The Gift That Keeps on Giving...

Is it possible for me to be thankful for the life that I am presented with and also hope that, through a miracle, my life is changed into something else entirely? I have chronicled in this blog that we should not shrink away from the difficulties presented us in our lives, but rather by embracing our struggles we are able to grow and learn in ways that would be impossible otherwise. It makes perfect sense to me that we should not be afraid or try and run away from our struggles because they are capable of transforming us; however, it also makes perfect sense to hope and pray that, through miracles, we will be relieved of our struggles. 

It's easy to say that we should accept our difficulties so that we can learn from them if at the end of the struggle everything ends positively. If you go through a trying and difficult time and you emerge from that experience healthy and happy (or your loved one emerges healthy and happy), then it is easy to look back over that difficult time and see the positive sides. It would be much more difficult to watch a loved one pass away or suffer intensely and then try and find positivity. It is with that wrench in the mix that I'm asking whether you can accept your difficulties happily and also pray for a miracle to change your life.

I've spent over three years trying to accept my life with cancer and deal with the difficulties in as positive a manner as possible. But every second that passed in that time I have been praying that God would create a miracle in my life and relieve me from the struggles of cancer. I have grown from my experience and learned so much invaluable information - lessons that I would never trade for anything - but I don't want to stay sick forever. When the book closes on this saga, I want to be one hundred percent healthy. 

Even though I have been praying for a miracle every day over the last three years, I have never asked God to take away the cancer just because I wanted it gone. Instead, what I've asked is that if I'm chosen as deserving of a miracle that God create that miracle as he sees fit. Whether that means a miracle is moments away or years away, my hope is just that I'm lucky enough to get a miracle, but if not then I will welcome my future as it comes. It's logical that I would want to not suffer, but, to me, it also is logical that if you must suffer, then you shouldn't complain or curse God, but rather simply accept your cup and drink from it. Jesus Christ did not want to suffer, but suffering was his fate and so although he asked that he not be made to suffer, he resolved that if suffering was his destiny that he accepted it as his destiny and loved it as his destiny. 

I have had friends and families that were not lucky enough to receive a miracle. I've had an e-mail companion who was not lucky enough to receive a miracle. I've had old teachers that were not lucky enough to receive a miracle. What I do know is that each of these wonderfully inspirational people fought as hard as they could against there struggles and they fought with the voracity of the Spartan army. Alas, by virtue of their humanity, though they fought through hell and high-water, they simultaneously wished for a miracle that they may be saved.

I can't explain the perhaps displaced guilt that I feel when thinking that I'm still around and they are not. I feel guilty looking into my cousins' eyes knowing that their mother isn't around. I feel guilty looking at my friend's eyes knowing his de facto fiancee isn't around. I feel guilty looking into any person's eyes because everyone has known somebody who has suffered a tragedy. I feel guilty that I've been lucky by being able to survive this long, and I, like each of them, pray and wish and hope that I will receive a miracle that I may be saved. What I know is that, though each of the people I am describing wished for their own survival, that they all, knowing me, simultaneously wished for my survival as well. If my position was switched with theirs then they would be writing here about their guilt.

Because of my guilt and because of my experience, I look at my life and my struggles and I try and accept them openly and fight against the difficulties honorably. But because of my humanity I will hope and pray for a miracle to change the difficulties right now facing me. It seems a tall task, but it also seems fitting, that I will try and live my life happily and in a matter that my fallen friends will smile when looking down. I will try and live my life so that the loved ones of those who have fallen will not say that I'm wasting the gift that I've been given that their loved ones were not - the gift of life. 

"Life is a gift, and it gives us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more." - Tony Robbins

Look Who's Talking Now...

What was the cause of cancer? I'm not talking about what causes cancer. I'm asking you what caused cancer in the first place. Smoking causes cancers, drinking causes cancers, genetic predisposition causes cancer, but again I'm curious as to what is the first reason for cancer ever having occurred. There are documentations written on papyrus from around 1500 B.C. that explain separate occurrences of tumors being found in human tissue. There has also been speculation by some archeologists that hardened tumors have been uncovered on dinosaur fossils. So you see, I'm interested to know if you are interested in knowing how, when, and why cancer first started. The most likely answer is that we will probably not know how, when, or why cancer first started. We will have to accept that cancer is more than likely a random act of nature that we will never fully understand. We will have to accept that cancer is one of many things that can be classified as beyond our understanding. 

But we are not comfortable with the idea that there are things that we cannot understand. We believe that whatever we personally cannot understand, there are some people that do understand the things that we do not know, likewise we know things that other people do not know. This shared knowledge is part and parcel of a social contract of which we all are apart. If I know everything that I can know about A, but know very little about B, and you know everything you can know about B, but you know very little about A, then between you and I we know everything we can know about A and B. This is the type of environment in which we believe we exist. Among all the people in the national and global population we comfort ourselves by believing that we know everything that can be known about everything. So when we need our plumbing fixed we call a plumber because those are the people who know about plumbing. And when we need to fix our car we take it to a mechanic because those are the people who know about cars. When we need medical assistance we go to see a doctor because doctors are the people who know about health. At least that's the precedence for our belief system.

But our belief system is a lie. Actually it's not actually a lie, because a lie would mean that someone is creating this ideology falsely in order to deceive us, but that's not really what's happening. We all know that there are things in this world that no one knows, so it's not a lie. It's like Isaac Newton's laws of physics: if you follow out the mathematical calculations of Newton's laws it turns out that the math does not completely work itself out. The math is so close to being accurate, however, that we accept the laws as truths despite their inaccuracies. Likewise, we accept the social contract that states that whatever we don't know personally somebody somewhere knows despite the inaccuracies of the contract.

I've said many times in the last three years that doctors can say that your life will end soon, similarly they can tell you that everything is A-OK, but the truth of the matter is that there is no way that the doctors can know everything. As far as what doctors are capable of knowing, though, cancer is at the very bottom of the list. Doctors understand very little about cancer especially in comparison to how often the disease occurs. I have detailed in this blog ad nauseam that the doctors believed that I would be dead a long time ago, and yet I am still alive. I have also told you all in this online memoir that there have been multiple occasions in which the doctors told me that I would no longer be living, and yet I promise you that I'm alive. 

I guess this post goes back to my statistics thesis, or my statistics antithesis. Life does not follow logic or reason or mathematics. Whether our lives are predestined or we have free will we can debate forever, but in either case whatever happens to us or will happen to us does not follow a certain equation and it certainly does not follow the dialogue of medical doctors. In other words, just because someone tells you a certain thing will happen does not guarantee that the thing will actually happen. We all seem to understand this when it comes to certain professions - politicians, lawyers, hair stylists - but what we need to understand is that this fact also applies to the professions we normally associate with inarguable facts by virtue of their professions - doctors, teachers, accountants. No matter what we are told at a given time it by no means limits the number of possible outcomes. There is no such thing as good news or bad news, there is only news and our perspective to that news at a given time.

Doctors are not infallible predictors of the future and it is not they that pretend to be such, it is we who assign them that characteristic. Personally I could give a damn what the doctors tell me will happen to me because as much as they may have studied cancer, more often than not the doctor has never had cancer. As much as he knows about what the medical books say about cancer that gave him the title he holds today, I know a hell of a lot more when it comes to undergoing the disease itself.

I graduated in the top 30% of students at New York University, a school which graduates among the most students per year throughout the country. I graduate cum laude. When it comes to doctors I always keep this small fact in mind, and you should too: it is a mathematical fact that fifty percent of all doctors graduated in the bottom half of their classes.

Don't believe everything that you're told...

Curiosity I Guess...

Heck, I'm curious as a cat. I have a couple of friends that call me "Whiskers"...

Before I was diagnosed with cancer, most of the stories I heard about cancer patients were not flattering. More or less I was bombarded with stories that sounded like parables from the Bible. What I mean by that is that every story seemed to follow a nice and neat narrative arc that began with impossibility, moved to anger, slid to reflection, and transformed into peace and acceptance. In short, the stories of the cancer patients that I heard did not sound like real life; rather, they reminded me of the hundreds of predictable stories that I'd read in the years of studying English literature. All you ever hear about with the stories of people with cancer is the anger and then the reconciliation of that anger, but there are very rarely real, tangible feelings that come out of those stories. I'm going to try and break that trend.

