Eisenstein

I notice a sort of strange hunger in popular culture these days for Einstein to be proven wrong. What they mean, really, is that they want to see Relativity proven wrong. Einstein himself was often wrong. He once said, for example, “A little schnitzel never hurt anyone.” Yeah, tell that to people who choked to death on pieces of schnitzel! (And this in the days before the Heimlich Maneuver, when one imagines the cafes and bistros of the world were littered with the prostrate bodies of choking victims, when the accepted wisdom was to give a choking person a glass of water, thus compounding choking with drowning.)

Thus we see that Einstein WAS wrong. At least once. But here’s another example. He once said “I see; the souls of the departed pass into the trousers of the living.” (He really did.) This, as I think any thinking person will agree, is nonsense. The only stuff that passes into MY trousers are my legs and other bits of biological undercarriage. So there, Einstein was wrong twice. (Would it not be fundamentally creepy to find that the souls of the departed really DO pass into the trousers of the living? Imagine discovering that you've got the soul of Ho Chi Minh in your trousers. How would you even grapple with such a thing emotionally?)

But why do people hunger to see Relativity proven wrong? Do they not like Relativity? Do they not like Einstein? Do they blame him for the fact that science is hard? (Einstein once said “Do not worry about your problems in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are worse still.”) Do they not like his hair? Do they blame him for the atom bomb? Maybe they log on to the Internet to find out more about Lindsay Lohan’s fingernails and are suddenly confronted by news stories they don’t understand but seem to have something to do with that creepy German guy with the funky hair. You know, one of the Einstein Brothers, the one that went into physics instead of staying home like a good boy and making bagels, the one that came up with all that claptrap about invariance and equivalent frames of reference instead of just asking us if we’d like schmeer on our onion bagel.

In the novel “Angels & Demons” Dan Brown establishes the scientific bona fides of the luscious Italian physicist by tossing off the remark that she had “disproven Einstein with a stopwatch and a school of tuna fish.” Again, I think he means she disproved Relativity, not Einstein, because I can’t see what a stopwatch or a school of tuna have to do with choking on a piece of schnitzel. I’m glad they left that part out of the movie – I would have brayed like an Army mule and then, most likely, choked to death on a piece of schnitzel.

Thus I am deeply gratified to report that General Relativity just passed its most exhaustive and extreme test yet when the behavior of a binary pulsar system was found to agree with the predictions of General Relativity down to a ridiculous number of decimal places – it don’t get much more relativistic than two pulsars orbiting one another! And the early word from Argentina is that the GZK Cutoff is indeed observed in the real world, thus confirming Special Relativity, and consigning the dubious contender “Doubly-Special Relativity” (nicknamed “DSR” so it doesn’t sound quite so much like an ice cream dish) to the trash can of history. “I’d like a Doubly-Special Relativity, please. With sprinkles. And butterscotch syrup.”

I am, as you can doubtless tell, bored out of my skull. I think I suffer from a weird form of ADD. I know what the GZK Cutoff is and what it means, but I can’t balance my checkbook. Why is that? And why do I think you’re even remotely interested in the GZK Cutoff? (I don’t think you’re interested in the GZK Cutoff; I think that you’re interested in the fact that I’m interested in the GZK Cutoff. I think that’s what I mean. But I’m not sure it’s interesting. I think.)

I should go do something productive, like prove Einstein wrong with a sundial and a sleeping dog.

Years ago I watched an episode of Night Gallery (I think it was) where a guy had some kind of earwig eat its way through his brain from one ear to the other. I’m having the same problem, except without earwigs or a brain (so to speak). I’ve discovered that when shingles heals, intense itching sets in. It’s like someone rubbed a shedding cat all over the right side of my face; sometimes the desire to gibber and scratch at my face with some kind of gardening trowel is almost insurmountable. As it happens, I DO gibber, but lacking a garden implement, I’ve taken to worrying at my face with a comb. Good thing I’m not a werewolf; I’d tear the side of my face off by accident. Hard enough to explain the clutter of half-eaten sheep carcasses around the apartment without having to explain why your face is hanging off in ribbons at the same time.

666

This is my 666th post. Let he who hath understanding reckon the number of this post...

I may have to go listen to Iron Maiden just because!

Relapse?

I wonder if I'm having a shingles relapse.

My eye is extremely uncomfortable today. It's felt more or less normal for the last week, and it still works more or less normally (episodic fits of double-vision notwithstanding) but egads it hurts tonight. I can't touch my skin anywhere around my eye socket.

But at least I can see. Pain I can deal with, but not seeing well enough to manage something simple like eating a hot dog, that's a pain in the ass.

This is, by the way, the fourth anniversary of me not dying of a heart attack. I'm sure as holidays go it's of less than national importance, but it's a big deal to me personally Or has it been five years? I don't remember. I just remember that it was the morning of July 4th that my coronary arteries finally gave out, and the next day had my chest cut open with what I like to think was some sort of chain saw.

So here I am, debating whether I still have cancer or not, trying not to touch my eye lest it go mad, listening to Insomium and wondering if I'm really that that fortunate I didn't die four years ago.

Of course I am. Duh. I have no deathwish, despite my penchant for death metal.

Panel Discussions

Panel discussions are all the rage today - in our modern punditocracy, they're the new town hall meetings, I guess. And panel discussions on alternatives to fossil fuels are especially popular, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon mess, $110 a barrel oil, and mounting evidence that we're doing something evil to the planet, even if we aren't sure exactly what.

So they get some experts together, they have a panel discussion, and it's so goddamned frustrating. Once again, nothing can be done. The wind power pundits do nothing but debunk solar power. The solar power pundits do nothing but debunk wind power. The conservation people debunk everything. The conservatives (some of them, anyway) debunk the notion of climate change. The end result: intellectual gridlock, because everyone assumed that it's their way or the highway; that any "mind share" a competing technology gains is that much money they lose.

But one thing is a given: nobody takes a beating in these discussions quite like nuclear power. They practically take turns dragging nuclear power out to the woodshed and beating it like an army mule. But here's where I break ranks with my cohorts. I think nuclear energy is absolutely essential if we're going to be serious about reducing our consumption of fossil fuels. Let me reiterate: absolutely essential.

I am not saying that we should give up on solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, and whatever other alternative forms of power generation there are. But if we're serious about significantly reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide and ending our dependency on "foreign oil", we're going to have to stop burning oil, gas and coal. That means taking millions of cars and trucks off the highways and replacing them with electric cars. That means closing gas and coal fired power plants. That means we're going to add a whole new load on our electrical generation infrastructure (battery-powered plug-in cars) just as we're taking a big chunk of our generating capacity off-line (coal and gas-fired power plants).

Can't get there from here. You can't double and triple the demand, reduce the generation capacity by 70%, and expect the books to balance.

Now, clearly, wind and solar power have a significant role to play. But even if we quadruple solar power and wind power generation in the next ten years, where are we? Doodley-squat times four is still roughly doodley-squat. Pursue it, by all means, and pursue it hard. But what do we do in the meantime? What technology can, relatively quickly in terms of economic cycles, gear up and generate a lot of power without increasing our consumption of fossil fuels?

Yes, that dreaded red-haired stepchild, nuclear power.

I don't make this stand frivolously. It only takes one "accident" like Chernobyl* to make the whole enterprise decidedly unappealing, and nobody finds the idea of thousands of tons of radioactive waste hanging around for thousands of years very pleasant. But if you want to generate serious megawatts of power, and if you want to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and if you want to stop writing checks to oil sheiks, well, the options seem pretty limited to me.

It strikes me that fusion power is the desired end state. We're able to generate scads of power with fusion, even today, but unfortunately the difficulty lies in harnessing the power. How exactly does one capture the output of a ten-megaton thermonuclear weapon? I don't know how long it'll take to develop the technology required to generate power by fusion in a controlled and reliable way. But once we do, all the other technologies become irrelevant. We can dismantle the windmills, recycle the solar panels, cement over the nuclear power plants, dynamite the hydroelectric generators, because the days of virtually free energy will be upon us.

We just have to get there. I figure it'll take about 100 years for this to happen, and I suspect it's going to require breakthroughs in magnetohydrodynamics that we can't even guess at today. But it'll happen. Stars do it all the time, so in principle we should be able to as well. So we've got to find a way to bridge the gap of about 100 years, and I think well-engineered nuclear power plants are the answer.

