Lamentum Aeturnus

You know what, I feel pretty crappy for the weekend before chemo. Usually by the weekend before chemo I'm starting to get my act together, but Cheez-Whiz, not this time. Legs hurt in a dull continuous way. Hands feel like they're being electrified. Colon in open revolt. Fingernails splintering and coming apart. Mood dull and uninteresting, and getting more uninteresting all along.

But at least I don't seem to have cancer any more. One more chemo, and a few weeks of recovery, and maybe I can finally stop experiencing (and complaining about) this wretchedness.

I really wanted to write a post to test my computer - I updated the web browser and I want to make sure it'll do the small number of things I expect it to do before I declare victory. But since I'm flat out of energy and ideas, and can't seem to think of a single interesting thing to say, I fell back on the old standby of griping about chemo.

Thank you for your patience. This concludes this test of my new browser ("same as the old browser," I think The Who would say).

Nobody Asked For This!

Indeed, nobody did ask for this, but here it is anyway. I was going through my various writings and found a book-like thing I'd written on wargaming. It amounts to 220 pages of persanal history, game reviews and wild speculation, but I find it amusing. You might too, though be warned, it IS 220 pages; I'm not kidding.

It can be found here:

http://groups.google.com/group/dubious-downloads/web/wargames_cutback.doc?hl=en

Gnt Spdr!

So you and your party (consisting of Hero, Other Hero, Thief, Other Thief, Wizard, and Other Wizard) are exploring a dripping cave when suddenly someone shouts "Run! It's a Gnt Spdr!"

This is a blow-up of the counters for the old SPI game Deathmaze, which actually wasn't bad as long as you didn't expect too much from it. It could only be played solitaire, though it wasn't uncommon for one's D&D hearties to play it en masse while waiting for the rest of one's D&D hearties, or for the pizza delivery guy. I thought it was a lot more fun than Magic Realm, though I took a lot of grief from snooty Magic Realm geeks for that belief.

I spent a lot of time and money on wargames, starting around 1975 with games like Starforce, Starsoldier, Tobruk, Panzerblitz and Dungeons & Dragons. By the end of the 1980s I was pretty much out of wargaming, partially because my interest in such games had waned, and partially because the games themselves had changed over time; I was not then a big fan of what came to be called the "Euro-Game", though today I am more tolerant and open-minded.

But anyway, I still have most of my old games. I sold a few at a garage sale, and I wish I hadn't. A few were destroyed in action - my old Battle of Britain game, the one with the round counters, dried out and fell apart like a third-rate mummy, and the vital book of paragraphs for Voyage of the Pandora accidentally got used as a blotter for a gallon can of varnish and had to be thrown away with the can of varnish. Some I just lost. Gladiator, for example, simply vanished into the mists of time, but I have a photograph of me and some of my friends playing the game and prominent on the table is a large bottle of Cutty Sark scotch and several tumblers of same. This may explain why I can't remember where the game went (my flesh crawls and I think Gawd, it wasn't even good scotch!).

Going through my old game collection is potently nostalgic, but I try not to do it very often. Every time I do, I find myself drifting over to eBay to try to replace the games I sold at that yard sale so many years ago, and I really don't need to do that. Really I don't. I need another Car Wars supplement like I need a hole in my head.

Jon and Kate Plus Tedium

I see TLC is playing nothing but Jon and Kate Plus 8 today. Ugh. I guess I won't be watching TLC today.

I didn't care for their show back when they weren't notorious. I didn't like Jon or Kate to begin with, and I was never curious what having eight kids was like. But now that they are notorious, I'm even less inclined to watch. And an all-day marathon of their show? HP Lovecraft would have struggled to imagine such heartless horror.

I love the little rock and roll band stage that Guy Fieri has on his show. One day I'd like to be watching his show and see the Swedish death metal band Amon Amarth suddenly take over his stage and start playing Gods Of War Arise. They aren't the heaviest band in the world, nor the most original, but I kind of like them, and I like the idea of a bunch of big hairy shirtless Swedish guys taking over Guy's set, throwing his stuff around, setting fire to his waveboard, pouring his bottles of Cabo Wabo tequila on the floor. Guy always seems to me to be trying to channel the spirit of Sammy Hagar and I think it would be fun to see him assailed by death metal. (I suspect, though, that if you asked the guys in Amon Amarth, they'd say that they do Viking metal, not death metal. Machs nichts.)

