Life, Death, and Cancer

The Gift That Keeps on Giving...

2009-09-16T10:31:00.006-04:00

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...

2009-09-04T21:46:00.006-04:00

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...

2009-08-28T22:59:00.007-04:00

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...

2009-08-25T21:41:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-05T20:00:00.005-04:00

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...

2009-08-02T21:04:00.007-04:00

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...

2009-07-30T17:14:00.003-04:00

"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...

2009-07-10T13:21:00.003-04:00

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…”

2009-07-07T17:30:00.004-04:00

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...

2009-06-17T13:08:00.007-04:00

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...

2009-06-08T15:00:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-05-26T16:07:00.003-04:00

"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.

2009-05-01T13:34:00.003-04:00

"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...

2009-04-22T10:44:00.004-04:00

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?"...

2009-04-15T14:04:00.002-04:00

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...

2009-04-14T17:00:00.004-04:00

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

Oh, How Times Have Changed...

2009-04-02T13:00:00.002-04:00

As many of you know, yesterday was April 1st. The infamous day of pranks and practical jokes known as April Fool's Day. Yesterday also happened to be the one year anniversary of my surgery to remove a potentially fatal brain tumor. As a form of habit we compartmentalize our days according to some habit forming method. The day starts when we wake up, the next phase being the arrival at work, the 10 o'clock pause to fill the coffee cup, lunch between 12:30-1:30, another pause around 3 o'clock and the punching out of work being the final. Yesterday, though, my day was separated according to a different set of references. 7:30 was not associated with my half-way point between work and home, but rather with my preoperative preparation at last year. 8:15 was not associated with my arrival at work, but rather the acceptance of my epidural. 7 o'clock was not quitting time, but rather the time I could remember being brought into the Neurology Observation Unit. It was certainly a different way to view my day, but I got through it.

It was very surreal though. I continued to recall blurbs from last year. The discussion with the anesthesiologist of preferring scotch to margaritas. His insistence that I would soon fall asleep, and my subsequent refusal to do so. His frustration and ultimate timidity in giving me doses that exceeded those he normally likes to distribute. My anxious dissipation into ultimate darkness. My cloudy immersion in the recovery unit and the shrouded realization of where I was and why I was there. Recognizing the nursing assistant in the corner who was the first person to know that I was awake who immediately called in the doctors and assistants. Hearing the question, "You are recovering right now. Do you know where you are." The shaking of my head indicating that I did not know. "Do you know why you would be in the hospital or why you would have had surgery?" The second shaking of my head in denial of understanding the situation. "Do you know who you are?" My occipital response of gazing off into the upper left corner of my eyes as if trying to recall my name and who I am. Observing the deeply concerned looks exchanged between attending surgeons and nurses who were immediately instructed to get the primary surgeon. I recalled the slowly cracking smile that stretched painfully across my face as I finally spoke saying, "Hey! April Fools." Watching as the surgeons and nurses angrily sauntered out of the room and hearing that initial nursing assistant hold back her laughter.

I had told my brother Sam before the surgery that if I woke up after the operation and I could still make a joke that my family should know everything was okay. I remember the primary surgeon coming in to perform a quick mental test. If you recall, this is where I was asked to remember those three words: Cat. Apple. Table. I did. My reward: seeing the family members who had been sitting in the lobby of the hospital for endless hours. My mom came in holding back tears and my father came in with a happy smile on his face. I presumed above average news was relayed to them. I remember my brother coming in pretty even-keeled. My Aunt Lucine stayed at the entrance way and was hesitant to come into the room. My family could only stay for a few minutes and I asked them if things had gone well. They said the doctor gave them positive reinforcement that things had gone exceptionally well. They left.

I asked the nursing assistant to make sure that as soon as Katie got to the hospital to make sure that she was allowed to come right in to see me. She promised. And when Katie arrived she came right in along with my brother. Man, Katie looked horrified when she saw me. I don't know if I told her that before this. I told her that she looked horrified when they removed my bandages, but I don't think she knows how she looked when she first saw me post operation. To her credit, she tried to hide it. I was happy to see her. I was ready to be moved out of the recovery room immediately. Finally around seven-ish I was brought into the observation room. I spent the night acting as if nothing had happened and trying to avoid the 1,000 pound gorilla in the room. It was interesting to say the least.

Last night I was driving home around 7:00 p.m. I arrived at my fiancee's house after 8 o'clock. We watched shark-inspired episodes of Mythbusters. We fell asleep on the couch around 9:30. Then I went to bed.

A lot can change from one year to the next. That's the simultaneous beauty and disgust of life. But that's the way things go, so either deal with it or be destined to suffer because of it.

Call Miss Cleo for Your Free Tarot Readin'...

2009-04-01T09:32:00.006-04:00

It seems to me that the existence of psychic abilities is something that most definitely exists. The definition of psychic abilities is the ability to perceive hidden information through means independent of the physical senses and independent of previous experience. This is more popularly known as extrasensory perception or ESP and it can be manifested through clairvoyance, precognition, or telepathy.

I tend to believe in the existence of psychic abilities because the main focus of the textbook definition maintains the ability to know things, or know about things, that already exist in reality. Clairvoyance and telepathy are the abilities to uncover information about an object, person, place, or action that actually exists. For instance, a clairvoyant could describe the actual appearance of a house in the Czechoslovakian countryside as if he were standing in front of it or had stood it front of it, though he has had no previous experience with the house. The point is that the house is actual and not potential and the psychic "power" is the ability to describe it without having experienced it. It is similar with precognition. Every moment of existence leading up until today has created a trajectory for the future. If we freeze time and prohibit any stimuli from acting on the present, then there will be a logically determinate future. I believe that precognitive people are able to tap into this trajectory at a given moment in time, but the prediction would only be true if nothing else changes, which we know is not the case. Therefore, any prediction a precognitive individual can make, though it may be true at the time of the prediction, will subsequently be subjected to an ever depreciating ratio of truth.

In a sense, psychic abilities are the abilties to access the mental atmosphere that encapsulates the earth and all of it's objects. This is known as the noosphere, which is the sphere of human sonsciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noosphere). The noosphere is a global consciousness in which the knowledge and emotions of every individual in the world comes together in an ocean-like existence. The belief is that all people are able to access the noosphere, thus access the collective knowledge of the human race if they could only train their minds properly. It is in this light that I believe psychic powers exist. They are not determining something that is not there or does not exist; rather, they are able to manipulate their minds to access the global knowledge of the noosphere.

I'm crazy... yeah, like a fox:
In the 1960s it was believed that the Russian government was investing extraordinary amounts of money into funding and developing psychic research as it pertained to effective government and military usage. Apparently it was such an issue that between 1968 and 1971 the United States government developed a similar program that existed until 1995 under both the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). The Stragate Project was de-classified in 1995, at which point various members associated with the program authored books and gave interviews documenting their experiences with the project. This was not just a program that scientifically researched whether or not psychic abilities existed. The Stargate Project has documented well over 100 missions in which remote viewers (psychics) were used to gather intelligence that had not been recovered through any other possible means. The most gifted individuals within the prgram achieved over 65% accuracy above chance. The individuals of the Stargate Project displayed elements of clairvoyance and precognition. Even though funding ended in 1995, the actual use of people as psychic spies and over two decades worth of research entails the United States government believed in the existence of psychic abilities. They believed in it to the tune of $20 million (www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/stargate.htm).

Does this mean that some psychic reader popping you off at $60 per 30 minutes in "Earth Spirit" along the strip mall is telling the truth when they say you have an old soul, or that your relationship will/won't last, or that so-and-so will/won't die? Hardly. Consider: if psychics (and I mean street psychics that purport to know the future and delegate that information at a cost) were accurate, why would you ever need to go back? Is it any wonder why they only predict your life three to six months into the future and tell you to come back for more after then? These people should be avoiding death, anticipating stock market moves, curing cancer, predicting natural disasters, and betting the ponies. They should be doing anything with their skill other than peddling pennies from people who enjoy the theatrics and awe of magic tricks.

Any single, individual life is capable of progressing down an infinite number of paths. The decisions and goings-on of today dictate the possible futures that can exist. If we are to believe that all psychics (even the street psychics and Tarot card readers) are honest and legitimate, then a professed psychic AT BEST is able to predict one of the infinite pathways your life can take, but in no way can guarantee that things will manifest themselves according to the manner they have predicted. Again, if the psychic is real, then we must assume the reason they tell us to return in six months is because the decisions and happenstances that have occurred in the six months since your visit have dramatically altered your future. In short, they tell you what your future will be, but it's up to you to decide if you want to change it.

It's okay to believe in psychic abilities, it would appear it's even rational to do so. But then, on pain of irrationality, should believe in Judeo-Christian predestination, proclaimed prophets, UFOs, aliens, and God. Do me a favor though: let's not get all fidgety just because Sarah the psychic in Red Bank says I'm going to die before 30 after I have my first child, because last time I was having three children and living into my 60s, and the time before that I was marrying someone I don't even know yet and dying in my 40s, and before that I was not going to live more than a few more months.

Just like a story's plot doesn't progress if you never read the next page, your future cannot be determined until you decide to make it so. So fuck the psychics and forget the trembling worries of what may come and step outside of your bubble. Life is waiting for you to tell it what to do.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility...

2009-03-25T15:41:00.005-04:00

Super-heroes and super-villains are the fictional recreations of our society’s dialectic between good and evil and the human condition in its entirety. As I’ve said before, all forms of art are only effective through their ability to reflect a tangible aspect of society back towards the audience. Super-heroes and super-villains hold a place within all of us exactly because of their usefulness in magnifying the fundamental aspects of good and evil, making these abstract concepts more accessible. The three most widely recognizable superheroes are Superman, Spiderman, and Batman. This triumvirate are intrinsically balanced as each of these three super-heroes represents one of the three major types of super-people.

Superman represents the first group, which is the alien super-hero/super-villain. Superman, who was born as Kal-El on the planet Krypton, arrived in Kansas and was raised by farmers and he assumed the identity of Clark Kent. A fundamental understanding of Superman is that he is NOT human. There is an implied philosophical sentiment by Superman supporters that presupposes that, if we are to take Superman as wholly good, then the human condition, even in its most optimistic proliferation, is incapable of ultimate success or ultimate “good” just as humans are incapable of doing the things Superman does. Kal-El is an alien, but he represents what we humans consider as desireable traits. He is strong, fast, and supremely moral. His superpowers are of the best ilk. He can fly, he has x-ray vision, he is faster than the speed of light, he is bulletproof, he has endless strength, and so on and so forth. All of these traits are juxtaposed with his nemesis Lex Luthor. Luthor is viewed as existing in the highest tier of humanity. He is wealthy, philanthropic, and intelligent. Moreover, Lex Luthor is the one that is human, yet he is the embodiment of what humans stereotypically consider evil. Superman does not represent what a man can become, rather he represents what we want to become, but never will. There is the implication that the human is less than perfect in his inability to become what Superman is.

Spiderman represents the second group of super-heroes/super-villains, which are those that are genetically altered human beings. As opposed to Superman, Spiderman is a human being. He is Peter Parker. In order to become Spiderman, though, Peter Parker had to be bitten by a radioactive spider whose radioactive venom significantly altered his genes, thus creating Spiderman. While Superman maintained his powers as an element of his physical construction alone, Spiderman's powers are a mixture of his physical mutations and his pre-existing intelligence. He has "spidey-senses" and he is fantastically agile and much stronger. He also has the ability to defy gravity by climbing walls and by having a supreme mastery over his body. Intellectually his powers are made more prominent as he creates a technological device that allows him to shoot a web-like substance from his wrists in the likeness of a spider. We must note, though, that there is a significant distinction between Peter Parker and Spiderman. Peter is a kind and gentle-hearted individual who keeps his identity hidden, but Spiderman is a lush for the spotlight. Spiderman is received with mixed reviews by the public as some see him as a savior, but others see him as a menace. Since Spiderman is created from a genetic mutation of the human condition, we must view Spiderman similar to Superman, though we are able to relate with the former more than the latter: Spiderman does not represent into what a man can make himself, rather he represents what we might possibly be is we were changed. Again, there is an implication that human beings are destined to fall short of the desired self since they cannot become what Spiderman is without the rarest of circumstances.

Batman represents the third group of super-heroes. These characters are human through and through and their "super"-ego (not Freudian) is entirely consistent with their humanity. Batman is neither an alien, nor have his genetics been altered in any way shape or form. Batman is the multi-billionaire Bruce Wayne, owner and operator of Wayne Enterprises. Batman is not an example of what we want to be or what the maximum human output could be if external influences are introduced, rather Batman exemplifies what a strong human will can do all on its own (and lots and lots of money). Batman captures humanity completely. Unlike Superman, there is no definitive distinction between good and evil. In reality, we do not live in a black and white world. We live in a world of infinite shades of gray. Good and evil ("in and of themselves" - : P) are illusions; the method that Batman operates on, and the method that appears most in sync with reality, is that the situation and the environment and the "before" and "after" determine what is good and what is bad, and that distinction only applies to that specific situation. Batman does not have superpowers, he uses intelligence and grit to establish himself as a super-hero. An awesome car, a trusty utility belt, a resolute mind, and complete fearlessness are Batman's powers. Even Batman's enemies do not have superpowers. They are all perversions of the human form. The Joker is a sadistic, schizophrenic, masochistic individual who is severely detached from rality. The Penguin is a deformed human, abandoned in his infancy, and looking for vindication. Two-Face was the famous politician Harvery Dent who lost the love of his life because of Batman's mistake and now vows to oppose Batman at every turn. Batman represents exactly what a normal, yet determined individual can accomplish if he grits his teeth and decides that no matter what he will perservere.

We will not all be Superman.

We will not all be Spiderman.

We will not all be Batman.

The thing is this:

We don't have what we need to become Superman.
We don't have what we need to become Spiderman. (Sorry Sam)
But we have exactly everything we will ever need to become Batman: determination and perserverance.

I am the Bat!

The Song Remains The Same...

2009-03-17T13:54:00.005-04:00

Life is a song...

