I met with my oncologist Dr. Savage today, and I’m very happy to say that my cancer is in remission. My scans came back totally clear, so no further treatment is needed. I’ll be going in for checkups every three months to monitor things. Thank you to everyone who’s helped me along the way through this. Will write more later - I need a nap.
posted: 3:23 pm
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posted: 1:06 pm
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The last chemo I had has left me a bit more wiped out. I think I can understand somewhat what being “shell shocked” must be like - there is a feeling of violence done against my body that’s hard to shake - that is being imprinted on a cellular level. The more chemo I get the more emotionally intolerant I become of it - basically it just wears me down emotionally. It feels like I need some time to just release all this poison and violence - a reprieve.
Spent Sunday on Gambier. Watched an incredible storm pass over in the morning, and it was clear and warm in the afternoon.
posted: 11:52 am
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Just had chemo 12 of 12. Crossing my fingers that I won’t need any more this lifetime. I feel good. I have a battery of tests booked towards the end of the month, to see how my insides look. Feels like a major transition point in my life. I read a sad and touching story in the Globe and Mail today by someone who is dying of lung cancer at 44 (non-smoker, otherwise healthy). It reminded me that this last chemo does not mean that I’m out of the woods, and that taking things one day at a time is the only way to go. Sounds cheesy, but every day really is a gift. It’s funny how most people (me included, of course) have to face death before really getting this (and I still don’t feel like I’ve really got it). Perhaps that’s one reason why we create these kinds of situations. Our culture is not comfortable with mortality, but we have access to spiritual traditions with the power to get us through tough times. The transformation of my own spirituality has been one of the most significant consequences of getting sick, and I feel like I’m only still seeing the tip of the iceberg. To really take on and embody the spirituality that transcends physical mortality seems just as daunting to me now, and it looks like a lot of work, not just a intellectual exercise, but a daily practice of contemplation and repetition, with no guarantees of success. Faith and hope, which were before just dead words, have become more compelling and alive to me.
Simone Weil, a 20th century Christian philosopher, has been giving me a comfort and insight recently. I’m reading a book called Waiting for God, which is a compendium of her spiritually-oriented letters and essays. I’m not a Christian, but I find that her ideas and insights reach beyond her own tradition. It’s making me want to learn ancient Greek. If anyone reading this would like to teach me, or know anyone who could (I’ll pay for it of course), please let me know.
posted: 9:01 pm
Comments OffThese days it seems like everyone is like “OMG - I wish someone would break down the stages of human communal life using some kind of teleological framework.” And so I’m like WTF? and do it in Blenz while I wait for chemo. Succinctly:
Prokaryote - living with parents
Life begins in someone else’s house. Either you grew up in a tidy house, where you couldn’t wait to escape the tyranny and rules, or you grew up in a messy house, where you couldn’t wait to escape the chaos and disorder. Either way, the transition out of this phase is marked by the disappearance of direct parental influence on your behavior. You somehow manage to graduate high school and hit the road. You soon find yourself in…
Eukaryote - college social dorm
In this phase, personal responsibility is known only by its complete absence. In this institutional Gomorra all needs your are provided for, allowing you to focus entirely on reckless libertine experimentation. After the first week, all indoor environments smell like stale beer, pizza, and puke. The common rooms all have a patina of compressed mouldering beer and cheese that the strongest industrial solvents cannot remove. Someone tries to use your building’s communal vacuum to clean up their own vomit, after which all vacuuming ceases. There seems to be an unspoken, ongoing contest of who can throw the biggest piece of furniture through a dorm building window. You build furniture out of stolen beer kegs and milk crates, which become little islands in the sea of filth that is your bedroom. You learn to have sex very quietly in order to not wake your roommate, sleeping only feet away in the same room. Those that survive this phase move on to…
Invertebrate - college mature housing
