Content warning: mental illness, self harm, suicide, suicidal ideation
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Category: Life
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When you fall for someone, the first gift you give them is a set of tools. These are tiny tools, like something a watchmaker might use, or a neurosurgeon – miniature screwdrivers and pliers and tweezers and tack hammers and fine files and sets of miniscule gears and tightly coiled springs and winding keys, but also scalpels and forceps and plastic capillaries and saw-toothed blades and tiny drills and delicate sutures and immeasurably sharp probes – all of these bound up in a small neutral canvas roll woven from words of love.
With these tools your lover can repair the small tears and breaks that form in every life, reaching the places that you can’t reach alone – the cracks in self-esteem caused by unkind words, the fear forming after a serious diagnosis, the arrhythmic beating of a broken heart after a loss, the depression of the modern world – providing patches and repairs sufficient to help you finish healing on your own.
But if they unroll that canvas completely, toying with the marvelous array of tools you’ve given them, they can do as they wish. They can use the same tools to destroy you.
That is love – the faith that the tools you’ve provided will be used for good.
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Courtesy of Heather I learned a new initialism this week: BLUF, for bottom line up front. This is a good opportunity to put it to use.
I have cancer. Again.
I’ve been sitting on* this bit of info for a while, but my family has been going through some monkey’s paw-level curse shit over the last couple of months. My 89 year old father was diagnosed with cancer on a kidney (which he’s now had removed). My brother, Scott, lost part of a toe to diabetes and had to have the same foot rebuilt to repair damage. My sister-in-law, Vikki, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. (The two of them have been taking care of my dad through his illness, too.) And all of this within weeks of my last cat passing away. I’m assuming that my brother pissed off some old Eastern European woman and she hexed us all.
This time around the cancer isn’t in my throat; it’s in my prostate. Prostate cancer – as people like to point out – is very survivable. In fact, it’s virtually guaranteed that on a long enough timeline any American with a prostate is going to develop cancer there. In most cases a “wait and see what happens” approach is sufficient; I’m not one of those cases.
It doesn’t appear to have spread yet, but it has the potential to be bad if it does, so we’re going for surgical removal rather than taking a chance on radiation doing the job. My doctor doesn’t feel that it’s radically urgent to get it out at once, though, so the surgery is scheduled for November 13th – deliberately right before Thanksgiving so that I can use those vacation days as recovery time.
I’m taking advantage of the pre-surgery time to get my affairs in order, as they say. I’m not worried about something going wrong – although accidents do happen – but because an incident like this is a good reminder of the importance of having a living will, medical releases, and so on in place. Plus I have a shit ton of office work to do before I go under the robotically-wielded knife again. The last thing I want is for my workaholic self to be thinking about getting communications out when I should be stoned on prescribed painkillers, watching trippy movies, and letting myself heal from multiple laparoscopic holes in my abdomen.
So there you have it – the most recent bit of news from my part of the world. How are you doing? Better than that, I hope!
*Unintended pun, but I’ve leaving it.
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Since switching to full-time remote work, most of my time is spent at home. My schedule includes a moderate number of meetings, but my employer doesn’t require that everyone be on camera all the time, so I’m certainly not getting up every morning and putting on a suit and tie. The closest thing I have to formal work attire is a solid-color Costco polo shirt and a pair of jeans with a pair of white cotton athletic socks in place of shoes.
A few months back, though, I realized that I should really go to the effort of wearing shoes more often. One reason is that I have some very cool sneakers — rainbow-hued Chuck Taylors, for example — that deserve to get more use. But in truth, the house is so quiet when I’m working* that the sound of my big feet clomping down the wooden stairs to the kitchen annoys me.
The main reason for wearing shoes more often is a growing awareness of my need to protect my feet from injury. I am a diabetic, after all, and even if it is so well-controlled that I barely warrant a pre-diabetic label most of the time, I know what can happen to the extremities of diabetics. You end up getting an unnoticed splinter in your heel, an infection creeps in, and suddenly you’re eight inches shorter on one side. Neuropathy’s a bitch, man.
This past autumn, then, when I was asked about what I wanted for Christmas, I asked for slippers. Fuzzy slippers. Fuzzy slippers with rubber soles so I won’t slip on the stairs, and fuzzy so my feet don’t get cold when I’m sitting in front of a computer screen for hours at a stretch in a drafty old farmhouse in the midst of a bunch of cornfields.