Traveler

I don't know how popular role-playing games are any more. I suspect that they've lost a lot of ground to computer games over the years, and I doubt that kids today are inclined to start playing Dungeons & Dragons when they could just as easily sign up for World of Warcraft.

I'm of the D&D generation. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons back in about 1977, a year or so after the game was originally published. And I liked it plenty, at least until I discovered a new science fiction role-playing game called Traveler. I never had much success convincing any of my friends to play Traveler, as they were all D&D fanatics, but good heavens did I ever spend a lot of time on that game. I designed planets, subsectors, sectors, starships, and weapons. I generated entire legions of characters. I wrote computer programs. I wrote fan fiction. I drew mission patches and sketched people. And I don't regret a bit of that goofy fannish obsessiveness.

Later on GDW chose to modify the Traveler backstory with the releases of Mega-Traveler and Traveler: The New Era. I didn't care for either. I thought Mega-Traveler had some extremely flavorful touches but had gone over the top in terms of complexity, and the whole collapse-of-the-Empire thing in Traveler: TNE was tired and trite (not to mention even more complicated than Mega-Traveler).

Over time certain aspects of Traveler started to bother me. It took place in the 25th Century, against a backdrop of a galaxy-wide Empire that was stable, rich, kind of inert, and slightly corrupt. And after a while, if you thought about it too hard, it became hard to deal with. In the 25th Century, against a backdrop of unimaginable technology, what does money act like? What is a trip to the convenience store like? What is sex like? It becomes almost impossible to imagine what ordinary life would be like and the contradictions and problems start to pile up.

But oh my was it ever fun. I'll probably never play it again. Sitting here, I can imagine myself sitting down with some friends to play D&D in a less than totally serious way, but I doubt that Traveler will ever see the light of day again. But my decade-long obsession with Traveler helped to make me who I am today - which may or may not be a good thing.

Memorial Day

It being Memorial Day, I've decided to do a bit of writing about those people that we memorialize today, our fallen veterans. Actually, that's just a cover because I've been intending to write about my change of heart regarding World War Two for a while.

I used to believe that the decisive theater of World War Two was the Eastern Front, the epic clash between rival economic, political and military systems. I used to believe that it was the immense power of the Red Army, finally harnessed in Operation Bagration, that defeated Germany. But having thought about the matter, I no longer believe this to be the case.

It strikes me now that the absolutely decisive element in WWII was the industrial capacity of the United States. It is difficult to overestimate the way that US industrial and economic output powered Allied victory. It is difficult to think of one key resource that the United States did not supply - food, oil, tanks, ships, aircraft, bulldozers, radar, even trucks. Watch films of the Red Army in action in World War Two and try to count all the Studebaker US6 trucks you see. It literally can't be done.

So having defined US economic power as the decisive element, it follows that the only hope the Germans had of winning the war was to prevent US economic power from coming to bear. That is, to win the Battle of the Atlantic and prevent convoys from reaching England and the Soviet Union. The Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic and still lost the war - one need only think of the Enola Gay to be reminded of that - but if they did not win the Battle of the Atlantic, then they had no hope of winning the war. (And it then follows that it was the British who fought and won the key campaign of the war, since it was the British who shouldered the bulk of the struggle against German U-boats.)

Morning of the Lepus

Who here remembers that classically bad monster movie from the 1970s, Night of the Lepus, wherein giant rabbits the size of Winnebagos menaced some dusty burg in northeastern Arizona?

Well, today we had Morning of the Lepus, wherein rabbits the size of large bagels menaced a dusty burg in central Arizona. I got up this morning and let the Dawg out to do her business, and as usual she flushed three or four tiny little rabbits in the back yard. Dawg snorted and put on speed to try to catch them, and the rabbits scattered in all directions. Soon came the disheartening sodden splash of a small rabbit falling into the swimming pool (apparently in the throes of escape-lust rabbits imagine they can leap all the way across the pool, only they can't).

So I hot-footed it outside and grabbed the net. I didn't want the rabbit to croak, and I didn't want a dead rabbit in the pool in general. Fortunately rabbits can swim, so the rabbit was still on the surface and kicking when I got to it. Did I say "fortunately"? I meant "unfortunately" because the little bastard kept swimming away from the net.

Morning is not my best time. Early morning is especially not my best time. Early morning on the Sunday after chemo is especially bad, because my legs don't seem to work right and I feel as though I weigh about 900 pounds. So I kept trying to fish the rabbit out of the pool with the net, and I kept failing, partially because of poor judgment and crappy motor skills, and partially because the rabbit was trying to avoid the net.

