So strange to see his face after so many years.  All of today my thoughts have been with him and his family in Calcutta.

        Blue is cackling something awful this morning. That’s how she tells me she laid an egg. I flip flop down the concrete steps from the trailer backdoor jingling the matching gold bracelets, full set of three that I got yesterday at the Family Dollar. I’m sure Blue can hear me coming, and I call out to her, “Blue! Bluey!” raising my voice up to a high pitch. She knows it’s me. “Bock, bbb bock!” She starts her cackling again.
       Mama says she cackles when she’s cursing. She says if laying eggs is anything like giving birth, then Blue is cursing out loud. I say she is rejoicing.
      I walk toward the coop. I’m still small enough to be able to walk in and stand. I push the straw under my big feathery hen, and sure enough, I find a small tan egg under her thick breast. I hold the egg up to her close, so she can see the fruit of her loins. She smiles at me her chicken smile, cocks her head, and girggles proud.
     Blue has been my chicken ever since the Sugarcane Festival down in New Iberia. She was my first place prize for 4th and 5th grade division 4-H. I grew the sweetest sugarcane right in my own backyard. They told me my new hen was called Blue Cochin, but I just call her Blue for short. It was love at first sight, I must say. She knows my heart. She knows when I’m happy and when I’m sad. I know she’s wise ‘cause she’s what they call a thoroughbred hen.
     “Mama’s in a foul mood today,” I tell Blue in confidence. “She must be bleedin or something ‘cause she told me I had no business wearing this tiny t. She says I out-growed it last summer. Why was I keepin it around? I told her it was my favorite, and it is even though it shows my belly button. I kinda like bein able to see my belly button. It’s a fine belly, don’t you think?” Blue just nods her head at me agreeing.
     “Blessen? You come back in this house and finish this mess of a breakfast you made. What you thinkin’ puttin’ sugar all over your buttered toast? You made a mess in here. Your teeth are gonna rot out for sure.” Mama calls out from the back window.
     I pull Blue out of her roosting spot, cuddle her close like I’m holding a precious baby, and smile into her beady black eyes, “How do my teeth look to you?” I show all my pure white teeth in a wide grin. “I don’t think Mama knows what she’s yappin about.”
     Blessen is the name Mama gave me when I was born. It’s not a nickname like some people think. It’s from the Bible, Genesis, “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” Mama changed the spelling, so I could be special. Blessen Lafitte, that’s me.
     I don’t know who my father is. Mama says he was the fertilizer. I imagine a knight in shining armor on a white horse lowering his golden sword over my mama’s belly and poof! I was created. Some people say he must’ve been an African American man ‘cause my skin’s so dark compared to my mama who is pure white like the Gardenia she is named for. My hair is thick and curly-brown while hers is fine and blond. The last time I asked Mama why my skin was so dark, she said, “That’s how God made you, Blessen.” I don’t ask her anymore.
     We live on True Friend Road in St. Martinville, Louisiana. My Pawpee’s house faces the street. He built that house with his own two hands. Mama says it’s falling to ruin. The last hurricane sent a water oak through the roof. With the FEMA money, Mama got a trailer. That’s where we all live now- me, Mama, and Pawpee.
     From where I stand next to the chicken coop, I can see Pawpee’s old house and the two rows of crepe myrtles in full bloom lining the gravel driveway. Pawpee still trims those trees every fall with a cherry picker from his wheelchair. He says he’s topping the trees to make the blossoms fan out like a fiery bouquet. Pawpee’s quite proud of his trimming skills.
     I chase Blue a little around the chicken yard, give her a little hug, and then flip flop back to the trailer to meet the reproof of my mama.

Anna came up for the weekend from Hopi.  I met her at the airport and we took BART and the bus back from the airport.  I wanted her to revel with me in the public transportation.  We napped, so tired were we, and we awoke and ran to the corner theatre for the last showing, period forever in this city, of Departures, and afterwards bussed and largely walked to the Thursday night fete at the California Academy of Science.  We ate hand-raised free-ranged pork tacos and watched a physics teacher be pressed between two beds of nails with a cinderblock placed on top and then hit full force with a sledge hammer.  The physics teacher shot a ping pong ball straight through a beer can with a self-designed vacuum gun and sucked in a gas heavier than air so that he sounded like Darth Vader. If only to be a gear head in this city of cities and assume sufficient marginal command over matter and energy to have it do your bidding, creating magic so that all you need do is enter a destination into a telephone and the device divines your current location from the miracle of satellites and geographic positioning systems and can tell you that you need only walk 100 feet to your right and in three minutes a magical Miyazaki-like bus will materialize out of the darkness and carry you home safely to slumber.