Emphasis on well-engineered. No RBMK reactors, no graphite moderator, no reactors with positive void coefficients, no harebrained experiments on reactors that have been poisoned with xenon, no guessing at water levels because the core itself doesn't have water level instruments... I'm kind of impressed by the Canadian heavy water reactors, myself, since they seem to sidestep the whole issue of fuel enrichment entirely, and I confess I find the very idea of "heavy water" groovy.

This means, more than likely, that the pundits will drag me out to the woodshed and give me a thorough thrashing, but that's okay. I haven't done any research or anything (heaven forbid), but I'd be greatly surprised (greatly surprised) if the combined energy output of all the solar power plants in America exceeds the output of just the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station near Buckeye, Arizona. And that's probably true of all the windmills in America too. Put that in your energy equation and calculate it!

(It bears noting that fission-based nuclear power has a limited lifetime. In a few tens of thousands of years, natural radioactive decay will have converted all the useful fissionable isotopes of uranium and thorium into useless stuff. So it's a case of use it now, in the next ten thousand years or so, because eventually the option to use it will expire.)

*Chernobyl was no "accident", any more than hitting another car because you're texting on your cell phone is an accident.

Binoculars

I'm not much of an observational astronomer. I like thinking about the big questions of cosmology and cosmogony (not deeply or incisively, but I still think about them) but I find peering through a telescope damned frustrating. There's always something something wrong. The eyepiece is wrong and I have to rest my actual cornea on it. Or the eyepiece is in the wrong place and I have to bend myself up like a paperclip to get my eye to it. Or the mirror is covered with dew. Or it's hot. Or it's cold. Or there's a huge flying bug plaguing me. Or I can't see the star chart. Or I can't Hercules with both hands and radar.

I'm more the binocular type. I go out with the binoculars, I have a look around, I see star clusters and globular clusters, I go back inside. Neat, clean, tidy, uplifting, and just about as much astronomy as I care to do on any given night. (Not that there's anything wrong with telescopes, or astronomy as a serious hobby, but I've dabbled enough to know that binoculars are about my speed.)

Only I can't find my binoculars. They were good ones too. I paid a small fortune for them and they featured lenses about the size of dinner plates (well, small dinner plates). They were designed for backyard astronomy, and they were good at it. But I fear that right now, they're serving as traction for a Caterpillar D9N dozer at the local landfill. I must have thrown them away, though I have no memory of doing so, and can't imagine that I ever would have in my right mind.

Ah, my right mind. That explains that.

So the other day I did a little on-line browsing for binoculars, thinking I would perhaps replace the missing pair with something new, shiny, and optically perfect. Then I laughed. Here I am, functioning with one eye, buying binoculars? I'd have more luck taping a smallish refractor to my head. To be monocular in a binocular world - it sounds like a song, or an epic poem, or the lament of a dude with shingles in his eye.

But today my eye just started working again, just like that. No double vision, reasonably clear eyesight! What a pleasure to drive with both eyes! And what a pleasure to once again be able to think about binoculars again. Heaven knows what happened last night. Did my eye swelling go down to the point that my brain could make sense of the information again? Or what? Either way, it's greatly heartening to have two eyes again, even if it does take my right eye about four seconds to change major focus, and another second or two to track in so the double vision resolves. The fact that there's been improvement seems to argue that there'll be more improvement.

I actually do have a telescope. It's an antique 4.5-inch refractor and it's a lovely instrument to look at, all varnished wood and polished brass. It looks like the kind of beautiful hand-made instrument an 18th Century astronomer would have used, and it works about as well too. There's no focusing rack; you focus it by sliding a brass tube in and out of the back of the thing. Looking at any kind of reasonably bright source produces an orgy of colored auras. It's big, and the solid brass equitorial mount alone weighs about 40 pounds, and even mounted on the sturdiest pipe I could find (cast iron sewer pipe embedded in about three feet of concrete) the thing jiggles and shivers uncontrollably.

I took the old eyepiece to an astronomy shop and not even The Guy Behind The Counter could identify it. He eventually decided that it was a Fossl, a play on Plossl. So I bought a new eyepiece, a relatively low-power Plossl. I got to the point I could see stuff through it, but the endless vibration and the difficulty in focusing the thing finally convinced me that it was best suited as a piece of novel indoor decor.

Anyhow. The telescope remains in my office, and meantime, now that my eyes work, I'm going to go look for binoculars.

Slow Recovery

My shingles situation is slowly improving. Most of the crusty scabs fell off my forehead, leaving substantial pits behind. My eye now opens and stays open, but it's still swollen, red, and doesn't work very well. My eyesight at close range is pretty good, but beyond about two or three feet my eyes don't seem to agree on which direction they're looking and I suffer from wild double vision.

But it IS getting better. The cloudiness is going away, and there are moments when I suddenly realize that my eyes have "clicked" and are working together. Such moments don't last long, but they're becoming more and more common. Maybe one of these days I'll be out of these woods.

I desire some slack. I'm tired of being sick.

I'm No Expert

I'm not an expert. I'm not a scientist. But I like to think that I'm about as smart as the people who make science shows for the Science Channel, and I like to think that I've thought about matters at least as much as they have. So here are my totally unscientific views on matters that seem to excite the TV show producers.

1. Is time travel possible? Yes - but only into the future, and through mechanisms described by relativity (that is, relativistic velocities or really deep and steep gravity wells).

2. Are there alternate universes? I don't think so, but even if there are, we'll never detect them, so we'll never know. I'm wary of the "alternate universes" interpretations of superstring theory and tend to reject the pop culture gosh-wow alternate theory nonsense that grows up like weeds in the cracks of the sidewalk.

3. Are there more than three spatial dimensions? I don't know. And I don't know how to detect them if they exist. 3+N dimensional space continuums seem to always flow out of attempts to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics (superstring theory, loop quantum gravity and so forth) and I'm always tempted to say these are cases where elegant mathematical models lead us to inelegant physical models, but in the end I'm basically agnostic on multiple dimensions.

4. What are the constituents of dark matter? I think WIMPs (Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles) are a reasonable hypothesis.

5. What is the basis of dark energy? I wish I knew! I confess I'm not entirely convinced that expansion is really accelerating - I have a sneaking suspicion we're seeing an artifact of measurement and assumption. But people way smarter than me think it really is happening, so I guess I should too. But what's causing it? Dunno.

6. Regarding the huge disagreement about the value of the cosmological constant, who's right, quantum mechanics or relativity? I side with relativity - it's hard to argue with observational evidence.

7. Are there a lot of Earth-like planets out in the universe? I don't know what "a lot" means, but I think they're going to turn out to be reasonably plentiful. And I'm confident that there is life out there somewhere, and that it is also reasonably plentiful. Is there intelligent life out there? Probably.

8. Why hasn't SETI detected signals from other stars? Given that I think life is common in the universe, and intelligent life not uncommon, why haven't we heard it? My personal guess is that most of the observable universe lies beyond the "life-radio horizon", as it were - we've only been sending out radio signals for about a hundred years, after all, and a civilization in the Andromeda galaxy would have to be millions of years old for us to hear it.

9. Do wormholes exist? Probably, but I doubt that they can be created artificially, or used as a transit system (or even a communications system). But the science fiction fan in me likes to think that some hitherto-unsuspected property of hitherto-undiscovered exotic matter might make such things possible.

10. Is supersymmetry real? I'm dubious, and as the energy of particle accelerators increases and supersymmetrical partners continue to not be found, I grow increasingly dubious.

11. Is superstring theory right? I'm dubious. It seems too convenient to me that the theory can be reformulated as required to justify its lack of experimental evidence, and I'm wary of efforts to define this as a new way of doing science.

12. What is the origin of the Pioneer Anomaly? The engineer in me thinks it's some subtle real-world effect we aren't taking into account and not something fundamentally wrong with our theories of gravity. I'm not sure what real-world effect we're missing - drag from the spacecraft colliding with dust particles, maybe - but I prefer that over the alternative.

13. Does the Higgs Particle really exist? Hell if I know! It's in danger of being dismissed as too convenient, just like supersymmetrical partner particles. Strange, isn't it, that every time we fail to discover the Higgs Particle, someone recalculates its mass so it's just slightly too heavy to appear? But if it doesn't exist, there are ominous implications for quantum theory...

And now, I think I'm going to think about cooking a sausage for lunch.

Herpes Zoster

Ever wondered what shingles looks like when it's on your face and in your eye? It looks like this. I look for all the world like I've been involved in some good-natured but extremely violent Dudesons stunt, except that so many of their good-natured but extremely violent stunts seem to involve horrific testicular disasters (the "Stairway to Hell" being prototypical and cringeworthy).