A gorgeous blend of rhythm, harmony, melody, tonality, theme, and motif. An antiquated balance between form and function, between studied theory and whimsical talent, between percussive dominance and rhythmic passivity. A continuous interplay between instrumental equivalents finding a voice within a construction and settling into a comfortable role. Think Jazz with me: any instrument can lead the musical arrangement, it just depends on the intended construction and the moment in the song. Sometimes, each instrument has it's time in the sun. Now the lead guitar vacillates all over the musical staff - major, minor, thirds, sevenths, diminished, augmented, pentatonic - the direction is left to the guitar. Now the bass takes hold, the grooving bass that forces you to bob - not nod - your head in calm and collected coolness. Then the drummer kicks it with some rolls, a bit of a high hat, syncopated beats, speed ups and slow downs that beg for toe-tapping.

Life is similarly constructed of a confluence of elements that result in a symphonic and harmonious output. Some lives are psychedelic, some rock and roll, others are classical, and still others are somewhere else. Some people do a lot of talking in their lives, just like some songs focus on the lyrics. Some people do a lot of waiting in lives, just like some songs focus on the music. Some people do a lot of crazy things in life, just like song solos are all over the place. Some people stay very close to the chest, just like some songs keep it very simple. There is no life that is definitively and objectively better than another, just like there is no definitive and objective way to place songs in a particular order.

Though our verses tell the story of the goings-on that make up the fluidity of our lives, it is the chorus that is the real meat and potatoes. Those battle-tested beliefs and ideals that we continuously fall back on. Our cheat-sheet that we use as the basis for all of our decisions. Just like the song, our lives always come back to the chorus or the hook. And just like a good song, if you have no hook, then you have no song. It's the "Bye, Bye, Bye" and the "Oops, I Did It Again" that pulls you back in. It's the "Let It Be" and the "If You Want Blood" that grabs our attention. It's the "Sipping on Gin and Juice" and the "It's Tricky To Rock Around, To Rock Around the Clock" that sticks with us. It's the "Lovin' Is What I Got" and the "Whoa, Amber is The Color of Your Energy" that bobs the head.

A great song is like a beautiful work of art. Whereas artwork stimulates your mind visually, music stimulates your brain sonically. Both are constructed with interconnected complexities that add or subtract various levels of depth. The most important correlation between the two, however, is that the power both have over the individual. Moreover, that power is directly proportionate to the ability of the artwork to impact the audience through the reflecting of life back towards the audience. Every great piece of artwork - paintings, songs, symphonies, sculptures, novels, theater, television, films - is characterized by the ability to reflect an aspect of life back to the audience. Some for humor and some for drama and some for both. This is no matter. The point is to remember that these artistic creations reflect our lives and we are not supposed to make our lives reflect them.

Sometimes, even, art can be an even better representation of the realities of life than life:
"And, in the end, the love you take,
Is equal to the love you make." - "The End", The Beatles, Abbey Road

"People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone." - Chuck Palahniuk

2009-03-16T15:50:00.006-04:00

Do you ever feel that when you are talking to someone they are not really listening to you, but really just waiting for their turn to talk? Sometimes they don't even wait politely, right? Those are the people that say "right" or "yeah" after every sentence just waiting for the moment you hesitate too long so they can tell you how what you are telling them is "just like this one time..." I am trying to figure out how it is that some people just always know exactly what you're talking about and, luckily enough, are able to relate it to some story in their own lives. I'll tell you it feels refreshing when someone can relate to what you are going through. At the same time, it's awfully annoying when the person makes it seem as if they are the only ones that have anything interesting to say. Even if they don't believe it, they sure as shit need to pretend a lot better.

Sure it comes from our narcissistic, ego-centric belief that we are the proverbially straw that stirs the drink. Again, we are the star actors in our own lives. It's like a self-help author reading his own book for advice. If you don't want to hear what other people have to say, then talk to the mirror. Although, that might result in You fighting Yourself since neither You nor Yourself would get a chance to talk since the other one will constantly be talking over the other. That's a good way to guarantee split-personality disorder. You will be fighting with Yourself because You won't stop talking over Yourself and You won't be giving Yourself a chance to talk.

People won't even listen to you when they think you're going to die. They really try at that time to convince you of what you should or should not be feeling. I laid in the hospital the night before my brain surgery and had my brother and my future sister-in-law and my parents there. Of course, My Love was there as well. Some close relatives on the low. I told my parents that I just wanted to hang out and stay relaxed. In no time I had a church ceremony taking place in my hospital room. Frankincense and myrrh including in the celebration of "mass." Even a sermon was given in which the participants prayed for a "miracle" hoping that I would come out alive. Goodness, I was nervous, but at least I was confident. Then I hear people praying for the miracle of my survival and I became upset. Pissed off I believe would be the accepted F-ing vernacular. People pretend they want to listen to you when they think you are dying, but really they just want to savor those last few moments to tell you what they really think. I assume they hope to send you up to heaven with their words as your last memory so that you can tell the peoples upstairs how awesome they are.

I don't like to lack faith in people, but sometimes people make it too hard not to lose faith. People don't want to talk to each other. Politicians don't want to listen, they are all a bunch of opportunists. They want the power superstructure to fail so that they have a platform on which to pontificate their equally ridiculous ideals. Many religious individuals don't want to listen, they would rather explain how you and your peers seated around you are spitting in God's face just by enjoying a fine meal or a few glasses of an alcoholic beverage, while they are somehow closer to God because they attended seminary school. It doesn't just float to the top though, even our peers don't want to listen. We all want to be the one to untie the Gordian Knot (or at least be savvy enough to slice through it with our mighty sword Excalibur, thus ascending the throne and running Camelot like a BAMF).

I talk a lot and I sure as shit act like I know what I'm talking about all the time. I hate being wrong. When I am, I will admit it (however begrudgingly it comes). I will also try and see anything from your point of view even if I disagree with it. I really will. No matter how far up my own ass I have to try and put my head. I'm flexible. We don't even really like each other except for the few specials in our lives. Why else would we invent phones to be used between individuals separated by mere rooms. Or the Internet. We would rather text a question than ask it. MensHealth actually had to survey women to see what their reactions are to being asked out through text/e-mail because so many jack-asses seem to be doing it instead of the phone call, which is already distancing in itself.

All I think is deserved is the mutual respect among all of us to shut up and listen when someone else is having a conversation with you. One-on-one we should wait, listen, then thoughtfully respond rather than bite our tongues until it's our turn. Just listen with open ears and an open mind and I promise you will hear new things in old places, and you will gain knowledge where you thought none existed.

Be like water...

2009-03-13T17:39:00.001-04:00

“Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis, and suicide. With failure comes failure.” – Joseph Heller
Many people throughout history have discussed suicide. It has been understood both as a form of cowardice and a form of heroism. Aristotle believed that even though suicide displayed bravery in the face of death, it is always the escape of some fearful thing and so it is the love-child of cowardice. Albert Camus wrote about suicide being the only thing that a man can do that is truly taking control of his own life. Phil Donahue believed “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Shakespeare focuses on suicide over and over throughout his plays and, coincidentally they are featured in his most celebrated plays “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Othello,” and more. There was even a time in our history that believed that suicide was fashionable as satirically portrayed in the Winona Rider movie “The Heathers.” Dante Alighieri believed the innermost circles of hell were reserved for the abhorrent individuals who chose to commit suicide instead of face life. Arthur Schopenhauer said, “They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
I fall on the side of cowardice. Life is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s hard for every animal on the planet, the difference being our knowledge of the difficulty. I can agree that surviving in life is difficult and the knowledge of our unforgiving existence is regrettable, thus I suppose that suicide, or the wishing for death to come, is a means of relieving the pain and difficulty. But it is not life that we are hoping to avoid through suicide; rather, it is the tribulations and afflictions that confront us in life that we run from through suicide. So, suicide simultaneously delivers us from our pain, but condemns us to never experience the positives that come from life.
We refuse to accept the vicissitudes of life and this is why we are met with adversity that we believe we cannot overcome except through suicide. Some forms of martial arts, such as Aikido, discuss the forces of fighting like the forces of nature, more specifically as the force of water. The key to be truly prepared to endure any attack from an opponent is to remain in a relaxed position that is adaptable to an attack from any angle. Most importantly, one should not attempt to defend the incoming force with opposing outgoing force; rather, the trick is to use the incoming force as a method of avoiding the contact. Is that confusing? Instead of trying to block a punch by forcefully raising your arm, logically it is easier to avoid the punch by stepping to the side and using the puncher’s momentum to put him to his back. Such is the same in life. Instead of fighting against the difficulties of life, which can lead us to take extremes measures to avoid them, we need to work with the forces of nature in order to survive. We say we want to live in reality, that is what “The Matrix” portrays, that if given the choice between a real reality and a fake reality we will take the real one. I agree with this idea, but I disagree that people truly want this. Most people are like Cipher from the first matrix movie, they wish they had taken the blue pill.
Reality is the painful and usually slow realization that your life is not like the movies and books you have wished them to be. Your life is hard and it sucks, but it’s a better option than death I assure you. Our buddy Chuck Palahniuk said, “Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.” They want a hyper-reality. They want a life that they believe they deserve rather than the life that they have been given. Suicide may not be cowardice and it may be brave, or the opposite. I don’t know for sure. I can tell you this much: with people trying to hang on to life by a thin thread, clinging on and fighting to endure things unimaginable, even the mere contemplation of suicide, let alone the act of suicide, is a direct slap in the face. Some have lost loved ones against their wills, and when they are confronted with a person who decides that taking their own life is their will, I think it is perfectly acceptable to slap them right back. Draconian laws are acceptable with suicidal miscreants.
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better or for worse.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war...

2009-03-11T15:20:00.004-04:00

"Find out what you're afraid of and go live there." - Chuck Palahniuk

Mr. Palahniuk is the author of "Fight Club" that, yes, was a book before it was a movie. The man is a somewhat dark and demented author, but poetic and invigorating and exciting. To really appreciate him you have to peel away the layers of what he writes to find some underlying, deeply buried moral that exists in his writings. If you do, then amidst the animated violence and degradation that we all intuitively associate with a movie like "Fight Club," and so also the author that we may not even know, we can discover soul-searching parcels such as the one highlighted above.

Fight Club is not about fighting, neither the book nor the movie. It's about an ideology other than the materialist one to which we all mindlessly abide. More than that, it is about a polarizing new ideology that forces us to confront the choices that we have made in our own lives and whether or not they are the appropriate ones. The message to me really seems to focus on what can happen when we accept ANY ideology without paying close attention to ensure that we are in control of our ideology and not that our ideology controls us and inevitably leads us to commit random acts of vandalism and possibly incinerate credit card buildings in an attempt to erase the national debt and wipe the slate clean.

My focus today, though, wants to stay on the quotation above. As Colonel Kurtz aptly puts it in Apocalypse Now in 1979 (which was also based on a book written before the movie came out, The Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad) horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror or else it is truly an enemy to be feared. Confrontation to the ultimate degree is our chance to prove ourselves, our bank-like stress tests in a sense. The first Century Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men." We are defined by our battle-hardened bodies and psyches much like the soldier receives adornment beside his lapel for his struggles. We have our sniper medals, and purple hearts, and medals of honor, except we don't place them neatly on our chests, nor should we. Because the knowledge is won internally so too should the knowledge remain. We find out something about ourselves by going to battle in our lives, and there is no reason to boast or brag about our accomplishments by putting them on display. We cannot assume that we know the battle tested hearts of the people walking past us.

The sentiment in the quotation, then, follows: we must find exactly what it is we are afraid of, and then set up camp until we overcome that fear. A man must be willing to face his fears or else he does not know of what he is truly afraid. I'll tell you, cancer was not something that I was excited about, but it was something that I had to confront. I have done as best I could. If you bring yourself to the challenge and do not run from your fears, and you do the best you can, then you have already won. A tragedy is an opportunity to do something special.

"I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That's the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about." - Chuck Palahniuk

Our Matrix...

2009-03-05T13:35:00.003-05:00

"I think, therefore I am" holds that being able to think is both sufficient and necessary to knowing that one exists. That is, you must be able to think in order for you to possible know that you exists and if you are not able to think, then it is impossible to know for sure that you exist. Further, if it is true that you are able to think, then it is guaranteed that you exist. Let us forget postulated arguments to this position and accept the standard belief. We will not bother with the brain-in-the-vat dilemma or the moral implications of the statement for beings that lack the capacity to reason in a rational way.

When Descartes said "I think, therefore I am," he attached this to a theory that everything that exists outside of the mind is perceived through a perceptive sensory organ that renders the individual incapable of directly interacting with the object outside of the mind. Without being directly in contact with an object, our minds are susceptible to misinterpret or misunderstand the object. The support for this is that when we look at an object from a certain position it appears to be a square, but as we move we are enlightened to the idea that the object is in three-dimensions and is actually a rectangle. In essence, our perception of the object through our sensory organs of our eyes caused our mind to pervert the actual nature of the outside object. Even our sense of touch can be deceived as in cases that have been reported of amputees feeling pain in the limb that has been removed through operation. In any event, what we understand through the words of Descartes is that everything that exists outside of our minds - including our bodies - are unreliable in their truths, and so are open to subjective interpretation.

Through our interaction with the world over time the number of levels that we are removed from outside reality has continuously grown. This phenomenon can be understood by reading the post-modern philosophy of Jean Baudrillard perhaps most notably in Simulacra and Simulations. According to Baudrillard, technology and philosophical and intellectual elitism has constructed a world of hyper-reality in which simulations for reality have been created ideologically, metaphorically, and realistically in order to take the place of actual reality. Our every interaction with reality is actually an interaction with a created reality - a simulation of reality. The things we see, read, hear, and learn are filtered through a measured and exact narrative that is intended to perpetuate a particular message, image, or idea.

Former reality television show characters (and indeed characters is the correct term) wage their biggest indictment against the shows themselves by claiming that the producers will edit video in order to convey a certain perception of reality. This is one thing with which I agree with Amaya from The Real World Hawaii house. It is called reality-tv, but we all know it's not and that's why we like it. We see two cast members meet on move-in day and hear "Bleeding in Love" by Leona Lewis and I know that during the season one of the characters will express an unrequited love for the other, maybe like Melissa excessive crush on Jaime from The Real World New Orleans.