The next day Anna accompanied me to my treatment, she witnessed the bolting, the zapping, the incremental burning of skin, she met the rad RN and the first year resident, and reminded me to keep sterilizing my hands.  We walked up the block and peeked in the shuttered storefronts – the Czech bar and Mani + Nanny salon, and returned on the 38 Limited Geary to the Red Bike and dang if they didn’t make a perfect shot and I ate a peanut butter and jelly and banana sandwich with extra peanut butter and I think I could taste just about most corners of it, so happy was I.  We took the bus to a thing called the Metreon and we watched Harry Potter – part of it was in something called 3-Dimensions.  And I thought, man, maybe Ishould adapt a screenplay that has no character development and no narrative drive and just seems to go on and on with bearded wizards and murky cinamatography.  It can’t be that hard.  Maybe I could start an international chain of electronic stores – those things seem to make money.  We had dry drinks at the Redwood Room with my cousin Inta and ate Faux Gras – chicken instead of goose livers – that tasted of metal, metal, metal.  It was night and then day and we just wanted trash so we lay in bed and we watched old episodes of Lost.  We took our laptops to the Apple Store to get a new battery with incomprehensible innards that could not hold a charge and replaced some missing keys, except the replacement keys were in both English and Kanji.  You see, we could just walk into a store in a place called downtown, we could just go there and we could sit with someone and they could fix it.  We didn’t have to drive 5 hours to Phoenix.  Anna typed “Excellent Coffee” into her phone and it told us to walk three blocks to Blue Bottle.  The phone knew (no, not the phone, but a vast disaggregated database and some Software Agents that could parse the word ‘excellent’ and through some statistical arbitrage glean) that that was, in fact, the place to get the most excellent coffee.  And not Starbucks or Tully’s or any other joint.  And it was a miracle in itself that Blue Bottle even exists.  I watched a girl with zen precision and calm, dose, pack, and pull a shot so perfect in form that I wanted to cry.  It is so hard, so incredibly hard, to do anything, even the most simplest of things, with perfection.  I was so happy for her, so proud of her, for being able to do it.  We bought two cream puffs the size of billiard balls.  We split one and gave the other to a man (god he needed a cream puff) standing outside.

Later we lay in bed and you see, there was this thing called The Internet, and a speed, it’s 6 megabits per second – it can even be 10 or 15 megabits per second in this city – and with this speed, and this thing called The Internet, you can hit a virtual button in an application and a few minutes later have possession of the “Cold Cuts” season 5 Soprano’s episode, and get this:  you can watch it.  Just like that you can watch it.  And in the middle of the episode, if you get hungry, really hungry, and you want a cheeseburger, you can type the words “Bill’s Hamburgers San Francisco” into your phone and hit another virtual button and a phone number appears and the number dials (except there are no more dials anymore, nothing even remotely like that, instead something called Software transmits a sequence of something called Bits to a 5E Switch through a series of handoffs between cell towers.  It’s all energy, all different states of energy that have been encoded with vast amounts of information) and then you’re talking to a man at Bill’s Hamburgers – he’s not even beside you; he’s actually somewhere else a few blocks away- and you can tell him that you want two cheeseburgers and you ask if the fries are handcut, and my god, he answers, yes.

