the original:
“…and I suppose I should rephrase my thought about death’s approach, my approach to it, since I am going towards it but I write from where I am and where it is — once I arrive the meeting will stop the writing, but what I am doing is coming to die.”
[Image]
Reversing the direction, of death’s coming, is like hearing Monk play, really hearing. Piano keys are never pushed, they are not hit, they are not struck however gently — Monk rests his hands above the keyboard and lets them fall. Myopic naysayers could not see how he would wait, in full control,
how he would let,
the keys fall
in gentle syncopation.
[Records]
Every year I rename my journal. Two thousand six on New Year’s Day was titled “Small Steps in Death’s Shadow.”
3 January 2006 untitled day
“. . . I don’t know if stress it the cause or not but my stomach fucking killed last night, right when I was about to sleep.
“Pain tonight too on the 4th, next day.”
“— pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 61) Not that we would otherwise forget. . .
[Memories]
4/5 January 2006 slow life dull pains
“. . . Next morning, the 5th, my stomach hurts still. Like this highwire tension, it seems like it won’t go away.”
I would run 6 miles a day. My halfway point a work of public, community art beneath the University Drawbridge, perhaps an anti-war piece, 14-feet tall, encircular, grey & red, in any event called “The Wall of Death.”
8 January 2006 why stay awake
“Sunday morning. Briefly, before the sun was up, sitting at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I thought, ‘This is not too bad, I feel pretty good being alive.’”
Consolation, there is no consolation in premonitions. Just one more ringing echo return of dumb fate speaking against the boundless sky. Deaf fate awaiting her return. A clownshow communication you can only watch if you turn on the subtitles.
Morning of 9 February:
“I woke up today and my stomach was hurting again — that nervy and painful feeling that I’ve had nearly every day for months now, and spend hundreds on for bullhsit no medical help.”
“The time to show a message is when too late and later there is no hanging in a blight.” (Stein, Tender Buttons 5)
[Tender Buttons]
2 March 2006
“In the morning I got a ride from Kim to have my endoscopy done, I lived.”
“The one thing you want is to pause so as to puzzle all this out, but that is impossible; you are moving much too fast for your momentum to be halted.” (Ashbery, Three Poems 87)
5 March 2006 cannot wait
“I keep waking up at about 5 every day — now . . . 5:21 and I finally . . . 'fuck it,' more insomnia coming . . . the summertime curse? . . . some other reason . . . stomach feels nervous all the time at night, that . . . pain upper left since last fall?”
10 March 2006 Dr. Peppin bad news
“6:02 PM, Dr. Craig Peppin just called me, at home, at about 5:50, which I’m taking as a sign that he’s concerned.
“Somehow even the line that it could be a kind of cancer just doesn’t bowl me over, but rather seems somehow appropriate, like it was only a matter of time until I would learn that in my life. Why do I feel that way? Will it all be cut short? And more strange however, when I piss and moan about my existential angst all the time, how life is so unsatisfying and I feel almost nothing but of the soul riven by lack then why should that be a worry to me?”
“And would you believe that this word could possibly be our salvation? For we are rescued by what we cannot imagine: it is what finally takes up and shuts our story. . .” (Ashbery, Three Poems 104; italics added)
Sunday, September 03, 2006
9.03.06, A Sonnet from Fragility
“Life, the Crash Course Version”
Death opens vistas through its immanence. Widened
Vision and broadened possibility both result from the horror
Of the approach, the horror. Every possibility existing gossamer,
Hanging by delicate threads of if, comes to the fore of when
Pain’s freedom is finally achieved. The ambivalent joy is where
In the eye-opened crash course for life, life until death is no more
Fast on silent shoes of black patent leather across a floor
Swept clean by silence? The daily expectancy is where,
In dodging nausea, neuropathy, constipation, diarrhea, and more
The localized general pain, incessant & unseen like a cancer,
Stop a step short of simile — as cancer without “like” is interred,
Buried in the belly of everything you could have become before
Your horizon expanded to reach anything, yet restricted to the now?
Dream your fullest desire your everything, just do it fast somehow.
* * *
If there is going to be a Franky Scale I'm going to think about it some more. Even at this time of day it hasn't been long enough to say well. And sometimes it gets tiring constantly taking one's temperature.
Death opens vistas through its immanence. Widened
Vision and broadened possibility both result from the horror
Of the approach, the horror. Every possibility existing gossamer,
Hanging by delicate threads of if, comes to the fore of when
Pain’s freedom is finally achieved. The ambivalent joy is where
In the eye-opened crash course for life, life until death is no more
Fast on silent shoes of black patent leather across a floor
Swept clean by silence? The daily expectancy is where,
In dodging nausea, neuropathy, constipation, diarrhea, and more
The localized general pain, incessant & unseen like a cancer,
Stop a step short of simile — as cancer without “like” is interred,
Buried in the belly of everything you could have become before
Your horizon expanded to reach anything, yet restricted to the now?