It is worse, though. Even our news is filtered and constructed around a particular narrative. The narrative arc spans further than just republican and democrat, right and left, conservative and liberal. The arc follows a certain pattern of attention grabbing imagery and language in addition to a subtle selection, by producers and executives, about what constitutes as news. During the democratic primaries, The media made a disproportionate amount of news fodder from the fact that Barack Obama did not wear the American flag pin on his lapel; meanwhile, there was nearly zero discussion regarding the beginning of the economic decline (or depression). Even when we watch shows like "Planet Earth" on the discovery channel or live footage of animals in their natural environments, what we are seeing is distributed through so many different levels - the presence of the film technician, the transition of the film to the studio, the editing of the film at the studio, the transmission of the film through the television, the narrative tone that is displayed from the opening credits of the show until the moment that I am viewing the moment in question, the music in the background, the juxtaposition of frames and angles, the script of the narrator or on-air personality, the time of day the show appears, the show's targeted audience, and even the actual audience that tunes in to watch. Of course, there is also our perception of what we see and our processing of all the relative information in our minds, which we know is often deceived by the things that exist outside of it, not to mention its ability to be deceived when people are influencing a thing in a manner that is different than how that thing might be without interaction or interpretation.

One of the most often levied criticisms of left-wing documentaries is that they are so prejudiced in the content they elect to provide that it negates the content itself. This is a method of arguing called poisoning-the-well. In essence, instead of addressing the content given to me directly, I refute the argument based on either the manner it is presented or on the individual or group presenting it to me. For example, if a convicted murderer said that they believed that free market economy was the best way to guarantee free trade principles, it would be improper argumentation to say that the person must be wrong because he is a jailed murderer. This is what happens to Michael Moore. He makes a documentary and it appears so radical to some people that it is refuted without giving consideration to its merits. On the other hand, at times it is indoctrinated based on its having been made by Michael Moore. Neither approaches are logically sound arguments. You don't like Michael Moore because of "Fahrenheit 9/11" that's okay because it deals with a very difficult subject matter. Have you ever needed a surgery that you didn't get because your insurance didn't cover it, or because you didn't have insurance? Watch "Sicko" and perhaps your opinion may change.

I used to think that their was good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral, light and dark, love and hate, night and day. Even the most basic investigation yields that these are but two extremes of extensive spectra. Life and the individual are not made to contain either one or the other; rather, they are suited to - even created for - exemplifying some combination of the opposites. There is lightness and darkness within us all, but it comes down to deciding which we choose to follow in a given moment. Night and day appear separated, but there are the moments as the sun begins to go down and the sky is painted orange, red, and magenta where the night comes to join the day, the light comes to join the dark, and the two hold hands above our heads. And we can see all the gradient in-between of light and dark. It is living ideology. It is philosophy personified and we see this every night. Since the classical times of Greece and Rome, the greatest thinkers of the world have tried to find a universal code of ethics and none has developed one that has not been refuted on firm grounds. Logically, your moral codes would be determined by the subjective ethics you choose to follow.

And so I return to the thought that I can only be sure that I exist because I am sure that I am thinking. Reality is contained in the mind. It is not contained in the body or in the bank or in society. It does not seem reasonable to surrender our minds to those who wish to uphold the convictions of their own. Let us be inquisitive, but let us be resolute. Power lives in the mind, and the subjective reality lives in power. Be not afraid of the world, nor anything that comes in your way. No obstacle, no force, no situation is too much for you. Descartes' dilemma works in both directions. If you cannot really interact with the things outside of your mind, then likewise those things cannot really interact with you. If they can't do that, then they can't affect you. So, I say again: color the duck your way.

It's Some Good Advice, That You Just Didn't Take...

2009-03-04T15:31:00.003-05:00

"Memories are meant to fade. They were made that way for a reason." - Strange Days (1995)

Today we speak and the words forcefully pass our vocal cords, are bounced against our palates by our tongues and forge through our teeth and out of our lips only to sputter a few inches in front of us and smack against the floor with the vigor of vomitus. We live at a time when a mid-90s musician writes a song called "Ironic" that reaches number one on the billboards and the song does not contain a single example of irony (no, rain on your wedding day is not ironic, nor is a free ride when you've already paid, though some might say these are unfortunate occurences). We have also witnessed one of the most celebrated presidents say on national television that the interviewer's question depending "On what your definition of is is."

"Cogito ergo sum."
"Je pense, donc je suis."
"I think, therefore I am."

These words spoken by the same man, here presented in three different languages have significantly altered the trajectory of human philosophical and mental development for approximately the last 500 years. These words, and the other writings of Rene Descartes have given people the ability to make the world whatever they have wanted to make it. They have allowed people to take the notion that the only thing one can say is true is that they exist and transform it into the contract labor oppressing capitalist ideology and from there into the will to power that states that all things are permitted. All things, apparently, really mean all things.

There is a shot that is administered to chemotherapy patients that bolster the white blood cell counts after the chemotherapy drugs have diminished them. there are different such shots, but the one that I know of is Neulasta (pegfilgrastim). The dosage is recommended to be a single 6-mg injection per chemotherapy cycle (www.neulasta.com). This amounts to about 2-3 seconds. The drug is considered imperative to many patients who undergo agressive chemotherapy cycles as it prevents life-threatening infections that can stall the administration of chemotherapy, which can allow for the spread of the cancer. You see, though the drug cost can grow as high as $7,000.00, which is good if it's your two-week paycheck, but less good when it is part of your two-week expenses (www.neulastainfo.com). Certain healthcare insurance companies do not believe that neulasta is a necessary drug and so many refuse to for it. Nine months I was on a treatment that required me taking the neulasta shot. since, I don't like when people say "You do the math," I'll do the math: 9 months X two treatments per month = 18 times the neulasta shot is given. 18 x $7,000.00 = $126,000.00 and remember that this is with insurance.

There is a basic difference between something that is necessary and something that is sufficient even though many people do not understand that difference, including insurance companies. A condition is necessary if and only if it must be true in order for some situation to possibly be true. Or if the necessary condition is not true then there is no way that the situation can be true. For example, being a mammal is a necessary condition of being a human because you have to be a mammal in order to possibly be a human and if you are not a mammal then there is no way you can be human. A condition is sufficient if and only if in some situation if the condition is true then the situation must be true. For example, being a human is a sufficient condition of being a mammal because if you are a human then you must be a mammal. The difference is subtle. Because the sufficient condition is not also a necessary condition. That is, being a human is sufficient to show that you are a mammal, but it is not also the case that being human is a necessary condition of being a mammal, for instance you can not be a human (you can be a marsupial) and you can still be a mammal.

The insurance company decided, without consulting me, that the shot was not a necessary condition for my survival because perhaps, without it, I would still live. They also decided that it wasn't sufficient because perhaps, with it, I still might not live. In translation to formal logic, the quotation above says that memories are designed to fade because they are meant to fade. If we were using Microsoft Excel we would get an error reading saying "Circular Reference." The quotation believes that knowing that memories are capable of fading is sufficient to knowing that memories are meant to fade. This logic, however, begs the question by assuming as a premise exactly what it aims to prove.

I still remember the first smell I ever smelled: snow.
I still remember the first time I ever saw my fiancee.
My friend Andrew still remembers so many things about Susan.
My cousins Michael and Timothy still remember everything about their mother.
My fiancee still remembers what it was like when I called her on July 6, 2006.
My sister-in-law still remembers both of her cousins so well.
My mom still remembers the times of each of her three childrens' births.
We all still remember a lot of things

Memories are not meant to fade or else they would all fade. No, memories are meant to be remembered, forever. The ones that fade away are replaced by the ones that never will.

Remembering is a sufficient condition for surviving... And I can't wait to remember what it feels like to hear the good news of a clean bill of health once more...

Peace...

Stimulate Me...

2009-02-25T13:30:00.002-05:00

The United States government in the last six months has spent somewhere near 1.5 trillion on stimulus packages to defribrillate the flat-lined economy. And we aren't talking about Russian rubles. That's grade-A American minted dollars. I really don't even mind the inclusion of pork or earmarks in the bills. they want to toss a billions of dollars at big businesses and banks that mismanaged themselves and have no accountability for it, all the while sneaking in money for parks, environment preservation, etc., that's fine by me. I do not even take issue with adding money to pay people to hand out birth control or to fund anti-smoking campaigns. Do it. I don't care. Maybe it will help to stimulate the economy. Every financial advisor and economist agrees that the best way to stimulate the economy is for people to feel comfortable enough to start to spend. The disagreement is to what is the best means to acheiving the level of comfortability necessary to loosen the pockets, but people are the backbone of capitalism.

So this makes me question why federal medical research funding has increasingly been cut. Billions of dollars spent to line the pockets of millionaires, and less money left to help keep more people around. I congratulate Barack Obama for trying to issue health care to more people. It's a tragedy that so many people are walking around without the ability to go see a doctor or a dentist. These people delay needed procedures because they cannot afford medical insurance or they are unable to be accepted for medical insurance. And the largest population without medical insurance is under the age of 40. Good, extend insurance. But, uh, Mr. President, maybe you could also try and help some people live a little bit longer by putting a little pit of that pork spending into medical research. If people spending money will help stimulate the economy, then I can only rationally conclude that more people spending more money will help stimulate the economy more quickly. Admittedly, I'm not an economist nor a mathematician nor a politician, but, the government has a de facto responsibility to help it's citizens since they are elected officials, and perhaps keeping those citizens alive in order that they may be helped is more important than nationalizing banks so that corporate executives do not have to travel coach rather than first class.

So, what am I trying to get at? The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is a federal funded entity that has a wide range of responsibilities, such as researching new and innovative drugs, therapies, and theories for all types of cancer. In 2007, the NCI spent a total of $4.80 billion dollars on cancer research of the major cancers. Stomach cancer, globally recognized as one of the deadliest forms of cancer, and categorized by it's little varied issuance of poor prognoses, received $12.0 MILLION of the reported $4.80 BILLION made available by the government. Not to mention, the $12 million dollars is down from the $13.4 million distributed in 2003. This is to contrast with the recipient who received the largest portion of the government offerings, Breast cancer research, at $572.4 million dollars.

Breast Cancer - 12% of government funding
Stomach Cancer - 0.25% of government funding

Keep in mind that even the total amount funded by the government of $4.80 billion is only 0.60% of the total money that was just passed out in the last stimulus bill (0.32% is you count Bush's last stimulus bill as well). Forget it. Even Breast cancer, which received the most funding has only 0.07% of all the monies given out in just President Obama's stimulus package. I don't even want to do the math for stomach cancer. Let's put the pink ribbons on our cars and participate in the March of Dimes and all of the wonderful charities, but do not think that breast cancer, testicular cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, and lung cancer are the only cancers that exist.

My point is that if you aren't going to spend the cheese to try and keep people alive for the long haul, then what exactly are we doign here? I'm going to die eventually that's fine and so are you. But how many more people after us are going to die unnecessarily because of our irresponsible spending today. Why can't we get all the types of cancer AT LEAST to the level of breast cancer? If you don't want me alive, then don't tell me that you want to fund smoking cessation programs and build parks to preserve this "Great Nation of Ours", because my mind can't comprehend that hypocritic, non-sensical, flat out insulting, equivocating bullshit.

(We do have a fundraiser going right now and if you would like more information on how you can help contact me at amsamuel6@gmail.com)

"All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a functions of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche

An Honest Hypothetical and True Interview That Never Happened With James Lipton From Inside the Actors Studio...

2009-02-24T15:55:00.008-05:00

JAMES LIPTON: Okay. So you're twenty-one. You're in college. Now you have cancer and you're told that you probably won't make it through the summer. You look to your left and there are your parents. You look to your right and there is your girlfriend, who you want to spend the rest of your life with. What's happening in your mind?
ANDREW SAMUEL: It's a surreal event. The never-ending back-and-forth between what has always been reality and what is your new reality. You try and find a ledge jutting out to grab hold of, but you realize that the whole wall is smooth. Then you beginning slipping down towards a very dark area.

JL: I can only imagine that it's at that time that you really huddle in close around family and friends so they can help you out.
AS: You know, friends and family are great in the way they try and help you out and a good support system is important. The truth is though, that at that time you just really feel alone. And you are. Because you don't want to hurt the people close to you by making them worry more than they already do, if that's even possible. But you kind of feel like you are trapped inside of your own dark thoughts. Try as they might, friends and family cannot pull you out of the hole that you are in.
JL: Then how are they important?
AS: That first hole you fall into is unavoidable. I think you have to go into the darkness in order to come out and see all the goodness you still have left, for however long you have it left for. So your family and friends can do nothing to get you out of it. And I believe it is important in any tragedy to allow yourself to fall into the darkness and to accept all the truths that come with the tragic event. 'You have cancer' and you deal with all the consequences that arrive from that situation. 'A loved one has passed away' and you deal with those consequences. But you can only deal with all the real consequences that arise from a situation if deal with the circumstances up front and completely. So, I think the fall into darkness is good.
The friends and family are amazing because they can keep you from falling back into the hole after you have climbed out the first time. They can also be a reason for you to try and even climb out in the first place. That is extremely important. Immeasurable. Once all my stength and energy are all used up and I have dragged my decaying body as far as I can, my loved ones step in at just the right time to carry me until I gain my energy back.
JL: Who have been the people there for you the most?
AS: Well I would have to say my fiancee who dealt with a whole hell of a lot more than a lot of women in her position would have. And I think it's critical to mention that Katie (fiancee) and my mom have been to every appointment I have had in two and a half years. But you cannot limit the influence everyone else has had on me as well From people I see everyday to people who I don't talk to but once a year. Every word really fuels the fire.
JL: What's the worst thing about cancer?
AS: The thoughts that come into your mind and you cannot block.
JL: What's the worst thought?
AS: That when I die, I'll have disappointed more often in my life than I have pleased. That I'll have let people down
JL: What do you want people to to know about cancer and about the people that are afflicted with the disease?
AS: First, people with cancer are identical to people without cancer, so don't treat them differently. Second, humans are like babies. When we bump our heads, if everyone starts to jump up and make a hoop-lah, we will start to get worried and cry. On the other hand, if everyone remains steadfast and continues life (even while recognizing the unfortunate event) we will carry on dressing up Barbie or waging war with G.I. Joe's against Cobra Command.
JL: What is the best piece of advice you can give someone in your situation?
AS: I think it is the same advice I would give anyone who didn't like the way there life was going, either from tragedy or anything: "If you do not change the direction in which you are going, you will end up where you are headed." - Confucius
JL: And now we turn to our questions...
What is your favorite word?
AS: Revolution
JL: What is your least favorite word?
AS: Cannot.
JL: What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?
AS: The attempt to laugh... Hard.
JL: What turns you off?
AS: Giving up.
JL: What is your favorite curse word?
AS: Fuck.
JL: What sound or noise do you love?
AS: Laughing so hard it doesn't make a sound.
JL: What sound or noise do you hate?
AS: Muffled tears.
JL: What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
AS: Chef/Restaurateur
JL: What profession would you not like to do?
AS: Politician
JL: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
AS: Thank you for always trying to find the joke in everything...

