#being-there

[newbloggycat]

Quote of the day – NBC "I'm with you every step of the way"

[rafaeltorch]

Scene From A Marriage: Bobby's Plight

“I’m afraid of dying.”

She moves over to me and rubs my bald head, bald from the intensive, 21-day experimental treatment I’ve undergone to try and choke my deathless cancer.

“I don’t know when I got to be so afraid again, but here I am.”

“Things have changed, right? I mean, things have changed. Our life is going to change.” She holds me at the edge of my side of the bed, the light from the bed side table glows orange, aggressive but only for its own corner, the rest of the room is sunk in shadow. As she holds me I can feel her belly now nine months along. Sometimes if I stare long enough at it I can watch the little one’s butt move from one side to the other seeking room and comfort. “Everything is going to change.” She tells me very softly and very gently. Recently I’ve imparted this fear of dying so much that I think she’s sick of it, sick of answering for it, that it makes me so tired.

I don’t look at her as she holds me and tells me this. I have my eyes closed. We rock gently there in the open, almost vulgar, glare of the light. It’s like the world could see us. 

“I swear. I wish I didn’t always feel this way.” 

“I know. I know.” 

All of a sudden I remember when I’d try to tell my old students, when I used to teach, how hard it is to impart real “Love” because of how awesome is the failure of language to do what it’s supposed to do. “‘For example,’ I’d tell them. ‘Take Bobby here. He might want to tell his girlfriend how much he loves her.’ [class laughs -- Bobby turns red]. ‘So, Bobby here, he tells her one day, ‘I love you;’ and what do you know, his girl says, ‘I love you’ back. She tells him, ‘I love you, too, Bobby.’ But here’s the hitch: Bobby might hear something in her voice, some little thing in the way she said it, and he might wonder, ‘Hey, does her Love mean my Love. Is her ‘I love you’ my ‘I love you’? [my voice trails off] [and to no one in particular, I say] Bobby’s question is a good one.” 

I feel Bobby’s plight with language now because I wonder deep down if my wife does “know” I wasn’t always so scared of something I’ve no control over; but something’s cracked in me. 

Earlier, the radioman said that there were great summer storms coming our way. He said, “Y’all in it’s path.” The storm is coming on strong now. There’s sideways rain and big chunks of hail. The lights are dimming. The thunder is loud. The lightening is bright. It’s getting violent, like the earth is readying for something we can’t understand. It’s all so incomprehensible. 

As the lights flicker, she asks, “You know I know, right?” 

[rafaeltorch]

Everything's Got The Shine. That's Been My Point.

I was telling someone that my current experimental treatment was like the experience of being in a car crash. It’s the only way I know how to describe it. Sometimes I think it’s not even the crash itself but the treatment I just had was like the moment right after collision and right before the crash stops -- all that time in between. It’s much easier to say, “It felt like a car crash.” Moreover, it’s not even the violent part of the car crash, but some potentially dreamy core, some highly intense and traumatic middle place.

That’s how my memory is processing it, how things are coming back to me after being forcibly sick for 13 or 14 days. I know the major events of the experience: the chemotherapy to rid my body of the old, worthless white cells I’d been born with, then the actual treatment, getting back millions of white cells that they’d taken from me only weeks earlier and then modified and made bionic in the lab according to the cancer my body has harbored, and then, to spurn on my immune system, to make the whole thing go, the IL2 (Interleukin) treatments. I remember the four doses of IL2 even though I was stung by severe rigors, violent, strange chills that left me like a Mexican jumping bean for twenty minutes -- maybe more --  depending on how the Demerol worked on my system. 

I remember the hallucinations that made the whole treatment come to a screeching halt two Saturday’s ago now. The doctor was nervous about continuing because they couldn’t stop madness ultimately, couldn’t predict when it would end the way they could my flu-like symptoms or the way they could yield a ventilator to stop the experience of shortness of breath. 

I knew it once it was happening, me sitting in the bathroom, looking at smudges on a stainless steel shelf just in front of me. The whole time I’m thinking I’m hallucinating. I knew what I was looking at wasn’t real, but there it was, the movement of the smudge, what looked like, very briefly, a congo drum player, dressed like a conquistador or some sort of pre-American borderless wanderer, playing the music of nowhere. This was the weirdo narrative I had been building in my head as I took a crap looking at the smudge on the stainless steel shelf. 

I said to myself, “It’s not really happening. You know this. You know that this is the Il2. They warned you. They said there could be madness.” Nonetheless, you did your business with the toilet, cleaned up, and then yelled, “Emily! Emily! Get in here. You got to see this.” Like you and her were going to dig the little musical show on the stainless steel shelves where, in your head, some weird musician was doing his thing. You couldn’t quite place it, the music. You figured he’d had to learn it all somewhere else too because the drum was African. He’d brought it with him, here, to this place where Hell was breaking out for all parties involved, a whole place being born, an Eden destroyed and, yet, a whole new peoples coming of age. Sitting in your bathroom you felt like you were at the edge of history. 

You said, “Il2 treatments.” 

You yelled out, “Em! Come see this shit. Not, like, shit shit. But, like, the shit. On the wall.” You realized the whole thing sounded mad. You. The music. The congo guy. All of it. Things were unraveling. “I’m hallucinating,” you said. But you wanted to be sure. You yelled again for Emily. 

She opened the door and looked at me looking at the wall, and I said, “You see this, right? Or, I mean, you don’t see this, right? Well, I don’t know. Whatever. I think you know what I mean. I think you know what I’m talking about.” 

Wow. How crazy you were. 

She sighed. Looked at me sitting there, looked at my IV pole like it was a strange intruder, just standing there, like it’d been caught, a silent partner to madness and hallucinations. Like it’d been egging me on, pumping me full of drugs. My go-to-guy. Who Lou Reed had been waiting for with $26 dollars in his hand. My IV pole. Dressed in black. As she’s looking at the walls, I’m singing in my head, “Up to Lexington 125/Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive/I'm waiting for my man.”