Fear is a crippling emotion. It makes you do things you would not do, but it also stops you from doing things that you would do. Besides those relatively obvious conclusions, fear is a word that people thoughtlessly use. I would assume that many of you will say that you know what fear is and that you have truly felt it through and through. I would, however, be surprised if most of you have ever felt a fear that actually changed the way your mind operated from that moment onward. 

In this blog I have been reticent to distinguish myself from anyone else because I truly believe that I am not different from you just because I have cancer; nevertheless, I have felt a fear that has altered my life and I believe that most of you have not, despite your feelings to the contrary. Most individuals have moments where they fear for their lives, but the things about those times are that they are moments and nothing more. Try and imagine taking that moment, those seconds, those minutes, or hours even, and extending them for three years. Imagine feeling the most fear you have ever felt - imagine feeling that life-and-death situation - but that you feel it every single second for three whole years straight. Imagine that fear never gets less, but in fact has frequent moments in those three years where the fear grows stronger. But fear is perhaps the easiest of all the emotions I've experienced.

The secret emotion, the one that slips under the rug, and the one that you probably imagine is nonsensical is guilt. I have been inundated for three years with a guilt the extent of which I can never truly make clear to you. Fear is difficult to endure, but one can endure. Guilt, though, is inescapable, because you are not battling an emotion with an origin from within. The guilt I feel each and everyday comes from the pain, hurt, panic, fear, and worry that I've caused my family, friends, and loved ones.

You see, most people are too preoccupied with the difficulties facing the cancer patient to see how the loved ones of the patient are being affected. My fiancee Katie spends almost every single second of her life worrying about me - how I'm feeling, have I thrown up today, did I eat enough, is my abdomen filling up with fluid, does my back hurt, do I feel nauseous. She is constantly tired because her mind is so preoccupied with me that she sleeps lightly just in case something happens to me she can be there in a moment's notice. Her life is completely altered because of my deficiencies. And this is more or less the same for my father and my mother, not to mention the preoccupation of my brother, sister, and other loved ones, though it may not be to the same extent. 

Those of you who know me well should know that I have never been a person who depended on other people very much. My parents have always been there for me and that has been a comforting safety net, but I have always done things on my own. I've always been considered a man's man. A guy who could fend for himself, who could physically handle most things, I was a guy that you would call to move your furniture, or to back you up in a fist fight. Cancer has taken so many things from me - my health, my hair, my appetite, my iron-clad stomach (I'll be back in form one day Emanuel), my strength - and it has forced me to be a burden to my loved ones. They of course will say that I am not a burden, but I feel like a burden. The albatross that hangs from their necks, that keeps them from sleeping comfortable at night, that impedes them from carrying on their days as they normally would. 

When I visit friends and family for dinner, they have to adapt their planned menu around me, and if they don't then they are made to feel guilty when I don't eat. You see, everyday I manage to change in some way the way a person would normally conduct their life. At work, my cousin, who is very serious about working hard, is willing to allow my work to go uncompleted if he even suspects that I am feeling less than well. I appreciate that he is so understanding of my difficulties, but it's difficult to accept that I am now the person who has excuses made for him. I used to be the rock that everyone could count on for a die hard demeanor, but now I'm looked upon as a weaker, less capable version of my former self.

I am humbled by so many of these things, but humility cannot take away the guilt. Even as I write down my consumption of guilt here, it is not an adequate description of what I feel. It's a lose-lose situation because if I make it out of this situation alive, which I whole-heartedly believe that I will, then the last three years will have taken so many opportunities away from those who are closest to me. If, however I do not make it out of this situation, then not only have those who care about me altered their lives to make mine even a little more tolerable, but they will also have to reconcile the loss of their son, fiance, brother, cousin, nephew, or uncle. Lose-lose... 

You always hear about the anger, the pain, the nausea, the difficulty, the strength, the determination, and the perseverance of the cancer patients, but what you do not hear about (perhaps because you refuse to listen, or maybe because the sufferer is reluctant to explain) is how the cancer patient suffers from an overwhelming guilt. My life means nothing to me if not for my family and my fiancee. That's why the guilt breaks me down. I hope you understand that I know it seems silly for me to feel guilty that the people who love me care about me enough to alter their own lives. You will tell me that they do it because they care. I know they care and I know that's why they do it; but you must know that I feel guilty nonetheless. I hate making people worry and my loved ones, especially my Katie, can't help but constantly worry about me. 

She's a worrier. That's why I call her "Whiskers"... 

I'm Just Trying to Graduate...

Some people have asked me how I am able to find the strength to deal with the difficulties I've faced in my life. Still others have wondered why I am so determined to face my obstacles head on without slowing, without rest. The questions may seem reasonable from your perspective, but you must understand that they are difficult for me to comprehend from my vantage point.

When I was still in school, I was given homework assignments, and we had quizzes, and there were tests, and papers and what not. I never really enjoyed school and I definitely did not enjoy school work. Yet I did my homework, and took the quizzes, studied (somewhat) for tests, and researched and wrote my papers. I did not complete my assignments because I wanted to nor because I enjoyed doing it. I completed the tasks that the teachers laid in front of me because that was what was required of me if I wanted to pass the class. I needed to do the work if I wanted to move on, that is, if I wanted to make it to the next grade level. If, however, my goal was to remain exactly where I was at that moment, then I could have chosen not to do that work. I could have chosen not to complete my tasks, my obstacles, and I would have been left back. The only way to move forward in school was to complete whatever assignment was laid in front of me, to the best of my ability. There were no other options. Either I could deal with whatever crap was laid in front of me and move on or I could choose not to confront the challenges laid in from of me.

Most people that I know didn't make their way through school because of some inherent sense of enjoyment. I think for the most part, we did our school work because we wanted to move towards the things that lay beyond school. In essence, we wanted to keep on living at the same pace as everyone else our age rather than being left behind in their dust. The assignments were obstacles on our pathways to our goals and they were obstacles that needed to be overcome. And either we overcame them and we were able to realize our goals or else we did not overcome them and we had to reset our goals.

Finding the how and the why to exhibiting strength in living with cancer is very much the same to me as finding the how and the why to getting through school. I do not go to my treatments because I enjoy them or because I think that they are "fair." I go to my treatments because those are the obstacles laid in front of my pathway to my goal. I do not force myself out of bed, tired and in pain, to go to work because I'm a man filled with unequivocal inner strength. My goal is to beat my cancer, no matter the difficulties and no matter the consequences, and in order to reach my goal I must first overcome the obstacles that lie between my goal and myself. 

If I did not want to move on or move forward in my life then I could very easily choose not to attempt to overcome the difficulties and challenges presented to me. Before you throw around words like strength and determination and perseverance, we must look at the entire scope of the situation. I'm trying to survive, and that's all I'm trying to do. It's not about strength, determination, and perseverance, just like it wasn't about strength, determination, and perseverance when I was trying to move from seventh grade to eighth grade. Back then, just like now, all I was trying to do was keep moving forward. There were no pats on the back nor praise when I passed from grade to grade, because I was seen as having done nothing more than completing the assignments required of me. My struggle with cancer is exactly the same thing: I'm just completing the assignments required of me. 

It seems simple enough to know that a law student deals with the difficulties of studying law with vigor and determination because he hopes to become a lawyer and enduring those difficulties are necessary in his pursuit. Similarly, it seems commonplace to note that a presidential hopeful withstands the hardships that come with running a presidential campaign because we understand that he deals with those things because he wants to be the president. For me, it's easy enough to understand that a person who wants to survive will complete any task that is necessary for that person to survive. 

I don't know about words and titles that one may attach to my life right now because the only thing I'm focused on is completing the task at hand. Maybe I'll look back when this ordeal is over and I will say that strength, determination, and perseverance got me through my fight against cancer and against death. As for now though, I'm just trying to do my homework so that I don't get left back.