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do." - Helen Keller

2009-02-23T16:32:00.004-05:00

Have you ever seen the movie "The Shawshank Redemption"? In the movie, Morgan Freeman's character talks about how prisoners who are in the jail long enough no longer want to be freed. They have been behind bars for so long that it is the only thing they know and they need the prison. They become institutionalized. Our belief that prisoners behind the jail bars want to be released and live among us outside of the jail bars is subjective, none of us knows what it's like to be behind bars so long that the bars begin to feel like home.

It's a funny thing about cancer that so many people swear by the disease teaching them and showing them and enlightening them and yet there is not a single patient who wishes that he maintain his disease. Each person ever to experience cancer, either directly or indirectly, wishes that they never had - whether they are still alive or have since left us. I do not think it is very difficult to see why.

Of all the things in my life, I never thought I would be known for being sick. I never thought people would remember me for almost (hopefully) dying. There are a lot of ways that I would choose to define myself, but none of those ways could ever replace what I will undoubtedly be known best for: having cancer. Lance Armstrong won seven consecutive Tour de France races - SEVEN - and I still think that he is better known for having had cancer. The man accomplished something in sports that had never happened and likely never will again. As for his cancer, people have overcome more difficult circumstances than he did. Even so, his cancer is more famous than he is. And the man was a world-class cyclist before cancer was even a whisper on his lips.

The hardened, rough cinder blocks barricade me in on three sides, above, and below. The steel bars close in the fourth side. Those metalic Ventian blinds open and close, the visual ebb and flow of what once was and what is to be. I can press my face between two bars, release my body weight, and hope to slip through the cracks, but this leaves a mark. My arms slide through the cracks and rest on the "outside" of the cell even though my body remains incarcerated. I oscillate - mentally, physically, and visually - between where I am and where I wish to be. If only it were a solid door, so that the sight of freedom would not tantalize the will and parch the soul. My body is separated - limb from base, mind from body, healthy from sick. A human jigsaw of adjacent opposites. Black borders white while good borders bad and dying touches living.

I am not a part of the prison. I am not institutionalized. I may have forgotten what it feels like to be on the outside, but I have not forgotten that being on the outside is where I want to be. I will accept my temporal seclusion because freedom lies up ahead. I have adapted to my cell, because adaptation means survival. The prison does not hold me, I hold the prison, and so I will learn to control my environment.

"Complete adaptation to environment means death. The essential point in all response is the desire to control environment." - John Dewey

They Day Before Tomorrow...

2009-02-18T16:10:00.003-05:00

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde

Like an enlarged phallus, I lied upon the board and pleasured the General Electric Lightspeed VCT as best I could for a whole seven minutes. I was the proverbial hot dog thrown down the CT machine's hallway, not even grazing the sides of the gaping void, which I entered and exited at will.

I felt like I was in a Taiwanese bordello as I was greeted amicably at the door, filled out paperwork, and was given a drinkt o sip while waiting for my turn. I, however, was drinking what they call "Gastroview" a mixture of water, diet raspberry Crystal Lite, and some chemical in order to make my veins more visible during the scan. I imagined it to be a Sammy Sosa, though - a drink that Katie and I seemed to enjoy while we vacationed in the Dominican Republic last year. I remained tranquil while I sipped my beverage and read about how the auto industry is asking for yet another 13 billion dollars.

My name was called and I was taken to the back where I was instructed to strip down and put a gown on - gown facing forward. Not to worry, my helper put me to rest by telling me that I only had to remove my hat, my sweater, my undershirt, and my pants, but that I could leave on my undies, socks, and shoes. Thank goodness! How embarassing would it be to be peered at through a glass window while by numerous males and females if I couldn't have my socks on? I was then taken into yet another room where a very kind, Latin male nurse sadistically pierced my skin and decided to tape up my hairy arms while giggling, "Oops. Oh my sir, you have, like, too much too much hair." Oh my.

And then I see it. That big old hunk of plastic and the chill of air conditioning needed to keep the machine running. Yes I would like a warm blanket, thank you very much. It's time for me to lay down and get my money's worth out of this bad boy. Arms over my head, legs slightly bent, I'm slowly glided into and out of the hole under the instructions, "Take a deep breath... Hold it... Breathe." Like a college frat boy, I use the machine for my benefit only and I never stop to wonder, "Was it good for the Lightspeed?" What does it get out of all of this?

It is my familiar friend, though, no matter how latently sexual it all seems on a grand scale. I have received myriad scans - CT, PET, MRI. Each machine deciding the next however many months of my life. Will they be good or will they be bad? It all depends on what pictures these machines decide to take of my insides. It's no use being nervous while passing through the wide opening that spins around you, violating your organs, snapping pictures of them from their bad sides - their cancer sides. There is no reason to get flustered when the contrast dye is injected into your veins and you feel the warmth course through the arm raised over your head, then to the back of your throat, proceeding to cause a distinguishable feeling of heat throughout your body and to each extremity, finally settling in the violating, uncomfortable ring around your bottom-side forcing you to try and determine whether or not you just embarrassed yourself in front of everyone behind that window.

Tomorrow I go back to the chemotherapy after nearly a month and a half off of treatment. My schedule goes to every week as opposed to the every two weeks I did before. I'll tell you: I'm not looking forward to the upcoming gauntlet. Every week? Every Thursday from tomorrow until who knows when. But remember the thorn bush is full of roses, not the other way around. Tomorrow starts the unmitigating difficulties of treatment, but on some other tomorrow, in the future, starts the first steps of recovery.

Life will always be happy while we continue to have tomorrows. I have too much to be happy about - too much to look forward to - to stop believing that tomorrow is always a new day.

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Thought" in Black and White...

2009-02-16T14:07:00.018-05:00

"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Trafalmadorians are aliens from another universe that believe that the earthly and, consequentially, human perception of time and space is significantly flawed. By earthly perception, I mean to say the socially accepted version of time and space - linear view point of space and linear progression of time. The understanding of the space-time continuum on Trafalmadore is that all time - past, present, and futue - is present now. They say that we view time similar to someone on top of Mount Everest looking at the top of Mount Everest. That is, they can only see what is immediately visible to them, also known as the present. The Trafalmadorians, on the other hand, view time the way that one might look at the Himalayan mountain range, and thus Mount Everest, from a distance. At such a view point, one would be able to see everything that is before Mount Everest and everything that is after Mount Everest, also known as the past, present, and future.

Maybe that mass encased by the green box is still in there. I mean, it did happen it was there at one time. Maybe that gruesome mass was never there. Maybe it simultaneously is not there, has never been there, is there, and will always be there. Maybe. Some quantum physicists maintain that there are an infinite number of universes in which every conceivable version of "reality" exists. So, on some alternate universe John McCain is the president, on another Al Gore won the 2000 election, on another Ross Perot is now our president, and on still another Michael Moore is the ubermensch totalian dictator of the Western Hemisphere. In essence, every possible way life could be, it is... somewhere.

Maybe.

I like the Trafalmadorian version better. When they see a dead corpse, they view that individual as existing in a bad condition, but that they are still very much alive in the past. They also believe that everyone has the capacity to see this person at that time when they were still alive. It is our choice at which point we choose to view the story. Either we can come in at the happy parts or we can come in at the sad parts.

I think myself a non-fictional Billy Pilgrim. You see, Billy Pilgrim was the main protagonist in a book about a guy writing a book about Billy Pilgrim's life which happened to take place during World War II. That book is "Slaughterhouse V." And in that book, Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time" after being abducted by the Trafalmadorians and forced to live in a zoo on Trafalmadore. I don't think I am unstuck in time as it were, but I definitely think that our conception of time is, at the very least, misguided. It's my thought that objectively (for whatever can be defined as objective knowledge) time moves forward in a progression like a string of beads, one after the other. I think, however, that psychologically (and, in effect, all that truly matters in the world is what takes place between our ears) we can be everywhere and no where depending on what we choose to look at with our memories.

When we lay on our death beds, I find it difficult to believe that we will step-by-step go through the chronological and linear progression of our lives. I do not think I will say that when I was five I did such-and-such, and when I was six I did thus-and-so. I do not believe that I will say that when I was 30 I made this much money and worked on these accounts, cases, jobs, etc. No, rather life (at least the way we remember it) is a fluid and organic recollection of relevant memories. When I lay on my death bed I will not remember my life chronologically, I will think of my life the way one would look at the Himalayan mountain range from afar: I will be able to see the whole thing from start to finish, though only some important parts will distinguish themselves in my mind. And I believe that I will choose to focus on the peaks rather than the valleys, the good times rather than the bad.

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

...The clear MRI rather than the one with the golf ball sized tumor in it...

The Force is Strong in You...

2009-02-13T12:00:00.002-05:00

“Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.” – Voltaire

If something is inspirational then it must burn a fire deep inside you and make you want to changes your approach to life. More than just wanting to change it, an inspiration actually makes you change your life. I have seen the horrors of cancer, not from looking in the mirror, but rather from looking at the rest of the world; through those horrors I have seen the truly inspirational. It is not inspirational to simply endure a difficult time; rather, in order to be inspirational, I think the trial must be pitiable, but also be so profound that it shakes the souls of those who observe and call them to change their lives.

My first surgery was in the summer of 2006 to implant my mediport in my right chest and to perform a laparoscopy of my lung. While in the waiting to be taken back to have an IV placed into my arm, I had my eye on a little girl. She was no more than four years old, and she was balder than a cue ball. She had no hair, no eyelashes, no eyebrows and piercing baby blue eyes. She smiled at me and turned back to her coloring book in which she was making an interesting looking duck with a brown beak, purple and red feathers, black feet, and, fittingly, baby blue eyes. Then my heart broke. She tried to get at a certain angle to color in the clouds yellow and the IV tube in her arm that flowed back and was attached to a seven-foot wheeled stand filled with chemicals wiggled the needle in her arm and she yelped in pain and her eyes got teary. She did not cry, she turned to her mom and asked if they could take it out of her arm – just for a little bit, Mommy – because, in her words, “I just want to color my duck.” That, my friends, is inspirational. I thought that I would never be able to live with myself if I let my cancer beat me down. How can anyone call me strong when there are super-hero toddlers as strong as this young lady?

Life with cancer is exactly like life without it: some days you feel good and some days you don’t, sometimes you feel like doing stuff and other times you don’t, and life can always end in the blink of an eye, but the way you look at life can make you live forever. It’s an inspiration when a person hits a road block that seems impossible to overcome while on their path in life, and that person at least makes an effort. Success and failure, victory and defeat, life and death lay in the hands of the gods, so let us take pride in the effort. It doesn’t matter the outcome, but only that we try. I learned this from an aunt of mine who was and always will be truly inspirational.

Whatever the struggle, whatever the task, inspiration is born of the people who have an affinity for succeeding no matter the task. Inspiration arises from the simplistic decision to be resolute and to strive to achieve the task. Bells and whistles are not necessary. The child on the fifth floor of the burning building that one runs to save is not what makes the man inspirational; rather, he is an inspiration because of the quiet manner in which he saw the path he had to take and was steadfast in his pursuit of the goal, not allowing the obstacles that tried to keep him from completing his goal to deter him from making the attempt. The struggle of cancer, like the struggle in every circumstance of life, is a matter of knowing where you are, visualizing where you want to be, evaluating what the necessary steps are to travel that pathway, and then completing the steps. Or more simply put:

“Begin at the beginning and go on ‘til you come to the end; then stop.” –Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

We will always lose every battle that we think we will lose; there is no way around that. I think the point of this post, and the message to be taken in life, is simple, elementary even: Just keep coloring the duck, and make it look however you want it to look.

“Do or do not… there is no try.” – Yoda, Star Wars

This is the worst box of chocolates that I've ever had to force down my throat...

2009-02-10T16:02:00.000-05:00

“Momma always said dyin’ was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn’t… I don’t know if momma was right or if, if it’s Lieutenant Dan. I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both.” – Forrest Gump (1994)

Here is the million-dollar question: what makes things happen the way that they do? Do we determine every step of our lives with every choice or action no matter how big or small? Are the paths of our lives predetermined rendering us incapable of altering or changing the course of events? These are the two extremes. Then, there is the middle ground – the infinite “Golden Mean” – in which many of us forms our ideologies of causality in the world. A lot of people want to know how things are allowed to happen, and why they have to happen. Some people ask themselves, very much like Forrest, why people have to die. I think the error in asking this is that we focus our attention to the result – the end – rather than on the process of getting there – the means.

Society seems like an end-result entity, tending to focus on where we end up, rather than how we get there. I think life, as it is itself transient, is made of a much more ephemeral composition. The end, the destination, is ever-lasting, which gives me no information about anything that came before it. For instance, if I look at the arithmetic equation “2+2=4,” I can observe that “4” is the result, or the sum as it were while “2+2” is the method of getting to the result. Which half of the equation tells you the important stuff? If we continue as we seem to be going already, then the result – 4 – would be the important part. On its own, however, “4” explains nothing of any substance. Is it 1+3, 2+2, 2X2, 16/4, 22? On the other hand, “2+2” actually explains something that can be ingested and understood. “2+2” can only equal four. Furthermore, it tells us exactly what steps were taken in order to reach four. In essence, we understand something intrinsic about “4” by knowing that it came to be through “2+2.”

So what’s my point? On the level of the individual, life has a starting point and it has an ending point and it would appear that neither of these points explains anything significant about the individual. It is rather everything that happens in between those two points that are of substance. Case in point, he was born February 12, 1809 in Kentucky and died April 14, 1865 in Maryland. I know nothing about this man other than a small amount of useless facts. When I examine the space in between these two points, the space composed of this man’s actions, I will know something about him. The process of this man’s life will determine whether or not he is to be remembered. This man was Abraham Lincoln.