Dream your fullest desire your everything, just do it fast somehow.
* * *
If there is going to be a Franky Scale I'm going to think about it some more. Even at this time of day it hasn't been long enough to say well. And sometimes it gets tiring constantly taking one's temperature.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
9.02.06, The Long Arm After Sunset
[during daylight]
When the sun goes down you will find me at my keyboard.
You will not find me today, since I slowly skirt from book to book,
and from here to somewhere else.
Occupy a small piece of park grass not far from water spray, a piece no one
else wants. It's supposed to be this way. No conflict, no mine, no retroactive nostalgia, just reading and time's passage. All the innocent voyeurism.
Remember, avoid prolonged exposure to the sun while taking chemotherapy drugs.
Franky Scale: 6. Again, getting drug times, food times, sleep times all right. Somewhat trickier than it sounds.
[after sunset: (This added a few hours after this post, I guess I don't want to apologize for it, I take what you said, DP, to heart, and thanks to the both of the commentors so far. But since out of genuine caring some of you might feel this kind of "talk" is too grim, just remember it's good for me to express it. It has to come out sometimes, on occasion it just needs to make its way out. Already there is enough inside me, in all the various states of matter and emotion, to try to cap it all. I only want to stem any over reacting, just in case. This kind of pain and fore-trauma needs to be experienced for it to dissipate. I do want comments though, as I always do, since they help keep this whole thing moving and alive, they keep us in some sort of dialog I imagine. I just wanted to prevent any over reaction in them. In mutual understanding then.)]
A few comments, including some off-blog through email, have come in about my last doctor's appointment and the issue of pain. Thank you all and let's do assign a special Pile of Shit Award as was suggested. Slarry, you mentioned or asked about the procedure itself. Well, if you're going to do research you might first want to see four abstracts/articles I have on it — it actually seems quite good, low risk, and is very standard procedure for pancreatic cancer pain — and if you do look it up notice that it's officially called the NCPB, or neurolytic celiac plexus block. The celiac plexus contains the primary nerves going out from behind the pancreas, so you kill deaden the nerves and you usually end up eliminating a good deal of pain (74% of the time). One study even shows a slightly lower mortality among patients who underwent the procedure (perhaps because of increased quality of life?) but I don't believe that's an entirely reliable conclusion since the study wasn't specifically designed around that information. Overall, it looks good and has a zero percent mortality, from what I've read.
Discussing the NCPB forms a good transition into the next topic, which might fall under the category of morbid thinking. For the past couple of days I've been more preoccupied — not unhealthily — with death time. Reading the abstracts for those articles is part of the reason. Information about those who undergo the procedure inevitably leads to specifics about how many people undergo a re-do after about three months, and how many don't live that long.
Couple that with dreams. Where supposedly the unconscious, which itself is structured like a language, speaks. A wish fulfilled, though usually several steps removed through displacement, symbolism, overdetermination, etc. Two dreams this week remind in part why sleep might be necessary but not always desirable for me. One, I totally lost the content of, but the feeling I awoke with is better left unsaid. True to the dream structure, it's what cannot be said. In the other, however, I do remember some of it and it involved spending some time with someone I know, who's dead. Someone I knew. You don't have to be Freud to makes some sense of it.
The Wednesday meeting with those two doctors, which in terms of being put off and realizing how (un)important you are to The System truly resonates with David's story about his mother, and the dreams, and a little catch up on my own management schedule all conspire against high Franky Scale numbers. Then there is simple the passage of time. There is Camus telling how only for the condemned is there liberation, only for those last days does the indifference to draining minutiae reveal itself. There is also at times a feeling not of proactive choosing the absurd, more Camus (an active daily confrontation of a meaningless life, rather than a living death chosen by others), but of just being tired. Only problem is that I can't always distinguish the cause — from chemotherapy, from missing sleep due to pain or due to anxiety, from — here comes a term I don't like to even say or think — cachexia. The wasting away process.
Your cancer grows while the rest of you wastes away. It just gets "healthier" while you pay the price. Quite a lot of people die specifically from cachexia. People with pancreatic cancer that is. Now, do I apologize for being so heavy here? Well, it has to happen somewhere and I expect if you're reading, then to some extent, you're already along for the ride. I read the words "advanced" and "terminal" and "late stage" and that too is tiring. It creates an unproductive cycle where learning about the disease might "save your life" and yet the more you read the more you're battered over the head with these terms. With the reminder.