So then, you and your wife, you can put on your shoes and scarves and walk out into the cold mist.  It’s 10:30 at night by the way.  10:30 in the middle of the friggin’ night and there’s a place, you can walk there, and it serves burgers.  Perfect burgers and handcut fries.  Outside your door is not just endless desert and buttes and stars and darkness, but instead buildings, and a movie theatre premiering Inglourious Basterds, and the hiss and roar and of the 1 California sucking from the overheard wires its elixir of energy that propels it on until it disappears in the foggy darkness.  And then, there it is, Bills Hamburgers and the man is there, but in flesh and he hands us the grease spotted bag in exchange for crumpled green paper and soon we are home back in the same bed, taking bite after tasteless bite while Tony Soprano avoids and evades and shouts at Dr. Malfi that it wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t been there to help his cousin Ton on the heist 17 years ago, he would have been there, christ he would have, but he was jumped by a bunch of motherfucking cocksucking jiggaboo bastards.  And you can wish that you could write, hell – deliver, a line like that, an ugly line that so perfectly expresses a person’s character.  A line, a mountains of lines, written and delivered over seven years that dove so low (Oh Mary-Elizabeth, you’re going to hate me for this) that they emerged on the other side as arguably some of the best writing ever in the American language.

The next day, Anna dried herself off after her morning shower.  We lay in bed and she turned to me.  She had looked at the towel in the bathroom.

You’re losing your hair, she said.

[Reposted from www.rainandsnow.wordpress.com ]

Said friend had been forwarding to me, quite often, right-wing Internet postings with transparent lies about the issues involved with health care and health insurance. I tried for a while to respond to them by picking a phrase from the posting, adding the word “hoax”, and Googling for results. Just about every instance came back confirmed as a baseless hoax. So after responding in this way a bunch of times seemed to make no difference at all, I proposed that we stop exchanging political stuff, and just stay with “general interest” messages about our friends-in-common, events in our own lives, etc.

He agreed with the suggestion, but I haven’t heard from him since then.

This all happened even before the Palin Amendment to the healthcare debate was introduced, wherein Sarah Palin floated the suggestion that Death Panels should decide who should live or die, based on the anticipated ability to contribute to society. (Actually, Palin was ostensibly objecting to such panels, but since nobody had suggested any such thing until she shrieked about it, I think it’s fair to call it the Palin Amendment.)

Sad if I lost an old friend in the heat of the protracted moment, but how is it possible to “discuss” anything, in public discourse, when it degenerates to being a matter of lies-versus-refutations? (I don’t mean to imply that my friend ORIGINATED the lies; just forwarded them to multiple recipients without checking them.)

It’s getting awfully hot in here.

This morning for the first time I decided to open my eyes and see what I could through the mask. The face of the large machine (I don’t even know what to call it) slowly circled and hovered proximate to my neck and jaw. I felt like I was staring into the gaping mouth of a great white shark.

What if someone comes up and offers you two million to do six rounds with Mike Tyson? Yeah, sure, I can do that. So first round you hop into the ring, for two minutes you dance around a bit, all is good, fun even, and then he pops you one. And then things change. This suddenly doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

My side effects have begun to manifest themselves. Yesterday my morning cup of coffee tasted funny. My saliva is turning sticky. The inside of cheek feels abraded. And if sunlight strikes my neck it instantly feels like a sunburn. No one need remind me to keep it covered.

From the very beginning of this adventure I’ve wondered about the Homer Simpson factor: what happens when you put your average clod in close proximity to a nuclear reactor?

Yesterday in my weekly meeting with Dr. Quivey I asked how they knew if they were succeeding, how did they know they were actually getting the tumor cells?

She looked directly at me with a gentle clear-eyed intensity.

We don’t, she said. And it’s incredibly frustrating. We are in the position of only being able to observe and manage the negative side effects.

But how do you know you’re right? The machines for example – do they ever get out of whack?

The resident quickly piped in. The machines are calibrated every night, he said.

Quivey concurred and added that they check and calibrate the intensity every day. As for the beam vectors they regularly check the alignments.

She once again smiled at me. But they’re machines, she added. And I don’t trust machines. Machines are not to be trusted.

And the 40 variable algorithms?

The same, she said. Sometimes we need to lie in order to get the algorithm to do what we want.

She seems to find great pleasure, glee even, in this. I think of Ahab’s mad glee that drove him to the bottom of the ocean and left Ishmael floating in his coffin. But therein lies the beauty: those who profess to know are liars. But that glee somehow also tells me that my rad onc is no Today midway through my second week.

This morning for the first time I decided to open my eyes and see what I could through the mask. The face of the large machine (I don’t even know what to call it) slowly circled and hovered proximate to my neck and jaw. I felt like I was staring into the gaping mouth of a great white shark.