Santa delivered. I have never felt as old as I did when I opened the gift and realized that I was genuinely elated on receiving a pair of fuzzy, blue, rubber-soled slippers. I wear them all the time — almost literally, since as I mentioned, I seldom leave the house.
But “seldom” isn’t “never,” and every couple of days I do walk the 150 yards or so from the house to the mailbox to see what manner of junk has arrived. I stroll briskly down the cracked and rotted old asphalt drive to the mailbox and back up to the house. If my work is finished for the day and the weather is nice, I might walk the mile-long side street past the neighboring farmhouses, and then just turn around and walk back again. (It’s an exciting life, isn’t it?) It’s a bit of exercise, anyway, and lets my eyes focus on something that isn’t digital for a change.
A couple of times I’ve run into neighbors and chatted with them. They’ve always been pleasant people in that inconsequential small-talk kind of way. One time I met the wife of one of the farmers — a young woman, maybe early thirties. She didn’t have the luxury of working from home since her job entailed handling billing paperwork for a mid-sized local medical practice. We spoke about jobs, and pets, and living in farm country. I enjoyed talking with her quite a bit, actually, even if she did give me the occasional raised eyebrow and half-smile.
It wasn’t until we parted ways that I understood. She’d just spent twenty minutes talking to an old, bald, white guy with a gash healing on the top of his head from a fall down the stairs, wearing a pair of faded black jeans, a logo-ed corporate jacket open to show a t-shirt covered in weird mystical symbols. And oh yeah — a pair of fuzzy blue slippers.
Yep. She was wondering which psychiatric facility I’d snuck away from.
There’s an unexpected bucket list item checked off: I’ve become the weird old guy living in the ancient farmhouse on the top of the hill — the one kids make up stories about.
*The irony of my preference for quiet while using an extremely click-y mechanical keyboard is not lost on me. I am a paradox; I contain multitudes. Sue me.
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It was about 7:30 or so on a Saturday night when I realized I left my phone in the car. I went out into the twilight to retrieve it, then stopped on the porch for a moment or two to watch the late birds dart through the branches. That’s when I saw the car moving slowly down the street.
It was a Pinto, strangely enough, and though it was difficult to tell by the streetlight, it looked brown, but new. The dome light was on, so I could see two people inside, arguing quietly, a strangely familiar woman and a thin guy with long hair. I saw her point at me, and the guy opened the door and got out, walking up the sidewalk.
He was thin, painfully so, with long light brown hair, and a pair of aviator glasses sliding down his nose. He had almost made it all the way to the porch steps — nearly tripping once over a small branch in his path — before I recognized him. It was me.
“Hi, uh, sorry to bother you, but, uh, have you heard of the, uh, Gusman Theater? I think it’s around here somewhere.”
Oh, crap, I thought. I remember this, it’s the Chuck Mangione concert, back in ’78, and I went with… oh, no…
I glanced at the car, and saw Diane staring back at me, fingers drumming impatiently on the dashboard. When I looked away the kid had an odd, puzzled look on his face.
“Yeah, I know where the Gusman is, but it isn’t nearby. Why don’t you come inside and I’ll write down some directions.” I opened the door and motioned for him to come in.
Once he was inside I shut the door quickly. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and certainly didn’t remember any of this, but that was a lot of years and anxiety ago. I needed to take advantage of this opportunity to fix some things from my youth.
I grabbed a pad off the table and turned toward him. He was looking around the living room with wide eyes, saying nothing. Then he noticed me staring, and a small shudder passed through him. “Do I, uh, do I know you…?”
“Look, I know you aren’t stupid, and I know you have an open enough mind to accept what’s going on without understanding it. Yes, I’m you, and yes, I’m older, and no, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, either. But I know some things that you need to know…”
“So are you — uh, am I a musician? Of course I am, I don’t know how to be anything else! Where do you play, in a jazz club? Well, yeah, what else? What else…?”
“Whoa, stop! Look, I need to give you some advice, it is really, really important. That woman out there, in the car…?”
