A few months ago I wrote about the haunted hole in our backyard. To recap: last summer after filling the hole with dirt only to later find the dirt all washed out and the hole filled with water again I filled it with tiny rocks which were then mysteriously removed.
I don’t want the hole to fill up with water because then it becomes a breeding pond for mosquitoes.
This summer I tried dirt again and it didn’t work, so I added more dirt and placed a large rock in the hole thinking, hey, just like the small rocks this rock will be removed within a few days and then I’ll write something funny about it. As Robert Burns said the best laid rocks gang aft agley. And then the rock sat there. And sat there. And sat there. I accepted two things: first the holey ghost had a sense of humor and by writing about it I’d taken all the fun out of the joke, and, second, I’d finally solved the mosquito problem.
And there was a third thing I had to accept: the term “spunk-water” I quoted from The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer didn’t result in unusual search results bringing anyone here. Neither did the fact that the hole, formed by two trees that have grown together, does sort of resemble a certain part of female anatomy as pointed out by Jamie of The Pinknoam.
Anyway here’s the hole a few days ago:
No joke. The ghost was back. At first I thought it only moved the rock aside slightly because psychokinesis requires a great deal of energy regardless of what you see in the movies, but then I realized it was mocking me.
The dirt at least is still there, but sooner or later it’s going to rain. This just might turn into a trilogy.
After taking a sip of his morning potato juice and putting aside the news sheet Lord Buxtingtoncheth motioned to the underbutler Digby.
“Pray tell my good man if you would, where is the Lady Anesthesia this morning?” he queried interrogatively.
Digby straightened the wastrels of his tunic coat.
“I am given to understand she is breakfasting in her room m’lud.”
Upstairs Lady Anesthesia sat up in bed. She’d tried to counter her insomnia with a novel, but after writing two chapters had given it up as hopeless.
Back in the dining room Lord Buxtingtoncheth’s eldest daughter Primrose, already dressed on flocculent muslin, entered, and promptly tripped over her sister Chrysanthemum. The son Hawthorne then entered and joined the dignified tangle of extremities on the Polynesian carpet.
–selection from Sceptre Over Skegness by R.A.L.B.G. Wavell, O.B.E.
Happy birthday Danitra Vance. If you don’t recognize her name that’s not surprising, but also sad. She was the first African American cast member on Saturday Night Live, as well as the show’s first lesbian (although this wasn’t made public at the time). Her tenure on the show, and her life, were too brief. Born July 13th, 1954, we lost her to breast cancer a little after her fortieth birthday in 1994.
She did a few sketches on SNL, including some recurring characters, but it’s Shakespeare In The Slums that I remember. It was hilarious, but so tight I was afraid if I laughed I’d miss something.
Art is communication. There’s no universal definition of art as far as I can tell, but I think that’s the one absolute. Art communicates something to the viewer whether the artist intended or not. And sometimes there is no artist, but that’s called pareidolia and is an entirely different thing.
Seeing this old pay phone stand made me think of that because it’s become a target for all kinds of graffiti. It used to be a way for people to communicate. Whenever I’m with someone younger and we see an old pay phone I like to tell them, “In my day that’s what we called a cell phone.” And then they look at me funny because “cell phone” is an almost obsolete term now. They’re just phones. Anyway this pay phone stand is still being used to communicate. It’s just a different kind of communication.
In Life Is Elsewhere, Milan Kundera‘s portrait of the artist as a young man, the protagonist cuts the receivers off twenty pay phones, sticks them in a box, and mails them to an artist who’s made him angry. It’s creatively destructive, or destructively creative. He’s sending a message but making it harder for others to communicate. And while we never know for sure chances are the artist doesn’t get the message.
Some people think graffiti is destructive. I look at this old pay phone stand and just see a creative bunch of messages.
I was diagnosed with cancer on June 17th and started chemotherapy on July 7th, not quite three weeks. I tell people that and they say, “Wow, things happened quick.” And I say, try it. I spent most of that time recovering from surgery that, in spite of being minor, was still surgery and left me with some pain, meeting my oncologist, talking about my chances, and preparing for chemotherapy. Well, there wasn’t much preparing to do, and my wife did an amazing job of stepping up and doing a lot of what needed to be done. She bought a moisturizing mouthwash because chemo would probably give me dry mouth, and an electric razor because I’d have a compromised immune system and a cut could be deadly. She bought a bunch of toothbrushes because I’d need a fresh one each time I started a new round of chemo. She’s also worked in medical research and went into meetings with doctors armed to the teeth with questions. Anything I could have thought of to ask she had covered, and more.