"Because I Said So" Doesn't Count Here

You are nonchalantly walking down 7th Avenue in New York City passing in front of the Madison Square Garden side of Pennsylvania Station. You glance up to look at the world famous arena, and a man, dressed in an expensive, custom tailored suit punches you directly in the face, shattering your left eye socket. The man continues to walk down the street, southbound, and you decide (without any evidence to substantiate your claim) that he is heading to Nevada Smiths on 3rd Avenue and 11th Street to watch an English Premier League match between Liverpool and Arsenal. Nobody around you seems to have noticed what has just happened to you, despite it being 5:15 p.m. with the crowd of rush hour commuters scrambling to make their trains. You pick yourself up off the ground, gather your wits about you and board the New Jersey Coast Line 5:26 train heading towards Bayhead, NJ. As you sit down you finally are given the time to reflect back on what your Guinness drinking (speculation) English soccer watching (further speculation) assailant has done to you.

My question: are you more concerned with the manner in which this man came to punching your eye socket into pieces (HOW) or the reason he punched you in the face (WHY)?

If you want to know HOW this man wearing a dark gray, Joseph Aboud suit with a red and white, thatch patterned Burberry tie and Prada shoes came to punch you in the face, that’s easy. Electrical signals traversed the synapses between the billions of neurons his brain, which then travelled down the spinal cord, locating the proper nerve vessels to trigger muscular reaction in a wave-like successive manner producing a fluid movement of the arm in a punching motion. The motion itself created a determinate kinetic force, which was transferred at the moment the business man’s fist made contact with your face, at which point the force generated by his movement was beyond the force that the ocular bones of the skull could absorb and so the bones fractured. Understanding HOW the man punched you is like understanding how two plus two equals four. It’s a matter of INFORMATION only. And it’s about as useful as trying to uncover HOW our lives are lived, whether we are “free” to make choices or the choices have already been made. What are you going to do to change it anyway?

Let’s say when you die, you go up to Heaven and you ask God, “Did I have free will or did you already know everything that was going to happen?” And God responds saying, “You had free will AND I already knew what you were going to do.” Are you going to engage God in a debate about how if He already knew then you were not really FREE to choose? I mean He’s God! Or even if you die and there is no Heaven, but you just die, would you like to die having spent your life worrying about whether you were "free" to make choices or not?

But understanding WHY the man punched you is something altogether different. It’s not about asking “Oh goodness, WHY me? What did I do to deserve this?” That’s cowardly, not to mention, asking why it happened to you is not going to make whatever happened to you UN-happen. Asking WHY is about understanding what can come out of whatever has taken place. Asking WHY is about coming to an UNDERSTANDING. I assure you that nothing that is worth knowing can be attained by acquiring information. It must be understood. It at least must be contemplated, thought about, ingested, digested, excreted and studied. 

There's some things that we have talked about a lot. We are all going to die some day. We can't control the things that happen to us, but only our responses to what happens. Life is perhaps meaningless and absurd. Fine... But we are here so... We have already spent so much time asking HOW. Mathematics, physics, quantum physics, Darwin, evolution, natural selection, genetics, surgery, medicine, and on and on and on... We have so many answers to so many questions, but we have only been in the pursuit of INFORMATION. And so all we have is a whole lot of information, but not that much UNDERSTANDING. We know how the seasons change, how weather happens, how obesity causes heart disease, how how how HOW. We think we understand the way the world works, but most scientists will tell you that despite all the things we do know there are an infinite number of things we do not know and may never know. Like how does an otherwise perfectly healthy 21 year old man develop a highly fatal form of cancer with such a bleak prognosis that over 80% of the times affects people between the ages of 55-75... How does that happen? I don't know and neither do any of you, or anyone else... So, why not try to start answering the question of WHY?

God is a choice that some make to answer why. Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Atheism, Satanism, Hedonism, and many other "-isms" all try to answer the question why. Look: sometimes your eye socket gets smashed, sometimes you get into a fender-bender, and sometimes you get cancer. It's hard to anticipate how your life is going to pan out, because that entails having to know the future and unless you are a super-intelligent, perfectly predicting alien then that might be hard. But "why" is about experiencing something and then being asked to look back over it in the hopes of understanding it. Or "why" is about understanding now why you will do something in the future. But it's not about information it's about understanding.

This was long, but I leave you with perhaps one of the most thoughtful quotations I've ever read (and I will try and make this the last Kierkegaard quote for a little while):

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard

To Thine Own Self Be True...

Imagine that we are the figurative prisoners of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which he represents in The Republic. Imagine that we are chained to a wall in an underground cave and we cannot move our limbs nor swivel our heads. We are forced to look straight in front of us. This is the only world we have ever known. We were born into bondage and have remained fettered thus since our birth. Meanwhile, our captors have taken to create puppets that are in the likeness of objects that appear in the "real" world such as puppets imitating men, women, trees, balls, dogs, cats, the sun, the moon, etc. The have decided to build a fire behind our chained backs and pass the puppets in front of the fire in order to cast shadows against the wall of the cave which we are facing. We see the shadows passing across the cave wall and, becoming familiar with the shadows, we begin to name the images that we see before us. In this "reality" the most "intelligent" individuals would be the ones who can identify the shadows most quickly and most accurately.

Now imagine that our captors decided to unchain half of us. We would now be able to stand up and turn around and walk around. Instead of seeing only shadows cast by an indeterminate light source, for the first time we would see the puppets and the fire itself. Our eyes would be blinded by the brightness of the fire after so many years spent in darkness. We would be unfamiliar with the puppets having only experienced their distorted shadows cast on the wall. Slowly we would begin to become familiar with the light of the fire and the forms of the puppets. The most knowledgeable of the individuals in this reality would be the ones who could understand manner in which the fire created light which cast the shadows of the puppets when the puppets were passed in front of them. The fire would become the new light and the puppets would become the knew objects. Together the fire and the puppets would be the new truth and our "truth" would be more correct than the "truth" understood by those still chained to the wall.

Now imagine that our captors decide to take you alone out of the cave and force you above ground for the first time. The brightness of the sun in relation to the fire would once again blind you. Eventually, your eyes would once again become acclimated to the new light and for the first time you would see the objects in whose image the puppets of the cave were created. For the first time, you would see men and women, trees, balls, dogs, cats, etc. We would understand the true source of light and the true nature of objects. Our "truth" would be more correct than either "truths" we "knew" in our other circumstances.

I know that was long and drawn out, but it's important that we know these references. There is a reason why nearly every individual who receives a higher education reads Plato and Descartes, Aeschylus and Shakespeare, Homer and Dostoevsky. These things have reference to our lives STILL. Lessons have been learned from reading them for years and will continue to be learned for years. The lesson learned from the Allegory of the Cave is to understand that the pursuit of truth, knowledge, and understanding is not about increasing achievements, but is rather more about successive disappointments. As we "understand" more, we are disappointed to learn that what we previously understood as true was not actually true (or at least it was true in a much lesser or different form). 

My cousin Elie posted a comment in which he wrote that our life is not about whether or not we are "free" to make choices, but is more about understanding why we make the choices we make. He makes a reference to the Latin phrase temet nosce (or more properly nosce te ipsum) which means Know Thyself. We worry about being free to make choices. We worry about free will. We worry about valid and sound reasoning. We concern ourselves with our moral responsibilities. We never stop to concern ourselves with understanding "why." "Why" what? "Why" anything? We are too busy being concerned with the manner in which our lives unfold to stop and ask why our lives unfold the way they do. In the previous post I wrote about the truths that a confused human concludes in the face of a meaningless and absurd world. Still, however, there lacked an understanding of why. My cousin does well to refocus our attention to the why rather than to the how.

All things being equal, we will understand neither the how nor the why... But it would seem that the more relevant futile pursuit would be in trying to understand why I have a deadly form of cancer that threatens my life each day, each hour, each second, each moment rather than trying to figure out some reason as to how this happened to me. Not "why" as in "God, why have you done this to me." By "why" I mean trying to discover what the purpose is for me having this disease. In other words, how am I supposed to "know thy(my)self" through this cancer. If any person in the world can contract this disease, then why has the world decided to give it to me. Remember: our purpose is to find meaning. 

"Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living." - Soren Kierkegaard

What Does This Mean...

"A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.” - Soren Kierkegaard

Let’s face it… Taken on its own, the world seems meaningless and absurd. It is devoid of apparent rhyme or reason. This results in the human confusion in the face of said meaninglessness and absurdity. For me, it is the reflection on my own confusion in the face of a meaningless and absurd world that produces some sort of knowledge of the world. I unveil and elaborate on my thoughts below…

Truths for a Confused Human Facing a Meaningless and Absurd Reality

1. Death

Dying is a part of living. This paradoxical truth is an unavoidable dilemma, and ultimately death is the catalyst that causes us to choose what we have (life) rather than what we do not know of (death). Hamlet’s question “To be, or not to be” was the existential choice we are faced with in our lives. Should we deal with this meaningless and absurd world or should we choose death. The existence of death and the pain we feel in dealing with the existential choice between life and death creates the death-anxiety, or fear of dying. We argue, much like Hamlet, that even though life is often times difficult and unfair and meaningless, that at least we have experienced it and know what it is like, unlike death which we know nothing about. “But that the dread of something after death/… makes us bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others we know not of…” So, we experience anxiety over death and all things associated with death. Senescence – the gradual decay and eventual ceasing of internal processes that sustain life – is the face of impending death. We grow older, our knees creak, our back hurts, high blood pressure forms, heart disease is more prevalent, we become weaker, and so on and so forth. The death-anxiety, conversely, displays within each individual the courage it takes to actually live a life. Each one of you is courageous in that you choose to stare death in the face each day and continue to live your life. You may not see it this way. You may look at me and say I am facing death and my case is tragic, but the truth is my days are very much the same as yours. I contemplate the philosophical implications of imminent death and I have anxiety over it, but ultimately I decide that no matter what obstacle stands in my way I will choose to continue to live. And since neither I nor you can determine when it is we will die our death-anxiety persists, and we live our lives courageously in the face of death for however long it is that we live. But death is unavoidable and when we do inevitably die it will be all by ourselves.

2. Aloneness

Another part of life is aloneness. We enter and exit this world the same way – alone. Most of what constitutes as our lives takes place in the “inner world” between our ears – our thoughts, our wishes, our emotions, our desires. Yet, in a meaningless and absurd world where each day we live in fear of death, living in an inner world only serves to perpetuate the anxieties in life. Relationships – between lovers, familial relationships, cultural relationships, social relationships – are the foundations for our survival. We experience a catharsis (emotional cleansing) of our existential anxieties by engaging in interpersonal relationships, because in these relationships allow us to escape the seeming futility of life by offering us subjective meaning. In a world that is concluded to be meaningless and absurd, the establishing and nourishing of interpersonal relationship allows us to CREATE meaning. Caring about a fiancée, wife, brother, sister, or friend makes our actions subjectively meaningful. I say subjective because even though our actions will have no universal meaning to the world at large, which has been established as having no meaning, relationships give meaning to our INNER WORLDS. It is the pursuit of interpersonal relationships that establishes intent within our inner worlds, which is where we are free to exercise our option to choose.

3. Freedom

I am resolved that the ability to make a choice (even the illusion that we are making a choice) is the vessel through which our confused souls can face such a meaningless and absurd world. The ability for us to determine what makes us more or less happy and then our ability to actually CHOOSE that thing over others is what makes all the difference in the world. If death and aloneness are the downsides of a world of meaninglessness and absurdity, then freedom is the upside. In essence, if life has no required pathway that needs to be travelled, then our choices are really not about where we are going, but are instead about deciding what we want to do between the time we are born and the time we die. Our choices are about how we want to live our lives. Our freedom allows for creativity in an uncontrollable reality. Everything from paper or plastic to selecting a job says less about where you are going and more about how you want to get there. Ultimately, though, the freedom to choose (the way we want to spend our time while alive) takes orders from the fourth truth for a human facing a meaningless and absurd reality:

4. Meaning

If the world has no intrinsic meaning, then we are free to give our own meaning to life. If reality is meaningless and subject to change depending on our choices, then it is the meaning that we uncover in our subjective lives that will determine the choices we make (or seem to be making), which will decide how our lives will be lived. It is here, at meaning, that all four truths come together. Confused, we exist in a meaningless and absurd world, but we choose life over death because death is not presented to us as a choice. We WILL die, so we CHOOSE life, even if only because we are afraid to die. Once we make that decision, we are faced with our loneliness in an already scary and confusing reality. So, we resolve to establish interpersonal relationships that attach us to certain things and detach us from others. And through these relationships, we are able to uncover those things that make us happy and those things that are important to us… We are able to uncover individualized meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. This newly discovered meaning acts as a guide in determining how we will exercise our freedom and choose to live our lives.

There are no other things that we can figure out. In a sense it is our destiny to die. But this is not our purpose. Our purpose is to figure out what is meaningful TO US and then to use our freedom to make choices that satiate that meaning.

“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” Soren Kierkegaard.

The Gameshow Known as Life...

We return to a popular theme. Why do things in this world happen? Do we have control over our actions and over our futures, or has everything been predestined by God making the future unavoidable. This is the main problem we have with the Judeo-Christian ideology of predestination. It would seem that by subscribing to it, we cannot determine who is culpable for the actions of man. Does man have free will to choose whatsoever he wishes, thus making him responsible for his actions and therefore condemnable to eternal suffering for his moral violations? Or, if God knows already what will happen, then it must already be determined what will happen, therefore we are not in control over our decisions, thus we are not liable for any wrongdoing we might commit. This is where people have a problem, and the problem makes sense. There are passages in the Bible that support both the ability of man to choose his future and the foreknowledge of God coupled with the powerlessness of man. So what’s a person to do?

I think first we have to secularize the conversation. We need to shift the discussion away from religion. It is difficult enough to consider the existential philosophical dilemma of causation without also engaging in a theological debate. So let’s rethink the situation:

You are randomly selected to participate in a game operated by a super-intelligent alien from another planet. This super-intelligent alien is unique in that he can accurately predict the future, he is not a psychic, rather he actually knows exactly what the future will hold, he is infallible, and he is incapable of making an error. Whatever action you choose to take in the game presented to you has nothing to do with why the super-intelligent alien has made the prediction he has made.

The game is as follows: There are two cardboard boxes labeled A and B. You can choose to take the contents of both boxes or you can choose to take only Box B. Taking Box A only is not an option. Box A contains $1,000. The contents of Box B is determined as follows: before the game starts, the super-intelligent alien makes a prediction as to whether you will take only Box B or you will take Boxes A and B. If the alien predicts that you will take both boxes, then Box B will be empty, but if the alien predicts that you will take only Box B, then Box B will have $1,000,000.

By the time you are asked to make a selection, the alien has already made its prediction and the contents of Box B is already determined. So once the game starts Box B has either $0 or $1,000,000, and not a single entity has the power to alter the contents of Box B. As the player of the game you know that Box A contains $1,000 and that Box B contains either $0 or $1,000,000. You also know that the contents of Box B is based on the prediction made by the super-intelligent alien and that the super-intelligent alien has the unique ability to infallibly predict the future. The only piece of information that you do not know is what the alien actually predicted, so obviously you don’t know what is in Box B.

Which option do you select? Box A and Box B or just Box B? Your goal as the player in this game is to maximize the payout, to get the most money. The two choices represent two logically valid strategies that yield conflicting answers to which option will maximize the payout. All of the people reading this blog post who choose to select one of the options in this thought experiment will have a perfectly clear idea of which option you should select. The problem is that half of the people will choose to take both Box A and Box B and the other half will choose to take only Box B, and both sides will be absolutely convinced that they are right and that the opposing half is being irrational. 

Strategy number one says that no matter what prediction the alien has made, taking both boxes is always best. If the alien predicts that you will take Both A and B, then you are choosing between $1,000 (Box A and B) or $0 (Box B only). Obviously the preference would be to take both boxes. But, even if the alien predicts that you will choose only Box B, then taking both boxes gives you $1,001,000, whereas taking only Box B gets you $1,000,000. With the strategy of always taking both boxes you always get more money.