At this point while trying to net the rabbit I lost my balance. While the rabbit chuckled in sinister fashion I fell over backwards into the garden, crushing the garden fence flat and filling the seat of my trousers and the back of my shirt with about forty thousand thorns. I'm glad I didn't fall on the trowel, that's all I can say. Or, heaven forbid, one of the short fence posts. That would have taken some explaining in the Emergency Room.

Jean saw me gadding about in the back yard and came out, armed with a large basket, thinking perhaps that we could corner the errant bunny between us and scoop him out. Eventually we did and the soaked and exhausted rabbit staggered away, his little shoes squelching, his ears sagging and bedraggled. I staggered away, picking thorns out of my butt and heartily cursing in a generic and non-specific manner.

Dawgs, rabbits, swimmng pools and chemo - it don't get no funner than that. Now you'll excuse me while I go pick more thorns out of my butt.

Fudge

Well, it's official, I have one more chemo treatment to go, in the early part of June. There was some question on whether today was my last session or not. Working with a calendar suggested that June 3rd was the Glorious Day, but the doctor thought that today was it. It turned out that someone made a simple clerical error in my chart that made it look like I'd had 11 treatments, not 10.

So I'm a little put out because, yeah, as irrational as it sounds, I was kind of hoping that somehow my calendar was wrong and today was it. But it still feels pretty good to say "One more" and know that it is true. Now I just have to get over this one, which has hit me hard and early. But maybe, as I tell myself, if I get sick early I'll get better early. Chemo is hard to predict and as theories go this one is about as convincing as medieval theories about phlogiston, but one clings to what solace one can.

And I'm pleased to report that I can't see or feel any evidence of cancer. The node in my groin that I think started this whole business has vanished. A few weeks ago it was but a tiny vestige of itself, mere scar tissue perhaps, but as of this morning it has vanished. And my weird symptoms - itchy skin, visibly swollen nodes, swollen leg, drenching night sweats, intense back pain, shortness of breath, megalospleny - are all gone as well. So I am confident of eventual success, even though I'm trying not to be over-confident, even cavalier, about the whole thing.

Incidentally - without wanting to get drawn into a whole Dancing With The Stars diatribe, I was hoping that if Ty Murray couldn't win (an inevitable outcome, really) that Gilles would win. But they couldn't even give me that, the Philistines.

Blawg Dawg

The Blawg Dawg is better. She had to go to the vet Monday because she kept crying with pain for no discernable reason, and we simply can't have a sick dawg. For all the hours that the dawg has sat patiently on the sofa next to me while I tried not to be sick from chemo, she deserves to be taken to the vet when she's in pain.

Turns out she has arthritis (arf-ritis, haha) in her neck and back, but somehow it got aggravated to the point that turning her head made her cry. So the vet gave her some muscle relaxants and pain pills, and the dawg is better. She still seems a little sore from time to time, but she doesn't cry and she seems happy.

So I'm thinking, you know, she hasn't used up her pain pills and muscle relaxants, and how unethical would it be if I gave her bacon and kept the pills for myself?

D

I have now written D posts - that's 500 in Roman numerals. That's a lot of posts. Do you suppose that a sustained reading of my 500 posts would reveal some sort of grand theme, some sort of organizing principle at work in my mental landscape? Or would one have to admit that in the end my "voluminous correspondence" amounts mostly to what Robert Hughes once called "a cornucopia of dung"?

Still, I'm impressed that I haven't through inattention, pique or error managed to delete my blog over the years.

NTV

I've been watching a bit of NASA TV the last few days to keep up to speed on the Hubble repair mission - as though it makes a difference if I'm up to speed on it or not. NASA TV has been on pretty much all day, for example, while two astronauts conducted a very long spacewalk to replace this-and-that faulty equipment on the Hubble.

Man, has it been boring! I'm all for this man-in-space stuff (Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface just scant days after my ninth birthday, and I've been a tireless if perhaps delusional defender of NASA ever since) but a full day of televised spacewalking is about as much fun as a full day of watching someone work on their car. Note to self: restrict yourself to watching the Flight Day Highlights and skip the live coverage.

Still, it comforts me in a perverse way that NASA has the same problems I do. I go to Auto Zone and buy a water pump for my car, and I go to install it, and it doesn't fit. What do you mean, it doesn't fit? How can the water pump not fit? It looks just like the old water pump, and the computer says it's the right part, but it just won't seat properly. The hell?? How many different kinds of water pumps for GM 350 small blocks can there be?? (Probably many, but don't confuse me with facts, I'm on a roll.)

