Good news: I have a photo printer! And it was free! Greg came home from work early yesterday, just ambled in like nothing was off or strange at all about him walking through the door with a large box containing the afore-mentioned.
Whatcha got there?
I bought you a printer.
And then he put it down by my computer, peeled a Pabst from its six-pack plastic habitat, cracked it open on the front porch and resumed from where he'd left off in his new copy of Tolkien's The Two Towers. Then he wrote me a beautifully sad and beautiful love song, performed it with the help of a choir of teenagers from the park across the street, who suddenly dropped the bat they were holding or the pot they were smoking to assemble on the benches and form a chorus of cherubic oohs and aahs. When the song ended, I noticed he was wearing a cape and that he had, during the song, somehow teleported around the world and back - in a flash! I didn't even see him leave his chair! - saving all of the world's problems on his journey, including (but not limited to) the Problem of George W., the Problem of Global Warming, the Problem of the Tension Between the US and Russia, and the Problem of My Plates Still Being Expired. Then he cracked open another beer, looked over at me gaping in awe and admiration, said, "what?", looked out to the glowing horizon and saw that it was good.
Back On the Mainland: My uncle has stomach cancer. Isn't your stomach that funny, violent little place inside where your blood picks up everything you've put into said tummy and carries the nutrients - ya know, vitamins, minerals, CANCER - to all the other fabulous destinations within? Tell us where they're going next, John!
Well, Dave... Next, our lovely couple will be magically whisked away on a three-day cruise through the miracle of the human landscape, with ports of call in the Lovely Liver, Pancreas, and Even One Kidney! But the fun doesn't stop there, Dave...
He lives in his semi in Texas, or wherever his semi leads him. He's lived on a steady diet of caffeine and nicotine for at least thirty years. He's six foot five and weighs little for his height, and has the deepest, slowest Texas drawl anyone has ever heard (All these people, the men in my family that are shaped like me/that I'm shaped like, they're all getting cancer).
The book I'm reading right now stars a man whose mother died of stomach cancer. It's filled with all the fun details, the kind that make me remember the exact crescent arc of the peach juice stain left on the living room tablecloth the day they took my father away (the span of an arc can be expressed by the equation....? why can't I remember this shit when I need to). It's pissing me off in the exact way that a musician gets pissed off when somebody else makes a bijillion dollars off an idea they had once but for whatever reason - fear, laziness, they had to take out the trash, or (wait, no, it COULDn't be) deficiency of talent - didn't follow through on and now are being subjected to their own failures. Run-on sentences? Disconnected jarble that wait, no, really is connected, it's just subjective, see? There's a point in here somewhere, I just gotta find it, I stuck it in one of these piles... hey! there's my watch!
Dammit, I had a patent on that shit once upon a time, in my own big little ego.
My friend Jeff told me last night that there's a traceable chemical that exists in teenagers, a hormone that makes them read their diaries to a crowd of fishbowl superstars and that, when scanning the brains of those same people 15 years later in their 30s, egads!, the chemical had vanished. There is a chemical/hormonal process that gets replaced by something more laid-back, more settled-in-like, that makes you want to have a color scheme in your house so the curtains in the bedroom pick up on the colors of the throw pillows in the living room, and you settle down and aren't quite so, ya know, sha-ZAM! anymore.
That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
So if I seem a bit dijointed these days, it's only because I'm fighting the process, trying not to censor myself like I have for the last ten years, letting out the crazy and letting you all in on the little known fact that somewhere underneath these mountains of words there is a center, a point at which the cancer crosses the delphiniums (delphinia? -um, sans 's'?) and all of this makes perfect, utterly clear sense. And also at which Greg really is a fucking superhero and my kid rules the world and every day is a day for lying on the chaise lounge in the backyard amongst the butterflies from Mexico (¡hola!) and the fucking squirrels I'm afraid are going to jump on me to perch on my sternum and devour my eyeballs right there in front of me (how can I see this if they've eaten my eyeballs?) and the birds only my grandmother can identify, slathered in sunscreen smiling and reading about dead people.
Fucking cancer.
Posted by stephanie at June 8, 2007 08:45 AM