“Diane? Yeah, isn’t she great! She really understands me. But hey, what I am saying? You know that, by now we’re married to her!”
He looked at me with a huge smile on his face. This was all wrong. What was I going to say to him, that the woman in the car would tear out his living heart, that she was going to dump him, go crazy, and start mailing him pages torn from Bibles with verses circled in red Flair pen? That he was destined for a life unlike anything he expected, not full of music, but filled with heartbreak and pain and weirdness and strange adventures?
“Yeah, look, Kevin, let me just write down how to get the Gusman. You don’t want to be late, we both know how Diane gets if she’s late somewhere.”
I scribbled down some directions, and he said, “Weren’t you were going to tell me something?”
Handing him the paper, I said, “Yeah. Buy her a t-shirt. It’ll mean a lot to her. Buy one for yourself, too. And enjoy the show.”
I walked him out and grimaced as he tripped over the same damned branch on his way back to the Pinto. He turned and waved at me as they drove away toward the interstate, and I walked back into the silent house.
I was pouring my second drink when there was a knock at the door. A shiver went through me as I wondered if they had gotten lost and come back again. I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing him again, let alone Diane.
When I opened the door for a moment I thought it was my father dropping by, and then I understood. He was a little heavier than me, a few more wrinkles, but more muscular, with solid white mustache and goatee. Muscular? Had I been working out?
“Don’t stand there with the door open, idiot, the cats’ll get out!” He turned sideways and slipped in past me.
“I only have time for two drinks. Get the Green Chartreuse out, I haven’t had that in years.” I stumbled numbly to the liquor shelf and got a cordial glass and the bottle. He took both and poured himself a healthy shot, drained it, poured another, then looked at me with glee. I realized to my horror that his eyes were almost twinkling, like he was fucking Santa Claus or something.
“Okay, look, here’s the deal. Tomorrow you’re going to start thinking about tonight, and agonizing over whether or not you should have warned young Kevin about Diane and the other heart breakers in his future. Then you’d start thinking about career choices, and investments, and next thing you’ve gotten yourself into a self-indulgent, self-referential frenzy of recrimination. Well, I’m here to tell you to knock it right the fuck off.”
I took a slug of rum and regained a bit of composure. “And I’m to believe you because…?”
“Because I’m you, dim bulb! You think I’d go to this trouble if I didn’t have a reason? C’mon, you know how lazy we are!” He wasn’t wrong in that.
“Look, I know we hate that ‘Everything happens for a reason’ crap, so I’m not going to insult our intelligence by spouting it. But who you are is a result of the choices and events that came before. You wouldn’t be who you are if Diane hadn’t broken your heart and driven you halfway insane, and I wouldn’t be who I am if you weren’t who you are in…”. He looked at the wall for a moment. “Wow, I had forgotten about that Alan Moore portrait. That is cool! Anyway, where was I?”
“Something about being who I am so you can be who you are…?” I ventured.
“Right! Look, it’s simple, things are going to work out. They always do, just as surely as we could never see it at the time. It’s the curse of feeling too much, you never believe the pain can end. But you know, our emotions and sensitivity has it’s upside, too.”
As I saw my reflection in the glass curio cabinet it occurred to me that I looked a lot healthier as an older man than I did today. I opened my mouth to ask about it when he interrupted me.
“Look, I know you have trust issues, but you need to believe me on this. You are going to like where you are going. Trust me.”
He raised his glass in a toast and I instinctively followed suit. As he lowered his glass I saw the glint of silver on his finger. He noticed, and laughed. I opened my mouth and —
“Ah ah, no questions! I’m not going to let you fuck this up.” He put the glass down on the counter. “Now you are going to go to the computer and write this down so I can read it and remember what I said, and I’m going to take off so I can get home before she notices I am late.” He winked at me. “Ah, who am I kidding! She knows I’m always late!”
We walked out onto the porch, and he stepped into the fading twilight. “Remember what I said, and relax a little. It’s all going to work out. Oh, and just for the record?”
He paused, somewhat melodramatically.
“I have it on good — no, the best! — authority that you might just turn out to be a pretty good father. So like I said, relax.”
With that he turned to walk away, stumbling gracelessly over something on the sidewalk, then slipped into the night while I went back into the house to wait for my future.
Hidden City v23 