The names for this phase differ, but the concept is always that the least stable Eukaryotes have all dropped out or been expelled, so the better-adjusted two-thirds of the bell curve can get serious about their studies. This phase is marked by the introduction of non-hierachical communal living, which is constantly confused and provoked by your roommates’ shifting liberal arts education - the internal dynamics can be reduced to the sum of the forces of the topics being studied (read: fanatically adhered-to) that week. Nietzsche, Deleuze and bell hooks argue over who should clean the toilet. Your more uptight roommates distribute multi-page self-indulgent manifestos decrying the leaving of empty tuna cans in the sink. Your house has no toilet paper for two weeks, and no one does anything about it. The next few years are a haze of libertinism and cramming, with the scale and scope of the libertinism diminishing year after year, along with your idealism. You don’t buy drugs yourself anymore, but you’re happy to indulge if anyone’s got any. You apathetically slouch into…
Vertebrate - post-post-secondary shared accommodations
This phase is similar to Invertebrate, except that you no longer live on campus, and your mattress is now on the floor. People have begun to group themselves based on the beliefs and desires that have congealed out of the undifferentiated collegiate soup of hedonism and utopian ideology. Most conflicts arise from the programmed tendencies of the Prokaryote phase and play themselves out over and over again. Three possible configurations emerge:
Human - total spiritual oneness
Seeing that the manifest and spiritual realms are not-two, the %0.000001 of the population who achieve this state stop the wheel of death-and-rebirth and sit on a thousand-petal lotus while being perfectly ordinary. You take out the garbage, and the garbage is taken out. “The Bachelor” is on. You tape it. You hear the toc toc of bamboo wind chimes on the porch. Leaves fall, one by one.
Thus concludes my analysis. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Having solved this problem, I hope we can all move on.
posted: 5:45 pm
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A can opener is a simple tool. It’s so simple that no one’s ever tried to think up a fancy name for it. It opens cans. Simple. Every household has one. You can find them in several different configurations - some sit on top of the can, some come at it from the side - and you have those super cheap skinny all-metal ones that hurt your hands. The thing is - most of them don’t work. My roommates and I have gone through three different pairs and they were all defective in one way or another. With one the blade would regularly ride up the edge and jump out, meaning you had to reposition the whole thing and start over a bunch of times, with another the blade would fail to cut the metal in spots leaving the can with a pattern of dashes around the edge (”maybe I can squeeze the tomato sauce out?”). Sometimes it would just get stuck in one place and spin - I would keep turning and turning the wheel, hoping that somehow the thing would re-engage and get cutting again. Sometimes I would stick my finger in the half-cut can crevice, betting I could find just the right amount of leverage to push the lid up without cutting through the skin. One of these openers was even a supposedly high-end $16 model.
What could be the process designing these things? Do the engineers test them on thinner cans? Do they test them at all? After a few basic tests they would realize that the can opener they designed is crap and needs to be re-engineered. It’s funny, because all the other features - hand comfort, sleek design, etc, don’t matter at all if the can opener fails in its primary purpose - it doesn’t come out of the gate, let alone win the can opener race. I guess part of the problem is consumer apathy - my roomies and I never took back any of the defective openers - it wasn’t worth the time to do it for the few bucks spent. We would just suffer with the frustration for a while and eventually go out and buy a new one - so there was no feedback loop to the retailer or the manufacturer. If people started returning their crappy can openers in droves, maybe the can opener makers would wise up. Another problem is that it’s tricky to test them on the spot - chugging can after can of fruit cocktail while you test every model in the Safeway housewares aisle, fruit chunks and pear juice dripping all over your shirt. But those little red candied cherries…
When I was a child my family had a can opener that always just worked. It was probably in the family for 30 years at least, and always worked perfectly, maintenance-free, day-in day-out. Recently I was at my cottage, and opening a can I noticed that this can opener was one of the good ones. I searched for a brand name, and engraved on the side were the words “SWING-A-WAY”, in a kind of wavy font. This stuck in my mind, and the next time I was at my local hardware store, I made a point of seeking out the elusive SWING-A-WAY, and found it inconspicuously hanging amongst other kitchen tools (including several models of cheaper, but non-can-opening, can openers). As soon as I got home I tore open the package, grabbed a can of chickpeas and went to work. The satisfying ease of gear and wheel effortlessly slicing through aluminum made up for all those infuriating epsiodes with the cuts, the bruises, the hurt feelings, and worst of all - the knowledge that I was suckered.