“What you looking at, hon?” she asked me as delicately as possible. 

“It’s no biggie. I’m seeing things. I’m just making sure. You don’t see this guy here playing the drums? Like a conquistador. Playing the congo’s?” I pointed over to the thing. I circled it with my index finger, fingered the area where I saw it happen.

“No,” she said. Then looking, and after some silence, “Yeah. No. Not sure I do.” She looked hard at the stains on the shelving. She really wanted to see it for my sake, I think. I don’t know if she thought I was losing my shit. I wasn’t, I thought, because I knew I was hallucinating. Does knowledge of hallucination make one less mad? But she didn’t know. I couldn’t ask her all that. She said, “It’s just dirt. I think you’re seeing into it.”

“Oh, I know it. I’m seeing into everything.”

“Honey, why don’t you pull your pants up and come on out and get into bed? You should just come on out and rest.”

“Yeah. Ok. Good idea.” So I pulled my underwear up and grabbed my IV pole and we wheeled out into the room and I got back into bed. I wanted to be confident in my madness. I just didn’t want to be making this shit up. I started to think that maybe I wasn’t seeing anything at all, that the whole thing was a hallucination in and of itself, like thinking about it to such a degree was itself a sort of madness. I then got lost in my thinking. 

I looked around the room and things had a sheen to it. I remember thinking, “The room has a sheen to it.” That was the word. "Sheen." “The room shined softly” is what I kept telling myself. I wondered if others saw it. It wasn’t malicious. It was blue, a light blue around all things. Things vibrated slightly. I knew it was all over for me. They were going to stop the treatments. 

When the doctor came in he asked me how I was doing. I told him. He asked me how I felt, I told him that it really had nothing to do with “feeling.” I went on. I told him about the conquistador. Yeah, it was all over for me. I think I got him on the conquistador. I think that’s what did it for him, when I told him about the stuff in great detail, even the narrative I’d built about the conquistador -- you know, “being at the edge of history” and all. 

He put his hand up to stop me from talking, adjusted his glasses on his face, looked at me, said, “Wait, I’m sort of confused now.” He paused to catch his breath. I knew it. My narrative was breathless. I mean, the music, the conquering, the indians, the terror, the melding of peoples. It was a little overwhelming. He asked, “How are you being so lucid about hallucinations? You’re making me confused.” 

I told him that my undergraduate experience afforded me opportunities to explore various modes of consciousness. I smiled. 

My wife laughed, like “Oh my god. Here we go.”

He smiled uncomfortably, shifted his weight from one leg to another. He was in blue surgery scrubs, a white jacket over them, a patch on it that had a man slaying a huge crab. The doctor wiped his brow. He was sweating. “Ok, then,” he said. He proceeded to ask me a series of questions, as if this was going to prove anything at all, he asked, “What’s 100 minus seven?”

I said, “What?”

He said, “100 minus seven?”

“Uh. 93?”

“Minus seven?”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t know. Like 85. Maybe 86.” I was counting on my hands. I was laughing.

“And minus seven.”

“No. I’m not doing this.”

“You have to.”

“No, I don’t.”

I told him to look at the clock, and I told him to look around at the blue sheen of things, and he did and didn’t. He was a very by-the-book kind of man, and I think he just thought I was seeing things and that there wasn't any more to seeing things than seeing them, like there was nothing else to it, like no story to it, no MEANING. But I think there were other things happening, but he didn’t want go there with me. He didn’t have the time. He was on call. He’d been there all night already and didn’t need to do the whole Carlos Casteneda journey with a 35-year-old cancer patient whose got four spots in his lungs and a bigger mass along his psoas muscle. He didn’t want to do the Tim Leary thing with me even though I was all (always have been) like “Fuck Tim Leary.” I just wanted him to see what I was seeing, what I’d been seeing, but I knew that was probably impossible. He had his own research to do, his own kind of seeing to do. 

He just said, “Well, I think we’re going to stop. You made it to four. That’s good. It’s clear the treatment is working. You’ve got the shine.” 

I nodded sagely, I told him, “ Yeah, man. Everything’s got the shine. That’s my point. Been my point the whole time, man.”

        Emily smiled. Shrugged her shoulders. Like, this is my man.

He smiled meekly and said, “Ok then. Well, I’ll check in later, Mr. Torch.” He threw me a little wave of the hand.

“Ok, Doc. See you later then.”

I think when he left then we were both a little confused because we were both witnessing some kind of shine. He just didn’t believe in mine as I was to believe in his. Later, my wife told me that my skin had a sort of flush to it that made it look shiny. It looked like I’d been in the sun for a few days and I had been sun-kissed. It’s what the doctor’s call the “IL2 glow.” Their “glow” was more “real,” I guess, than the “glow” I was just getting into and they pulled the plug on. This was part of what made this whole thing like being in a car crash -- a beautiful car crash, a car crash that wakens you to the minute details of everything happening all at once. I feel like I’ve been in a car crash and it’s still sort of happening, the long smashing of glass, the noise of the crack-up, the way the light glitters off all that broken glass, the holy terror of it, the breathlessness of it, the speed or no speed of the whole thing. Everything sort of weightless and you’re left wondering when it will stop -- things just suspended, there to see and witness. 

* * *

Maybe it was two days ago, before I left, that I looked in the mirror at myself and had the brief sensation of being someone else. It was only a moment but one that seemed to last an eternity. Like I’m still looking into the mirror. I said, “You’re you. Stop being so dramatic.” I looked and tried to capture me and my heart got heavy and I thought I’d cry a little but then I didn’t. 

I’ve lost a lot of weight these last three weeks. My cheek bones are sharp and my skin sort of falls near my chin or, better, it makes a slight dimple at either side of my lower jaw. I broke my nose when I was in my early twenties in some ridiculously wonderful and absurd bar fight and the broken bone now sort of stands prominently out at the top, where my glasses sit. My hair has been falling out and, also, a first, my eyelashes and eyebrows a little. So when I looked into the mirror I was experiencing something else. Someone I didn’t know. I wanted to put my hand out and shake his hand. My eyes have always been big, but they bulge a little now because of the severe angularity of my face without the weight I’ll gain back very quickly I’m sure. My eyes, they’re ridiculous. But there you have it. 

