Naked.

WRITING HAS COME MORE SLOWLY OF LATE THAN USUAL. I started a draft last Friday that has been mouldering on my desk unproofed and despised. My notebooks floweth over with thoughts, but I have hardly been able to string together anything coherent. I often feel like I am in my own dunce corner of reality, raving to myself about "epigenetic monsters", "disease", "Allostatic Load" and "semiotics" while the rest of the world marches out to lunch. Phoebe, all the way from Seattle keeps me grounded in my writing; my ultimate lifeline to de facto future creativity. Penumbra wouldn't have been possible without her. She believed in my voice, in what I was doing; never thought it was pretentious or masturbatory. Wise despite her young years, and closer to that fervid "get up and go" artistic exuberance I once swam in, before economic reality and cultural indifference becalmed my tiny yawl, Phoebe gifts me the nectar of her thoughts.

Next year will mark a decade since I came here to resurrect my life from prior misadventure. A decade with nothing to show for it; not a God-damned fucking iota of satisfaction. I am broke. My business is gone. My things are in storage and the only thing keeping me from ghosting Portland (this Californicating cesspool where people are too cool to give a shit) and repeating the same cycle is my cancer treatment. I have never been "at home" anywhere. How much longer do I have to wander the desert before life finally clicks? Conflicted, feeling like I worked myself to the bone, and also like I wasted so much of my time and so much of my energy here for nothing. This time last year I was listening to an oncologist tell me I had stage IV cancer, that my diagnosis in any other circumstance was a terminal one, and I was relieved. Finally excused from trying to make something of myself, attain my aspirations. Finally a reprieve from life. No one would blame me for throwing in the towel now, tossing my hands and exclaiming, "Right. Well, New plan: Fuck it." Time to luxuriate in Hedonism until a slow, degrading death six months to a year out. Bring on the hookers and cocaine. I have stared death in the face four times in 37 years. The only thing more frightening than death, is futility.

There is another death that stalks the land, unseen and unheeded: Nihilism. The only cure for it is strong social bonds. I think of Vera, up in Eugene today, living her own Grenzsituationen–when one goes about one's day and something commonplace, and seemingly unrelated brings one's face into intimate contact with the cheese-grater of reality. Cancer destroys, complicates, mocks, heckles, cackles, wounds, cripples and kills. It is more than metaphorically demonic. I have never hated anything more in my whole life. I delight in contemplating its murder; its annihilation; its eradication.

Vera has been in for an exploratory surgery for a half hour that may as well be eternity. I walk my dogs. I cook. I attend to my daily tasks. The pangs of concern hit me, the tears well up as I think about someone with whom I had once been intimate and loved deeply going through cancer in paralell and it feels personal; like some horrific beast is fucking with one of my own, someone I wanted children with when we were together. Cancer may have taken children away from me. Cancer may be robbing her of more children as I type these words and I am furious, and devastated, and I would butcher the whole world for one shot at vengeance. I am sat here alone in the dark, red-eyed with trembling hands, feeling helpless while she is peering over the abyss into Hell. Beating back the tears all day, pushing through my own emotional shit-storm, keeping her distracted, supported, still feeling helpless. We're not even together anymore, haven't been for years, but I'm not going to let her go through this alone like I did, no matter how bad it gets. The price paid is a heavy one: Synchronicity, often jovial, sometimes cruel. I'm reliving my own experience of the diagnosis almost to the day and in real-time with Vera's, those first tenuous steps down the path to pandemonium; my partner abandoning me in the middle of radiation and chemotherapy–never paying the traitor's tax; I picked myself up, dusted my heart off and mushed on alone. It's all coming back up like a bad meal in the toxic waste part of town. I wouldn't trade this renewal of a bond for anything even if the circumstances underwriting its genesis are tearing me in half. I'm waiting by the phone, waiting for a word. I can't stop weeping. It feels absurd.

This is raw, messy, ugly writing. I'm almost ashamed of it. I hover over the delete key every few moments. Something inside me says, "Don't. Let it live. Speak the truth, though the skies fall." Welcome to the desert of "the real."