The book What Dying People Want is so benign and sensitive compared to a medical article. Yet that too, I can only stand to read it for so many pages at a time. . . . Where is all this going? How did it get started? I thought of writing about little everyday routines, about the park, the sunset, normalcy, about sitting outside editing poems for a friend and making notes for projects in the future.
But today the reminder has been serious, the words "terminal" and "advanced." Sharp awareness of what time a pill must go down. So in the end, the sun, park, poems, etc., I still feel like much of these is being held a certain distance out in front of me, held by some anonymous hand at the end of a very long arm. I don't know whose arm, but it's sinewy, strong, looks possessed of endurance. I stand and stare, it waits extended. A game of chicken where no movement wins. A game with no winning — so like one dear friend recently reminded, I have to keep standing, face up, taking all the absurd fucking time that hangs in between.
When the sun goes down you will find me at my keyboard.
You will not find me today, since I slowly skirt from book to book,
and from here to somewhere else.
Occupy a small piece of park grass not far from water spray, a piece no one
else wants. It's supposed to be this way. No conflict, no mine, no retroactive nostalgia, just reading and time's passage. All the innocent voyeurism.
Remember, avoid prolonged exposure to the sun while taking chemotherapy drugs.
Franky Scale: 6. Again, getting drug times, food times, sleep times all right. Somewhat trickier than it sounds.
[after sunset: (This added a few hours after this post, I guess I don't want to apologize for it, I take what you said, DP, to heart, and thanks to the both of the commentors so far. But since out of genuine caring some of you might feel this kind of "talk" is too grim, just remember it's good for me to express it. It has to come out sometimes, on occasion it just needs to make its way out. Already there is enough inside me, in all the various states of matter and emotion, to try to cap it all. I only want to stem any over reacting, just in case. This kind of pain and fore-trauma needs to be experienced for it to dissipate. I do want comments though, as I always do, since they help keep this whole thing moving and alive, they keep us in some sort of dialog I imagine. I just wanted to prevent any over reaction in them. In mutual understanding then.)]
A few comments, including some off-blog through email, have come in about my last doctor's appointment and the issue of pain. Thank you all and let's do assign a special Pile of Shit Award as was suggested. Slarry, you mentioned or asked about the procedure itself. Well, if you're going to do research you might first want to see four abstracts/articles I have on it — it actually seems quite good, low risk, and is very standard procedure for pancreatic cancer pain — and if you do look it up notice that it's officially called the NCPB, or neurolytic celiac plexus block. The celiac plexus contains the primary nerves going out from behind the pancreas, so you kill deaden the nerves and you usually end up eliminating a good deal of pain (74% of the time). One study even shows a slightly lower mortality among patients who underwent the procedure (perhaps because of increased quality of life?) but I don't believe that's an entirely reliable conclusion since the study wasn't specifically designed around that information. Overall, it looks good and has a zero percent mortality, from what I've read.
Discussing the NCPB forms a good transition into the next topic, which might fall under the category of morbid thinking. For the past couple of days I've been more preoccupied — not unhealthily — with death time. Reading the abstracts for those articles is part of the reason. Information about those who undergo the procedure inevitably leads to specifics about how many people undergo a re-do after about three months, and how many don't live that long.
Couple that with dreams. Where supposedly the unconscious, which itself is structured like a language, speaks. A wish fulfilled, though usually several steps removed through displacement, symbolism, overdetermination, etc. Two dreams this week remind in part why sleep might be necessary but not always desirable for me. One, I totally lost the content of, but the feeling I awoke with is better left unsaid. True to the dream structure, it's what cannot be said. In the other, however, I do remember some of it and it involved spending some time with someone I know, who's dead. Someone I knew. You don't have to be Freud to makes some sense of it.
The Wednesday meeting with those two doctors, which in terms of being put off and realizing how (un)important you are to The System truly resonates with David's story about his mother, and the dreams, and a little catch up on my own management schedule all conspire against high Franky Scale numbers. Then there is simple the passage of time. There is Camus telling how only for the condemned is there liberation, only for those last days does the indifference to draining minutiae reveal itself. There is also at times a feeling not of proactive choosing the absurd, more Camus (an active daily confrontation of a meaningless life, rather than a living death chosen by others), but of just being tired. Only problem is that I can't always distinguish the cause — from chemotherapy, from missing sleep due to pain or due to anxiety, from — here comes a term I don't like to even say or think — cachexia. The wasting away process.