I was talking to myself in the mirror, and I suppose everyone has these moments, moments we think for a few seconds that the person staring back at us, that this person, this can hardly be us. We hardly believe it. The years and the tensions and the joys and the hardships and the wonder and the pessimism and the strange skepticism and the terrible optimism and all of it, the madness and hatred and silliness and humanness of being alive all gangs up on you. I guess that’s what it was, I was looking at all of it at once. I wonder if you have before. I wasn’t hallucinating. It was me. But it wasn’t me, or, better, I didn’t want to think it was me because I didn’t want to believe, maybe like you, I didn’t want to believe that at my age, 35, I was privy to such things yet. When is the right age, I guess? There’s no right age. But I wondered, looking at me in the mirror, staring at the foreigner, I wondered what he was doing there. I wanted him to go away even as I leaned in to get a better view: the eye-sockets perfect in their form, but scary because it seemed like one good punch would do some serious damage; there was the seriousness of mouth and the slight hanging at the corners of my mouth, like I was frowning, but I wasn’t. 

“This can hardly be us,” we say. We stare. We inspect. We can hardly believe it. Life all of a sudden. Yes. That’s it. Life all of a sudden. Like a heap on you. Like it fell out of the sky, out of nowhere. The passage of time. The complete wonder of it all. And it reads on your face now is all. When your hair does grow now there’s the little bits of gray hair. There’s the signs of history. You are at the edge of history. You weren’t bullshitting him. You weren’t hallucinating. It’s here.  

And you’re like, “No way.” 

But, “Yes, yes way.” 

There it is. Look. 

Nonetheless, even with this knowledge, you stand there, and you say, “Nope. Not you. Who are you? Get. Go on now. Get.” There’s a slight terror, but also a feeling like it’s always been this way. You were always right there. But what were we looking at before? What the fuck have we been looking at?

The hair product.  The shaving. The lotions. All of it. The preening. The time in front of the mirror and really, well, where were you? Excuse me. Where was I? Where’ve I been? This is what I’ve been thinking about. 

It’s like being in a car crash. Life flashes before your eyes. Moments of clarity. Illuminations. The pleasure of reality. Seeing and not seeing. Hearing and not. There you are and there you go. Gone.

And that's the experience I just had. As best as I can put it. So when I say something like, "It was like a car crash," I guess I mean that it wasn't just being treated for cancer, because, you know, fuck cancer, but it's the experience of not being me. Or not believing me when me faces me with me. Like the image of me is hard to believe. But, there it is. Now, when I look in the mirror, there I am, man. A severe, sometimes terrified man. Yet a man who has experienced wonder, a guy with the shine. And he keeps experiencing it and keeps experiencing it, has bouts with much darker things, but this wonder, well, this wonder makes him want to go figure it out now that he’s back in the streets of his Chicago again after that long car crash.

[rafaeltorch]

A Portrait of Boredom and Boredom’s Agents.

The boredom. It’s the boredom of disease. I stare at the objects of my room to no end, until they hurt my eyes. Like I think my eyes may have grown sores on them and have broken and pussed or have broken and are bleeding. Like even closing my eyes hurts and so, hence, my eyes can find no solace. I find myself trying to inhabit an impossible middle-ground, half-open and half-closed, but what is that? I do not know. The boredom. It’s the boredom of disease.

Here are some things that signify Boredom, are Boredom’s agents if you will (all of which stand directly across from my bed — always in my line of sight, the things of sight, what are, slowly, I’m beginning to think, beginning to signify not only Boredom but, sadly, Me).

Thing One: Right now the IV Pole, the pump machine hooked to it, the thing I’m hooked to (my “dancing partner” my nurse tells me), the “Alaris Medical System, Model 8000 Advanced Programming Module,” makes a noise like a quick whirring, a churning noise so minute and obscure that it sounds like it’s very far away, a noise from some machine many rooms down — a heart monitor maybe, quick to relay information to nurses about some lonely man’s faulty heart. For many days I thought the noise was thus, but then learned, in the boredom, the boredom of disease, that it was not thus. That all of that noise, not so minute and not so obscure after all, was right here, next to me, all day and all night, pumping saline or fluids or antibiotics or chemotherapy or my modified white blood cells or the IL2 treatments into my veins. It was right here, near my left ear. No, not so minute and obscure. A noise right here.

It’s brother, the sound I’ve come to know with it, a sound that comes every six seconds, is like a squeaky bike tire, something long needing lubrication. This sound is much more overbearing and right here. It, too, I’ve come to know because it’s the noise that keeps me up all night. Something akin to Poe’s tell-tale heart. It is not so much a metaphor for my conscience but maybe a metaphor for the cold demonic heart of my disease or, better, it’s rude cousin, Boredom.

Thing Two: The Blue “Dinnamap Pro 300V2″ all-in-one machine. It checks my heart and reads my oxygen intake and also takes my blood pressure. The nurse comes in and wraps a white blood pressure cuff around my right arm, the arm without the picc line, and then attaches a small, pac-man like grey, plastic clamp to my left finger, for there would be no accurate reading if she were to attach it to the right arm because, of course, that’s the arm that’s being squeezed off by the arm cuff. The pac-man like grey, plastic clamp when opened emits a soundless red light. It goes no further than the second knuckle of my index finger of my left hand.