Earlier the dark thing on my eyelid finally crusted up and fell off. I hoped this would represent some sort of progress, but it didn't. My eye is as swollen and painful as ever, and the crusty bits on my forehead have begun to bleed.

On the whole it doesn't hurt as much as it did last weekend, when it seemed that some large and important cranio-facial nerve was freaking out about every five seconds. Now it just feels about like it looks like it should, like I got hit in the eye with a softball or a rocket-propelled stuffed reindeer (to keep the Dudeson reference alive).

Hipsters I Have No Use For

Today I went (against my better judgment) to read stuff on "Stuff Hipsters Hate". I saw them on CNN the other day and couldn't believe that such irrelevancy was given space on the CNN website. But it was, and I was curious if their blog was as irrelevant, so I went to go see for myself. And yes, by cracky, it's at least as irrelevant, if not more so, and just as stupid.*

Normally I don't waste much time criticizing hipsters or uber-hipsters. What they do doesn't matter to me, and what they think is irrelevant to me.

But after I got out of the shower after scrubbing the oily self-satisfied residue off my person, I came to this realization: I don't know what hipsters hate, and I don't care. But I do know what hipsters I have no use for.

After almost dying twice and going through 18 months of chemotherapy and two bone marrow transplants, there's no room left in me for hate. If these irrelevant twits want to hate everything that they don't like, I don't much care. If they want to hate me, I don't much care. But I can say that it'll be a cold day in hell before I ever go back to their site.

(What I find particularly unamusing about their site is that despite their literary pretensions, they can't seem to go a paragraph without saying "fuck". Does that make you feel like a grown-up, talking like that? Good for you. Now go find a poetry slam or something to infest; I have more important things to think about.)

*Their CNN bit was something about snazzing up Tweets so you sound suitably status-conscious and ironically hipsterish. You can't say "I ate lunch"; you have to say "Had an ironically hip wrap at [insert oppressively hip-for-the-moment watering hole here] in Manhattan." Yeah? Well, what if I had two tacos at Filiberto's in Phoenix? Only 99 cents, and just as tasty at four times the price, and I didn't have to put up with any buffoonish hipsters while I was eating. But having said all that, the only appropriate answer to the question of how one makes a Tweet "more acceptable" is to say that as a first approximation, no Tweet is acceptable. It's only when you get down to the fourth or fifth approximation that any of them start to serve any useful purpose at all.

Jacques

I spent most of yesterday watching big chunks of a Jacques Cousteau marathon on Turner Classic Movies.

First, permit me to thank TCM for the effort. I can't even log on to check my email without being involuntarily exposed to crap about Kate Gosselin, Lindsey Lohan or other celebutards, and sometimes I forget that there really ARE people out there who give a shit. Thanks, guys, I needed that!

Jacques Cousteau was a big hero of mine back in the 1970s. I suspect he was to a lot of people. My heroes at the time were Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau, and Roger DeCoster, a Belgian motocross racer - you can't be a boy without having at least one sports hero, I guess, even though I remain torn to this day on whether racing is really a sport or not.

So I watched the Cousteau specials, many of them narrated by Rod Serling, and couldn't help but feel that we'd lost something over the years. Imagine it - a TV documentary that doesn't insult the intelligence of the viewer! That doesn't rely on irritating camera tricks to conceal a basic lack of content!

But I will say this - sometimes I saw just a little too much flesh in them. I'm no prude, but I don't really need to see a French scientist wearing a swimsuit the size of a piece of toast. Really.

Alas, the marathon is over, and the world moves on and sinks back into its trough of celebutard dissipation and irrelevance.

Sigh.

Still, I draw some solace from the fact that in a hundred years, more people will remember Jacques Cousteau than Kate Gosselin.

Dear Blogger

Dear Blogger,

When do you propose to do anything about this recent epidemic of chuckleheads posting bullshit comments that are nothing more than deceitful links to what appear to be Asian porn sites? I seem to spend more time killing these bullshit comments than I do posting, and it's getting really irritating.

I tried to "Notify Blogger" but I ended up tattling on myself!

This is crazy. All I ask is that you turn off links in comments - I don't care what they say in the comments, I just don't like all those hidden links lurking like time bombs in my blog.

Failing that, I may have to shut off comments altogether, which would be unfortunate, but I do so hate my blog being violated by a bunch of 14-year-old knuckleheads. And if that doesn't work, I can go somewhere else.

Thanks for nothing, because I know you won't do anything about it.

It's Shingles

I haven't written much lately. On the one hand, I've been trying to work more hours, and by the time I get home, I'm usually pretty pooped. Given the choice between writing and sleeping, I seem to settle for the latter more often than not. On the other hand, I've developed shingles on my face and in my eye, which is highly inconvenient, not to mention really quite painful. Given the choice between writing and bleating softly in pain, I seem to to settle for the latter.

I didn't even know you could get shingles in your eye. I went to the doctor when it first started and they thought it was blepheritis, and they gave me some ointment. It did no good and it kept getting worse, to the next week I had my oncologist look at it, and he went "eeek!" By then the crusty shingles rash had spread over half my face and up my forehead, and the diagnosis was easy. So I'm back on acyclovir and Neurontin, and it seems to be moderating a bit. It's still a crusty, oozy mess, and it still hurts quite a bit, but it doesn't seem as bad. At least the pain has stopped radiating all the way around to the back of my head and down into my jaw; now it's just in my eye and temple.

But having bitched about all that, it has to be said that radiation treatments continue to work. My swelling in my leg is steadily decreasing. I gauge it by whether I can see wrinkles in the sole of my foot, and whether I can see veins in the top of my foot. Both tests are once again positive; I have wrinkles and veins, and every day the swelling is less.

So what do we conclude? The cancer is being beaten back and (hopefully) killed, and the shingles is actually kind of a relief. I was worried for a while that some horrible tumor was growing behind my eye, and finding out that it was really "just" shingles was a relief. Shingles will eventually go away, though I may end up with some dandy pockmark scars on my eye and forehead. But the bottom line is that shingles isn't cancer.

I have one more week of radiation to go, then I'll have a PET scan in early July. I'm really expecting it to be good news. I can't feel any nodes anywhere, and it's obvious that the cancerous nodes in my groin are, if not dead, then very nearly dead (my radiation oncologist decided to lay on about twice the normal total dose of radiation "just to be sure", and I'm heartily in favor of being sure).

Okay. Eye hurts. Lying down.

I have friends who won't go see the movie Avatar because they think it's "too political." But they will go see The Step Brothers or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. What do I take away from this? It's okay if a movie is painfully stupid, unfunny or physically repulsive, but if the movie has the slightest whiff of a political message, it's to be shunned. (Honest to God, has Will Farrell no self-respect at all? I think he deserves to suffer for that scene where he scrubs his butt in the bathroom sink with the bath mat. I'm sure his legion of apologists and fanboys think it was the funniest thing ever, but if Will Farrell is your hero, you may need to think about your life just a little bit.)

I didn't think Avatar was that political anyway. It isn't anything like an examination of US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's more like another installment in the long series of "noble savage" movies like Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves. Worthwhile? It's fun to watch. Life-changing? Not so much.

Did you watch the finale of Lost? I didn't. I started out a pretty big fan of Lost, but somewhere in the third or fourth season I lost the faith. I got tired of wishy-washy Kate. I got tired of Jack, who when he wasnt being wooden was being sanctimonious. I got tired of the way every time I started to like a character, death was soon to follow (Mr. Eko, Libby, Anna Lucia, Charlie, all morted out apparently just because I liked them). I got tired of the growing irrelevance of the flash-sidewayses and flash-forwardses and flash-diagonalses. And I'm really up to here with alternate timeline plots, which increasingly seem to be the plot device of choice these days, but seem desperately convenient to me.

I never hated Lost. It just stopped being interesting, and I stopped watching. The last episode I watched was the one where Juliet detonated the core of Jughead by beating it on a rock. I am so sure. I wasn't even really tempted to watch the finale. And now it turns out that the whole thing was, basically, a doctored version of Jacob's Ladder - and Jacob's Ladder pulled it off in about 100 minutes, and with a healthy dose of groovy horror. And instead of watching Hurley steadily gain weight from one season to the next, we got to see Elizabeth Pena's breasts. A lot.

Case closed.

