Thanks, AOL

I was reading news headlines on AOL, such as AOL news headlines are - lots of gushy nonsense about stars that I don't care about, let alone have ever heard of. Somewhere along the line I slipped and accidentally clicked on a Justin Bieber link.

Now I need ritual cleansing and purification by a team of tonsured monks. Maybe even make a huge donation, crawl on my knees like a pilgrim, drag something heavy across the desert in a gesture of hair-shirted penitence. It isn't just because Justin Bieber is pretty much a train wreck (though he is - and they laugh at my music!). It's more the comments appended to the news stories that made me feel defiled and unholy - annoying gibberish "written" by people who can't spell the word "you" and who can't think their way out of the simplest of logical traps. Ugh. How horrible.

My favorite comment was something about how "all u haters think he can't sing shud shut up cuz he's HOTTTT." One hates to argue with geniuses of this ilk, but "hot" and "able to sing" are two different things, and neither one implies the other (just consider Neil Young, who is uglier than twenty miles of washboarded road but has a certain facility with music). This leaves entirely unasked the question of whether he's actually hot or not, but I'm inclined to believe that anyone not old enough to get a driver's license, register for the draft, or buy a beer legally is unhot by definition.

Another comment I greatly enjoyed (in a perverse, self-hating kind of way) was something like "All U HATERS stop hatin". Once again, one hates to argue with such a mental heavyweight, but thinking that someone's pop music drivel is drivel isn't the same as "hatin". And besides, if I stopped "hatin" I would no longer be a "HATER", and who am I to deny my own essence? If I'm a HATER, I hate, it's what I do.

All of this leads one to the inevitable and unhappy conclusion that something has gone haywire somewhere along the line. Not so much with J.B. himself, who seems pretty laughable, and the less energy I expend on him, the happier I am. No, mostly it makes my flesh crawl to witness anew just how low our standards of writing and critical thought have gotten. What must it be like to inhabit the minds of these comment-writers?

Ugh. Send for the priests, I require purification in the worst way imaginable.

IJ

I just finished reading the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest yesterday. Been at it for a while too, have I, inasmuch as the novel runs over 1,000 pages with endnotes, and often confronts the reader with page-length multi-clause sentences, deliberately obfuscatory denseness that brings post-structuralist writings to mind, and a wild lexical exuberance that expanded my personal vocabulary considerably. It may not be the Mount Everest of novel-reading experiences, but it's way up there, high enough that oxygen stops being a good idea and becomes a requirement. It's not Tarnsman of Gor, in short.

I'm not always good at discerning themes in novels, and I'm known to claim that a great many novels have no theme at all. Reviewers seem to be much better at this sort of thing than I am - this novel is about retribution and redemption, they write, while to me it was either a good story or a bad one. (I think reviewers occasionally invent improbable themes just to make themselves seem smart - this novel examines the ontological implications of left-handedness within a context of post-modern urban ennui and its effect on the Ozone Layer.) I'm quite certain that Infinite Jest abounds with thematically-oriented material, but the best I can come up with is a vague notion that addiction sucks, recovery from said addiction is next to impossible, and everyone in the novel completely screwed, being either addicted or mentally ill or, usually, both.

It's incredibly literate, and Wallace's command of the craft of writing is masterful. It is also madly funny in places, but the humor is usually countered by many-page digressions on the physical and mental decay that comes with addiction (there's rather a lot of defecating in one's pants, for example, not normally something I go out of my way to read, especially since chemo brought me face-to-face with that particular horror).

The story is highly segmented and nonlinear, with many levels and subplots that often seem to (and occasionally do) have nothing to do with anything. The narrator and narrative style change often, as often as not within and not between chapters - it sometimes takes the reader a while to figure out who's talking (and speaking of talking, there are long sections that are nothing but dialogue entirely without attribution, and if you forget who's talking, well, trouble arises).