Watching “Forrest Gump” for the first time in a long while the other night made me rethink the quotation from the movie at the top of this post. Whether the movie focused on personal inadequacies, reckless life decisions, abusive childhoods, unfortunate circumstances, and even death, it would appear that the narrative arc visible throughout the movie was that despite it all, you must keep going forward because we can never understand today until we see tomorrow. We just have to remember that the way something ends has nothing to do with what that something means. Life is a hard thing, but it’s all about perspective:

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Instead of complaining that the rosebush is full of thorns, be happy that the thorn bush has roses.” - Proverb

The Living-Dead...

2009-02-06T16:35:00.002-05:00

Unbeknownst to me, I died at some point during 2006. On January 1, 2006 statistics were calculated by various organizations who intimated that during the course of 2006 approximately 1.4 million people would receive a new cancer diagnosis and roughly 565,000 would die from cancer. That is nearly two million people for those who excel at discerning spatial relations, but fail at basic arithmetic. Determining my unique diagnosis and adding to it my less than favorable prognosis would have lead almost all cancer experts to determine that I would die before 2007. Be that as it may, I assure you that I am indeed writing this blog today February 6, 2009. I may, however, be writing as a resurrected being. That situation has not been determined as of yet.

In any event, I’m alive, which seems a trivial statement out of context. I assume that you, who are reading this, are similarly alive. For me, though, that statement means something special. It means something especially since at one point I was dead. There is something altogether skin-crawling about hearing the eerily calm voice of a doctor, after having read your record, telling you, “It’s a surprise to see you alive still.” I would think that surprises are not exactly good things when dealing with cancer, but I sure do feel mighty special every time I can make some doctor give himself a chuckle. I do like to respond saying, “I’m glad I can hang around long enough to pay for your kids’ college tuition.” Then the sadistic son-of-a-bitch wants to slice me open and look at my brain.

I have begun to understand that I am quite good at almost dying. It’s living with which I am having the problem. I cannot seem to keep a steady stream of days together in which I am undeniably alive. If I were to guess, I would assume that right now I am actually dead, but I am still able to walk and talk and gesticulate in the likeness of a living human being. Forgive me for saying so, but it would seem that it’s much more fun to be dead and walking amongst the living than it would be to be living and walking amongst the dead. That’s just my guess if one had to choose. Don’t throw your hands up in disbelief that I’m calling myself dead either. Go to www.dictionary.reference.com and enter in dead. The Random House Dictionary lists forty-two separate definitions of the word dead with only the first three definitions meaning dead in the classical sense. Let’s use the thirty-sixth definition of the word (it seems just as arbitrary to choose number one as it does to choose number thirty six): the period of greatest darkness, coldness, etc.

As stated though, I am exceedingly successful at almost, but not quite dying. It gets to the point sometimes where you are so used to being almost dead that it becomes commonplace. I forget what it’s like to feel fully alive. I no longer remember what it’s like to say, “See you in a few weeks,” and know that I would actually see them. I only know how to plan for the future accepting that it might be a future that I will never see.

There is a set of beliefs that propose the notion that one’s name dictates the trajectory of one’s life. For instance, in theory, being named Samuel, which means “his name is God”, would affect how that person progressed. Perhaps, he would be more attuned to the teachings of monotheism in its totality. Katherine means pure, so perhaps a person bearing this name would have elements of her that would be considered pure. Andrew means strong, manly, and courageous. Obviously, this theory is astoundingly correct! I’ve died two or three times in the last two and a half years and this living-dead carcass, with manliness, strength, and courage, will not go gentle into that good night. It will rage against the dying of the light.

My body may be bruised and scarred like the prize fighter who has reached the winter of his career. My innards may be the distorted incurable filigree crafted by the most malevolent of artisans; however:
"NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be" – Gerard Manley Hopkins “Carrion

If you think watching movies with sex scenes in them with your parents is awkward…

2009-02-05T15:43:00.001-05:00

Before my treatments began, I had to sit through an awkward conference from my oncologists nurse about the effects of chemotherapy on human beings. Eventually, we arrived at the point in which my nurse explained that the side effects of chemotherapy on the reproductive organs are unknown, and perhaps I should consider cryogenically memorializing my genetics. She suggested some places in the area that come with a good referral. In any event we made an appointment at a sperm lab in midtown Manhattan on the east side.

Inconspicuous would be my description of my first appointment. The day seemed rather uneventful. I went to the hospital and had the doctor give me some results of my tests. Then, we took a cab ride to the east side and stood outside what we were told was our destination. The funny thing about places in New York, as I’m sure many of you know, is that the outside appearance of a place in no way indicates what lay behind the entrance. Two discrete doors can actually turn into a swanky, upscale Korean restaurant that takes up over 10,000 square feet over two floors. Repro Lab, Incorporated appeared to be as unnoticeable as the other thirty some-odd apartment buildings on the same block. Behind door number one, however, was a land of opportunity. It was a building from which babies, and baby making materials would be extracted, maintained, and cultivated. It was a baby factory. Against my wishes, Katie and my mom accompanied me to location. I told them I didn’t need that much moral support.

I went to the desk and retrieved the necessary paperwork needed for me to make a deposit. I joked with the lady at the desk whether this bank had a competitive CD rate or not. I figured I could make a deposit and gain interest over time. Let my investment mature over time. She was not of the humorous type. I think she was a Russian babushka, a throwback to the old Soviet Union. Short, stout, fat women who do nothing but look at you funny and make you feel like you’re the one who speaks awful English. I took my clipboard and read over the papers. Across the top of each page is what I can only surmise to be the slogan or tagline of Repro Lab Incorporated: “Repro Lab Inc. – The Semen Cryobanking Center that Cares.” I pondered about what it might take for a spank bank to differentiate itself as caring. Premium priced magazines? The Playboy channel? Deposit assistants? Security guarding the sperm vault?

So, I fill out my name, age, and address and give my social security number, meanwhile, I’m trying to understand in what way RLI will show me they care. I wonder if they hire people to sit inside the spermatorium and read Dr. Seuss books and Mother Goose tails to all the future children. I would suggest “Hop on Pop” and Humpty Dumpty. I assessed my sperm proxy care individual. I decided that if I were to die that the best way to repay my father for all the hard-earned cash he spent on me was to give him my special men. My imagination created the scenario in the fashion of putting ashes in an urn and resting it on the mantle… I gave my paperwork to our Russian KGB and sat down.

The whole place made your skin crawl. Common stains on the floor became much more distasteful in my mind. At last, Galina Ulanova called my name and brought me to my room. Quick room inventory: ten-by-ten (at most); one counter, soap dispenser and sink included; one paper towel dispenser; long table placed against the wall, various (low-end) pornographic movies and magazines included; one surprisingly comfortable looking lazy boy chair, with recline capability; one ten-inch television/VCR unit.

I tried to become comfortable in this room. I tested the comfort of the lazy boy chair. The rustling of the medical protective paper as I sat startled me and I jumped up afraid that I could be heard outside of my room. So I waited a bit, I realized that I could hear everything going on in the hallway. I could hear Oxana Baiul figure skating clients into their rooms and then performing a salchow into a triple axel back behind her iron curtain counter. As if the situation were not awkward enough, the gentleman in room 4 had the volume on his television/VCR unit entirely way to high. I turned my back to the door to look over the landscape in front of me. My eyes scanned the room and in that moment I considered exactly how important to me it was to have children. That plastic cup was just staring at me from the counter. It burned a hole through my forehead, man! There he was just sitting, judging, as if to say, “Yup, this is what your life has become.” I hated that room.

After three visits, I began my treatment. For reference, I went there alone each time after. I gave you this lurid story because it was exactly two and a half years ago that I took my first treatment. I just thought that you might want to really know what I was doing before treatment. And I ask you, “Please, it’s tough to write this stuff down sometimes – don’t make fun of me the next time you see me!”

Take care. I’ll be back.

The Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss...

2009-02-04T15:16:00.005-05:00

"I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind.
Some come from ahead and some come from behind.
But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see.
Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"~Dr. Seuss

When I was a boy I played with my toys
Some of my toys were toys of boys
Of soldiers and turtles and racing cars, too
If only I’d known what would come when I grew.

When I was a bit older, my shoulders grew bolder
And my bolder shoulders asked girls to come over
I twisted, I turned, but none did I see
Well enough to think “Gee, this one’s for me.”

I tittled and I tattled and I often did battle
With mindless chatter that piddled and prattled
I bibbled and babbled to answer the chatter
But often I said “This is all much too much a-clatter!”

Until the day when she came my way
I was smitten as a kitten, what can I say?
In my clouds and shrouds, she was my ray.
I’d say, “I’m going to marry that girl some day.”

Not her, not I, not none could predict
That I’d become a fix that couldn’t be fixed.
I smiled through my trial though my feelings were mixed
This story I’ll explain, I’ll try to depict.

A fighter I’ve been, ones who know will agree
But fighting this fight was not one I could see
To me it was nothing but a pain while I ate
I strained with the pain that I tried to abate

Black lung, pink lung
One lump, two bumps
My time is come
My time is done
The fruits of old life
Of this I’ll have none

Tested and testing, scanning and scanned
Poking and prodding, appointments I’d planned
Today, tomorrow, two years-one half
Two more? To know, how great would be that?

To sleep, to dream, to sweat, to scream
To wake, to wait, to think, to seem
To be better, to be worse,
Seem to be the same to me

To live, to die, to laugh, to cry
I did not ask, "God, tell me why!"
Life does pass most people by
While they’re busy making plans,
But those plans never fly.

Those plans they die without flight
The flight has to fight with the scary plight
And the scary plight has a very mighty might
Life passes by, the plans never see light

What plans, with scans, can I try and make, sir?
What stake, with haste, can I try and claim, sir?
I do not like black lungs and scans…
I do not like them Sam-I-Am…

I would not like it in my head
I would not like to lie in bed
I do not want it in my gut
I do not want it that would suck
I would not like it in my chest
I would not like it in my neck
I would not like surgeries numbering three
I would not, do not want that for me

However, it seems as though it’s in your head
It seems as though you’ll lie in bed
It seems as though it’s in your gut
It seems as though this will suck
It seems as though it’s in your chest
It seems as though it’s in your neck
It seems as though you’ll have surgery
It seems as though there should be three

One slice, two slice
Three slice, me slice
Beds and heads and chills and pills
Pain and gain, hopes and thrills.

“How did it get so late so soon?
It’s night before it’s afternoon.
December is here before it’s June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”- Dr. Seuss

This is not the way things should go,
This is not what I’ve been told.
Son goes before mother grows old?
This is not what I’ve been told.

I cannot, I will not let it be so
Though my body be weak and my hair start to go
Let my stomach to my food say “Oh, no
We don’t want you here, you've got to go.”
I'll take the bumps and bruises just to show
I cannot, I will not let it be so.

And I did not I have not let it be so
And now, on head and face, my hair does grow
I go, but slow I go, because I will always know
Today is here, though tomorrow may not show

The Grinch the Lorax, Mr. Knox, and the man
Who would not in them in a box
And would not eat them with a fox
They all learned the lesson to love
Above all, and of all, there is nothing above
While you’re still around, while you still can
Don’t be afraid to try Green Eggs and Ham.

I had Breakfast at Tiffany's once. It's a diner on Route 17. The food wasn't so good. Not worth a movie...

2009-02-02T17:50:00.002-05:00

"I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing. Kissing a lot! I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles." - Audrey Hepburn

Some people may feel that it is easier to believe in nothing than it is to believe in something. I think that's because when you believe in something - another person, God, love, fate - it can let you down. If that something let's you down once it's almost as if you never trust that thing again. Or worse: when you finally trust it again, it lets you down once more. One of the hardest things to handle, I think, is to believe in something and have it prove you wrong.

There have been some who have believed in me and I have let them down. I have believed in my body and it has let me down. My loved ones believed in chemicals and surgeries and radiation and those things have let them down. It's tough for them to put their faith back into any of those things. Shit, it's tough for me to trust my body to get me up a flight of stairs, not to mention, defeat an infamous silent assasin. I lose nothing, however, by putting belief back into myself. At worst, it lets me down again. In that case I'm no worse off than I would be already. How much worse off would I be, I ask you to ponder, if I believed in nothing, and had nothing upon which to lean when I became tired from the constant fight? So I choose to believe in me again, because I cannot believe that a life without purpose is worth living.

So I have said, let us not believe in statistics, yet let us not be nihilists either. I do not know what it is that you believe in, nor will I try and manifest some universal belief system that can answer all your questions. I will only tell you to do this: find something to believe in and then really believe in it. You have to leave yourself open to be hurt. Allow that something that you choose to possibly let you down, because that means that you truly believe in it. And that belief in something is the only something for which living is worth. It's not supposed to make sense. It's not right because it makes sense, it's just right. Believe in something. Find something for which you will die for and then break your neck trying to pull it off. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."

This is my best Audrey Hepburn impersonation:
I believe in life. I believe in doing what makes you happy for no other reason than that it makes you happy. I believe in those who believe in me. I agree with Bertrand Russell that "the time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." And I believe it again when John Lennon said it to much more acclaim that "time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted." I believe in smiling. I believe in Bunny. I believe that either you beat something or you die trying to beat it, but that you can never give up.

But how do you believe in something without any proof? How can one believe in something when every ounce of evidence has proven the contrary? How can I, or anyone, logically believe that my situation will improve rather than diminish after one realizes the complete history of the manner in which my disease has progressed?

In the same way that the comedic hero Don Quixote forced a group of men he met on his travels to swear by the beauty of Dulcinea del Toboso or else die where they stood. They responded to Don Quixote that if he could only provide one picture - some bit of proof - of Dulcinea's beauty, that they would gladly genuflect before the knight-errant and proclaim Dulcinea del Toboso the most beautiful woman in the world. Don Quixote, however, did not except this answer and he replied to these men:
"If I were to show her to you," replied Don Quixote, "what merit would you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend it..." - Miguel de Cervantes "Don Quixote" Book I, Chapter IV
Something that has been proven to exist or has been known to exist is not a belief; it is a fact. A belief, however, is defined as a confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to proof. Thus, having proof of something, either through sight or identifieable experimentation and then believing in it is not to have a belief. That is logically reasoning from true premises to a conclusion. To believe in something without significant substantial cause, without concrete proof, that is to have a belief. To be cliche: seeing is not believing; believing is seeing.