After all is attached, she pushes a button and the machine hums to life and begins to do its thing. Strange how archaic the machine looks, the weird red, digitized numbers, like squares almost or, at heart, given the number it spits out, improvisations of squares. There are numbers that are orange; but I have yet to understand the significance of orange versus red. While the machine does its business, she takes another machine, which sits in a (again, grey) little metal basket attached to the “Dinamap,” which takes my temperature. It is blue and white and looks like an older landline telephone, but not quite as big. When the nurse picks up the machine — and remember, the “Dinamap” is doing its jig — and she puts it in whatever ear hasn’t been slept on or is closest (slept on because it might cause a faulty reading). She burrows it deep into my ear and burrows so deep, right until I think it’s going to tear into my ear drum; and then she presses the button, which being that it’s buried deep in my ear, I hear the spring coil and return (“boing”) as the machine reads my temperature (about one second) and then rings out three good chirps. She usually reads out the temperature to me in centigrade, and because I don’t know the metric system, I always ask for the conversion. (Out of impatience (?), they’ve taken to hanging a sign right on the wall across from my bed, a copied piece of paper, that says at the top, in sharpied, thick black scrawl, “Do Not Remove.” Under that it gives me the conversions. It’s also one of the things I stare at; for example, right now it’s telling me that 36.1 C is 97.0 F and 40.3 is 104.6 — last night my temperature for awhile was 39.9 C, which is, just about 104 F — last night I stared hard into the paper wondering if I wasn’t hallucinating this whole thing, this whole weird fetish I have with staring into things and they staring into me).

The “Dinamap’s” done humming and beeps (once again, three short, very cheerful, very high-pitched, beeps. Like birds in a tree, but digitized and made sharp and distinct, without life or value. Whatever that means). My readings come out across the grey screen and a host of meaning is there. And, cooly, it prints out a little white piece of paper on its right side that the nurse rips off and marks up with some other information about my “vitals.” She pockets it and she’s off.

Thing Three: A dull, beige, oddly Orwellian box on the wall across from my bed. It’s about two feet high and a foot across. It has a red sticker on the front that says, DANGER! And then proceeds to say it in eight different languages. And under that, a black needle with white writing in it that says, USED NEEDLES!

(**This is boring, right? But I’m finding it deeply pleasurable to tell you this. Deeply pleasurable to bore you, to bore you as much as I am beginning to be bored myself being here. I’m just this far on the side of “recovery” and here I am, playing with you, my faithful reader. Boring you on purpose. Boring you with such details of my life as it is. Boring you. Boring you because it gives me deep pleasure. (Although certainly this is perverse because what writer wants to bore his reader to high heaven?) Boredom is worth being captured.**)

There’s a lock on it for a key, which each nurse must have  I imagine, as they empty it from time to time. The receptacle then can be taken from the box, which is attached to the wall with I can only assume are long screws buried deep into the plaster (Oh, the boredom!) and taken to wherever-the-fuck. The opening to the receptacle in the beige box is open right now because the receptacle, which is red, isn’t full. When it becomes full the receptacle’s mouth closes and in huge red letters says, FULL (it’s a very noisy box and receptacle, everything big, everything overpowering. I guess this is the 1984-Orwell in it. The receptacle and box reminds me of the Ministry of Truth or some dark foreboding, low-slung building out in an office park in the endless suburbs of anywhere, a place with the illusion of serenity, with the illusion of pedestrianism, with the illusion of comfort). Anyway, right now, because it’s not “FULL,” the opening has a picture of a needle that says in it, black lettering, PLACE SHARP HORIZONTALLY! The pointy end of the “pump” is facing the box’s right side and the actual pump of the “pump” is to the left. On each side, arrows pointing up into the mouth of it. A mouth like a yawning catfish. Under that, it says, LIFT TO ASSURE DISPOSAL.

(The Caps Locked Helvetica font vaguely German in its force and terror).

These are the things I’m learning. Have almost memorized. Transcribed to my heart. More like tattooed.

Oh, the Boredom.

Thing Four: The clock. Oh wretched clock, oh how I hate you clock! I shake my fist at you clock, wretched, wretched clock! You, with your open face, you that gazes at me. Like one eye open, an eternally open eye. What’s more there’s the tick-tick-tick of you! Oh, you! Oh, you, open eye, wretched tick-tick-tick of you! Oh, you of boredom and time passing and the gaze. Like all at once the things I fear! Right now you are saying, “4:05,” like it is nothing; but you know full well you easily could be saying, “1:42.” This is the thing with you, wretched clock, you have no remorse, no sense of pity. You just tick-tick-tick and stare and say this one thing and you say it for a minute and then you say another thing for a minute and how do I know it is a minute? At the same time you are saying, “4:05,” there’s this other thing in you, this, tick-tick-tick, you do that for sixty ticks (“Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick”).

Oh, you are wretched. You with your black hour signifiers and red army-time hour signifiers. You with your black dots, the four ticks between every fifth tick, which is an arrow, like it was pointing me north. Oh, how I hate you the most of all. When I was hallucinating the other day from the treatments, you pulsed and vibrated, hummed, happy almost, jubilant, joyous, oh, damn you, you were ebullient! You and your purple rhythms and waves in hallucination and nothing but an open eye when not. In those hallucinations you jogged to and fro. I told the doctor about you. I said you had a sheen about you. I didn’t know yet what to say. I told the doctor to look at you, but he didn’t. I said, “Look, doctor, there’s a sheen, a blue, sort of, oh I don’t know, aura. But it’s no good. Blue auras you’d think were good.” How crazy I must have sounded. How wicked and insane, especially curled up in blankets to my neck, sweating, 104 F (39.8 C), just coming off an attack of rigors. I must have been. Like I was crying blood. “Look, blue,” I told him. Like you were good. But good you are not. I can feel you smiling at me devilishly, even now, not in hallucination, but rather in the midst of boredom, the rude cousin of disease.