Strategy number two says that you should always only take Box B. These people recall that the super-intelligent alien is INFALLIBLE, thus his prediction must be correct. If the alien must be correct, then you can ignore the possibilities of getting $0 or $1,001,000 because both of these require that the alien made an incorrect prediction. So for these people, the decision comes down to choosing between $1,000 (Box A and B) or $1,000,000 (Box B only). In this case it is obvious that always choosing Box B maximizes the payout.

So does man have free will or is life predetermined? Well, if you believe that you should always choose Box B, then you are suggesting that the alien can know the future with certainty, as such, the alien is not so much making a prediction as it is observing an event and then describing it. In this case, the alien's knowledge of the future is determining its actions in the present, thus future events are causing effects in the past. Your choice will have already caused the alien's prediction. In this scope, free will does not exist, and you are not really making a choice, you are just doing what you are supposed to be doing. If you believe that you should always take both Box A and B, then you are suggesting that future outcomes are continuously changing moment to moment because of our ability to choose, thus at the time the alien makes the prediction it may be true, but things may change between the time the prediction is made and the time the box selection is made.

The paradox presupposes a perfect predictor, implying that you are not really free to choose; however, the problem simultaneously presumes that you can freely debate and decide on a choice. This is the same difficulty many people have with mediating a belief in Christianity and the omniscience of God with the belief in free will. And the debate ends very much in the same way as the above game: both sides of the dilemma have equally logical arguments that strongly support them. In either case, you are going to do exactly what it is you are going to do. I mean, either you are going to fight or you are going to give up, either do the right thing or do the wrong thing, either go left or go right, either study for the test or not study for the test, either believe in God or not believe in God. The discussion of free will versus determinism is illogical since both sides prove equally valid and the answer will forever be unknown. So why worry about it? Just go and try and live your life right. That's all anyone of us can do.

"God does not play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

"Freedom is the right to live as we wish." - Epictetus

“Try Viagra, now with a NEW and IMPROVED soft-tablet, slow-release formula for extended…”

I've always tried to figure out how something could be both NEW and IMPROVED. I mean, if it's new, then it never existed before now. If it never existed before now, then how could it have been imrpoved? Inversely, if the something is improved then it must have existed in some form and it has since been altered in a way that is believed to be better. If it already existed and thus improved, then how could it be new? Sure you could argue that it had existed but now it's better (improved) therefore the final product is something other than what had existed earlier, thus it is also new. You could, but that makes no sense. I cannot take my 1997 Infiniti Q45 with 220,000 miles on it to the car shop, give it an orange pearlescent paint job, adjust the suspension, add "Spinners" and then walk away and call the car NEW and IMPROVED. It existed before, but now I changed it and made it better so for sure it is improved, but the car is not new just because now it exists in a manner different than before I fixed it. At the same time, if I drive my broken down Q to the infiniti dealership and drive off with a 2009 G35 I certainly have improved my car SITUATION, but the car itself is NEW but it is not also IMPROVED. My point is either something is new or something is improved, but it is not both new and improved.

People spend a lot of their time trying to make themselves new. After a nasty break-up a girl rallies around her girlfriends, they head out to a club, make a dance circle around their bags and shoes, and inevitably at some point between the fourth or fifth Jolly Rancher shot the girl will tell her friends that this is the NEW whatever her name is. Or when a man quits his job and goes out to buy himself a new wardrobe in the hopes that his Prada shoes will make the difference in his NEW life. Somehow their is a correlation that we make between severing the ties with the past and enjoying a more pleasurable life experience.

But I think that most people don't want to become new people. I think what they really want is to become an improved person. What I want to do is take an experience and then use it to dictate my actions in future experiences. Even when you leave behind your old ways or if you move out to a new town and abandon old acquaintances and family, it's not about abandoning or leaving behind the things that you have already learned. It's more about taking what you have learned and using it to make your future more pleasurable.

They say that when a man experiences cancer that he comes out on the otherside a new man. Well, I don't want to be a new man. I just want to be an improved man. I just want my cancer to build upon the myriad other lessons I've already learned. I don't want my cancer experience to be generative, forging a new creation through fire and smoke. In fact, I know cancer is not making me a new man. I appreciate the catharsis that is my cancer, because through it I have rid myself of self-pity and no longer am overcome with fear. Cancer may have been the catalyst through which the change was brought about, but cancer is not the vehicle of change. Cancer is merely an occurrence, like getting a hang-nail; it is something that happens. It is no more in control of itself than I am in control of developing cancer. The human being is the vehicle of change. I can choose to mentally change my outlook, and I DO choose. The ability to choose makes me infinitely more powerful than the cancer.

It is easy to press the reset button and start a NEW game when your tetris blocks stack too awkwardly together; it is much more difficult to choose to IMPROVE the unfavorable board you find in front of you. You cannot both start the game over and still be playing the same game. Don't look outwardly to find the help, just look inside yourself. Don't ask for a miracle, be the miracle and remember that all of life is nothing more than a hang-nail...

"If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make the change. You gotta get it right while you got the time 'cause when you close your heart, you close your mind." - Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror

A Rebel Without a Cause...

I often think about the antagonistically symbiotic relationship between life and death. It might seem paradoxical to say that two things are antagonistically symbiotic. How can two things be both hostile towards one another and also cooperative with each other? It occurs much more often than you might think. Oil and vinegar have a natural aversion towards one another, yet oil and vinegar go great together on salads and sandwhiches. Cold water and warm water are not exactly best friend either, but the warmth of one liquid cooperates with the chill of of the other by highlighting its characteristics. Take a chillingly cold shower and then immediately jump into a pool and what happens. The pool waters feels warm compared to the cold shower water. Take a warm shower and then jump in the pool. The pool water feels cold compared with the warm shower water. In essence, even though the warm water and the cold water are in opposition to one another, they also cooperate with one another through their opposition by magnifying the characteristics of the other. Life and death are in opposition to one another; however, they are also cooperative as the experience of either life or death magnifies the characteristics of the other, just as the one liquid magnifies the qualities of the other.

Intuitively we know life and death are in opposition to one another, but are they in oppostion with each other in a fundamentally logical manner? The American Heritage Dictionary defines life as the "property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organism and inanimate matter." So, "life" itself is defined as an opposition between those things that are said to be alive and those things that are said to be dead. Moreover, scientifically life is understood as objects that are composed of systems that "tend to respond to changes in their environment, and inside themselves, in such a way as to promote their own continuation" (Witzany). I think promoting their own continuation should be understood as avoiding the ending of their continuation (death). So, it seems that intuitively and logically life and death are in opposition to one another.

In addition to being in opposition to one another, do life and death have a hatred towards one another that causes their opposition? We have to understand this one through thought experiments only, because there is no way to prove life hates death or that death hates life. Religiously, philosophically, scientifically, biologically, and logically we can conclude in a general sense that life and death hate one another. At the very least, if life got along with death, then life would not try and avoid death to the extent that it does. In other words, organisms do not gravitate towards pathways that would lead them towards death. In fact, all species adapt in order to sustain life or else they risk extinction. If life and death got along this would not be the case. So, not only are life and death in opposition to one another, but they also have hatred for each other, thus they are antagonistic.

Being in opposition, though, does not mean that the two things are opposites. What are the opposites of the following things or ideas: hot, left, high, light, life.......... My guess is that more likely than not you thought: cold, right, low, dark, death. These, however, are NOMINAL opposites. That is, they are opposites only in name. Opposites only because we think of them in such a way. The opposite of HOT is not COLD, but rather the opposite of HOT is NOT HOT. Anything that is NOT HOT is the opposite of HOT, whether that be warm, temperate, cool, or cold. Those are LOGICAL opposites. Even though life and death have an opposition to one another, they are not LOGICAL opposites of one another. Therefore, life and death can have a symbiotic and cooperative relationship with one another, even though they have an antagonistic relationship as well - like oil and vinegar.