The 19th Century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer developed a philosophy with the concept of the "will to live" as the emphasis. Schopenhauer believed that every being in the universe, even the universe itself - every organism, social construction, even some non-living things - is driven by a primordial will to live. It was Schopenhauer's belief that the will to live was the most fundamental aspect of reality, even more fundamental than actually being.

I cannot disagree, but I know that there are others who can. I know that there are others who believe that the most fundamental aspect of being is the acquisition of power - this was Nietzsche. I know that there are others who believe that the most fundamental aspect of being is self-sacrifice - this was Jesus Christ. More often today most of us exist closer to the middle of these two unenviable roads. Some think the fundamental aspect of being is having perfect hair. Others belief that it is ensuring that others have perfect hair. Some believe that status, salary, or celebrity is the essence of being. Others belief that art, metaphysics, and ethics are the pursuits of the soul. What are all of these pursuits except the ultimate tilting at windmills? Power, money, self-sacrifice, hair, status, celebrity, art, and philosophy disappear the moment before our valiant lances plunge through them. And we end up face in the dirt, ass in the air. Please do not misunderstand, I'm not calling everyone to a monastic life; rather, I'm just hoping that these magical things capable of disappearing do not convince you that they are the essence of reality. If you believe that they are, they will leave you when you need them most.

Believe in something real and tangible and never fail to use it as your guiding light, as your North Star. Remember seeing is not believing, believing is seeing. Make the world what you want it to be by looking at it the way you choose. I'm afraid of letting down the people that believe in me. We cannot control what happens. I can only give you the promise of my belief. I believe that I will be all right, and in the end, this belief is the resolve that allows me to roll out of bed in the mornings.

Miguel de Cervantes was a wise man:
I've been a soldier and a slave. I've seen my comrades fall in battle or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I've held them in my arms at the final moment. these were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning "Why?" I don't think they were wondering why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams -- this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all -- to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Be a little crazy... Believe.

What Goes Boom in the Night?

2009-01-26T16:02:00.008-05:00

Am I fated to live Odysseus' life, to be away from home for twenty years? Ten years to be spent fighting a war that seems near impossible to win? A war against an enemy that has nearly never been defeated. And If I win this war, storming the cancerous walls of Troy, to what do I have to look forward? Another ten years at sea, trying to find my way home? Having lost myself in battle, I will awake every morning to a phantom pain, a nonexistent affliction that agonizes my psyche. I will spend every month at first, then every three months, then every six months, then every year waiting for that ache of malignancy to return.
As she sleeps, my fiancee tosses and mumbles inaudible cries that seek understanding. Finally, she asks aloud, "How can I plan for a future with you when I can't even be sure that you will be there?" How indeed. And I have no reasonable answer for her cries. What can I tell her? How do you put other people inside of your mind? What if she could know what I see just before I fall asleep.
In those moments before I fall asleep - a demi-death so to speak, a veritable recreation of the death experience itself - while others dream of being Peyton Manning, or Barack Obama, or Bill Gates, or Britney Spears, I imagine what might be if I never opened my eyes again. I meditate on the idea that sleep and death feel the same, the only difference being waking up.
My eyes grow heavy, but I fight on against the force that threatens to close my eyes. And in my illusory perceptions of conscious sleep I can visualize the organs in my body. I see black, hardened tissue spreading over the pink, fleshy cells like locusts over a lush green meadow. I see the images from health class of a smoke-damaged lung, the black tissue is the gnarled and twisted metals of a building burned down. Negative images of my body scans paint the backs of my eyelids. My body is the view from a ski resort window in the Swiss Alps, white snow as far as the eye can see. The flickering of concerned eyes from friends and family while they hear the unfortunate news. The gaping mouths of disbelief. This is not the winter, nor summer, spring nor fall of our unhapiness, these are the days of our discontent.
Have I fallen asleep? Am I still awake? Every day there is something to remind me, something that tells me that I am sick, that I am dying. My response, continues to feel the same: show me something other than black pictures with white skeletons swaying to and fro on them, I DO NOT FEEL SICK. I only feel the cold touch of death while lying on the chairs in which you tell me to lie. Only after accepting the medicine that you tell me to accept. Come see me on the other days I tell them. Come and sit on the couch with me and watch "Step Brothers." Show me I'm sick then. The mind cannot feel what the body does, and, unfortunately, the body cannot comprehend what the mind ponders. If only the body knew that it was not sick, then perhaps I might wake from this nightmare. But the body knows what the mind is unwilling to admit. He senses the infiltrator tip-toeing here and then there floating through his canals on a trip to another part of the body...
I'm jolted awake... I finally can escape the hauntings of my mind. I do NOT agree with the ideas that penetrate the soft walls of my head during the night hours, but I cannot escape them since I cannot control them. Surely, these thoughts exist in my mind somewhere; in some cavernous Mariana Trench in the North Pacific Ocean of my psyche. These are not my thoughts. These are inescapable horrors that come with the territory. It is like watching a horror film: one enjoys the feeling of being scared - or at least they are able to cope with seeing it - but one cannot escape the fearful thoughts that creep into the mind and poison the dreams of individuals.
Rest assured that thoughts alone will not make me too afraid to look under the bed, because I know that there are no monsters that dwell there. Come out from hiding and face me head on, I chide them. Like I thought, they prefer the deep ocean trenches. I think their voices are made scarier by the echoes, which deepen the groans and heighten the screams.
I am not afraid, nor should you be My Love. They are shadows and dust only. So, sleep quietly and sleep soundly.
Do not fear what cannot hurt you; and thoughts alone cannot pierce the skin...

Prepare for Battle Soldier

2009-01-21T10:29:00.002-05:00

After a treatment, the countdown towards the next treatment has already begun. It's a running timer that continuously resets itself and I cannot seem to avoid it. 25 of the last 29 months my treatments have come almost as sure as the sun rises. and when the breaks are given to you, that clock merely extends itself, but still it ticks away. Time doesn't stand still for a moment, except for the moments when you feel your absolute worst, when the clock seems to sit at 1:23 p.m. for an eternity. My pursuit against my disease seems to cast me as Sisyphus, the man condemned by the Greek gods to endlessly roll a boulder to the top of a mountain, at which point the boulder would roll back down from it's own weight. Laboriously, I accept my treatment and begin my banal ascent towards recovery at the top of the mountain. My Sisyphean task near completion, I reach the top of the mountain believing that, this time, my boulder might stay. The momentary hesitation of the stone only serves to reinforce my hopes that this time it will remain; yet, the boulder plummets towards the ground as I arrive back at the hospital for the next round of treatment. The fight and struggle seems futile, as the energy appears to be exerted towards accomplishing nothing.
The muscles tighten and fire electric signals to the brain, which relays back the physical movement of the body against its boulder. The body goes low for leverage and the foot digs into the ground. Sweat pours from the brow and often times the struggle seems too cumbersome a task. Then, the task is complete and the task is resurrected in the return to the chemo chair.
Sisyphus and I differ because he is dead and I am very much alive. My task may appear futile, but I have something that Sisyphus does not have: hope. His situation is infinite, decreed by the gods with no possibility for success, whereas though my torture may seem destined for failure, there has been no such prophecy.
I walk down the mountain towards my boulder smiling. Not because I am glad enjoy my plight, but rather because one day I will put the boulder in its place and descend the mountain with no plans to return.
So today, as I walk towards the boulder that awaits me in the chomo chair tomorrow, I smile, raise my glass, and propose a toast to life, to love, and to happiness (as I do every Wednesday night before chemotherapy). So, if you happen out on a random Wednesday night, and see me walk down the mountain and in the door of the bar, come and join me, we like company and good conversation, especially to clear the mind and become composed before we return to our burden. There is no cross we bear that is too heavy for our will to maintain, only a mind too irresolute to decide to do so.
"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Art of War...

2009-01-20T10:18:00.007-05:00

We arrive at 160 East 53rd Street in New York. We smile and say hello to the kind workers at the information desk. Elevator ride to the fourth floor. Say hello and check in at the desk. Fill out forms for perscriptions if needed. Then:
Take a seat and wait.
"Samuel, Andrew!"
Name is called and it's time to give some blood. Blood pressure, temperature, and pulse rate.

"Do you have a mediport?"
"Yes."
"Which arm has the best veins?"
"Most like to use the left."
The veins in my right arm silently weep as they slink behind skin and muscle. The phlebologist investigates the veins while she puts a tourniquet around my left bicep. She lines up her weapons: alcohol preperation wipe, gauze, bandage, needle equipped with a catheter, four viles to be filled with type A+ blood. The technician steadily pierces the skin on the inside of the elbow just to the right of the scar tissue that has built up over the last two and a half years. A slight wiggle and the blood pours forth, methodically filling up each vile in succession. She pulls out the needle (it always hurts more coming out for some reason) places the gauze over the small poke and bandages that bad boy up. Step on the scale. I can't read kilograms... And I'm done.

Take a seat and wait...
And wait...
The doctor's assistant walks right up to me to take me into the back to see the doctor. Her name is Jane. Sometimes it's Jessica. They know me well enough to not have to call out my name. Now I'm in the room sitting on the protective medical paper over the patient chair. Now it's time to:
Take a seat and wait...
And wait...
And wait...
Wait...
Wait.

Knocking at the door can either mean the doctor has arrived, or the attending doctor has arrived. It's the doctor. We exchange pleasantries and the doctor takes a nonchalant position leaning agaisnt the counter. I like my doctor a great deal. Not only is he extremely knowledgeable, but he is able to read his patients well. He knows that he can say things to me shooting straight from the hip and I like that. Good news or bad, I need to hear it straight and to the point. Nice little talk, maybe a little poking and prodding and examining.
Deep Breath...
And another...
And again...
And again...
And one more time.
And it's back out to the waiting room.
To wait...
And wait...
Wait...
Wait...
Waaaiiiiiiiiiiit.
"Samuel, Andrew!"

Called again and this time for the knock out stuff. Sit in the chair. "Would you like a blanket?"
I bring my own. It's not particularly cold at first, but with all the intravenous fluids going in, it cools down the blood. Nurse comes in and asks the questions. Same questions everytime. Now it's time for another needle stick.
The 'Huber' needle is a thicker gauged needle that is curved down slightly. It is pushed into the mediport that is embedded in my upper right chest. This stick is far more painful than the arm stick. The curved needle slices through the thick, protective skin of the chest and falls into it's place within the mediport. Usually. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to have the nurse just miss the void that exists within the mediport. Sometimes they miss altogether and other times they hit the surrounding lining,either way the medicine cannot get into the blood stream. When they miss, though, they don't take the needle out. They only pull it out a little and try and reposition it while the needle is still inside of you. This is not fun. Other times you are lucky enough to be pricked more than once by the curved needle.

Needle is in the skin now. A little saline for a while to hydrate the body. Then the anti-nausea intravenous medicine.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the next two hours. It's chemo time! I'm oddly composed as I watch the fluid in the bag race towards the tip of the needle lodged in my chest. I've always felt a relative calm in the chemo chair. A relaxed acceptance that the moment of calamity is upon me and it cannot be outrun. So slowly it comes and yet so consistently. I feel it the first time my heartbeat circulates the chemical-containing blood through my heart. It flutters in the beginning. The anti-nausea kicks in at this point. It's Benadryl. I started to figure it out. They drug you so you can't feel the initial effects of the treatment until later. My mind is stubborn, though. I stay awake as long as possible. The darkness takes over slowly. The clouds roll over the horizon. My mind grows tired, my eyes glazed, my speech erratic.
Fading...
Fading...
Faded...
Out.
The outside sleeps, but the inside fires off nuerological impulses as constant as ever. I can hear bits of conversations happening outside of me, and the war for dominance wages within me. It's the Battle of Bull Run on the inside and the outside peacefully sleeps with barely a rustle of the body. The Yankee troops of the normal cell tissue stages a battle. Massively out numbered and predicted to lose a quick war to the superior Confederacy. The Rebels of the dissenting cancer cells are highly skilled and highly trained soldiers prepared for swift victory over the Yankees. The Yanks win a surprising victory to start off. But much blood is spilled before the war ends. This, however, is the the microcosmic civil war. One body battling against itself. A single union divided by unavoidable issues. The dream wages on in my mind.
It is a lucid dream and I think I dream while I am awake.
It is a dream that does not end when I open my eyes.
It is a dream that does not end on the drive home.
It is a dream that does not end the next day.
It is a dream that has not ended.
My civil war rages and when my Yankee army is depleted and wounded and the superior killing machines of the Rebel South close in, I will recall Abraham Lincoln's words:
"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."

Let's have a party at Appomatox Court House when this war ends. Who's bringing chips?

Paradise Found...

2009-01-19T16:26:00.005-05:00

...in those sometimes green, sometimes brown, always beautiful eyes.
...with hearing my brother's silent agreement.
...behind my parent's attempts to hide their smiles.
...watching the way my sister is "all growns up" and so much better than either my brother or myself.
...during late night movies.
...kicking back for "Couched-Out" Sundays.
...during Friday and Saturday nights out and about on the End of town that always goes West.
...on hot summer days and humid summer nights and dogs that won't stop barking.
...with all night bonfires.
...grilling steaks for 30 while sipping on a cold one (or more).
...playing marathon volleyball matches.
...seeing my sister-in-law in a pretty dress.
...in Rock Band.
...knocking knees on 'Our' back steps.
...finding the 'Mud Bandit' of 2008.
...seeing old friends every once in a while at the Inkwell
...winning state-championships.
...drinking 10 a.m. cocktails in a country that has English as a second language.
...remembering: cat. apple. table.
...performing full-recoveries.
...on trips to the flight deck on Sunday mornings.
...thinking about awkward questions at the first family dinner.
...inside of two cases of 'stones, 1-on-1 beer pong, and a little hard to get.
...looking unpleasantly at dimples on the butt
...listening to advanced battleship during Desperate Housewives.
...enjoying Super Bowl XLII.

These are a few of my favorite things...

Creative Writing...

2009-01-16T10:39:00.004-05:00

I remember rubbing my hand against the protective paper over the medical examination chair. the doctor was talking, but I was barely listening to him. The sound my hand made against the paper was the sound of waves crashing on the shore in Monmouth Beach on a mid-summer day.