Boredom. This is the test of human being. I’m learning it has nothing to do with the treatments. You have to do the treatments. Any man or women would do the treatments because what the heck else would you do? Not do it? Die? Everybody would do what I just did. That’s not the mark of strong. No. It’s this. This ridiculous nothing time, between them checking my vitals, bringing me my meds, room service, changing my linens, showering, maybe walking around in a circle my unit; it’s the nothing time, withstanding it, being sane in the grip of nothing, a weird silence shaped by the chirps, groans and ticks of machines; shaped by the first eldritch seconds of the coming of the narcotics pushed through the IV or a good Benadryl stoning. It’s resisting the urge to throw a chair through the window of the room and then jumping up on the large windowsill and screaming out into the courtyard below and the other hospital rooms across the way, gripping the frame of the window and shaking my fist, possessed, “I am a man and this is not the stuff of men!” And then plunging two floors. (probably just obscenely and absurdly breaking my legs and my back in seventeen places, and calling days upon more days of more Boredom rather than calling on the forever of death — vision of me in a full body cast, this time staring at ceiling, counting ceiling tiles).

Yes. Boredom. Standing tall to this, this is what makes me strong. These things. Boredom’s agents. I’ve figured them out. They’ve no alibi any longer, no cover story. The jig is up, Boredom. I’ve figured you out, Boredom’s agents.

Things Five and Six: There’s the dumb light switch to a nightlight that shines both near the ground right outside the bathroom door and right on the opposite wall on the inside of the bathroom door. Dumb. Looks at me dumb as dumbly as I look at it. It, with silver face and stupid yellow nose for switch. A cyclops of a face with one screw above nose and a surprised look, what with the screw below as mouth. (I see you there, Boredom).

Lastly, the bathroom door. Oh my God, the bathroom door. Just a huge, solid-core door at the depths, a hollow inside. And then you wear a veneer of wood. You’re like the Las Vegas of doors! You are nothing to me, but, boy, you take up almost the whole epic sweep of my everyday vision. Your face must change with every patient, as the papers that hang on your door do. But there you have it, your eyes, the left eye horizontal and rectangular, a whole matrix of my days urinations and liquid intake; and the right eye a vertical sheet of paper that is a research blood tracking sheet. Your eyes make you funny, but absurd. Like the stupid doodling’s of teenagers in class, their margins filled with them.

Your asinine nose is my name (“Torch, R.) and my doctor’s name (“Dr. Hong). It’s one long horizontal rectangular sticker. An absolutely boring sticker the unit secretary, Tenaya, must have printed out Day One, which seems like ages ago. Like whole Crusades have been fought and won and lost and won and lost in the time in between.

(“Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick”).

Your mouth. The handle. At the radical left. It gives you this whole sort of pained confused look. Your look is the look of Number Eight on the Pain Chart they give me. Like, “What’s your pain at, Mr. Torch,” and I look a chart and there are faces, each a round face from serene (0) to existential suffering (10). I’ve remembered it in the years of recurrence. You’ve the whole look of Number Eight, dumb fucking door. See, I’ve figured you out, Door, in all my boredom.

They can give me pills and IV drips for any kind of symptom you can imagine. They’ve told me this. The flu. Diarrhea. Fever. Nausea. Constipation. Urination. Mouth sores. Headaches. Bone pain. They can can treat cancer: breast, sarcoma, renal, prostate, melanoma, lung, brain, pancreatic, liver. They can do almost anything. But they’ve got nothing for madness and it’s strange step-brother, Boredom. This is what I’m standing up to now. Staring them down. Tick for tick.

[rafaeltorch]

...And Now A Word From Our Sponsor...(a literary aside)

“Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

--Walt Whitman

Fuck beginnings. Fuck’em if they get you here, in this kind of middle, into this kind of bullshit turn of events. Fuck beginnings, man. So let’s just get down to the nitty fucking gritty, right? 

Fuck cancer. Fuck it. 

Fuck saline port flushes. Fuck white blood cells. 

Fuck red blood cells. Fuck the sweet little receptionists, “sign your name on the line, honey. We’ll call your name.” 

Fuck Cancer. Fuck it. 

Fuck IV Poles. Fuck being neutropenic. Fuck hospital stays and the crackers (or some bullshit-what-the-fuck-you-think-I-am-some-kind-of-child-or-something graham crackers) they tell you to eat when “your tummy gets a little nauseous” like I’m a fucking geriatric motherfucker or some little kid all jacked up with leukemia. Fuck leukemia while we’re at it. Fuck cancer, period. Fuck the wrist bands they give you at hospitals to wear, always too loose and shit, up high on my forearm or way down at the base of my hand so I can’t do shit. Fuck the red ones that permit the hospital to give me blood transfusions “in case, uh, the occasion may arise, uh, that, uh, your red cells or platelets, or, uh, anything like that might be low. Just to be on the safe side,” (doc pats me on my foot which is burrowed beneath green hospital blankets.) What am I going to say, no? Fuck the white bracelets, too, with your name and birthdate. Fuck my patient number (48 25 63 9W). Don’t fucking ask me what that shit is. You fucking know it. It’s. On. The. Fucking. Bracelet. you wrapped around my wrist so tightly I can’t feel my hand and my fingers are blue and we might need to amputate these bitches. 

Fuck even your own name when you’ve got to tell them so they can be sure you’re you every time they want to push some toxic, high-grade crazy-ass chemotherapy into your blood. Some shit that ain’t no one knows for sure is going to work in your veins and around the places near your tumors or on the tumors themselves. (Only thing they know for sure is how fucking sick I’m gonna git). They say, “State your name and birth date.” “You know my fucking name, bitch. Fuck this shit. Just give me the bullshit. Let’s just get down to the bullshit.” Fuck chemotherapy, man. Fuck it in it’s fucking ass. Fuck chemotherapy for being chemofuckingtherapy. Do hear what I’m saying, man?

Fuck you for thinking I might be fucking whack for writing this shit because how the fuck do you think you’d be after eight rounds of chemotherapy and five surgeries (three on the fucking lungs and two on the fucking abdomen)? Fuck self-pity. Fuck you for having potentially stopped reading this because “boy, he’s just so mad and feels so sorry for himself.” Is there a better fucking way to talk about cancer than this? I haven’t figured it out. This feels fucking right. Fuck the socially acceptable ways we talk about cancer. Fuck them hard. You’ve just grown used to some poetic ass prose bullshit blogs about “pacific coast times” and “everywhere. Going everywhere” and the “recurrence of days” and “recurrence is short-hand illumination,” “the endless everything.” Fuck me for even writing that bullshit. This is cancer, bitch. It’s in you, too. You got cancer, too. You got cancer, too. You got cancer, too. (In a sing-song voice).

