It's been so long since I last blogged I almost couldn't remember my password. That's bad either way you slice it - it either means that I haven't written a blog entry in a long time, or my memory is faulty, or both.

I vote for both. I got a little tired of blogging because it seemed that it was nothing but chemo and lymphoma all the time, and sometimes I'd just as soon not have to think about such things. Chemo sucks badly enough as it is without dwelling on every intestinal spasm or nadir of helpless fatigue. I sort of scoffed at the notion of "chemo days" when I first started out, where a "chemo day" is a day where some combination of chemo, cancer and random chance leaves you completely unfit to face the world. Well, they happen. They happen to me. Some days I'm tough and some days I just stay in bed, but since I can't avail myself of such niceties as medical leave or short-term disability, I have to work. Taint fair, I don't think, but who asked me?

This chemo cycle doesn't seem as bad as the last one, but my work has placed fairly large demands on me. In better days I would have viewed this work assignment as a pleasantly meaty challenge, but under chemo, replace "pleasantly meaty" with "almost insuperable". The point is that my chemo symptoms this cycle aren't bad, but factor in the burden of work and I'm about as bad off as I was last cycle, when the physical symptoms were really bad.

As my grandfather once said, I'd complain if they hung me with a new rope.

I'm also a little irritated with the world of music. Insomnium claims to be working on a fourth album, which is good news, but it's so far out in the future they don't have a title or any artwork for the album, and it probably won't be out until next winter - and even then, I strongly suspect that iTunes won't carry it and I'll have to do the Euros-to-dollars conversion on some record store website to buy the CD. (Do you ever wonder if my sudden whim to model much of the Finnish Air Force is motivated by my liking for the band Insomnium? I do.)

I was listening to the album Swan Song by Carcass today. It's not considered their best work, and as it was their last work, it's regarded as a disappointment by those who like the grindy Carcass of old instead of the "death and roll" Carcass of Swan Song. Those "Behind The Music" documentaries would say something like "Fans did not follow Carcass into this new territory..." And it must be said that there's nothing on Swan Song that stands up to such bidness as Corporeal Jigsore Quandary or Inpropagation or Heartwork. But having said that, I have to say that there are some songs on Swan Song that do soothe my savage breast, notably R**k The Vote and Go To Hell, the latter of which I interpret as the band's final statement to the fans that they feel turned on them.

So I was listening to Go To Hell and working out the two interleaved rhythm guitar bits, and it struck me that I kind of missed not having a guitar. I wonder what a cheap guitar, a cheap amp and a cheap metal distortion pedal are going for these days.

Ah well, maybe after chemo I'll buy myself a guitar, sort of my reward for going through six months of fairly undiluted hell.