I envisioned myself on that beach. She was in a chair to my right putting on some tanning lotion. I smiled and said I was going to take a dip in the water. Of course I asked her if she wanted to come, but she said no as she usually does. "The waves could gobble me up and swallow me. I'm just a little itty-bitty!"

"So, in other words, there is no way that I can confidently tell you how long I believe you have left to live, because cancer is such an individual disease. Some people have the smallest of lesions and don't last more than a few months and others have very bad cases and end up having a nice quality of living for a long time."

I didn't like how often he referred to the term quality of living. As if feeling sick every day, being bald, throwing up, being too tired to do anything was any type of living besides a shitty kind. Was it supposed to make me feel better that every so often he treated someone that had a pretty bad case who made it more than a few years. I didn't want to delay the disease. I wanted to get rid of it. I can hear him talking over the thoughts in my head. What was that? He has treated someone as young as 19 years old who had a stage IIIa disease...

"How long did his 'quality of life' last, Doc? Is he still with us?"

"I'm not really able to discuss other patients with you."

I didn't think so. I don't want to be in this room right now. The worst thing is that I have about 10 people out there in the waiting room waiting for me to go out there and say, "You know what? They made a mistake. I'm just perfectly fine," but I'm not perfectly fine. I'm perfectly fucked. I can't say that I'm particularly angry at anyone. I can't really say that I don't deserve this. I think it's just pretty much something that happens and this time it has happened to me. What is it going to be like for my parents to have to bury their son? That's not the way it's supposed to go.

How can I look into the eyes of the lady I love and tell her that everything is going to be okay when the other doctors aren't sure if I'm going to make it out of August?

I just have to keep everything together. Don't let them worry about you more than they already are worrying. If the worst happens at least you won't be around to have to watch your loved ones cry. If anythign else happens just tell yourself it could always be worse...

I don't want to die right now. I want to marry her. I want to have kids. I want to see my brother's kids. I want to be a best man. I want to be an uncle. I want to graduate college. I want to see the Grand Canyon. I want to see Niagra Falls. I want to own my own business. I want to be a grandfather someday. I want, I want, I want...

Did he just say that I should consider freezing my sperm? Well, thanks, Doc. That sure as shit made it awkward with my parents in the room. I'm not going to be able to have kids! There might be some people that think that's better off though. I guess I will just have to wait and...

"Yeah... Thanks, Doc... I know... Okay, two weeks, can't wait...Bye."

"Are you okay, Son?"

"Let's just go. I want to get out of here."

I want to have a cigarette. I want a stiff drink. I want to get wasted and stop having these terrible thoughts in my head. I don't want to keep imagining lying in a bed with everyone around me crying and concerned. I just want to go to that party tonight where nobody knows and I don't have to keep dealing with it...

"No, honey, everything was fine... The doctor is very optimistic... We aren't sure yet. I have to coem back in two weeks...Yes, I still want to go to Justin's... No, I promise, I won't drink or have a cigarette... You're right. I am lying. Maybe just a few cigarettes."

That's it. I never want to see that look in her eyes again. You tell her it's going to be okay and then make sure that it's going to be okay. Make a promise to yourself right here. Be the exception to the rule. Be the one who writes the statistics, rather than the one that follows them. Don't lose the faith. What did Mickey used to tell Rocky in the movies? 'You're a machine. A machine. Put your head down. Keep moving forward. Run right through 'em!' That's what I'm going to do. Accept everything that happens, but never fold your hand. Break them and keep breaking them as long as they let you. The world doesn't owe you anything. It has no reason to take it easy on you. But you don't owe the world anything either. Who says you have to take it easy and just lay aside while the black hole sucks you in and tears you apart? You have two options: live or die. You can attack life and do it the right way for whatever time you have left, or you can lay back and let life happen to you. Attack. It's what you have always done. Go for the throat. Keep moving forward. Run right through it. Run right over it. It's not over until every bone in your body is broken and every muscle inside is torn apart. Let the world come after you and try and take you - death isn't and option, it's an inevitability - but you give the world the toughest fight it's ever had. Don't give up.

The birds are twittering outside of the window. My leg is super hot for some reason. I just had a weird dream. Death was attacking me. I kept jumping out of the way of the sickle. I pushed him off the cliff. But he told me that more would come after me. And keep coming until I'm the one who falls... I'm staring at my wall. I can hear birds and feel warmth and I can see my wall. It's been over a month. 'What now, CANCER!' Fuck it. I'm done. I'm done worrying. I'm done with all the darkness. I'm done with the waiting. I'm done with it all. I just want to go on. It's going to be tough. Forever. It will never be the same again. But I'm going to spend my life doing my best to make everything exactly the same.

I'll leave you with these two thoughts about pushing yourself to the extreme and giving all your body can muster up:

"Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it." - Steve Prefontaine
"To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the Gift." - Steve Prefontaine

I don't know what my "Gift" is... but I know that I'm ready to bleed.

I got white dog crap in my belly, then you lay this shit on me...

2009-01-15T11:47:00.018-05:00

It all comes down to treatments...

Immediately, almost instinctively, we imagine nausea, vomiting, hair loss, weight loss, fatigue. Images flash before our eyes like the camera toys for kids where you slide in a film strip and click through to see the images. There's the Eiffel Tower. There's the Sphinx. The Pyramids of Egypt. Machu Picchu. Statue of Liberty. The Great Wall of China. Except these pictures are altogether more sadistic: We watch ourselves wasting away in a hospital bed. Running to the bathroom to throw up. Looking down into our hands to see our hair falling out. Darkness and death.

What does it feel like?

It's about as bad as you can conjure up in your head, and then make it a lot worse.

My frist treatment was filled more with anxiety than vomitus. I was worked up and scared and nervous. What would it feel like? Would it hurt? How long would it take?

Will I still be myself afterwards?

Outcome: uneventful. I got nauseous and was a little tired in the days following the treatment. But I did not think it was that bad. So, I went in to the second treatment thinking, "Maybe I'm just lucky. Maybe the chemotherapy just doesn't affect me in the way it does other people." Stranger things have happened.

I was wrong. The second treatment hit me like a baseball bat to the back of the head. I was OUT! I was in bed for a couple of days straight. I couldn't eat. I couldn't drink. My tongue felt like a piece of sand paper. I was dizzy. I couldn't open my eyes. I felt like I had fallen away from the world, just my bed and I.

The doctor told me I HAD to eat during treatments, and I explained to him that eating would be lovely and I enjoyed doing it, but not when swallowing would be concurrent with vomiting. My solid food diet was suspended and I was relegated to drinking Gatorade, Boost, and Ensure. I had all the flavors I wanted... I still couldn't drink them. I drank them so often that the smell of those drinks nearly made me vomit.

Before I was diagnosed and began treatment I weighed a stout 175 pounds, which was normal for me. In one month's time, I weighed only 145 some-odd pounds. I lost over 30 pounds and looked like a walking corpse. I had not weighed that light since 7th or 8th grade. I grew out a beard to hide how frail and gaunt I had become. For my two year anniversary, I had to wear a jacket from 7th grade, because I looked like a ten-year old in his father's suit.

Then the hair started to fall out. Now, I have always had a ridiculously, unnecessary abundance of hair. The range basically went from the top of my head to the tips of my toes without a break. As such, though my hair fell out, I still had remnants, though they tended to be sporadic and non-uniform. My eyes brows vanished (though the existed in some purgatorial state that made it seem as if I was waxing my eyebrows into a shape indicative of the St. Louis Arch). Similarly, my eyelashes disintegrated. Tears poured forth from my eyes in the slightest of winds. Even my nose hairs disappeared and nose-bleeds were a plenty. You don't realize the beauty of design in the human body until those things are robbed from you. My chest hair thinned (I spent the majority of my life until that point wishing that it woudl go away, and I found myself missing each strand of organic velcro that had once garnished my body). I found that it was extremely surprising how warm all that hari had kept me when I had it, and how ridiculously cold I was now that I no longer had it.

A lot of people have tried to figure out how chemotherapy "feels." I cannot seem to really put it into words that give it justification. All I can say is that the physical ailments and the torture (and it is indeed torture) that your body faces is less than nothing compared to the mental agony that you have to endure. I will never be able to fully express how you feel physically during treatments; it's incomparable to anything else I have ever experienced. And I hope that you will never know what I mean. I can only try and put you in some type of mind frame to try and see if you can begin to get the mental strain you undergo.

The only way to save your life is to engage in an act that while possibly giving you a chance to become better, simultaneously threatens to kill you. And you must bring yourself to the hospital willingly to sit down in that chair and have them hit you with the hard stuff, knowing beforehand how crappy you are going to feel and knowing that the side effects only get worse the further along you go.

But there is an African saying:
"Rain beats a leopard's skin, but it does not wash out the spots."

2009-01-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

For more about the theory of 50/50 see the writings of Chuck Klosterman

Remember these words: Cat. Apple. Table.

2009-01-13T15:46:00.008-05:00

Forget about statistics.

To me, statistics feels like a branch of mathematics that is a product of our needs, as a society, to make sense of an otherwise imbecilic world. Statistics is defined as "the branch of mathematics that deals with the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of numerical data. Statistics is especially useful in drawing general conclusions about a set of data from a sample of the data" (The American Heritage Science Dictionary). In other places it is described a branch of mathematics that uses probability theory.

Statistics draws general conclusions about a set of data from a sample of the data using probability theory. But we let statistics govern our lives. What we choose to do and not to do. Another way that we use statistics is as a reader of the future. That is, we use statistics to determine whether or not something will likely happen at some point in the future. This to me seems inconsistent. How can we use samples of data in the past or present in order to determine something that has not yet happened? People take such a big issue with the idea of fate, destiny, and the Judeo-Christian ideology that supports Providence, and yet they adhere to an idea that purports to be able to use the past to make an educated assumption about the future.

To me, statistics is only relevant in a world of potentiality - a world of possibilities and probabilities. That is the world that waits for us in the future. Us looking forward into the face of the future is like looking into a dark cave. The possibilities of the shape of the cave is infinite. It is not until we walk into the cave and light is shined into the cave that we can determine exactly how the cave is shaped. Similarly, the future is a shapeless terrain with infinite shapes that it can take determined by the decisions we make today; and it is not until we enter the future, and it becomes present, where the light shines onto that time that we can determine exactly the way things have turned out. But we do not live in a world of probabilities; rather, we live in a world of actualities. Flipping a coin, you have a 50% chance that it lands heads and a 50% chance that it lands tails. But I can flip it 100 times and get heads 75 times and tails only 25. So much for statistics.

A single die (one half of a pair of dice) has six sides, each numbered 1-6. If you plan on rolling the die at some point in the future and you hope that the number "5" turns up, statistics and probability says that there is a 1 in 6 chance that "5" will show up (16.67%). Great! I'm excited. So I roll the die and I get a "3". When there is no die and there is no rolling and we are only talking about what could happen if I rolled a die and wanted to see a "5" that is when we are in the world of probabilities where my 16.67% chance has some substance. but when I have the die and am prepared to roll it and have selected the number I wish to be displayed, 1 in 6 is gone, and I'm left with a very simple dichotomous future: either the die will turn up "5" or it will not turn up "5." My chances are 50/50.

Either something does happen or else it does not happen. There is no reason to consider the probability of something happening in reality as such, because that consideration is only significant if we remain in a vacuum. There is a fifty percent chance of anything happening to you, around you, inside of you, beside you, etc. The probability of being killed in an automobile accident are 5,000 to 1 (http://www.fearlessflight.com/), the possibility of fatally slipping in a bath or shower is 2,232 to 1, and your odds of getting hemorrhoids are 25 to 1 (www.funny2.com/odds). These statistics are data-based approximations. And yet, it serves me no purpose to concentrate on these bits of information, because approximations can only be applied to a large group or else, when applied to significantly smaller set (as in an individual or all the people known by an individual), the sample set is too small. When the information is in fact attributed to a large group, the best the statistics can do is make some generalized impersonal statement about the group at large without expressing anything specific regarding the individuals that make up the group.

Statistics in no way can be used as an indicator of the likelihood of my personal chances of experiencing any of the conclusions drawn by said statistics. Once I experience one or another of the infinite experiences that one may or may not have, it becomes irrelevant what the prior probability of such an event to have occurred was, because it has ACTUALLY occurred. Whether the possibility before the event took place was 5 to 1 or 5,000,000 to 1, the event has actually happened and I am experiencing it. Whatever the relative statistics may have been for me to have developed the specific type of cancer that I have, my chances to ACTUALLY have developed that cancer was and always would have been 50/50. Either I was going to develop the cancer or I was not going to develop the cancer.

Paradoxically, the only way to know whether or not something will happen is for it to happen, at which point it becomes inconsequential what the likelihood of the thing happening was previously. On the other hand, the only way to know that something will NOT happen will be through retrospective observation by those who care about us after we die. That is, the possibility that you will develop cancer in your life will be present for the duration of your life, and it will only cease to be a possibility once you have moved on to the hereafter. Statistics comfort us by making us believe that we are statistically exempt from having certain things happen to us. Well, we're not...

And just in case you are thinking about locking yourself in a bubble and never leaving your house because you believe this will tilt the odds in your favor just remember what Julius Caesar said to his wife when she warned him that he should not leave his house because there was a chance that the citizens of Rome would try and kill him:
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene II, 33-38).

Can you remember the three words I told you to remember without looking at the title?

If not, then your brain cancer surgery did not go well...

If Blue Sca-doo...

2009-01-12T14:29:00.010-05:00

In 2008, it was estimated that the United States Population was approximately 303,824,640 people. In 2008 it is estimated that 1,437,180 people were newly diagnosed with cancer and 565,650 people dies from cancer. That is a total of 2,002,830 people, roughly 0.659%.

The global population is estimated at 6,706,993,152 people. It is reported that 12 million people were diagnosed with new cancer cases and 7.6 million poeple died of cancer related deaths. That is a total of 19.6 million people across the globe, roughly 0.292%.

In 2006 the U.S. population was about 299.1 million people. 21,000 Americans were projected to be diagnosed with stomach cancer. That's about 0.007021% of the population. The average age at the time of a diagnosis of stomach cancer is 71. Approximately two-thirds of ALL people with stomach cancer are older than 65. About 5% of patients are younger than 35 years old and only 1% of stomach cancer patients are younger than 30.