Fuck recurrences for that matter. Fuck getting cancer again. Like, after you had it once, you mean to tell me, mr. doctor, sir, that I got this shit again, like, not just one time but five more motherfucking times? You mean it can keep coming back? You mean I could fucking die even after all these crazy wild treatments? You mean I could have cancer endlessly until treatments are no longer feasible and then my life is lived out in some bullshit end-of-life hell-hole hospice bullshit (cue sad fucking film music -- roll fucking credits). Fuck having cancer five fucking times and potentially forever until it, the cancer, fucks up and kills me and itself in the process. Dumb ass cancer. Can’t even keep my ass alive to keep its own ass alive. Actually, it’s the only thing I like about it -- stupid ass kills itself. It gets too fucking greedy. Can’t just have a little part of my abdomen. No. Needs the whole fucking organism. Needs ME! 

Fuck your cancer, doc. Fuck your clinical trials and protocols and national institutes of health and “adult oncology units” -- especially when you really mean “cancer wards” -- again, let’s not beat around the bush any longer, let’s use the real words, let’s not dance around the thing anymore, the dance being the thing that hypnotizes and makes us all like googily-doo about the shit.  Look at us, the freaks, in our hospital smocks in green, white-padded hospital socks, the gullible, the fucking real “hopeful,” the holding on, wheeling out IV poles around to get some exercise because we live in hospital rooms with windows that overlook other hospital rooms where there’s other fucking schmucks. All of us, fuck us. We’re the anonymous. 

You know what -- now that I think about it? Fuck the American Cancer Society for being the fucking “official sponsor of birthdays.” You know what I mean? Like fuck them. Fuck them when they have Justin fucking Bieber singing happy birthday to me on TV as if he wasn’t “sucking his mother’s dick when I was making records.” Fuck Justin Bieber and the lamo’s like Jack Johnson and Keith fucking Urban and Maroon 5 who sing to me, “Happy Birthday to you” all somber and shit, like they’re doing me a favor reminding me that my birthday, the one I just had or am going to have, is a gift, like the American Cancer Society is giving me that shit. Like without them I’d forget how fucking crazy lucky we are, each day, each moment, how beautiful all this shit is really, even the madness. Who wrote that bullshit advertisement? Didn’t they think about cancer patients? Or was there just some fucking schmo-exec placating his tween daughter who gets a hard-on every time she sees Bieber and that jag, Adam Levine? Don’t they hear how fucking patronizing that shit is? They don’t. They don’t have cancer. I forgot. So, fuck birthdays with all this chaos in the world. Fuck the world.

Fuck it. Fuck it to hell. Yes. Fuck cancer. Fuck the headaches. Fuck the bone pain. Fuck neulastin and fuck ifosfamide and doxirubicin and cytoxin and fludarabine and gemzar and tazosulamb. Fuck me that I even know the names of that bullshit. Seriously? Fuck oncology. Fuck these big, ol’ patches my docs wear on their jackets that show some kind of warrior slaying a big crab. You ain’t slaying shit. So step the fuck off, bitch. 

You know what -- now that I think about it? Fuck Lance motherfucking Armstrong. Fuck living strong, fighting on, relaying for life, Susan G. Komen, the whole nine yards. Fuck the whole nine yards. Fuck the “strong.” (Again, reading between the lines, this word has been monetized, jacked up, given meaning. We’ve been told how to act. This, this aside, this ain’t “strong” to some livestrong bitches. Socially acceptable ways to being strong. I’m just saying.)

Fuck teams of doctors on rounds at seven in the morning, who come storming into your room with very sharp, crisp white outfits and wonderful heads of hair. Fuck the way they are all mashing their hands together because they’ve all entered your room having gotten a fresh squirt of fucking high-grade hand sanitizer (Them: “uh, yes, um, excuse the wet hand, uh. You know, uh, ahem, hand sanitizer.” Me, in my head: “No, shit, doc. I thought you pissed your hands and then said to yourself, I’m gonna shake this schmuck's hand.”) Fuck them. Fuck them when they come free-fucking-wheeling up in this bitch and all like, “How are you, Mr. Torch? How was your night?” Like my night was full of dreams about me running though fields of wildflowers and diving into crisp, cool pools of water that mirror the cloudless skies of heaven, and in reality I wasn’t woken up every two hours to take a piss because the chemo you gave me is so toxic it could fuck up my urinary tract so bad that you’ve got to jack me with some other kind of serious medicine to help me piss, keeping my bladder working overtime, and I’m damn near pissing my pants every couple hours.

How’s my night, you ask? Fuck you, I say. You want to know what? ... 

Fuck me in a serious way for saying, “Oh, great. Good to see you. Everyday's a victory, doc. Slept well. Feel better than yesterday, you know.  That’s a plus, right?” Fuck me for saying, “I’m ok. I’m well. You know -- given the circumstances.” And all them, no kidding, with their clipboards and papers and pens and their fucking white teeth and humorless grins and lack of irony and wonderfully groomed heads of hair and medical jackets full of noisy communication devices that each checks at least once in my presence. Fuck their pens and stethoscopes. And their glasses. Why all these bitches wear glasses? These spooky motherfuckers who live in labs and come barging into a man’s life at some ungodly hour to gaze at him and talk about him in the third person, about how he’s feeling, jabbing thumbs in my direction. Like, “the organism, is, uh, doing, uh, quite well. He seems to be managing the pain and strife and hell and, uh, well...” And so on and so forth. You get the fucking picture.

O.K. Breathe.