Two Weeks

Two weeks of radiation in the books, and so far, so good. Radiation has thus far presented me with no side effects at all, or at least no side effects that I notice above and beyond the side effects of chemo that still persist (neuropathy in my feet and hair-trigger fatigue, mostly).

I still think it's working. My leg feels better. Sometimes it gets a little sore, but nothing like it was. And the swelling still seems to be going down. Not as gratifyingly quickly as when I first started ABVD, but my leg is functional, and that's enough for me.

On a side note: I do believe that from here on out, I'm going to hew to the "country club" model of political debate: I won't tell you about MY political beliefs if you don't tell me about YOURS. Everything is so politicized today I want to throw up. Consider this (only slightly fabricated) conversation:

"Want to go get some lunch?"

"I don't know, what are your views on the Arizona immigration law?"

"I think it's irrelevant to the issue of seeking sustenance."

Nobody ever wants to talk about anything even remotely interesting these days. Nuclear energy policy, SETI, the fact that North Korea blew a South Korean corvette in half with a torpedo, synthetic organisms, annoying Facebook super-users that live way larger than you do, the shambles that is US space policy, the technology of oil wells. It's always the same stuff, over and over, the same Obama Rerangement Syndrome business.

Radiation

A week of radiation treatments is now in the books, and it's safe to say that I think radiation therapy is better than chemotherapy in every imaginable way. It doesn't make you sick, it doesn't take long, it doesn't hurt, it involves lots of cool machines and lasers, and it doesn't leave you feeling like you just got your ass kicked by the entire Bolivian Army.

Will it work, though? That remains to be seen. I have reason to believe that it is working, but I have four more weeks to go, so even if I'm being premature, there's still time.

Botanical news flash: we planted a tomato plant in one of those Topsy-Turvy upside-down planters. Rabbits eat basically everything we plant except for some of the pricklier varieties of cacti, and we thought the Topsy-Turvy would be a good way to grow a tomato plant without just feeding the rabbits. And it actually works - the tomato plant seems happy enough to grow upside down, and the rabbits haven't eaten it. But the birds think it's a sort of amusement park and keep breaking off chunks of the tomato plant as they play.

Can't win. Just can't win. But I don't care. I'm so happy to be going through radiation therapy instead of chemotherapy I just can't seem to work up any outrage about the poor tomato plant.

One last item: I calculated the other day that the energy in a single dose of radiation therapy was the same as having Sigourney Weaver thrown at me at the speed of 0.52 miles per hour (I picked her because I've always liked her as an actor, and she seems like she'd be merciless and ruthless to cancer cells).

3DCRT

Turns out I'm having "three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy." Sounds like something they'd do on Star Trek. "Scotty! I need you to emit a three-dimensional conformal x-ray beam from the main deflector dish!" And Scotty wails "Ach! Me bairns!"

The whole point of conformal radiation therapy is that a computer builds a model of the tumor, which is then used to steer the beam so that the radiation primarily impacts the tumor and not normal tissue ("conformal" means, I guess, that the pattern of radiation exposure "conforms" to the contours of the tumor). This allows the doctors to increase the intensity of the radiation, inflicting maximum harm on the tumor while sparing the neighboring tissue from undue harm.

While I'm on the subject of Star Trek... I really did enjoy the new Star Trek movie - it was amusing and entertaining and, in most respects, a faithful homage to the original. But did they really have to destroy Vulcan and spawn another damn alternate timeline? Those things are the bane of Star Trek - you need a wall chart and a ground spotter to keep the timelines straight. And why Vulcan? Was it destroyed just for sheer goshwowness? Couldn't they have written the story in such a way that they didn't destroy such a fundamental part of the Star Trek universe?

And why, while I'm at it, does Spock's little whirligig spaceship leave an actual damn exhaust plume? The fastest ship known to 23rd Century Vulcan science leaves smoke trails? I don't think so. Hell, we've known since about 1965 that smoke trails are a serious liability in air combat (and, presumably by extension, space combat). The North Vietnamese almost didn't need radar at all to track US F-4 Phantoms; all they had to do was keep an eye on the sky and look for the characteristic black smoke trail from our J-79 engines. Elimination of smoke trails from missiles and jet engines wasn't the only goal of subsequent work, but it was a goal.

But don't get me wrong, I did like the movie. I just think that the annihilation of Vulcan is a symptom of the same tendency toward self-one-upmanship that afflicts later seasons of Lost. I eventually had to give up on Lost for that very reason. Well, that and the fact that it started out mysterious and kind of eerie, but then turned incomprehensible and, if you ask me, kind of irritating.

But anyway. The point was three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy. I calculated yesterday that a 45 Gray dose of X-rays is equivalent in terms of energy to dropping a ten-pound cannonball from a height of 39 inches. That should get the job done - I hope.

Hi-Rez

I had another CT scan today. Two of them, really, as they weren't satisfied with the first one. Being in a CT scanner reminds me of the movie Contact; the spinning ring brings the Machine to mind. These were pretty high resolution scans too; the woman running the machine told me that she'd scanned me in 2.5 millimeter slices. That's ten slices per inch; all I know is that the ring in the CT scanner was whooshing like a jet engine during the scan.

I start receiving radiation for real on the 10th. The total dose will be 45 Gray, more than normal for treating a lymphoma, but as the radiation oncologist said, "better safe than sorry." And it's not as though there are any particularly vital structures in that part of my body, except for my left hip joint; it's not as though they're going to damage my pancreas or anything.

So now somewhere in the world a computer is building a three-dimensional model of my midsection. They make the 3D model so they can precisely aim the radiation beam, but I like to think they'll wrap an interesting skin on my model so I can see how my midsection would look if I was a reptile or a fish-man. But on the other hand, that means that there is now a 3D computer model of my Naughty Bits. I have mixed feelings about that - what if all it does is make people point and laugh?

Oh, it doesn't matter. Chemo removed every scrap of my dignity already; there's nothing more to be lost. Point and laugh all you like; I'm impervious.

X-Treme

I've been watching Treme on and off, and it's not a bad show. I find most of the characters in the show interesting. Even the Steve Zahn character is fun to watch, even though he can he as irritating as a fair-sized rock in one's shoe. But there are two characters that I really don't like and don't find at all interesting - the pair of street musicians, the snotty guy with the keyboard and the girl with the violin. So these people come down from Wisconsin to help rebuild New Orleans, and all these elitist Nawlins pinheads can do is mock them - "Had you ever heard of the Ninth Ward before Katrina?"

Their insufferable hip snottiness irritates me. Let's pretend that they get their way and all those stupid unhip tourists stay away from New Orleans. Where does that leave them? Playing their street music to nobody, for one thing. Would that make them happy? Would that fulfill them as Nawlins artists? And all this bellyaching about cleaning up and rebuilding. Well, why don't you get off your slacker ass and get a shovel and start doing something, instead of playing music on a street corner and pretending that you're somehow contributing?

Don't get me wrong. I like Treme. But those two insufferable uber-hipsters really cheese me. And maybe that's the hallmark of well-written characters, when they seem real enough to make me want to lecture them about some of the facts of life.

I Sleep Better Knowing This

I tried to send my sister an email where she works apprising her of my cancer situation and the fact that I'm going to start radiation therapy tomorrow. And their web postmaster bounced the email back to me, with this snooty note to the effect that we don't allow profanity on our system. Well don't I feel better! The housing market has collapsed, the financial system melted down, the Taliban is resurgent, Osama bin Who is still out there, and it's suddenly illegal to be Mexican, but they don't allow profanity on their system! Wow, I'm glad there are enough bland faceless IT droids out there in the world to protect us from all that profanity.

The word I used, bastard, isn't even profanity! It has a precise definition and is no more profane than words like illegitimate or conceived out of wedlock. And the exact phrase I used, poor bastard, is so close to daily usage the IT droids might as well complain about phrases like toilet paper or bowel movement.* One could argue that I used the word incorrectly, or in the wrong context, but they weren't judging my grammar or syntax, just the word I picked.

I bet the IT guys who wrote that list go to bars after work and say things like Man, this fucking job's killing me; those bastards in management are really busting my balls!

Arrogant hypocrites. I don't think the world is greatly improved by this sort of nonsense. Or improved at all. But I bet it makes a lot of jobs for IT consultants who can assure the spineless hand-wringers in HR that not a single instance of bastard will slip past their filters. I personally would think it would be more offensive to call someone a retard than a bastard, but retard will zip right on through, no harm, no foul.

* Might I suggest that instead of bowel movement they encourage the use of phrases like make a boo-boo or excrete a man-killingly large bolus.