She also acted as a filter for information. At times I was tempted to look up information myself, but I didn’t. I’ll always wonder whether this was a good idea or a bad one, although it seems like it was the better choice. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A lot of knowledge can be even worse. And while ignorance may not necessarily be bliss—I’d lost nine pounds when I started chemo—I’m not sure whether knowing all the fine details of my particular cancer would have helped my anxiety. The disease didn’t scare me nearly as much as the remedy.
I’ve never talked to anyone who emphasized this so much, and maybe it’s because I’m an idiot, but from the outset the one question in my mind was, what will chemotherapy be like? And it was a question I was afraid to ask because I thought it didn’t really matter what it would be like. Imagine you’re being chased by bears and your only hope of escape is to climb a cliff. And you’re afraid of heights. But you’re lucky: you’ve got an experienced climber who’s going to guide you up the cliff. Would you stop and wonder what the experience of climbing would be like? Or would you just shut up, do your best to swallow your fear, and get on with it? That was my strategy. If you’re thinking it would be a good idea to stop and ask for tips on how to climb, well, you’re absolutely right. I wish I’d thought the same thing at the time.
I wasn’t entirely ignorant. I may not have known the specifics of chemotherapy, but I had heard and read other peoples’ stories. I knew there was a pretty good chance of losing my hair, which sounded fun, but I also knew I could probably expect fatigue, nausea, and weight loss. I knew that chemotherapy could lead to trips to the emergency room and long hospital stays. I knew, from others’ experiences, that if they had to resort to really aggressive treatment it would leave me so wiped out death would start to seem like an appealing alternative. At the outset I knew I wanted to live, and the doctors kept telling me that I had a really good chance of beating the cancer, but I wondered, what if it turns out not to be so easy? What if things take a turn and get worse? I wondered if I, like another cancer patient I’d read about, would one day stand at my hospital window and contemplate jumping.
I spent most of that time in a weird mix of denial—my wife was the one who noticed that my right leg was the size of a tree trunk after my first couple of treatments, whereas I was just thinking, “I don’t remember these shorts being this tight”—and preparing for the worst. And I realize it must have been frustrating that I tried to make everything a joke. I’d reasoned that no one is better prepared for life-threatening illness than comedians because when you’re up there alone on stage your only choices are die or kill. And I thought if I pumped myself up on optimism and humor I’d be better prepared. If I fell from the cliff laughter could be my lifeline. It was good that I was coping but bad that my focus was too narrow. I’m happy to be a survivor, but I have regrets. My biggest regret is getting cancer in the first place even if I didn’t have a lot of choice in it, but a close second is not being more aware of what treatment was doing to me. That was important information that needed to be shared. Mentally I was coping, but I needed to be engaged with the physical part of my recovery too. “What’s wrong with your arms?” my wife asked one night. Oh, hey, I was so giddy from having been out that day cracking up strangers with my emergency room stories that I didn’t realize chemo had given me an allergic reaction to sunlight.
And in the end I got lucky. Chemo turned out not to be as bad as I thought it would be, or as bad as it could have been. I didn’t need radiation, and doctors had figured out ways to counteract some of the worst side effects of the poisons they were pumping through me. I had a few bouts of nausea but they passed quickly. I felt tired, but I never wanted to die. And when, on my first day of treatment, I was shown to a room the first thing I noticed was that the windows were sealed shut, and that it was only about an eight foot drop. Nurses came in and gave me apple juice and a warm blanket, which was emotionally reassuring but also nice because you could store meat in the infusion ward.
Of course it wasn’t just luck. My wife pulled me through a lot of it. Something else I should never take for granted, though, is how much I benefited from the experiences of others. Cancer patients who had come before me contributed information that improved my chances.
This is a song I had stuck in my head for nearly three weeks:
Sporadic (adj.)-Occasional, occurring at intervals, scattered or dispersed.