I know it. I know it all too well. I know. You’re gonna say, “Fuck self-pity, brother.”  And let me take this moment to say I agree. Let me take this moment to sound my barbaric ass motherfucking yawp from this motherfucking rooftop up in this bitch in bethesda, maryland in some institutes of health on the oncology unit and shit, let me yell it loud, make whitman proud and shit, “FUCK YOU SELF-PITY! FUCK YOU CANCER! YOU DON”T OWN MY SWEET ASS!”

But I got to say that when it happens, when it does own my sweet ass (which is more times than I care to admit) it’s terrible and I feel terrible and, listen, all of this here shit I said, I feel sort of terrible for putting on you like this, but I got to say it. All of us schmucks up in this bitch, in the cancer ward, and this here is the truth, we all got these feelings. All of us, even when we’re laughing, we’re thinking, “What the fuck happened? Like, what the fuck is going to happen? Like, when’s this going to fucking end?” We all saying it. Us, the sequestered. The neutropenic.

[rafaeltorch]

Quoth The Raven

Getting to the bottom of recurrence, as it has been as much a part of my life as cancer itself, I’ve sought out its meaning; and meaning for me has become sanctuary, even the act of seeking out meaning. Different dictionaries all conclude that to recur is an intransitive verb There are a few words like to die or to go or to sleep, to lie, or to sit, that, for example, are never going to be transitive. To recur is one of these verbs. It doesn’t suffer from ambitransitive-ness. It is what it is. Forevermore. 

The “forevermore.” Reminds me...

“And [ ‘Recurrence’ ] never flitting, still is sitting, still is  sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the  floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted - nevermore!” [my bold]

I can write, “My cancer has recurred,” and it’s enough. Then there’s always this: “The cancer recurred in my lungs, 4 spots now, all measured in mmm (2 in each lung), and one bigger mass in my psoas muscle, maybe 2 or 3 cm.” The latter part of this, the prepositional phrase, is a luxury. It’s opulent, grand even. 

In my mind, these days, who needs the rest of the sentence? Some would argue, “The phrase is a more specific, detailed fleshing out of the problem. The first gets at it, Raf,” they’d tell me. “Yes; but the second part, yes, the second part really gives us, the guts.”

“The guts?” I’d ask. “I’ve given the ‘guts’ with ‘my cancer has recurred.’ There’s no more ‘guts’ that that.” I’d ask them. It’s cancer. It’s recurred. Who cares, lungs and abdomen? Who cares lymph nodes and livers and brains? Who cares colons or renal glands or prostates? Who cares kidneys and bladders and intestines and pancreases. Who cares stages 3’s and 4s and three months to live or four? It’s always, rather plainly, ‘my cancer has recurred.’” It’s what I’ve told people. They don’t want that. They want the prepositional phrases. They want the adjectives and the adverbs. Never the thing-in-itself.

* * *

To recur, ( -curred, -curring ), most commonly means “occurring again, periodically, or repeatedly (see above examples). 

Like: (recurring) Can you see and understand the recurring theme? Like: Why does Poe use the raven as a recurring symbol throughout his poem, “The Raven”?

Like: of a thought, image, or memory come back to one’s mind: In Poe’s poem, “The Raven,” the Protagonist's own fears and desires keep recurring to him, even as he tries to forget and move forward, empty without Lenore, because his fears and desires speak directly to the opposite of his own sense of self; and it was this recurring“opposite sense of self” that he had held allegiance to for all these years even if this “sense of self” was potentially the most harmful thing in his life. Had he mistakenrecurrence for consistency and value and sensibility?

Moreover, the New Oxford American Dictionary notes that the word recurrence is a noun and a derivative of ‘recur.’ 

Like: My recurrence is back, and you’re gonna be in trouble (Hey La. Hey La...). Or, better, I’m experiencing a recurrence. Which is a strange sentence anyway because it suggests it’s a person, place, or thing that hangs around me for an inconsistent and indeterminate amount of time. My recurrences strike me as being like a loiterer. Similar to Poe’s raven, standing on the bust of Pallas, the goddess of wisdom -- at the highest point in the room, lording over. Similar to Poe’s raven, the recurrence is a haunting (in Sweden, the raven is the ghost of murdered peoples. In Germany, recurr -- um, I mean, ravens are the souls of the damned; and in Danish folklore, ravens could lead people astray. And yet, in various mythologies, ravens are god-like figures -- both Tricksters and the Creator God. In Poe’s poem, and in my life, he is both, the damned and the Creator).

The origins of recurrence are Middle-English (in the sense [return to]): from Latin “recurrere,” from re- ‘again, back’ + currere which means ‘run.’

All that out of the way, the deeper meaning of the word ‘recurrence,’ something I’ve been forced to read and see and hear and understand, something far beyond the mere medical definition and its ramifications is stimulating in its own right. It’s not just a symbol of resistance to treatment, to chemotherapies and surgeries, trials and protocols and prayer and eating well and exercising at least an hour a day. Recurrence has become an idea that is central to my life and maybe always has been central to my life, and I’ve just been too blind to read it and see. The notion of recurrence is central to all of our lives with or without disease: whether it’s the past we’re reckoning with, the return of a jilted lover, the dreaminess of a middle-aged man in the midst of a cliched or not so cliched crisis, or, plainly enough, the days we wake to everyday: the medium triple-shot latte I order everyday at Starbucks and their attempt to correct my language by saying, “You mean a ‘grande, triple-shot latte?’”, the routes we choose to drive or walk to get to work, the work we do, the hours we give to sleep (“I’ve got to have at least 8 hours of sleep every night or else I’m nothing the next day!”), the alarm clock everyday faithfully at 6:13 a.m. It’s this “everydayness” as Walker Percy describes in his wonderful novel The Moviegoer, our being sunk in “everydayness.” This being “sunk” is disease enough because it blinds us to the potential of recurrence. (And everyone has it -- most of us are sunk). 

We are all seeking Lenore, the absent woman of Poe’s “The Raven.” We’re all going crazy for her and the absence. Sunk in the narrator’s library looking at the raven on the bust of Pallas proclaiming, “Nevermore.” 