Positive

Well, I got the results of my PET scan today. Positive, the same two nodes in my groin. They're smaller than before, and less active than before, but they're still cancer.

I'm in the same boat as I was before the bone marrow transplant and $150,000 in medical bills. You'll pardon me if I seem a little disturbed. I'm not sure exactly how I feel - am I royally pissed off at cancer for putting me through this, or am I discouraged that all that suffering added up to a big zero in terms of outcome? Both, I suspect, but I'm having trouble disentangling the threads at the moment. I'll get back to you when my thinking on the matter clarifies.

Let's view this the way Tom Wolfe claims test pilots view things in The Right Stuff.

I've tried A - ABVD chemotherapy
I've tried B - ESHAP chemotherapy
I've tried C - autologous bone marrow transplant

Now I'm trying D, radiation therapy. Five weeks of said radiation, five times a week, 15 minutes per session. I don't know when exactly the radiation will start, other than soon. The hospital and the oncology clinic are holding talks to determine who can do it the most conveniently and inexpensively. The doctor is confident it'll work. I wish I was as optimistic as she is, though maybe when I've had time to think about it, I will be.

Is there an E? There is - an allogenic bone marrow transplant, which differs from an autologous bone marrow transplant in this respect: in an autologous bone marrow transplant, the transplant is done to restore one's bone marrow, which has been killed by high-dose chemotherapy (killed not once, but twice, and still the fucking cancer persists!). In an allgenic bone marrow transplant, the goal is to induce a modified version of graft-versus-host disease with the goal of killing my native immune system with its mutant Reed-Sternberg cells and replacing it with someone else's immune system. Doesn't sound fun to me. Or cheap.

Is there an F? I don't think there is. I'm running out of options.

Needless to say, I think buying a guitar wouldn't be a particularly good idea right now. I was going to have a death-to-cancer party, but that idea seems laughably naive in retrospect. All of a sudden I don't feel much like having a party.

Waiting

I was thinking about buying a guitar, but I think I've decided to put that on hold, at least for a little while. I had a routine PET scan done yesterday and I'm waiting to hear the outcome of that before I decide to do anything one way or the other. I have absolutely no reason to believe that I still have cancer, but once you've had it, you can never entirely get it out of your mind. It lingers, like the smell of stale Patchouli and clove cigarette smoke in a 1980s night club.

The point is that I'm waiting. Next week I'll mark Day 100, the official end of the bone marrow transplant program, and I'll transition back to my old oncologist for routine monitoring. That's if the PET scan reveals nothing. If they do find something, well, I don't know what'll happen then. But it probably won't be a lot of fun, whatever it turns out to be.

But one remains confident. Is there such a thing as "guardedly confident?" There's guarded optimism - arms control talks during the Cold War were said to be full of such stuff. But I don't know about guarded confidence. Maybe it's an all-or-nothing thing; you're either confident or you aren't.

So I'm confident. But wary. And so far, no guitar.

Core Sample

I have to go have another bone marrow biopsy tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to it, but there are worse things in the world. At least the moment they stop the biopsy, it stops hurting; it isn't like having a central line reset, which leaves you feeling like you've been kicked in the chest with pointy-toed shoes five or six times.

It's a little hard to believe that I'm almost at the end of the 100-day bone marrow transplant program. There were times (especially when going through ESHAP and then again when I was having to resort to morphine to kill the chemo-induced burn in my mouth) when I didn't think I'd ever get to the end.

But here we are, one bone marrow biopsy, one PET/CT scan, and one final consult away from the official end of the program. Time's fun when you're having flies, huh?

FB

I have a Facebook page. So does about 90% of the population of the Free World, and most of the Not-So-Free World too. I don't use it for much. I chat with a few friends, I play the occasional round of Mafia Wars, I post the occasional irrelevant status, and that's about it.

But I have certain ideas for how Facebook and Zynga might improve matters, at least for me.

1. Let me hide those useless, annoying So-and-so just became friends with so-and-so messages. You know what? I don't care. The ones that really make me sigh are the So-and-so just became friends with So-and-so and 249 other people. I haven't done a comprehensive study, but I imagine at least a quarter of all Internet traffic these days is composed of these bullshit friend notifications. There must be a way to hide them, but if there is, I can't figure it out.

2. Stop changing Mafia Wars every day. Every time I play (which, I admit, isn't all that often) it looks different and works differently. I know programmers like to change things, but gee whiz, you guys need to develop some sort of configuration control discipline, and that means not changing things just because you can or because it justifies the salaries of your programmers.

3. And while we're at it, can we lose the "Easter Crime Basket" thing? I think that's kind of tacky, personally. Well, one person's tacky is another person's edgy, I guess.

4. Is there a way to filter out So-and-so the Wonder Daughter YouTube video links? Some YouTube links are useful or fun - my wife's horse videos, the occasional OK Go or Insomnium or Bowling For Soup music video. Even clips from the Dr. Horrible Video Blog. But at least a third of the running footage of my status update consists of Wonder Moms posting YouTube videos of their Wonder Daughters - here's so-and-so winning a snowboarding event, here's so-and-so accepting a Nobel Prize for Physics, here's so-and-so passing a navy bean through her nose while her less talented friends look on with mixtures of envy and adulation. I have nothing against the Wonder Moms and their Wonder Daughters, but I get a little weary of slogging through all this YouTubery every day just so I can make sure my actual friends haven't been in a car accident or anything.

5. Please don't send me any more Sorority Life game requests. I am most decidedly not the target demographic for that game.

6. While you're at it, please desist from sending me updates that are quotidian to the point of being lame. "Ok, going to bed now." "Ok, realized that macaroni and cheese is orange." "Ok, bought some navy beans for the Wonder Daughter to pass through her nose later." I don't care, and if you keep it up, I'm going to start posting updates on the success (or lack thereof) of my personal hygiene on your feed.

7. Let's also cut down on the number of pretentiously pseudo-intellectual updates. I recently saw one that just said "Actually..." Actually what? Or those choice "So-and-so thought that life was a beef brisket, but oh he was SO wrong" ones. Unless you're a French existentialist (and maybe not even then) this sort of pseudo-philosophical musing strikes your friends as tedious drivel and doesn't make you seem thoughtful.

8. I find the "Burma-Shave Updates" annoying. This is where someone spaces out an update over the span of 15 separate updates, one word at a time. Unless you really are selling Burma-Shave (and nobody is, these days) or unless the joke is really good, it's just annoying. See #7.

9. Let's try to cut down on the number of So-and-so just became a fan of such and such updates, shall we? Sometimes I'm interested. If a friend suddenly becomes a fan of a given book, author, movie, album or whatever, I'm liable to think "Hmm, I wonder why that is! Perhaps this bears further examination." But if your update is So-and-so just became a fan of yellowish objects, all you've done is waste my time.

10. "U" isn't a word. It's a vowel. Use it as such.

11. So the Wonder Mom posts a wonderful, heartwarming YouTube clip of the Wonder Daughter doing something. Here's a kute video of the Wonder Daughter eating Spaghetti-Os! That's bad enough (see #4 above), but then there are 1,584 comments that all read exactly alike: "I LUV IT! I LUV IT! I LUV LUV LUV LUV LUV IT!" I hate to sound contrary, but I disagree. But if the Wonder Daughter suddenly erupts Spaghetti-Os like Mount Vesuvius, do let me know.

12. There needs to be a Plausibility Index associated with each update, which would be especially helpful in regard to updates from People Who Live Way More Large Than You. So here's some long status message, you're tired, and you don't want to read something along the lines of Well, today I wrote a novel, trained a set of sled dogs, had brunch with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, did some advanced work on cold fusion, edited my poetry manuscript, painted Sandra Bullock's portrait in oils, and went windsurfing. Kind of a quiet day for me. It would be handy to see the Plausibility Meter reading 0% so we could skip that BS entirely and never have to see it.

Julia And I

I just watched Julie & Julia. Or was it Julia & Julie? Oh, whatever. Fun movie - Meryl Streep is so good it's almost creepy, so much so that when the story switched back to Julie, I found myself wishing they'd get to Julia as soon as possible. Not that the Julie story was unappealing, but Meryl Streep stole the whole movie, as far as I'm concerned.

What if some fancy-pants Hollywood type discovered my blog and decided it (for some unfortunate reason) it should be turned into a blog? The resulting movie would make even less sense than Videodrome and be less fun than Out Of Africa.