It's not easy to read, but it's gripping, mostly as a window in a world of mental illness and addiction that I have next to no experience with. My main experience with addiction and recovery comes from my attempts to quit smoking, and somehow a mild cigarette jones doesn't seem to be worth mentioning when you're reading about, say, Kate Gompert's completely unresolvable unipolar depression or Don Gately's problem with oral narcotics.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fabulously worthwhile read, especially if you're of a mind to see a master writer work his craft. Just don't expect anything particularly uplifting to happen, because it doesn't. It's funny, sometimes outrageously funny, but it's also deadly depressing in places and - dare I say it - somewhat turgid and overwrought in other places. (Wallace, it should be pointed out, committed suicide by hanging himself, and if this novel is any guide to his inner landscape, it's not too hard to see why - but regarding Wallace, de mortuis nil nisi bonum.)

The novel leaves me with many unanswered (and now, unanswerable) questions, but here's the one that I think about most often:

Q: Why does the ghost of Himself manifest itself to Don Gately and, it is alleged, Ortho "The Darkness" Stice, but not to Hal? Is this some sop to Hamlet, perhaps, a work that I am next to entirely unacquainted with?

I'm not going to read it again, at least not any time soon. I put my life on hold for quite a while reading this gigantic opus and I'm not inclined to do so again - but I will think about it, you can bet on that.

Barbus Magnus

Doesn't that mean "Great Whiskers" in Latin? Something like that. Here we have a cell phone camera self-portrait of moi, snapped after getting in the car at the end of my day at work - hence the hang-doggishness of the whole thing. I do draw your attention to my whiskers. No great shakes in the beard department, but since I haven't grown so much as a single whisker in months, this counts as a pretty significant eruption of hair.

The better news is that thus far I have no lumps, bumps, tumors or weird symptoms, which is better than growing hair. Trust me on that.

It could just be me, but I don't think I look like someone who's been through a year of chemo. I seem insufficiently grey and pasty for that. But I'm not complaining.

And Now, The Traffic Report

I hate the winter in Arizona. To get to work, I have to drive through a very large retirement complex, eastbound in the morning and westbound in the evening. The road is very much a public road, but the geezers (I use the term lovingly, of course) who live in said retirement complex treat it as their own private property. Hardly a week doesn't go by without me being involved in a near-accident when one of them does something stupid, and practically every damn day I get stuck behind some guy in a Mr. Howell hat or visor cap going 25 in a 45 zone, and slowing down at every side street as though he intends to turn but psych goes straight.

If you read the letters-to-the-editor section of the local paper, you see a lot of these guys defending themselves in more or less the following manner: "I pay gas and sales taxes for the three months of the year that I live here, so I'm entitled to special treatment from the state, county and sundry citizens."

Got news for you, Slappy. I live here twelve months of the year, and have done so for my entire life, and I pay income taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes and heaven knows what other taxes for twelve months out of the year, and I have to put up with your terrible driving all winter, dodging golf carts and maneuvering around behemoth RVs that weave from lane to lane like drunken sperm whales and fuming in impotent rage as I creep along behind some guy doing twenty-under with his fedora on the package shelf of his car. Why am I not entitled to special treatment?

If you find my attitude ungrateful, you can pack up your stuff and go back to Minnesota and leave the public roadways open for those of us who really live here and need to use the roads to do such irrelevant things as, say, going to work.

I imagine the same thing happens elsewhere. One year my wife and I went to Montana to see her old stomping grounds in the Mission Valley, roughly between Missoula and Polson. Highway 93 in this part of Montana is no great shakes; it's a scribbly two-lane thing on a raised embankment that guarantees that any off-road excursions will require the services of a very large tow truck to make right - you go off the road and you end up in a ditch about ten feet below road level. And that highway is positively foul with RVs and campers hauling ass at high speed (no daytime speed limit, woohoo, we can go 90 miles per hour if we want!) in densely packed convoys as they head for Glacier National Park, awning a-flap and heat-ruined tires flying apart. Driving on that highway requires a certain relaxation in one's sense of mortality - just getting onto the highway in the first place is tricky and requires nerves of steel and lots and lots of horsepower under the hood.