Confused? Allow me to elaborate: Kurt Cobain, 27; River Phoenix, 23; Sid Vicious, 21; James Dean, 24; Sharon Tate, 26. These are all examples of people whose death magnified the qualities and characteristics of their lives, perhaps disproportionately. Without the prevalence of death, and in these cases premature and tragic death, the lives of these people are glorified in ways that they potentially should not be glorified. Each of these people show how life and death are antagonistically and symbiotically related. Antagonistic because their lives were blossoming just as the derangement or coincidental or unfortunate circumstances of death took hold. Symbiotic because the rising stars that were their lives caused their deaths to be commercialized and even maniacal, meanwhile it is their deaths that magnified the promising qualities of their lives. James Dean was an up-and-coming star projected to have every bit of the career that Marlon Brando ended up having. As such, his existence as a young actor and a rising sex symbol catapulted the news of his death into the mainstream and, consequently, into American lore. Moreover, his instant death in a car accident disproportionately magnified the acting skills Dean showed in his three major films.


Their lives made their deaths seems impossible and tragic. Their deaths, however, left their lives gilded with 24-karat leafing. It isn't accurately known whether their deaths were made famous by them being famous or they were made famous by their deaths. It has always perplexed me how a tragic and often times premature death can commodify that person's life. Yes, literally the life is turned into a commodity. The person in particular (and more tragically the family and loved ones of the person) is taken hold of by the population and made into something other than what he or she is.

To clarify: I am not a tragic case, nor am I unflawed. Much of my life has consisted of errors and flaws. If God punishes us for living unrighteous lives, then I cannot argue with my disease. If I die it should not be said that I was a great man or that I was a righteous man or that I was the model man. The truth should be told. When it comes to tragic death, though, the truth gets lost somewhere in between the "Story" and the "Memory." Jim Morrison is remembered for being the Lizard King, the singer-poet of a generation, the man who said what you thought. He isn't remembered necessarily for being a degenerate drug-abusing man who overdosed on heroine.

Before I was sick, people used to say, "I like Andrew, but he thinks he's better than everyone" or "he never lets anyone else be right" or "he's selfish." Since then, I'm some sort of inspirational story. A young and tragic look at the iniquities of life. A bold critique of the health industry's inability to explain medical ailments. I've become a prayer. I've become a plethora of candles lit in innumerable churches. I've been taken across the continental United States, and to Europe, and taken to the Middle East and put into monastaries and churches and temples. I've become the questions of so many friends and loved ones to nomadic street psychics and tarot-reading gypsies. I've become a compartmentalized conversational commodity. My disease, my cancer, has taken me from a living, breathing human being and turned me into a fucking t-shirt.

That's what death does to life. That's what even the potential of death does to life. If you aren't careful and if you aren't watching it can steal your identity and turn you into something else. My life until this point has magnified the "tragedy" that would result in me dying from cancer. Similarly, the potential that I can die TOMORROW from cancer has made Andrew Samuel into "Andrew Samuel." Still, in the end, I don't know the best way to measure a life. I think, though, the best measure of a man is in knowing how many people measure themselves by him. Measure using this, whether in "life" or in "death":

"I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victory or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit." - John F. Kennedy

The moment of truth...

One of the most difficult things to deal with as a person going through the throws of cancer is how people speak TO you in one way, but speak ABOUT you in another. I'm not the type of person to tell someone that they have to agree with the same thoughts that I have, but I am the type of person that asks for some semblance of consistency when talking to me and when talking about me. When people talk to me, that is when we are in a conversation, the general feeling always seems to be that I will somehow and some way defeat my cancer and go on to live a long, fruitful, and otherwise normal life. There is not a single person that is even willing to recognize the possibility of death. On the other hand, when people speak about me, that is when I am not actually around, I understand that there is an altogether more somber tone to the conversation. Suddenly, the persistence of my disease, and even significantly premature death, are not only options, but inevitabilities. Not only do I have a problem with the Orwellian double-speak, but I have maybe an even bigger problem with the fact that neither things that the people are saying to me is the truth.

You see the fact is, the people around me do not know if I'm going to beat my disease, but they also do not know that I'm not going to beat my disease. For those of you joining the game late, it has pretty much been a running theme of this blog that your life can change from one second to the next. So, why does me having cancer automatically make my future predictable, moreover, what makes people think that THEY can accurately predict my future? If I live - for however long I live - it will not be because my friends and family constantly tell me that I'm going to live. The support from loved ones is an undeniable part of my ability to fight this cancer, but that's because those people are there for me. It has nothing to do with what they are or are not saying to, at, or about me.

You know, watching things on television about people suffering with cancer, or listening to the stories of people who have battled cancer, you normally hear or see very dramatized or very commercialized versions of the stories. I am not saying that to be disrespectful, but only as a matter of observance. What I have found is that the general consensus is that saying SOMETHING, even if it is the wrong thing, is better than nothing. I am sorry, but I have to thoroughly disagree with this sentiment. As a child, when your mother caught you in the act of violating one of her rules and she said "What exactly were you thinking?" it was  NOT an acceptable option to just say anything whatsoever. In fact, it was very important that you chose your words wisely, not necessarily because you had to say the perfectly right words. The important thing for your mom was that no matter what you said, you just had better make sure that you didn't flip-flop your story later on. You see the thing that your mom hated was when you told her one thing one minute, but said something different the next, because then momma knew you were full of shit. 

I find that when you don't know what you feel or that you don't know what to say, saying nothing is better than making a friend feel betrayed when you say you're confident in them one minute, but then they hear that you doubt them the next minute. The funny thing is that no one even blames people for having doubts or for second-guessing. Some days I feel like I'm going to live forever and other days I feel like I can't even make it a few more hours. So, can I really judge someone who feels absolutely certain that I will be okay one day, but has doubts the next day? I know that people are just trying to say the right things and are trying to make sure the cancer patient doesn't lose faith. To me, the number one way that the cancer patient loses faith is when people only want to be honest when they talk about him and not when they talk to him. 

"Backseat drivers don't know the feel of the wheel, but they sure know how to make a fuss" - Bob Dylan Let's Keep It Between Us

Maybe I haven't wrote in a while because there hasn't been much to write. Or perhaps it's because I have run out of things to write. Still otherwise I may have spent the last three plus weeks laid up in my bed to sick to type. Maybe, you're thinking, I've fully exhausted the therapeutic tool of blogging...

I think Mister Bobby Dylan is more accurate. 

I think I haven't written a post in a while because my dedication to write honestly and openly has met the crossroads of delicacy of the emotions of others. Let me be more clear. To write truthfully about living (and dying) with cancer is a subtle tightrope one walks in which he must balance unbridled truth against the delicate nature of the unaffected readers' psyches. In essence, in order to be effective I must be truthful and forthcoming with how I detail my personal battle, but I must also consider the idea that (hopefully) the overwhelming majority of the people reading will never understand what it truly feels like. As I scan back over that last sentence I am surprised by the tone of the sentence and its seeming superiority, as if none of you has ever endured anything as difficult as I; however, I have restrained myself from editing the sentence because there is nothing wrong with what I have typed. You will never understand even one micrometer of what it is like to live my life, but similarly I will never understand what life is like for you. Inevitably, all people are destined to be separated by the very thing that makes our lives worth living: our individuality.

Since I am an individual and there is no one in this world that is even somewhat like me, every person outside of me is incapable of fully understanding any description of my life and the things that happen inside of it. That is why metaphors, similes, personification, and symbolism are so effective in story-telling from memoirs to Hollywood films. These artistic devices rely on communal knowledge and primal instincts and feelings to establish common ground in the efforts of bringing the audience to a more comfortable and accessible environment. The truth, nonetheless, remains unchanged. I can never make you understand what it is like to receive chemotherapy treatments if you have never had it. Moreover, even someone who has had chemotherapy treatments (even the same exact type of treatments) will fall tragically short of sufficiently understanding my trials with the medicine simply because we are individuals. Sure, we may be able to establish some common area of understanding, but since we cannot get into one another's head, and since we will always maintain our own minds, we will always be inherently incapable of fully understanding another person, cancer patient or otherwise. This phenomenon has lead to cliched phraseology such as "one man's trash is another man's treasure." If one forgives social and economic differences, this phrase is true simply because people experience the world differently.