But it does get one to thinking (which cynics might argue isn't such a good idea for me). If my blog was turned into a movie, who would they cast to play me? Pierce Brosnan seems like a good fit. If he's asking for too much money, why not Will Smith, or Jeff Goldblum?

Oh, sure. They'd be more likely to cast Leonid Brezhnev, after the heart attack.

PS: I am amused to find just how badly I've been mispronouncing Boeuf Bourguignon all these years. I find myself sitting and staring at those words, Boeuf Bourguignon, and the more I stare, the stranger they look. It's like my mind on some dark instinctive level thinks it should be spelled Beowulf Bolognaise.

And that, as they say in Hollywood, is a wrap.

In Other News

In other news...

1. According to my doctors, I'm in full remission. That's a happy thought. It's been a long year and a half, but apparently it wasn't all for nothing. The neuropathy in my feet and legs remains fairly ferocious, but compared to ESHAP chemotherapy and c. difficile and apheresis and all that, it's a picnic. Nothing that experienced in 49 years comes close to ESHAP for sheer sustained horror.

2. Our satellite TV blew up the other day. I think it's something wrong with the antenna, but what do I know. Since there's no satellite TV, we watched the new Star Trek movie the other day. I liked it - it's cheerful and adventurous and fun to watch, but it totally destroys everything that I understand to be canonical about the Star Trek universe. Yeah, I know, it's an alternate timeline and all that, but come on, can we stop proliferating timelines all the time? Would it have been THAT hard to write a prequel that didn't destroy the planet Vulcan and spawn a whole new alternate reality? It shouldn't surprise me, considering who directed it - Lost is nothing BUT proliferating alternate realities, so many of them that honestly, there's no catching up for me.

3. I started watching Breaking Bad the other day, when they were showing a bunch of the early episodes in a row. I quite liked it, though obviously my own experiences with cancer, chemotherapy and the costs thereof may have predisposed me to like it. But the new season? Just another grim crime show, as far as I can tell, good but sufficiently far removed from its original premise that it doesn't seem worth my while.

4. Baxter likes me again. He had to be locked up in the office while my immune system was hors de combat, and he appeared to have forgotten who I was in the span of those months. But now he's back out of lockup and seems happy enough to see me, especially when I have food.

5. I keep toying with the idea of learning a second language. Considering where I live, Spanish would be the obvious choice - I'd be able to read the billboards, if nothing else, and there'd be plenty of opportunity to practice. But intellectually, I'm really attracted to the idea of learning Latin. Latin would be about as useful in Arizona as, say, Finnish or Urdu, and contrary to popular belief Latin isn't even the language that English sprang from. So it'd be like a basketball in a hydroelectric power plant - useless, but fun.

6. I was tempted to believe that the population of out-of-state drivers was starting to wane, now that it has started to get warm, but the other day I was sitting in a modest traffic jam waiting for something to happen and realized that every license plate I could see around me was from Washington State. Every last one. If there hadn't been all those people from Washington on the road, there probably wouldn't have been a traffic jam in the first place. But here's what gets me. In any given romantic comedy, the man is usually an architect and usually lives in either Manhattan or Seattle. So every other movie I watch beats me over the head with the hipness, trendiness and sheer superiority of Seattle, and meantime I'm stuck in a traffic jam consisting entirely of PEOPLE FROM SEATTLE. It's not that I hate Seattle, though I will say that I used to think Seasonal Affective Disorder was a joke until I spent a month in Seattle, and then all the chic scarves and trendy trench coats and oppressively hip coffee joints in the city weren't enough to console me in my desolation. If it's so great, how come it takes me 45 minutes a day longer to drive home in the winter because of all the people from Washington?

One rarely sees movies about Portland, and one rarely sees Oregon license plates on the road here. Coincidence??

7. I think cinema hit a new low with the movie Step Brothers. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be a satire of losers who won't grow up and all that, but if it's so painfully stupid and cringe-worthy you can't bear to watch it, what's the point of the satire? It's so awful I actually felt sorry for Will Farrell. It's like watching that ski jumper crash over and over in the opening sequence of Wide World of Sports. You want to reach out and try to help the poor bastard, send him a fruit basket or a coupon for a free massage or something, but there's no stopping the train wreck until the last car has derailed.

The Fun Continues

I have to go have a bone marrow biopsy done next Tuesday. I thought we were all done with those, based on the testimony of my doctor, who told me repeatedly that we wouldn't be doing any more of those. Until yesterday, when suddenly she changed her mind. I suppose it's a useful diagnostic test and it wouldn't be a bad thing to make sure my bone marrow is still clean, but I don't have to like it. The first time I had a bone marrow biopsy, they bent the biopsy needle and had to start over. The second time I bled all over myself. And neither time was much fun.

Pain-wise, it hurts worse to have one's Hickman catheter reworked, but somehow it feels different. It's meat-pain as opposed to bone-pain, and meat-pain is something you sort of get used to dealing with. But the pain of a needle being rammed into your hipbone? It's weird and unusual and quite unpleasant.

I suppose I should quit my bitching; it could be a lot worse.

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.

2012

I love end-of-the-world theories. I never believe them, but I love them, in the same way that I loved the SF novel Rendezvous With Rama or the movie The Road Warrior. A story doesn't have to be plausible, or even possible in the strict sense of the world, to be enjoyable.

The short version of the 2012 End Of The World Theory is this: that on some day in the year 2012, the Mayan "Long Count" calendar will "max out" (or "overflow", as computer scientists would put it). When the Long Count overflows, time will end, the world will be destroyed, and pigs will fly (among other things).

The Mayans had three calendars. There was a 260-day sacred calendar, based perhaps on observations of the planet Venus. Then there was a 365-day secular calender. These were "geared together" in such a way that a single named day wouldn't recur in that system for 52 years - but the difficulty was that the two geared calendars couldn't distinguish one 52-year cycle from any other. You could specify a single day within the 52-year cycle, but you couldn't specify which 52-year cycle you were talking about (52 years is a long time, but it was possible and I'm sure it happened that an individual's lifespan exceeded a single 52-year cycle, so it wasn't a strictly academic problem).

To address this problem, the Maya developed the "Long Count", a sequential count of days starting somewhere in the year 3114 BC. The count was recorded in a number that looks a lot like a modern IP address, in the form of century.decade.year.month.day, such as 32.9.11.2.12. Supposedly this way of recording dates will overflow in 2012, signaling the end of days and the Phoenix Suns winning an NBA championship.

But according to what I've read, the Mayan priests who developed and maintained the calenders knew that the system would eventually overflow, and went ahead and calculated up another nineteen named periods of time beyond the century, culminating in the alautan, a period of time lasting about 63 million years. In other words, recognizing that eventually the "five-digit" Long Count would overflow, they cheerfully permitted it to simply add more digits as required. So 2012 does not signal the end of days and the Phoenix Suns winning anything; it merely represents the year that the sixth digit of the notation rolls over from zero to one. Consult Appendix D of the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann for a concise example.

My high school math thus suggests that the system, with its nineteen named time periods, should be able to enumerate 126 million years minus one day, give or take - that is, it'll remain functional until the year 125,997,000 AD, give or take a little. In other words, the problem of the Long Count overflowing is one we can comfortably put off for a few million years...

But you can't tell the nuts anything. 2012 has become a key feature in the nutcase view of the world, a view that now seems to include crystal skulls, UFOs, crop circles, Sedona-style vortices and other pseudo-spiritual gewgawry. In same way that "Y2K" became the mating call of survivalists in the late 1990s, "2012" has become the mating call of that fringe element in society that seems to have a particular taste for end-of-the-world theories.

While I'm at it, let me say that I think we as a society should be able to levy a Stupidity Tax on people who misuse the word apocalypse. Apocalypse is a Greek word meaning "revelation"; it doesn't refer to the end of the world at all. Nor does "Armageddon" for that matter either; Armageddon was the name of an ancient city-state and hill in modern-day Israel. I think any time some maroon refers to the end of the world as an apocalypse or an armageddon, he (or she) should have to pay the nearest sane person a five-dollar Stupidity Tax. These should even be additive - someone who refers to the "2012 Apocalypse" should have to pay a ten dollar Stupidity Tax, five dollars for misusing the word apocalypse and five dollars for not taking the time to understand what the Long Count is and how it really works.