My new SWING-A-WAY is a model 407, and it has it’s own webpage.
Postscript: I’ve gotta give props to the old-school swiss army knife curved-blade-style can openers. Those work pretty good too in a jiffy, and are very portable, but lack the ease and flow of the SWING-A-WAY.
posted: 10:52 pm
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I like this poem. It’s called ‘Food for Risen Bodies II’, and was written by Michael Symmons Roberts.
On that final night, his meal was formal:
lamb with bitter leaves of endive, chervil,
bread with olive oil and jars of wine.Now on Tiberias’ shores he grills
a carp and catfish breakfast on a charcoal fire.
This is not hunger, this is resurrection:he eats because he can, and wants to
taste the scales, the moist flakes of the sea,
to rub the salt into his wounds.
Here’s a short review of the poem, explaining the meaning and context a bit:
In this extraordinary poem, the reference to the simple pleasure of a barbecue, of eating ‘because he can’ could be read as almost heretical; yet what emerges is a superb image of the risen man, not yet returned to God, able finally to delight in the quotidian pleasures of life, his work done, his suffering over. It is a reminder of Jesus’ assertion that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand: in the natural world, in the bodies we are and the bodies we love, in family, in the land, in a simple meal of charcoal-grilled fish. Such poems re-sacralise the ordinary components of our highest rituals: bread, wine, oil, flesh, blood, seed.
posted: 10:39 am
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I am kidnapping the word laziness, to use it for my own ends. Partly I would like to see the word rehabilitated, but mostly I think the shock of the juxtaposition makes it more effective in getting my point across. The word lazy seems to nearly always be used pejoratively in our culture - when used it is meant to give the reader a little disapproving internal frown directed at the person or people described. The new sense I would like to give to laziness is, at the root, delighting in the beauty of reality. A cup of rational stoicism, half a cup of irrational faith, and a dash of ecstatic mysticism. Now that I’ve pointed at the essence, I’ll dance around the concept of laziness a bit to try to draw a more complete picture. Also I’m going to propose a new word, “unlaziness”, to express what laziness is not.
Laziness is a martial art that uses the opponent’s own strength against them.
The lazy person trusts the unfolding of reality, not out of blindness, but because they perceive its beauty.
The unlazy person sees themselves everywhere. The lazy person sees everything in themselves.
The unlazy person longs for or regrets what was, and pines for or worries about what could be. The lazy person delights in what is.
Laziness allows the emergent to emerge.
The guiding influence of a lazy person is invisible (although that doesn’t imply that they are). This influence can be seen in the way things just work.
Laziness, because it harnesses the inherent momentum of reality, is the ultimate efficiency.
The lazy person gets on a wild horse, subtly nudging it in the intended direction. The unlazy person beats the horse until, spiritless, it follows their orders without question.
Unlaziness is frustrated control. Laziness is mindful ordering.
Unlaziness is restless, tense-muscled, obsessive neurosis. Laziness is relaxed wisdom.
Laziness is a continuous descent into the subtle Being of things.
The mutual production of being and nonbeing,
The mutual completion of difficult and easy,
The mutual formation of long and short,
The mutual filling of high and low,
The mutual harmony of tone and voice,
The mutual following of front and back—
These are all constants.Therefore the Sage dwells in nonactive affairs and practices the wordless teaching.
The ten thousand things arise, but he doesn’t begin them;
He acts on their behalf, but he doesn’t make them dependent;
He accomplishes his tasks, but he doesn’t dwell on them;
It is only because he doesn’t dwell on them, that they therefore do not leave him.- Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching (Henricks trans.)
Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.
- Epictetus, Enchiridion (Carter trans.)
Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.Be a conoisseur,
and taste with caution.Any wine will get you high.
Judge like a king, and choose the purest,the ones unadulterated with fear,
or some urgency about “what’s needed.”Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when it’s been untied,and is just ambling about.
- Rumi, Mathnawi IV (Barks trans.)
LAZINESS: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure…. the first great virtue of a programmer.
- Randal Schwartz, Programming Perl
posted: 9:13 am
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