What if someone comes up and offers you two million to do six rounds with Mike Tyson? Yeah, sure, I can do that. So first round you hop into the ring, for two minutes you dance around a bit, all is good, fun even, and then he pops you one. And then things change. This suddenly doesn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

My side effects have begun to manifest themselves. Yesterday my morning cup of coffee tasted funny. My saliva is turning sticky. The inside of cheek feels abraded. And if sunlight strikes my neck it instantly feels like a sunburn. No one need remind me to keep it covered.

From the very beginning of this adventure I’ve wondered about the Homer Simpson factor: what happens when you put your average clod in close proximity to a nuclear reactor?

Yesterday in my weekly meeting with Dr. Quivey I asked how they knew if they were succeeding, how did they know they were actually getting the tumor cells?

She looked directly at me with a gentle clear-eyed intensity.

We don’t, she said. And it’s incredibly frustrating. We are in the position of only being able to observe and manage the negative side effects.

But how do you know you’re right? The machines for example – do they ever get out of whack?

The resident quickly piped in. The machines are calibrated every night, he said.

Quivey concurred and added that they check and calibrate the intensity every day. As for the beam vectors they regularly check the alignments.

She once again smiled at me. But they’re machines, she added. And I don’t trust machines. Machines are not to be trusted.

And the 40 variable algorithms?

The same, she said. Sometimes we need to lie in order to get the algorithm to do what we want.

She seems to find great pleasure, glee even, in this. I think of Ahab’s mad glee that drove him to the bottom of the ocean and left Ishmael floating in his coffin. But therein lies the beauty: those who profess to know are liars. And her glee somehow also tells me that my rad onc is no Homer Simpson. To revel in the risk and the uncertainty, you must first understand deeply what those risks and uncertainties are, perhaps more deeply than all those around you.

On my busride home today I spoke with my friend Patrick. He asked about my plans and I explained that I needed to unpack, move into my new place, fix the Internet connection, write a bunch, perhaps do some other stuff.

My god, you’re on fire, he said. Perhaps this radiation is turning you into some kind of super hero. Maybe you should get it on a regular basis, he said.

Perhaps. Perhaps everyone should, I answered.

But in this case, it’s not about the journey; it’s all about the destination. Why else would I subject myself to trekking this desolate strip of pavement in the middle of what once was a desert (or a least mimics one). To get from point A to point B, my options are one: the yellow striped tarmac running through the length of my sanity. Dreams of evening trips and local events cool my thoughts until it’s time to do it again.

Whoa.

My daughter asked me if it was fun.  Yes it was, I told her.  And it was also scary.

I strolled into the basement of Mt. Zion, they pointed me to the men’s changing room, I rummaged through a box of striped gowns (they reminded me of Holocaust wear), threw one on, was guided into a sweet catapulting room with cherry floors, lay down on a softly cushioned table, jammed a prosthetic in my mouth to prevent my tongue from moving and a few moments later two men bolted my head down with a mesh mask and split from the room.

Right on.  They told me they were taking x-rays which might have been a dumbed down euphemism for something else.  I heard a heavy whooshing sound, like the proximate breath of some very large reptile.  Every so often I would register an intense blue white flash followed by a strange sharp odor lodged somewhere between my nostrils and my tongue.  It smelled as if the air itself was burning.  Not cool.

I followed my breath.  I tried not to swallow.  I composed long sentences in my head.  Not much different than any other time except for the swallowing part.  I wondered about how much tolerance there was in the measurements – what would I fry in my head if I tricked my neck a millimeter to the left or to the right.  I tried not to trick my neck.  I hoped that their measurements were right.

After 20 minutes it was over.  I mentioned the smell to the rad tech.  Only a small number of people can see and smell it, he said.  What’s up with that, I wondered.  We all have eyes and tongues and noses.  There shouldn’t be that much variability in this stuff, in our bodies, in energy moving through those bodies.  And in my mind, in this game, variability is also not cool.

I grabbed my stuff.  I snapped some pictures.  Rad tech John handed me a green appointment slip for my first dosing.  8:30 am.  Monday.