Culling The Herd

Every now and then I read about some group of off-road enthusiasts who try to make themselves more palatable to the population at large by repairing trails, picking up trash, or issuing press releases urging their members to be courteous and to obey property laws. I'm all in favor of that. As a former dirt biker myself, I have no problem with people enjoying themselves with off-road vehicles. But I happen to think that their efforts are doomed by the fact that a significant population of quad owners are jerkwads. I don't know of it's 10% or 40% or what, but I'd estimate that at least a quarter of all the quad owners I've come into contact with in the last few years have, shall we say, taken their social cues from NASCAR.

There was the guy who, when told that he was trespassing on private property, said "So?"

It's not like we have a huge spread either. We own two and a half acres of land, so it's not as though we're running the Ponderosa Ranch here.

Or the guy who tried to argue with me that he had the perfect right to ride on my land because it happens to include a portion of a dry wash and was thus "public property". He got all red-faced and ornery about it too, apparently believing that it was better to try to intimidate his way into riding on my property than to simply go out in the desert where tens of thousands of acres of actual public land awaited him.

Or the guys who tore down our "No Trespassing" signs and threw them in the bushes, or the guys who dismantled and moved aside the barricade we put up to replace the signs, or the guys who can't find anything else to do with their quads except spin doughnuts on the gravel road and tear it to hell, or the guys who can't seem to find anywhere to blubber back and forth on their quads than six inches beyond my property line, back and forth, back and forth, all damn day, pausing only long enough to throw down another six pack of cut-rate discount beer.

So while I applaud the efforts of concerned off-road enthusiasts to give their hobby a better political smell, I don't think they'll succeed until they cull their own herd. I don't know how many of these boobs they'd have to kill, but maybe after rubbing out a few thousand of them the rest would get the idea. Every time I hear off-roaders crying about how they're being systematically shut out of this or that area, I can't help but think "You know, if some of you guys didn't act like assholes and didn't comport yourselves as the lords of creation because you've got quads, maybe you wouldn't be systematically shut out."

Not that quads and off-roading are the only offenders. Every hobby and pastime has its proportion of assholes, and the "normal" members of that hobby or pastime should be given extraordinary powers to thin out the jerks. I once entered a model of a Chieftain main battle tank in Iranian markings in a model contest, only to be told in a highly deprecatory manner that "Iranian Centurions were never that color." Oh yeah? First of all, it's a Chieftain, not a Centurion. Second, how the hell do you know what color Iranian tanks are painted? Served in the Pasdaran Baseej, have you? One should be permitted - expected - perhaps even required - to drop such people on the spot with a single well-aimed shot. (Nobody has any real clue exactly what WWII German airplane colors like "grauviolett" really looked like, but you'll still run into self-satisfied turds who insist that they know.)

One of my favorites was the owner of a hobby shop (I won't divulge names) who suffered from Panzer Lust. The characteristic features of Panzer Lust are a bizarre fixation on German tanks from World War Two and a tendency to say things like "The Germans had the most powerful military machine in the world..." (A statement which any sane person would recognize as nonsense, considering the truly unparalleled size, power and reach of the US military in World War Two.) Anyhow, in the closing stages of World War Two German engineers developed a superheavy tank that German tankers nicknamed Maus. Maus is pronounced "mouse" and in fact means mouse; the German tankers intended for the nickname to be ironic, considering the vast size, inordinate weight and general clumsiness of the superheavy tank. But this guy, the guy with the Panzer Lust, proceeded to tell his cronies in the hobby shop about the great features of the tank, which he consistently mis-pronounced as Maws, clearly suggesting to his credulous lackies that it was somehow related to the Maws of Death. Anyhow, as he was going on about how if the Germans had only built ten or fifteen more of them they could have thrown the stupid smelly Russians all the way back to Moscow, I found myself wishing that I had been granted what the Romans called postestas maior so I could have culled the herd.

Panzer Lust really irritates me, mostly because I can't tell it from low-grade Nazi Worship.

Once I was in a wargame store where the clerk and his chubby, sebaceous, ungroomed cohorts were having a fairly impassioned discussion of what exactly they should do to celebrate Rommel's Birthday. Last time I checked, Rommel was a Nazi who fought for the most evil regime in modern history (and maybe the most evil regime ever). But there they were, debating whether they should have burgers or brats, and whether they should play Panzerarmee Afrika or Tobruk to celebrate. These guys weren't physically intimidating, nor were they assholes in the usual sense, but still, Rommel's Birthday? What's next, Zyklon-B Day?

The need for cullage even extends into music. I once read a quote from a black metal drummer who calls himself Hellhammer, where he said something like "I was playing in the shit band Entombed..." BLAM! Time for that to end. If Entombed was such a shit band, what were you doing in it? And I think that any band which records a song that includes the lyric "Yeah!" needs to be culled. Or bands that mention themselves, or who write "concert songs" that consist of basically nothing but a list of cities, so that no matter where they go they can get a cheap roar from the crowd (and, if Hoboken isn't on the list, they can simply swap Holbrook out and get a cheap roar anyway).

I'm drifting off topic.

Mainly, I'm just complaining that there seems to be a lot more stupidity out and about these days than in the past, and that pop culture makes virtues of stupidity and confrontational nastiness. I don't like that development. And if you don't like it, I'll punch you in the snoot! Oh no, they've gotten to me too!

Time to cull myself.

Orympics

I like watching the Winter Olympics on TV. More so than the Summer Olympics, at any rate. I especially like the strange and inexplicable events like luge, skeleton, biathalon, ski jumping and downhill skiing. How did ski jumping come about anyway? I can see how biathalon might have started among hunters in a snowy clime, but ski jumping? Was there a need in the old days to cross major rivers by jumping over them? But practicality and real-world meaning (or lack thereof) aside, I like watching those events.

But I don't care for ice dancing. I don't hate it. It doesn't make me break out in hives. But it just doesn't hold my interest, and sometimes I want to slap the announcers. "They're really dancing with power and conviction," one of the announcers said last night. How can you tell, one set of twizzles (their word, not mine) being about the same as any other? Or "They're really sinking into their knees." Yeah, right. The jargon of ice dancing is stupid, and the event itself is nothing more than a popularity contest (I contend that any sport whose outcome is determined by judges is nothing more than a popularity contest in the end. Dick Button gets all defensive about that point and says that if you're going to dislike ice dancing because it's a judged event, you have to dislike all the other judged events.

I'm cool with that. I'm all for sticking to sports that are determined by objective criteria - distance, time, speed, quantitative measurements that don't depend on the whim or mood of the ruler or clock. (The terms "figure skating" and "judging scandal" are so closely linked in my mind I have a hard time telling them apart.)

Maybe I'd like ice dancing more if I was a pubescent girl or gay, groups not normally known for sartorial moderation and for whom the costumes are probably spiffy and not, as in my case, foppishly annoying. Or if they leaped 140 meters in a single go, or if they had to stop in mid-twizzle and mow down lemon-sized targets with a .22 rifle, or if they suddenly accelerated to 92 miles per hour and had to negotiate banked turns. But no, it's all scarves and twizzles and fabulously overwrought commentary from the announcers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's hard to do, and I don't hate it. It just doesn't interest me, and doesn't in my mind repay its own hype. I'd just much rather watch ski jumping and wonder what sort of immense clanging brass cojones it requires to step off that little couch-like thing on the ramp and commit yourself to a jump spanning 130+ meters. Or watch people ski cross-country till their heart rates reach about two billion beats per minute, and then have to shoot accurately.

Drat

I do a lot of writing - not professionally, by any means, but certainly a lot of amateur writing. I used to keep the documents on my hard drive and occasionally copy them to a thumb drive as a backup, but then I got into the bad habit of just keeping them on the thumb drive and not having any local copies. Sure as crabgrass, about a week ago my thumb drive got corrupted and I lost everything. Well, not everything. I had a second thumb drive with an emergency backup from June of 2008, so I was able to recover everything up to that date.

But I've lost everything between June 2008 and today. That's a roughly 18-month slice of my life, and that's kind of annoying. I wasn't diagnosed with cancer until December 2008, so I lost everything I ever wrote about cancer, chemotherapy and mortality, which maybe isn't that bad a deal; who needs to dwell on that?

But I am highly annoyed that I now have an 18-month gap in my model diary. One of my more peculiar habits is keeping track of my modeling hobby in an immense seventy-page (at last count) text file. It includes every model I've finished since 1998, things I've learned, ideas, speculations, reviews, whiny complaints, the works. It isn't a serious loss - it is just a text file about a hobby, after all. But it does torque me that managed to keep this file intact for over ten years, through several different computers, only to lose 18 months of it because of a failed Geek Squad thumb drive.