Your cancer grows while the rest of you wastes away. It just gets "healthier" while you pay the price. Quite a lot of people die specifically from cachexia. People with pancreatic cancer that is. Now, do I apologize for being so heavy here? Well, it has to happen somewhere and I expect if you're reading, then to some extent, you're already along for the ride. I read the words "advanced" and "terminal" and "late stage" and that too is tiring. It creates an unproductive cycle where learning about the disease might "save your life" and yet the more you read the more you're battered over the head with these terms. With the reminder.
The book What Dying People Want is so benign and sensitive compared to a medical article. Yet that too, I can only stand to read it for so many pages at a time. . . . Where is all this going? How did it get started? I thought of writing about little everyday routines, about the park, the sunset, normalcy, about sitting outside editing poems for a friend and making notes for projects in the future.
But today the reminder has been serious, the words "terminal" and "advanced." Sharp awareness of what time a pill must go down. So in the end, the sun, park, poems, etc., I still feel like much of these is being held a certain distance out in front of me, held by some anonymous hand at the end of a very long arm. I don't know whose arm, but it's sinewy, strong, looks possessed of endurance. I stand and stare, it waits extended. A game of chicken where no movement wins. A game with no winning — so like one dear friend recently reminded, I have to keep standing, face up, taking all the absurd fucking time that hangs in between.
Friday, September 01, 2006
9.01.06, Deciding on Next Procedure
This is all boring material but needs to be passed on. It's all about my Wednesday doctor's appointment with Dr. Saunders to discuss a possible procedure I might undergo for pain reduction. (below)
Today has been quiet and bookish, I've been holed up trying to finish some writing. For Franky Scale everything is fine, no incident...what's the number for that? If I stick with trying to rate it based on lack of pain or other problems, which I probably should, then 7 today. Despite my use of narcotics. (below)
The Celiac Plexus: This endoscopic procedure involves the standard EUS (endoscopic ultrasound, or garden hose down the throat with a camera and a needle or two on it, shoved down into the gut or “belly” as the first doctor liked to call it) and then the injection of alcohol into the celiac plexus in order to numb or kill the related nerves. The goal is to reduce abdominal pain, and a side effect/bonus is the likelihood that I’ll be able to reduce the amount of “narcotics” I take. Less constipation results too, we hope. This was the gist of my Wednesday appointment with Dr. Saunders, although most of my time was spent with a Dr. Scanga because the former was stuck with a patient for about 45 minutes.
Curious, there was a distinctly judgmental or moralistic tone I caught during this appointment: “You’re taking a HUNDRED mg of oxycontin every day?”, bushy eyebrows raised, and you could just hear the suggestion in his voice. This was Scanga. I got the sense of being looked at askew like (a) I shouldn’t need that much medication for pain, (b) I should tough it out for odd puritanical reasons, (c) I might be faking it to try and overly enjoy the meds, or (d) who knows. I said nothing then, except when later in our consult I told them that pain management is the single key to improving the quality of my life, which is short, and something they need to consider. Don’t know why but I could only say anything indirectly at the time. The whole issue of terminal-ity hadn’t been brought up and I feel they were more uncomfortable talking about it than I. The difference between these two GI fellows and Dr. Whiting and EVERYONE at the SCCA is like night and day. The former group just doesn’t seem to get it, the latter is entirely sympathetic and would never criticize what you're doing or how you’re doing it to relieve your pain, or manage it. Why should they, you're fucking dying?
Wednesday’s boys were a little lacking, then, in their terminal bedside manner. And I learned a new angle on the use of euphemism. So many times they use is to protect the patient or themselves, to make the world sound softer, more fuzzy, to hide a procedure or fact from immediate understanding. Non-resectable, for example, means “we can’t operate”; ablation, killing some nerves and possibly reduce pain; apoptosis, the dying off of cells; etc. What I found on Wednesday was the reverse use of euphemism, that is, the deliberate non-use of a more euphemistic term to make it all sound more coarse.
At SCCA my pain meds are usual referred to by drug name, as opiates, or even opioids. The term “narcotics,” with is its potentially flashy and negative connotations we get from the news and drug wars, is rarely used. At this appointment, however, the word narcotic was used regularly. Call me paranoid, if you will, but the term was used to a specific non-euphemistic end, that’s what I sensed. You tell someone they’re using quite a lot of narcotics as opposed to quite a lot of opioids and I think a different message is conveyed.