The most interesting dictionary definition is third one in the OED. It tells us that ‘recurrence’ is, as with oceans, “a flowing back.” Lastly, ‘recurrence’ is a reversion to “an ancestral type” -- to return to something older amidst the chaos of the modern world -- reverting to another, older kind of thinking to alleviate the alienation of now even if that new-old thinking could alienate one further.

In this sense, my recurrence of cancer, two spots in each lung and one in the anterior abdomen, has forced me out of Percy-ian everydayness and into something more primal and necessary. To “back run” (the literal putting together of ‘re-’ and ‘currere’) is to run into myself, back into the buried. The recurrence of cancer, sure, is the splitting of cells and the failure of my body’s environment to deal with it, but outside that easy and diseased definition, the recurrence is also a moment that allows me to revert, flow back, and potentially find meaning -- if done well and purposefully. No wonder Poe’s raven sits atop the bust of Pallas, the goddess of Wisdom. What recurrence is, when used in the aforementioned ways, is an allowance to read again and see again the world we’ve been fundamentally reading poorly and not closely enough. Of course the raven sits atop the bust, for the man who has lost Lenore “for evermore” believes wisdom is the highest thing to be attained, what will help ameliorate terror. It’s why the bust holds prominence in the room (and is usually taught in American Literature classes as the symbol of rationality and reasonableness, what is, we teach wrongly I’d argue, lost to the man), but the bird, taking hold of the bust lets the narrator potentially see the world as it is. The bird offers a new worldview, a new ability to close-read. Yet even we, as readers, are as confused and terrified at the bird’s gaze. It’s what makes Poe so eerie. But, living with recurrence, Poe’s poem can’t help me think that what the bird is doing is teaching. His lesson, “Nevermore,” is a good one. A lesson that should be memorized, but to us and, more importantly, to the widower the lesson is lost -- especially as he is a man who is living in the midst of recurrence. 

He is given an opportunity to move beyond what is known as “wisdom.” For isn’t “wisdom” in the story a statue of Pallas, mere replica of the goddess of Pallas (much like Caesar's Palace is a replica of ancient Rome)? Isn’t the bust of wisdom a symbol of something worldly and therefore transitory, and what’s so spooky about the bird is that he speaks about a notion -- “nevermore” -- that transcends the worldly and right now -- Poe brilliantly brings our eyes not to the bust of Pallas, but, more importantly to that which is physically higher, therefore most authentic. He toys with us. We want to see the bust, because the bird and his pronouncement is just to scary to believe in and see and know. “Nevermore” (the repeated answer the bird gives to various questions posed by the narrator) speaks not to a horror but to a truth that extends beyond the grave and our fear of it. 

Sometimes the answer we’re given isn’t the answer we wanted or ever wanted. It’s true we weren’t asked to be born, but we must be responsible for the kinds of questions we ask even if it means the answers we find disrupt our lives in terrifying ways. Actually, with almost four years of treatment under my belt, I’m still terrified, but I find myself trying to ask the kinds of necessary questions that may make my life more full. 

“Nevermore,” quoth the raven. 

The narrator has mind enough to call him “prophet” because he just might see for a moment; but soon enough it is a “fiend,” “thing of evil,” or “devil,” as the answers he’s given to questions he’s asked are “incorrect.” “Nevermore” is Poe’s attention to the language, that in the everyday there is meaning even in the transitory and worldly. And it recurs over and over again, but do we stop to think about recurrences, to stop and say, “Hold it a minute, I’ve seen (or heard) this before. What does it mean?” 

As powerful as my cancer growing again, itself sort of yelling out, “Nevermore.” Believe me, there have been days where I, like the narrator of Poe’s poem: 

“shrieked upstarting - [...]

Leave my loneliness unbroken! [...]

Take thy beak from out my heart, [...]'

Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'”

But the problem was never the cancer or the recurrence, the real disease was the inability and ineffectualness of my desire to read well the world before me and to build a new thesis statement that would somehow account for the life I find myself in. I often tell my students (and this is a major part of the second half of an essay of mine on my other blog Pacific Coast Time called “Everywhere. Going Everywhere.”) that they should be prepared to, mid-essay, re-write their thesis statements because they might find that their evidence has taken them in new and exciting directions. They are too often ready to crash and burn with the ones they’ve built. We are too, it seems, ready to crash and burn with the faulty theses we’ve built because to destroy them would be to start again, to return to the beginning, and who would want to do that? What would it mean, we might ask ourselves, to return to the beginning? What if I have to deal with the unforeseen, turn over that rock or this rock? 

Progress is moving forward! we shriek. Progress is always moving forward, we tell one another. It’s in the language of our day. The president implores us to try and “own the future” or, better yet, “win the future.”

Building sound thesis statements that might mirror our lives and be testaments to the kind of lives we want to live should be our aim. We should attempt to be open to, recognize, and closely inspect the recurrences of daily life for they must mean something. They're recurring! To forever be attuned to recurrence is allowing us to be in the process of “going everywhere.” Everywhere at once. I’ve come to think progress is not always moving forward. Progress is going everywhere even at the price of maybe being forced to deal with the problems of any and all beginnings -- the blank page for the writer. Cursor blinking. Waiting. For you. Forevermore.

* * *

My cancer has recurred. I’ve so much ahead of me. Who could blame me for being so anxious and drearily dark sometimes, but on other days, being so dazzled by the potentiality of days, these recurrent days. Living with cancer, I’ve learned that recurrence is greater than wisdom, as we know it and understand it today. Being attuned to recurrence(s) is seeing. It is being-there. It is the Beautiful. It is forevermore because it is in the heart and is of hope, which is a place right between the roar and silence of things. I’ve come to pride myself in recurrence even if it does come on the heels of hearing the doctor telling me, “I’m sorry, son, the chemotherapy didn’t work. You’ve got cancer again. We’ve got to go back to the drawing board.”