So here's NASA, spending a couple of billion dollars on this repair mission, and one of the brand-new rate sensing units just won't fit. What do you mean, it won't fit? How can you spend such huge sums of money on the mission and Hubble in general and the RSU doesn't fit? The other two fit; how come the third one doesn't fit? The hell?? How many different kinds of RSUs for the Hubble can there be??

The difference is that nobody cares if I take a sufficiently large hammer to the water pump to drive it home, while hammering on the Hubble Space Telescope may not be the best idea anyone ever had (remember the scene from MST3K: The Movie where Mike broke the Hubble?).

Space hardware is not well represented in the world of scale modeling - the plastic model companies are too busy turning out Nazi stuff to make spacecraft. I'd be greatly surprised if there's any major (or even minor) German tank, warship or airplane from World War Two that hasn't been duplicated in model form. But how many scale models of the Hubble Space Telescope do you think there are? Not many, that's how many. It's hard for me to get really irritated by most things since the advent of cancer and chemo - compared to cancer and chemo, the various woes of scale modeling don't seem worth getting worked up about. But I still think there's something fundamentally wrong with the fact that the world abounds with scale models of Nazi weapons, but I don't know of a single worthwhile plastic scale model of a Soyuz TMA spacecraft, or the Spitzer telescope, or Pioneer 10, for crying out loud.

Rough Week

It's been a rough week, chemo-wise. I seriously think that I'm starting to break down a little, and perhaps the doctors who developed the ABVD protocol knew what they were doing when they limited it to six months. It's probably one of those minimax things - how to get the maximum cancer-killing benefit from the program without killing the patient in the meantime.

Curiously, I'm no longer nauseated. I haven't had an attack of nausea or needed a nausea pill in a couple of weeks. It's as though my innards finally just gave up the struggle, rolled over, and died. All the other symptoms are still present, though, and they don't go away as quickly as they used to. Intestinal pain, slowly worsening neuralgia in my legs and hands, fingernails falling apart, crushing fatigue that verges into genuine depression at times, the usual suspects. The neuralgia in my hands is slowly growing into the least favorite of my problems - every now and then I'll touch something in the wrong way and I'll experience a strange explosion of sharp, stabbing pain in my hand, as though my nerves are stuck at full throttle and can't tell the difference between mild pressure and a deep puncture. This may have nothing to do with chemo, but my oncologist and chemo nurse said that it isn't unknown for chemo to cause that sort of difficulty.

I feel like I've aged ten years in the last six months. I'm curious to see how much of that time I'll recover when chemo ends, and how much is just gone forever.

But what's a boy to do? Watch the Food Network, do the chemo, and hope for the best, mainly.

Speaking of the Food Network, I'm curious to see how this "next Food Network star" thing is going to work out. Here's hoping that the winner isn't someone with unfortunate hair or a penchant for distinctive fashion. With all due respect to Guy Fieri and his fans, he more than fulfills my expectations for "distinctiveness" on the Food Network. I hope the winner is someone who is as normal as TV allows, such as Tyler. I don't even want another Alton Brown - one guy with customized sock puppets and a fondness for vertigo-inducing camera moves is about all I can stand.

Trek

I'm tempted to let my inner Star Trek fan out to play for a while. The new movie seems halfway decent, according to the reviews, and I'm relieved that it's more of a flashback than something new. If Voyager is any guide, I don't need new Trek, I need old Trek, and I need it now.

I've always been something of a Trek fan, though I never wore a uniform or pointed ears, or collected Trek merchandise, or even said "Live long and prosper" in any way that wasn't pointedly ironic. What I'm saying is that though I've been to Star Trek conventions, I wore jeans and didn't affect some sort of idiotic headgear. And though I may have had the urge to buttonhole people and tell them why Bread and Circuses is my favorite Trek episode, I never actually did.

But though my flame of Trek fandom doesn't burn very hot, it burns long. I've liked the original show since the late 1960s, when I saw it as it was being made, and I tend to curl my lip at people who today heap scorn on the show. "Oh, the special effects were so hokey!" Well, sure, but it was 1969; what were you expecting? "Oh, the moral judgments of the show had all the subtlety of sledgehammers!" And you thought All In The Family was subtle? "Oh, William Shatner was such an awful actor!" To that, all I can say is "Gates McFadden".