The task of explanation becomes more cumbersome when it details individuals who experience certain extremities or boundaries that lie outside of the general norm. For instance, most people can actively participate in an open discussion about college life, since most people of our generation have actually lived the college life. Though the experiences may be dramatically different, "college life" is an environment that most people would view as normal. Even those who did not directly experience college life understand the themes and experiences that it entails either through hearsay or through media portrayals (see Animal House). On the other hand, there are experiences that fall so far outside the accepted norm that their discussion is rendered much more difficult. For example, most of us will never fight in a war such as the war in Iraq. So, soldiers, Marines, Navy men, and other members of the armed services have such an extreme experience that it is increasingly difficult for those individuals to relay their experiences to those who have not, and likely will not, experience them. Thus, we see the pains to which the military goes to readjust servicemen back into society and we are seeing more and more servicemen who are ostracized from society because of their experiences and diagnosed with various mental illnesses. As a result, the average non-war-fighting individual is at a loss to understand the experiences of a servicemen and often times we look at these individuals just as they look at themselves: different than the rest of us. Within our own difficulty in trying to relate to these individuals by establishing some common ground, however, we sometimes make the individuals feel as if they cannot be as open and honest as they would like. And so, the men and women of extreme experiences are at a crossroads between truth and the comfort levels of others.

There are some things that we do not want the soldiers to tell us. We want to know how they gave the children toys and soccer balls, and we want to know how the American troops stormed a building and foiled a key component of the plans of our enemies, but we do not want the whole truth. That is, we do not want to know about when a platoon fired through the windshield of a car who failed to stop at a military junction and upon inspecting the vehicle found only two infants and a local Christian missionary who was assisting the U.S. military efforts. This is the truth, yet this is the truth we do not allow the person to feel comfortable saying. 

By no means am I trying to equate my circumstances with the bravery and courage displayed by the hundreds of thousands of men and women who protect our beliefs and our freedoms by fighting our wars. Yet I do believe that I have reached a point in these writings where I am forced to compromise the truth of what I write for fear that someone will believe that what I write shows that I have given up, or given in, or that what I type is too much honesty for my loved ones to handle. In my honest discussions with some people about my situation, I am constantly met with replies of what I must do in order to get through this difficult time. I am constantly bombarded by people who are telling me what it means that I have cancer or why I have cancer or what is the proper way for me to live my life with cancer. I am told by my loved ones that these people are only overcome by an uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what to say, but I don't understand why this gives them the right to spew verbal diarrhea at me. I am so overwhelmed by the notion that so many people care about me, and are about me enough to try and give me words of encouragement, or help me through tough times...

...but too many backseat drivers wraps the car around a tree. 

"I have always believed, and still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value." - Hermann Hesse

My most recent trip to my regular cancer doctor did not go well. If I'm being completely honest, my last trip left me with no clue what to write about, which is why it has been so long since I've posted. I've had ideas, but in selfish light of the bad news we got at the doctor's office, I was sufficiently unmotivated to create a blog post. Thinking about it now, I believe that is a very sad perspective to have, but I must admit it was my point of view. 

The doctor basically told me that it did not appear that my disease would ever be resolved. I should mention that the overwhelming insinuation was not simply that I would always have cancer, but rather that I would expire in a relatively short period of time. These words, that news, depressed me in a way that I did not anticipate even though I knew that was already the case judging by the way my body was feeling progressively worse. There are still treatment options like the chemotherapy that I am on now, and when that runs out, there are clinical trials that can be enrolled in ad nauseam (pun intended), but somehow I felt uneasy about the future.

Be not afraid and do not feel sad because of what I have written above; only through the darkness can we understand the light. I have finally remembered that I am not in uncharted territory. That is, I have been here before. Perhaps, not all the circumstances are the same, but I have endured this situation already. I have been told that I would be dead shortly. The MEDICAL FACTS have already "guaranteed" my departure. Science and reason has previously divested me of every ledge upon which I could grasp a hold. The end for me has already come many times before and yet I remain among the living. I allowed fear to take hold of my head, but that fear was never able to get to my heart since my heart has seen these darkened days previously. I have risen from the medically pronounced dead more than once before and that means that there is no reason why I cannot continue to do so moving forward. The law of averages be damned, beating the odds once does not increase the odds against you. No, the odds remain the same and those odds are as we've discussed before: 50%/50%. 

I apologize to my fiancee and to my family for having forgotten this recently. I apologize to all of you for hypocritically posting messages here of thinking and believing in certain things and then allowing myself to be overrun by ignominious thoughts. Then I think - that's why they have so many cliches about failure: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again; it's not how many times you fall, but how many times you get back up; get back on the horse; it's not how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep getting up; etc. Even Jesus Christ walked around for three years preaching the good word of the Lord, speaking of self-sacrifice; yet, on the night before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion, while alone in the garden at Gethsemane prayed three times asking God not to make Jesus have to endure the pain, suffering, torture, and death. Though each time Jesus prayed to be relieved of his suffering, He eventually returned back to his original beliefs saying to God "nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done" (Lk 22:42).

My purpose is not to liken myself to Jesus, but to make the point that questioning beliefs and wavering strength is not only human, it is also divine. Jesus Christ, the leader of the Christian religion displayed the desire to ease the pain of his life. The Buddhist Gautama Siddartha, or "Buddha," similarly was described as having had many failures and moments of weakness in his quest to reach Nirvana. I spoke in elevated tones of strength, motivation, an living for now and yet I stumbled in my support of those things (it is not the first time nor will it be the last, I'm sure). But I am back on the horse, I took the hit and I got back up, I took a lickin' and I'm still tickin', you pick whichever cliche works best for you and insert it in this sentence. The point is not whether or not you suffer, but as Hesse says in the quotation at the top, its about whether or not you make that suffering into something of value. Faith in one's self is invaluable so I have to thank my doctor, and not be bitter, for giving me that bad news. His words caused me to remember how to fight back against the world. 

No doubt bad news will come. No doubt this treatment regimen will continue to be one of the more brutal combinations I have experienced. No doubt my physical strength and energy will be stripped again and again. But I have been reminded once again that though this disease and the associated treatments can take away my body, they cannot take away my mind unless I allow it to be done. It is the ultimate "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." I cannot be hurt by what I will not allow to hurt my will.

I must thank my fiancée Katie for re-awakening all of these things inside of me. If not for her, I may not have remembered what I promised I would never allow this disease to make out of me. I thank her for allowing me to hide my moments of weakness in her. I also need to thank my dad, mom, and brother for doing the same. "Don't worry guys, I may sound weak again moving forward, but my heart is in the game. Give me my moments to fall down and I promise that as long as I can I will ALWAYS get back up again."

"You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, single power, a single salvation... and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else."

I'm Better Than an Actor; I'm Really Real...

Can we go ahead and agree that we have all felt, at one time or another, that giving up would certainly be a hell of a lot easier than continuing? I think at some point, whether as children or as adults, we have all concluded that the road ahead just appears to difficult to travel and so along the way we have all sat down on the side of the road, refusing to navigate the course. I am making it a point to say that we all have done this because I believe it is a very human reaction. Humans instinctively shy away from difficulties and lean towards the easier of two choices. This time I say this not as an indictment of mankind, but rather as a characteristic that is shared amongst us all. I cannot say whether it was quitting a sport as a child, or giving up on a particular section in geometry, not bothering to talk to that girl for fear of rejection, refusing to argue with a friend just for the sake of keeping the peace, or accepting one's place in life because it affords comfort even though one deserved a better slot. There are so many different ways that we give up in life, which is why I can say with absolute confidence that we have all done it before.

My REAL concern, however, is when the giving up, the sitting by the side of the road, is done when it comes to life and death. I think this has become somewhat of a recurring theme on this blog, but I think that's because it is a subject that is so near and dear to me. It also happens to be a subject that we take for granted more often than we would like to admit. What amazes me is that people tell me that somehow I'm amazing because of what I have to go through in fighting cancer. 