1% of 21,000 people: 210. I was one of an estimated 210 people that in 2006 would be under 30 years old and diagnosed with stomach cancer. 210 out of 299.1 million is .00007021%. 1,424,286 to 1. Rare company indeed. There are better chances for the following to occur: dating a supermodel (88,000 to 1), the Detroit Lions winning Super Bowl XLIII (10,000 to 1 - assessed at the beginning of the season), winning an Olympic medal (662,000 to 1), and drowning in a bathtub (685,000 to 1).

And the staging process, how does that work? Stage I, II, etc. what does it all mean? Well each cancer stages differently. For stomach cancer there are many stages: Ia, Ib, II, IIIa, IIIb, VI. Staging is determined using the TMN system, where T explains the the extent of the cancer's penetration through the stomach wall (Tis-T4), N explains the number of lymph nodes that the cancer has spread to (N0-N3), and M is the presence of metastases to distant organs (spreading to other organs [M0-M1]). At my diagnosis I was considered a T4N1M1. A multi-problematic stage IV.

Oncologists and medical personnel in the cancer field determine success based on a statistical system known as the 5-Year Survival Rate. That is, if you are able to maintain a good quality of life for at least five years after the date of your diagnosis, you are considered a successful patient. The 5-year survival rates for the respective stages of stomach cancer are as follows:

Stage Ia/Ib - 88%
Stage II - 65%
Stage IIIa/IIIb -35%
Stage IV - less than 5%

My treatments started in August of 2006. It would be Monday and Wednesday every other week. My doctor and my family thought I should take a year off from college. I figured that I would live as close to the same life as I possibly could. So I attended class. I stacked my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Treatment weeks I would have treatment on Monday, classes on Tuesday, treatment on Wednesday, and classes on Thursday. I did take some extra days off. I graduated on time in May of 2007. What a headache!

Actually, the headache came in March of 2008. After 11 months straight of chemotherapy, I was given the summer off of treatment to recover. Treatment started again in October and continued through March of 2008. In the beginning of the month I started getting some headaches. Mild, though. By the end of the month the headaches culminated in one intense migraine. It got so bad that on Friday March 28th I was unable to function properly and went to the hospital for evaluation. I was told I had compound migraines caused by the new chemotherapy drugs I was on.

So imagine my surprise when subsequent CT-scans and MRIs revealed a malignant tumor in my right frontal lobe about 3.5cm squared, or roughly the size of a golf ball. Since we are talking about percentages: less than 5% of ALL stomach cancer patients will EVER have metastasis to the brain. Better and better, right. I'm already in the 1% of all stomach cancer patients, on top of that I have Stage IV with a 5% 5-year survival rate, and now I get another medical improbability on the plate. Immediate surgery was necessary, and on April 1st (April Fool's Day - how fitting) I had the tumor excised.

When I had recovered, I stopped my chemotherapy treatments for a while and began my radiation therapy, which took place over 2 weeks. Then I immediately restarted chemotherapy returning to a more physically demanding regimen. In the recovery time after the surgery, however, the cancer spread to my peritoneum and to the outside of the bladdar.

Millions of years of evolution and we still don't know a damn thing about anything (at least not officially). There are things we can "know" within ourselves. I want to share something that somebody said once. And I hope one of my friends recognizes this and remembers what it meant, and I hope you read it and realize that it not only applies to me or cancer patients or any particular person, place, or thing; but rather, it applies to whatever we choose to apply it towards:
"Now things in your life have changed ALOT, but you can get through this and anything else. You are not a victim. You are not a statistic. You are an anomaly. A rare, and therefore, special culmination of particular symptoms that have converged on one place at one time. And because you are an anomaly, you are capable of acheiving anything." - Anonymous

...we can, too.

And to ask the question is to know the answer...

2009-01-12T09:54:00.005-05:00

"For no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, than we begin to move ceaselessly towards death... so that our whole life is nothing but a race towards death, in which no one is allowed to stand still for a little space, or to go somewhat more slowly..."- Saint Augustine "City of God"

What an uninspired view of life. Life is a race towards death where no one can stop and smell the roses without, essentially, wasting the precious few moments that he has to live. Augustine's solution: spend your entire life praying and reflecting on God in the hopes that, after death, we will be rewarded with eternal life.

I will not impart any particular religious views because they all appear to be different slices of the same pie, with "exclusive" stories of their specific religions oddly enough seem to overlap with every other religion's "exclusive" stories. Similarities notwithstanding, let us presume there is a Creator, and it is within His creation that we exist. Fine. And it's clear that every moment we live is actually another moment closer to our death. Fine. But does that mean that we can only live after we die if we are lucky enough to be granted the grace of some omniscient Being?

It seems to me that the whole problem that people have with dying is that they do not know what death will be like and that they do not know what comes after death. If only a few of us are saved, then we fear damnation and so live according to certain rules. If we are all saved, then we fear damnation less and live according to a different set of rules. If there is no life after death, then we tend to grasp to every moment of our lives, scratching and clawing to pull ourselves in the opposite direction of the conveyor belt that draws us nearer to our final packaging.

Fear, then, is our major motivator. Fear is the reason we believe in religions and why we cower at the sight of death. Fear is why our emotions pour forward when we hear of someone who is at the end of their life. And we fear it because we know nothing about it:
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all - Shakespeare "Hamlet" (Thanks Mr. Maier)
This is the state of our existence. Fear drives us. But it is not death that we are afraid of, but rather the thought of death. When we imagine our own deaths, we imagine ourselves present in that moment. We imagine watching our loved ones crying because we are no longer with them. We wonder about who will show up to our wakes and our funerals. Were we loved? Did people really care about me? What will they say when I am gone? We worry about whether our wives or husbands will re-marry. Will our kids remember us? Will they think about me everyday? How much will I miss out on because I will no longer be alive?

But how much are you missing out on every day while you are still alive and have a chance to experience life?

Why worry about what you cannot know or reasonbly imagine? Change the course of the history of your life by acting today in a way that will make you smile when you are gone and looking back on the world. The reflections of God or the Creator or the gods are accessible all around us - in the glimpse of a lover's eye, in the giggle of a baby, in the beauty of a snow covered mountain range, in the serenity of the wind bustling through the trees, in the warmth of the sunshine on your cheeks, in the splendid taste of an ice cold beer in a frothy mug, in the tenderness of a mother's touch, in the adulatation of a "perfect game", in the pleasure of friendly company, in the raucousness of explosive laughter during good conversation, in the awe of a windless summertime day on the beaches of the Jersey Shore. These are my prayers. I try and see them in every moment that passes. Circumstance affords some of us the luxury of taking our time to discover that which is important in life. Such a luxury was not extended to me, but it was replaced with a much better gift: the immediate realization of how lucky we actually are. I wish you all could truly know how amazing a meal actually tastes, or how soothing it is to be with someone you love, or how good it feels to really laugh so hard it makes you cry...

Life is not a race towards death. It's not a race at all. It's a careful contemplation of who we are and what is important. We cannot help but ask "What is the meaning of life?" constantly demanding an answer to an apparently impossible question to answer. Is it impossible? I think in this case the question IS the answer. To ask "what is the meaning of life?" and expect an answer is like asking the sun not to rise and it conceding. To ask "what is the meaning of life?" and to pursue the answer in your life IS to answer the question. Simply put: the question - what is the meaning of life?; the answer - living.

"Certainly there is no one who is not nearer [death] this year than last year... For whatever time we live is deducted from our whole term of life, and that which remains is daily becoming less and less...It is one thing to make a longer journey, and another to walk more slowly. He, therefore, who spends longer time on his way to death does not proceed at a more leisurely pace, but goes over more ground. Further, if every man begins to die... as soon as death has begun to show itself in him... then he begins to die so soon as he begins to live." - Saint Augustine "City of God"

...Better get started living...

One a lighter note...

2009-01-09T13:35:00.002-05:00

I have solved the mystery of wehter a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable...

I stopped caring, and all my problems went away.

Seriously, if foods were people, people would give shit about which army the tomato was fighting on about as much as you care about knowing the color of your mom's under garments

Tyler Derdun Never Lies...

2009-01-09T10:28:00.009-05:00

The Rules of dying:

1st Rule: You do not talk about dying.
2nd Rule: You DO NOT talk about dying.
3rd Rule: If you give up, tap out, it's all over.
4th Rule: It's only you in the fight.
5th Rule: You only have one life.
6th Rule: No guts, no glory.
7th Rule: Life goes on as long as it has to.
8th Rule: If this is your first time, you're probably shitting a brick.

How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?

Well, not a lot.

Your entire life is a fight. From sperm to the deathbed.

Get this: When I was 21 yes I was told I would die. When you think about it, it's not really news. I knew that one day I was going to die eventually. I knew that no one lived forever. So why was it such a big deal? Because like everyone else, you know death is coming, but it's always thought of as something that will come, but it won't come now. It's thought of like Xeno's paradox of locomotion. In order for death to come, first it must travel half way to you, and once it travels half way it needs to travel half of the remaining distance, then half of that remaining distance, and so on, and so on, and so on. Thus, death can never arrive because there are an infinite number a half way points between you and death.

Ha. And this absurd logic is something we actually convince ourselves is true. Philosophy categorizes this type of argument of "Reductio ad Absurdum" (i think), which loosely means, if you follow out this argument to it's end, the result one would get produces an absurd outcome, which negates the argument altogether. But we always imagine we are invincible and act surprised when we are confronted with death.

But people do die. So Xeno's paradox must be absurd, because according to him no one can die, but reality proves otherwise.

We all accept the fact that cancer exists. No one refutes that point. What becomes silly is that we believe that cancer will happen, it just will not happen to ourselves. Our lives are ego-centric by necessity. We are only able to look at our lives, and the world proper, through our individualized perspective. So we are the main characters in our stories. We cannot imagine the star of the movie dying at the beginning of the story. He's supposed to live a cool life, then meet adversity, then go through some serious ups and downs, then get the girl, AND THEN he can die. But only after everything is tied up in a nice neat packaging with a bow on top. That's why in "Top Gun" Goose dies in the middle of the movie, but Maverick (Tom Cruise - who could forget the volleyball scene? Seriously, though, who flexes while checking their watch for the time?) deals with his adversity, kills the bad guys and then gets the girl. Sure the charater Maverick dies evetually, but that stuff happens off the screen where no one can see it. Maverick doesn't die of cancer. He dies of old age.

And WE are the Tom Cruises of our life movies. And we never envision the main character dying in the first half of the movie. So we say things like "I know cancer happens, but it won't happen to me," because we are somehow too special to get cancer. It's okay to happen to other people, just not to us. Wouldn't it just be perfect if bad things happened to bad people, and nice things happened to nice people? It would be like us living in a Disney Movie where everyone lives happily ever after except for the bad people. We can all be Cinderella and the bad people can be the Step-mother.

But it's not a movie. For me it's real life. For YOU it's real life, whether you admit it or not. The point is not to constantly worry about death around every corner. It's only so that you can reflect on how you really want to live your life thinking that maybe tomorrow you don't get a chance to do what you always wanted to do. Or say good-bye to the people who deserve to hear it. My biggest fear is dying before I can make sure that everyone I love knows I love them. Here's how it is though: you can't choose the way you leave this life, but you can choose the way you live this life. Put it on a bumper sticker and sling that shit!

To put it another way, life is like a game of No Limit Texas Hold'Em Poker. You can win big taking risks and you could lose it all in one throw. there is no winning and losing, because to win today means to lose tomorrow and a loser tonight can be Chris Moneymaker in the morning. Sometimes you get Queens full of Aces and sometimes you get no pairs, no connectors, and your drawing dead before the flop. You cannot control which cards are dealt to you, but you can control how you play those cards. Check, raise, bluff, fold, bait, all-in, call... In life, like in poker: only focus on the things you can control, and let the chips (yes the pun was intended) fall where they may.

I can't speak for everyone, but if I'm going down... I'm going down breaking every knuckle in my fist punching against death. I'm going down on my terms.

I am not a Cancer Victim.

I am not a Cancer Patient.

I am a Boxer who always has a puncher's chance.

I am a soldier of life.

I am Jack's Smirking Revenge...

The First Post

2009-01-07T11:48:00.007-05:00

Stage IV Gastric Adenocarcinoma. Metastes to esophagus, lungs, lymphatic system, peritoneum, bladder, and brain.

Fancy way of saying: your shit is fucked.

Well, it started off as a difficulty in eating. I was drinking heavily and working hard, so it seemed like a normal bodily reaction. It wound up being stage IV stomach cancer that spread to the esophagus, lungs, and lymphatic system.

I was told that I had 4 weeks to live. I was 21 years-old... I remember that day was sunny.

Well what could I do? We are very rarely able to appreciate the entirety of an event during the time we are experiencing it. This has given rise to the cliche that hindsight is 20/20. It is obviously easier to see the correct decision, or the extent of a situation, after you have experienced that event. After the event and/or decision has affected your life positively or negatively it is not too difficult to recognize it's impact at least on a very superficial level.

So I was sad, but no one knew that I had gone to a few other doctors alone who confirmed my diagnosis and actually were the ones who gave me the 4 week deadline. The oncologist I chose as my primary caretaker was reluctant to give me a time frame answer, especially with all of my love ones around. So the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th opinions spanned everywhere from 2-4 weeks.

Something happened on day 29. I felt liberated. I had beat the numbers. Calculations and probablilities weren't for shit. I woke up staring at my white wall. I remeber smiling, because I had been counting the days. It was at that moment that I realized that I was now playing with the house's money. I had many dark days reflecting on death and the things I would miss about life during the previous days. I accepted that I was going to die - soon, tomorrow, someday - and on day 29, the fact that I made it one day longer than expected allowed me to happily accept death whenever it came.

I've realized a lot of things since the "Reset" button of my life was pressed. Some of them you will not want to hear if you or someone you know has cancer or some other tragic disease or misfortune. The good things, though, you want to hear them, and for the first post I want to give you one really good thing to look forward to:

I was diagnosed Thursday July 6, 2006. I made it much longer than 29 days.

I can only tell you this blog will be sometimes sad, sometimes funny, always truthful.

I will talk to you soon