My point isn't that Star Trek was the greatest thing ever made. I still think canned chili might be the greatest thing ever made. But I think the show was a lot better than our modern irony-craving post-modernistically exhausted society will allow, and in terms of story I think there are a half dozen Trek episodes that deserve to be immortal. So I'm letting my inner fan out for a while.

Engage (yes, I know I'm crossing shows here).

Dentus Maximus

Am I the only person who is at all unnerved by the fact that Giada had twice as many teeth as the average human being?

X

X as in ten, not X as in X. Tomorrow is chemo number X, which is a nice round number but no more significant than any other number, I guess, except that I am slowly, week by week, being worn down by it all. It's like having one of those aggravating chronic chest colds that just won't to away, only chemo doesn't involve much coughing. The good news is that I can see the end from here - my last treatment should be June 3rd, which is almost close enough to touch.

These nights-before-chemo are kind of a drag. It's tempting to view tomorrow as a day off from work, and that's always good. But it's not really a day off, not in the sense of being able to do anything particularly fun. So mostly I sit here and try not to think about the fact that I'll spend a few hours tomorrow morning with a tube hanging out of my chest.

Nobody likes a whiner, but I find that on the nights before chemo, my horizons tend to draw in just a tad.

I have a terrible craving for a Bloody Mary. About six of them, actually. I don't drink very often, and I rarely have mixed drinks when I do. I don't know what it is, but the idea of a Bloody Mary is almost unendurable. I suppose I could drive up to the little store in Wittmann and see if they have V8 or tomato juice, but I'd probably have about as much luck asking them if they happened to have any uranium hexaflouride (it's a sign of life in the sticks when you can be quite sure the store has a plastic jug of Popov vodka, but probably doesn't have any vegetable juice).

Thus my deep need for a Bloody Mary goes unmet, yet again.

A Farewell to Crumpets

I'm slowly giving up on the Food Network. There are certain shows I'll probably keep watching in the future. Alton Brown in all of his irritating geekiness, and Ace of Cakes, even though in real life Duff Goldman would probably irritate me to distraction. But I'm officially giving up on the competition shows, all of them.

No more Throwdown. I must admit that Bobby Flay turned out not to be the jerk I thought he was, but that doesn't mean I like Throwdown either.

No more Chopped. I have nothing against Ted Allen, who seems generally harmless and inoffensive. But I grow weary of the cocky numbnuts they bring in as contestants. There's the guy who is a vegan private chef specializing in probiotic nutriphoria who is simply Way More Spiritual Than You. There's the guy who's going to bring his A-game, go for the three, swing for the fences, put the pedal to the metal and overuse sports cliches until our ears bleed and our souls pucker and die. There's the foodie who knows that the natural counterpart to the munchiness of cabbage is a gastrique of cane sugar, cider vinegar and braised kaiserwurt. Every now and then I do confess a mild interest when something strange appears in the basket ("Octopus?? For DESSERT??") but I really don't need a lot of cocky preening, foodie pretentiousness, or sustainable navel-gazing to go along with it.

No more of that show with the same people over and over who make cakes. They introduce themselves by saying "Hi, I'm Jim and I've been on the Challenge eight times, and I've won twice." People of interest show up once and move on, but somehow these same six or eight people recur with the depressing inevitability of cold sores. The latest incarnation of this show has them competing over the long-term, with slow-motion elimination in the manner of Dancing With The Stars. Lovely. Yet elimination is usually decided by some kind of twist announced by Chef Keenan Wynn - "The Wynner will be determined by a thirty-minute cake-off." A cake-off. I did not make that up. First, I never want to hear an adult say "cake-off". Second, I thought they were already having a goddamned cake-off.

Iron Chef America is kind of fun, but I hate it when the judges get snotty with one another. I notice that most of the time when the judges get snotty, that guy that looks like he's consciously imitating Johnny Depp is involved. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Hence my growing frustration with the Food Network. If I wanted to watch people being cocky, rude, stupid or grating, I'd watch something on Spike.

I started watching it in the dim dark days of December when I was doing a pretty good job of dying of cancer. I didn't feel like eating, and watching Ina Garten didn't make me want to eat either, but it was a way of connecting with the larger world when I was pretty much confined to my bedroom (not even to my bed; I was confined mostly to an office chair because it hurt to lay down). Plus it beat watching obscure college football bowl games on ESPN (the Colon Bowl, I don't know what all).

But either I don't need the connection with the real world any more, or the Food Network's competition shows don't represent any link to any known real world. I'm turning in my spatula.