That sounds silly to me. And it sounds silly because the assumption made by calling me amazing is that by fighting as hard as I can against my disease, I am somehow doing something different than what most people would do in the same situation. It is amazing for me to believe that anybody else in my position would NOT display the same fighting mentality as I. That is, I expect that they WOULD fight just as hard as I am fighting. If that's true, then what I am doing can hardly be said to be amazing; rather, it should be considered the norm. I understand if someone wants to connote that my reaction to my disease, although normal for anyone in a similar situation, is not normal because most people do not experience that situation. In that case I would classify my struggle as respectable, not amazing or inspiring. Any man who choose to sit himself down on the side of the road when the path in front of him is a choice between life and death is the one who is amazing to me. The man who chooses life rather than death, and to keep pushing forward no matter what the difficulties are is the man who is smart, logical, normal though not amazing, inspirational, or extraordinary.

(Before moving to the next topic I want to post a disclaimer stating that each individual cancer patient experiences even the same cancer in drastically different way, just as multiple individuals can experience the same event in dramatically different ways. As such, my opinions here are geared more towards the willingness to accept defeat, rather than an inquisition or assessment as to the relative difficulty to the particular people mentioned below).

It is also amazing to me the number of public figures who publicly announce their unwillingness to continue with cancer treatments. For instance, Farrah Fawcett, an extremely well known "actress" and individual, has had a difficult battle with cancer. Originally, she was diagnosed at the end 2006 and after chemotherapy treatments and radiation, she was declared cancer-free in the beginning of 2008, roughly a year and a half. When she was told that she had a malignant polyp return, she responded saying that she no longer wished to deal with the difficulties of treatment. Or Patrick Swayze, who was diagnosed in in January 2008, has experienced the spreading of his cancer to critical areas of the body by the end of 2008. It was reported that he, his wife, and his doctors believed that the countdown towards death had already begun. In response to the news, it is reported that Swayze has begun saying his goodbyes to family and friends ahead of what he believes is his imminent death. 

I don't mean to scare those who care about me, but over the last two years and nine months, I have both been told that various areas of my cancer have returned or gotten worse and that my already aggressive, deadly cancer had spread to more critical areas of my body. I have been told on more than one occasion that I was on my road to death. I do not say this to bolster myself or to indict Fawcett or Swayze; I am only saying it to explain that bad news is a part of cancer. Reaction to the bad news makes all the difference. 

Don't call me amazing. Don't call me a hero. Don't call me an inspiration.

Just call me what you have all always called me: a stubborn kid who hated to lose at anything. 

I don't plan to start losing now. Just know, though, that you don't have to lose either...

Hi. This is the Home of "Are You Feeling Okay?"...

I am destroyed by the madness of repetition. The second-hand tick-tock of my life petulantly slamming down one foot after the other – left, right – like Macbeth’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeping forward until the movie ends, the credits roll, the reel flickers in the dim light. Wake up, take a pill. Go to sleep, take a pill. Two wednesday night, two Thursday morning, two Thursday night. Pill for pain, pill for nausea, pill for vomitus, pill for headaches, pill for pills. They tell me to take a pill to counteract the pills that I'm taking. The determined pursuit of relief is the ultimate opiate of the masses.

Democracy comes from two Greek words: demos - the power, kratos - the people. Democracy is the power of the people. To control democracy you must control the power of the people. In order to control the power of the people you must find a way to control their worries. The people worry about living life comfortably or without pain. Life, however, is pain. To control the people's worries then is to control their pain. An offer to relive pain is the way to control the power of the people. You give them relief and they gladly hand over their freedom and liberties.

You tax a man more and more every year and give that money to a multi-billion dollar company, only to force that man to watch that company give it to a few hundred people as bonuses. Meanwhile, the man's factory has shut down and the 8.5% of people who want jobs and are looking for jobs cannot get them. The man changes the channel only to watch a man going to trial who took billions of dollars from thousands of investors (billions divided by thousands is still in the millions by the way) only to enter the court, keep mum, and say he is "truly" sorry for the pain he has caused, though he in no extremity of reality plans to tell these people where their money is so that they may use it. I will ask you: why does this man still love his country? Because his pains in life are eased here more than anywhere else (in his mind). Two tabs of tylenol takes away the back pain. Two pills take away heart disease. Two pills takes away cholesterol. Two nuclear bombs takes away inferiority complexes. I have realized an important thing from studying history throughout college: people will always trade freedom for food and safety.

My back hurts and I walk like a ninety-year-old man who can't find his cane. My knees hurt as if I've played as a catcher in major league baseball for 25 years on my way to the Hall of Fame. My stomach hurts from the creeping, twisted invasion of restrictive cells making extension and flexion more cumbersome a task than Atlas' struggle to hold up the heavens. I grunt and sweat from the pain in the night like a working-girl on a busy Friday night. Sometimes the pain is so numbing my mind goes blank and there is a momentary existence of nothing that takes place between my ears. I'll tell you what: when drugs and avoidance are my only options to escape the pain of my existence, it's about time for you to take me out back and shoot me dead. We might do our work through the easing of the pain of living, but you can hardly call it work if you are self-medicated, either physically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.

Do the time. Make the investment. Embrace your pain. Pain is life, your job is to ease the pain, but if you never experience the pain for what it is, then you similarly never experience life for what it is. It's your choice as to how you handle your life. You can take the handed out help and give up your demos, or you can ease the pain through real life, non-segregated experiences. That's my choice.

Just as I've told my fiancee that I love her so much that I would rather be fighting with her than doing anything else with anyone else, I'd rather experience real life, then coast through it unscathed.

PEACE

I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed...

Well, while I'm here I'll
do the work -
and what's the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow. - Memory Gardens, Allen Ginsberg

You would do yourself a favor if the only modern poetry you picked up and read was written by Allen Ginsberg. If you want some direction, try Ginsberg’s 1956 “Howl,” classically considered his most famous piece of work. If you want some further direction, then listen to the words this man writes and float away on a cloud of LSD just as he did. Ginsberg wrote the way your mind works: he wrote as a run-on thought string, each memory perpetuating the continuation of the sentence. But, more importantly, Ginsberg wrote the way you wish you could say. He believed that it was the poets job, his burden, not to write what came into his mind while he sat down to write a poem, but rather to write about the thoughs that crept into the poet’s head while he lay in bed at night – while his mind was most free and most truthful.

What more is our struggle in life except the struggle to ease the pains that life brings us? And if we are constantly struggling, surely we must say that we are constantly working. What option do we have, then, in our lives, except to “do the work?” More specifically it is the “Work” that is our job to make life as enjoyable as we can for ourselves and those around us (work – capitalized, thus connoting this is our most elemental form of labor; this is our Heavenly Work). It’s Ginsberg’s suggestion that everything else we do in our lives should be considered play time, here noted as drunken dumbshow. Though somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Ginsberg believes, in essence, that anything we do in life that does not ease the pain we experience simply by living is a waste of time. In other words, our thoughts and goals should constantly be tilted towards the easing of our pains. In other words, life on its own is pain. Our jobs in life is to enjoy it as best we can with disregard for the pain, acknowledging that it is there and it hurts us, but without letting the perpetuation of pain become our work.

Chemotherapy is obviously part of the beat culture along with Allen Ginsberg. I dig that. If we are to agree that our work is to ease the pain of living, then chemotherapy does work as it eases the pain of cancer. I find that as long as I do my “Work,” then chemotherapy does his. Sometimes phrases become cliches because they are true, like when a sports player says, "Well, you just gotta go out there and give it your all." That's a truth-cliche. It pertains to life in general and it is a good life lesson. Other times cliches are formed because people do not stop and ask why, like the phrase "When in Rome do as the Romans do." That is an untruth-cliche. I'm not a fucking Roman. If I followed that cliche as a lesson for life it would tell me that I should change my beliefs and practices depending on the beliefs and practices of those surrounding me. If I'm off my rocker I want people to know about it. Do as the Romans do is death to you as you. I'll live doing unlike the Romans because I can rest my head on the pillow knowing that I heeded Ginsberg's advice: "Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

"The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction." - Allen Ginsberg