So what's the moral of the story? There are two. A) Don't be so anal-retentive as to maintain a 70-page text file about your hobby, or B) if you must be so anal-retentive, don't forget to back the stupid thing up somewhere.

Dang it. Just dang it.

Blood and Hokum

I find that I don't care for the series Spartacus - Blood and Sand very much. It reminds me way too much of the movie 300, and that's a bad thing, since I think 300 was one of the worst movies ever made.

How's that for a brief review?

Baxter

I miss Baxter, our goofy orange cat. I'm allowed to play with the dogs a little, but so far I'm not allowed to be near cats. Apparently, despite their reputation for cleanliness, cats carry litter box residue on their paws and are for now pets non grata. Baxter has been confined to the spare bedroom while my immune system gets itself worked out, and I haven't seen him for months. The other day I crept into his bedroom just to see him, and found him sleeping in the closet, on top of a pad of foam rubber we bought for one craft project or another. He looked up at me, blinked, and hissed.

Fine, you little fink. I risk deadly infection to see you and you hiss at me? Jeez.

Meantime, I'm suffering from a horrible attack of nausea. Chemo, the gift that keeps on giving.

Shopping Carts

One of my stranger hobbies is virtual shopping. I go to the website of some company that sells stuff on the Internet and fill up the shopping cart. I leave the shopping cart full for a few days, then I empty it out and start over. Depending on what the website sells, I can easily get thousands of dollars of stuff in the cart, only to throw it all out and start over.

So the other night I went to a specialist tool distributor at www.micro-mark.com, which specializes in small tools for modelers, dollhouse builders and so forth. I filled my cart with about $400 in various things, then went to bed. But now my hobby may be biting me in the ass, because I went back today and just happened to look over the shopping cart, and I thought hey, I really do want all that stuff! All of a sudden I couldn't empty out the cart and start over, because all the stuff in the cart seemed impossibly cool (a miniaturized table saw? Oh yes!)

So here I sit, unable to click on the Empty Cart button, but unable to quite contenance clicking on the Check Out Now button.

Sigh. It's taking all the fun out of my shopping hobby.

Dietary Restrictions

One of the key features of a bone marrow transplant is that for a while the population of white blood cells (B lymphocytes, I think) in your blood drops to zero for several days. This disables roughly half of your immune system (there are two halves, which rely respectively on B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes) and leaves you at significant risk of illness and infection. Fortunately stem cells are industrious little buggers and six or seven days after being returned to your system, have implanted, reproduced, and completely rebuilt your population of white blood cells.

The practical result of this is that for a while you have to take fairly stringent measures to prevent illness and infection. You can't go to any sort of public function such as a concert or a movie. You have to avoid sick people like, well, the plague. You can't use knives or sharp instruments, as the slightest cut can result in disaster. You have to wear masks, take prophylactic antibiotics, and avoid cats (apparently because bacteria from their litter boxes lingers on their stinky little feet).

But the part that really galls is the list of dietary restrictions. No fresh vegetables of any kind. No fresh fruit, except basically bananas. No buffets. No fast food. No nuts (apparently nuts can and occasionally do carry the aflatoxin fungus). No restaurants. No leftovers. No pepper unless you put it in the food at the outset and cook it. No microwave ovens, when they argue don't heat foods evenly and leave pockets of potentially lethal bacteria here and there. About the only things you can really eat with a clear conscience are things that have been wildly overcooked to kill bacteria, or things out of cans, which I guess are wildly overcooked as a matter of manufacturing process.

Now I get around to my point. There's a Chinese buffet that we go to fairly often. Buffets are the kiss of death for someone with an impaired immune system, and they probably aren't good ideas for anyone at all. But I do happen to like Americanized Chinese food, and I rather miss the buffet and its ridiculous wonton soup (I call it ridiculous because I think it's 99.9% chicken broth and 0.1% other stuff).

Today I spent six hours at work, which was rather a long time. Afterwards I felt pretty good, so I went to the hobby shop and bought some glue (two kinds of glue, not that it matters). And on the way home I stopped at a menu-based Chinese restaurant called Big Heng to satisfy my months-old craving for Chinese food. Hey, it isn't a buffet, right? And they did clear me to eat at restaurants so long as I didn't eat anything raw. I brought dinner home, ate, and felt good enough to go outside and work on my Imhotep model for a while, till my bald head got uncomfortably cold.

My point - my real point - is that I did a lot today, and never really got that tired. Compared to the wretched ass-draggery I experienced last week, I feel really quite strong and rested. Is this just the result of taking it easy over the weekend, or is my body really getting stronger and fitter? I vote for the latter. And now that I have two kinds of glue, the sky's the limit.

Tubeless

I had my last Borg implant removed last week. The central line in the left side of my chest was removed quite some time ago, but I had the central line (technically a Hickman catheter) removed from my right side last week.

It's an amazing procedure. Now, bear in mind that the Hickman catheter consists of a plastic tube that goes up into your neck and then down into your superior vena cava, terminating just above the heart valve. This is as deeply embedded in one's circulatory system as anything can get. And how do you think they remove such a thing?

They grab it and yank it out. It's amazing to me that they could yank this thing out of my jugular vein without microsurgery and electrocautery and whatnot, but they not only can, they did. And it didn't even bleed. It was painful, but only momentarily, when the scar tissue let go.

Now I have groovy scars on my chest that look like old gunshot wounds, and it's ever so much easier to take a shower.

The Old Order

Here's something I wrote while I was in the hospital, presented here for no particular reason:

My mom bought me an ancient anthology of Isaac Asimov science fiction short stories at a yard sale for me to read while I was in the hospital. Read them I did. Asimov was never my favorite, but how can one argue with a man whose personal publishing career runs to some 500-plus volumes? He writes "idea stories", driven by interesting (or not) ideas or sometimes just bad puns, and never really gets too wrapped up in characters or even really plot.

But that's not the point. In reading this collection of short stories, I was put in mind of the gentle days of science fiction in general, which for me stretched from about 1968 to maybe 1988. Plenty of SF did I consume in those years, often simply *because* it was SF. Was it good? Doesn't matter; it said "SF" on the cover so I read it. I was even a partisan in the gentle debate between Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov on whether hair length was directly or inversely proportional to writing talent.

But for the last twenty years, I've been almost completely out of the habit of reading science fiction. The last true SF novel I read was one of those sly "you think it's by Arthur C. Clarke but it's really by someone else" efforts, and while I can't say that one single book killed my interest in SF, it is interesting that I haven't really been back since. Something changed in the mid-1980s, something that seemed to suck the enjoyment out of SF. Was it the nature of the literature that changed? Or was it just me, growing old and stodgy with a mortgage?

There's no way back into the past, and I don't think there's any way, or for that matter any reason, to try to rekindle a deep interest in science fiction. But there is a part of me that misses the old order, when Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein were the kings of the realm, when "new guys" (how that amuses me) like Larry Niven were trying to force their way into the popular culture of science fiction conventions, when Ringworld was fresh and everyone was still alive.

Still alive... They're all dead, you know. Almost all of them. Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Fred Saberhagen, Gordon Dickson, Robert Heinlein. All the masters of my youthful fling with SF are dead and gone, some of them dead and gone for a long time - Asimov died in 1992 and I didn't even know until I Googled him just the other day. Maybe what I miss isn't the old order of the well-regulated science fiction universe as it existed in the Seventies; maybe I just feel the passing of my own years and figure that missing the Old Masters of SF is somehow less self-absorbed than whimpering over my own inevitable aging.

Long Road Back

I've been back at work for three days, and I think I'm wearing down a little. I suppose that's to be expected - I had my bone marrow killed only about three weeks ago, so I guess it's normal to be tired a lot. But it's starting to frustrate me a little. I know I shouldn't expect too much of myself just yet, but it still annoys me from time to time that I'm not as strong as I was.

I'm always tired. I'm always cold. And I complain a lot too, apparently.

What really bugs me is that I seem to have forgotten how to paint a model. I've been working on the Moebius issue of Imhotep for a while, and it seems that everything I try is wrong. I bought the wrong colors of paint. I seem to have forgotten how to thin acrylic paint. I can't paint a straight line. It'll come back, I'm sure - I've been building models since I was seven, and surely forty years of experience can't vanish because of a little chemo and a few weeks in the hospital. But on top of being constantly tired and cold, it would be nice if I could at least paint something properly.

But let's look at it this way: where would I be today without the chemo? That puts things into perspective, doesn't it?