Otherwise they seemed fine, competent (to the degree I can judge this), and possibly skilled. Risk involved is loss of feeling in the lower body, something very, very unlikely they assure me as they stress how routine this 15-minute procedure really is. In very rare cases paralysis might occur, but they dodged this question, which I asked because Whiting told me about it. (He’s far more straightforward.) Doctor #1, Scanga, was the fill-in-while-real-doctor-is-late guy who had to gather general info about me and press on my stomach while the primary GI guy or EUS specialist was busy with another patient. Doctor #2 came in only to give me a little sales pitch of why I might do the procedure; and to tell me he thinks I’m a likely candidate for it given my pain situation. It works, he says, in 70-80 percent of the patients, who will feel significant pain reduction; however, they might have to have the thing redone in three to six months time.
Time to do more homework on doctor #2 (Dr. Saunders), on the procedure, and then decide whether to do it.
Today has been quiet and bookish, I've been holed up trying to finish some writing. For Franky Scale everything is fine, no incident...what's the number for that? If I stick with trying to rate it based on lack of pain or other problems, which I probably should, then 7 today. Despite my use of narcotics. (below)
The Celiac Plexus: This endoscopic procedure involves the standard EUS (endoscopic ultrasound, or garden hose down the throat with a camera and a needle or two on it, shoved down into the gut or “belly” as the first doctor liked to call it) and then the injection of alcohol into the celiac plexus in order to numb or kill the related nerves. The goal is to reduce abdominal pain, and a side effect/bonus is the likelihood that I’ll be able to reduce the amount of “narcotics” I take. Less constipation results too, we hope. This was the gist of my Wednesday appointment with Dr. Saunders, although most of my time was spent with a Dr. Scanga because the former was stuck with a patient for about 45 minutes.
Curious, there was a distinctly judgmental or moralistic tone I caught during this appointment: “You’re taking a HUNDRED mg of oxycontin every day?”, bushy eyebrows raised, and you could just hear the suggestion in his voice. This was Scanga. I got the sense of being looked at askew like (a) I shouldn’t need that much medication for pain, (b) I should tough it out for odd puritanical reasons, (c) I might be faking it to try and overly enjoy the meds, or (d) who knows. I said nothing then, except when later in our consult I told them that pain management is the single key to improving the quality of my life, which is short, and something they need to consider. Don’t know why but I could only say anything indirectly at the time. The whole issue of terminal-ity hadn’t been brought up and I feel they were more uncomfortable talking about it than I. The difference between these two GI fellows and Dr. Whiting and EVERYONE at the SCCA is like night and day. The former group just doesn’t seem to get it, the latter is entirely sympathetic and would never criticize what you're doing or how you’re doing it to relieve your pain, or manage it. Why should they, you're fucking dying?
Wednesday’s boys were a little lacking, then, in their terminal bedside manner. And I learned a new angle on the use of euphemism. So many times they use is to protect the patient or themselves, to make the world sound softer, more fuzzy, to hide a procedure or fact from immediate understanding. Non-resectable, for example, means “we can’t operate”; ablation, killing some nerves and possibly reduce pain; apoptosis, the dying off of cells; etc. What I found on Wednesday was the reverse use of euphemism, that is, the deliberate non-use of a more euphemistic term to make it all sound more coarse.
At SCCA my pain meds are usual referred to by drug name, as opiates, or even opioids. The term “narcotics,” with is its potentially flashy and negative connotations we get from the news and drug wars, is rarely used. At this appointment, however, the word narcotic was used regularly. Call me paranoid, if you will, but the term was used to a specific non-euphemistic end, that’s what I sensed. You tell someone they’re using quite a lot of narcotics as opposed to quite a lot of opioids and I think a different message is conveyed.
Otherwise they seemed fine, competent (to the degree I can judge this), and possibly skilled. Risk involved is loss of feeling in the lower body, something very, very unlikely they assure me as they stress how routine this 15-minute procedure really is. In very rare cases paralysis might occur, but they dodged this question, which I asked because Whiting told me about it. (He’s far more straightforward.) Doctor #1, Scanga, was the fill-in-while-real-doctor-is-late guy who had to gather general info about me and press on my stomach while the primary GI guy or EUS specialist was busy with another patient. Doctor #2 came in only to give me a little sales pitch of why I might do the procedure; and to tell me he thinks I’m a likely candidate for it given my pain situation. It works, he says, in 70-80 percent of the patients, who will feel significant pain reduction; however, they might have to have the thing redone in three to six months time.
Time to do more homework on doctor #2 (Dr. Saunders), on the procedure, and then decide whether to do it.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
8.31.06, Post Chemo Day
Chemo's done for the day, my Franky Scale is about 5, feeling drained and just wiped out in general from lying all morning with my pot-o-cath accessed, my veins all open. Now my eyes need closing and rest of me needs some sleeping. Rest now, and later tonight I'll get up some details from my labs and my appointment in GI territory yesterday.
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