Derived from the Greek σποριξ, from the island Sporadia in the Aegean sea. The Sporad were a militant people who occasionally declared war on the Athenians. They were admired for their prowess in battle but just as often mocked for forgetting to show up.
The Sporad appear briefly in both Homeric epics. In The Iliad they are a phalanx of soldiers who switch from Agamemnon’s side to Paris’s then back again before moving out of the battle entirely. They then organize a sacrificial rite but can’t decide which god they should honor. Early on in The Odyssey they attempt to offer directions to Odysseus but can’t remember which way Ithaka is.
I had a dental appointment yesterday. It was the first time I’d been to the dentist in more than eighteen months. I’d had a cleaning scheduled in late June last year, but my cancer diagnosis put everything, including getting my teeth polished, on hold. My wife reminded me that yesterday was also an anniversary. July 7th, 2014 was my first day of chemotherapy. It would take a little time before I’d learn the lesson that I now pass on to everyone who has to fight The Crab: chemo is boring.
It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was lying back in a leather chair, strapped down, with a bright light in my face, being jabbed, poked, prodded, stabbed, scraped, pricked, sliced, and sprayed with foul-tasting chemicals, that I realized why chemo terrified me before I’d started. I thought it would be like a dental appointment. I thought it would be hours of painful treatments with doctors occasionally coming in to say, “And just for fun, Mr. Waldrop, we’re going to hammer a chisel into your pelvis.” No one told me that chemotherapy, which sounds so intimidating, would be nothing more than a single needle stick followed by several hours of patiently waiting for IV bags to drain into my veins. The side effects may be horrendous, and for a lot of cancer patients they are. I was lucky. I had the worst side effects before I started chemo. Yes, I would have a few bouts of nausea and lose my hair along with some fingernails and toenails, and I’d have an allergic reaction to sunlight that would keep me indoors for most of the summer. Getting chemo turned out not to be so bad.
Recently a friend told me he was looking for t-shirts that would make people “smile, or perhaps want to start up a conversation.” I like wearing unusual t-shirts, and in my experience people seem to be too shy to comment on them. Or sometimes I’ve been in a conversation for several minutes only to have the other person say, “Oh, hey, I just noticed what your shirt says.”
There are numerous places on the web where you can design your own t-shirt, and I started thinking about possibilities for my friend. Playing around on Customink here are a few I came up with:
This one seemed misleading and more than slightly inappropriate, but would get the job done:
The one t-shirt of mine that does seem to get comments is my Lemony Snicket t-shirt that was given out as part of a promotion for volume 11 of A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Grim Grotto. The problem is most people don’t get it.
“What am I supposed to watch out for?” is the question I usually get. And they don’t get it if they see me walking away either.
They’re very funny, fun books, but for some reason when I tell people it’s a book their eyes glaze over and I can tell they think they’ve started a conversation with the wrong person.
In college I had a friend who, whenever a woman he found attractive would walk by or come into a room, would say, “Boing!” It was pretty obnoxious. I told him so more than once. Some of the women would ignore him. Others would give him a look that just said, “Grow up.” I assume he did eventually grow out of it.
So one afternoon I walked to the bus stop. There was a woman already there. I kept a polite distance the way I would with any stranger. Then a noise came from my jeans.
BOING! BOING! BOING!
It was my phone. I’d picked this noise as the text alert message because I thought it was funny. And earlier that day it had gone off in a meeting with my boss. “I should probably change that to something else,” I said sheepishly.
“No!” she said. “It’s funny!”
It’s funny until it goes off next to a complete stranger and then it sounds obnoxious, and possibly even suggestive when the stranger happens to be a woman. I hadn’t thought about it that way until I was standing at the bus stop and I had flashbacks to college. I’m probably—hopefully—being overly analytical about this. When I pulled out my phone that should have made it clear why I was boinging. I still felt like a jackass. After reading the text I stuck my phone back in my pocket.
A bus drove up. It was one for a different route than mine. The woman walked over to it and I thought, great, she will never see me again, and we can both put this possibly creepy incident behind us.
Then as she was stepping onto the bus I got another text.
No joke. The ghost was back. At first I thought it only moved the rock aside slightly because psychokinesis requires a great deal of energy regardless of what you see in the movies, but then I realized it was mocking me.