It must drive the locals half-mad, seeing their basically rural highway get turned into a high-speed RV raceway like that.

Bees On My Bonnet

Bees used to land on my head occasionally when I was fully bald. I don’t know why, they just did. Maybe to them my head looked like a giant pink flower. I left them alone too – better to wait for them to get bored and fly away then to try to usher them off and end up with a huge bee-goiter on the top of my head. So I’d sit there stock-still, aware in a weird cellular way of every tiny movement the bee made, or even didn’t make; even if it didn’t move I sat there, jaw clenched, willing myself to impersonate Greek statuary until the thing got bored and flew off.

I’m not fond of bees. They always seem kind of irritated to me, and ever since I wiped out that whole bee colony in the tree I’ve worried that they might be planning some dark, violent insect form of revenge. Stinging me to a swollen pulpy death comes to mind, and for all I know the bees that land on my scalp might be the early scouts of the bee equivalent of the Kido Butai, a thrumming mass of about 10,000 irritated Africanized bees all looking for that biped what done in the Queen (a sort of 10,000 Ronin, if you will).

Today I was outside in the sun, and a bee landed on my head again. But aha, I had a surprise in store for it. My scalp has grown just sufficiently bristly that it no longer presents to bees a smooth, slightly spongy, and inviting landing field. Now my scalp bristles with tiny hairs, insignificant at human scale but veritable Rommelspargel at bee scale. The bee landed, squirmed around for a few seconds as it tried to find a comfortable position amid the bristles, and soon gave up and flew away, irritated. I imagine that when it returned to the hive, its communication-dance read “I found a huge pink flower, but it’s bristly and unpalatable. Sorry, guys.”

But I still keep an eye out for the Kido Butai. You just can’t bee too cautious. Or too eager to spawn a cheap pun.

Max

Max, seen above in his more replete years, died last night, unexpectedly and without any obvious sign of struggle or pain. The day grows colder and greyer.

Regrowth

My hair and beard are starting to grow back. Well, my beard anyway; my scalp hair is still not much more than a faint fuzz that hints at future growth, but it's fuzzier than it was last week.

All of this puts me decidedly on edge. You'd think that I would greet the return of my hair with something akin to approval, the return of the Prodigal Follicles after being banished to the bleak Chemotherapy Desert for months. But it actually scares me. It's proof that the chemo has stopped killing cells in my body, which permits such useful things as hair follicles and digestive epithelium to grow back.

It also permits less useful things like mutant Reed-Sternberg cells to grow back. My cancer, in other words. The advent of hair means that the advent of cancer may not be far away either.

One certainly hopes not, and the odds against the cancer coming back are better than even - the "cure rate" (which is kind of meaningless unless you also specify a timespan) is 62%, according to the doctors. But 62% isn't 100%. Four times out of ten my cancer will come back, and meantime I'm as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I keep checking my groin and neck for tumors, as though they'll suddenly pop up from one minute to the next. So far so good, and the longer I go without finding any lumps the better off I am. But I suspect I'll never be entirely free of the fear of finding tumors.

Right now the fear is pretty strong. It'll probably wane the longer I go without finding anything, but it'll never go away.

And let's be honest, Hodgkin's is going to kill me eventually. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in ten years. But one way or another, Hodgkin's or the long-term consequences of chemotherapy are going to do me in. If the cancer itself doesn't get me, it'll be leukemia, heart valve damage or oxygen toxicity secondary to chemotherapy. I feel as though chemo alone has taken twenty years off my lifespan just from the sheer wear and tear. I'm not nearly the same man I was two years ago, and I don't believe I'll ever recover completely.

But secondary leukemia, oxygen toxicity and the like are things I'll have to worry about in ten or twenty years. A return of cancer is something I'd have to worry about right now. That's the difference between dying of cancer and dying of chemotherapy.

Fun, huh?

Well, it could be worse. A lot worse. As of my last check, I didn't have any tumors, so I'll take what I can get.