Sunday, March 28th, 2010
So…here’s something…I guess.
My new book is here.
The Cancer Chronicles brings together every single cancerous blog post that ever there was into a single book.
It’s all here: the whining, the crying, the teeth-gnashing. The anger, the depression, the inability to eat for days at a time.
But wait, there’s more: the shots and throwing up, the stumbling through the streets, the sleeping 31 hours out of every 24.
But wait, there’s still more: the coffin salesman, the treatment room where everyone wore too much make-up, the five nude nurses!
My biological father’s death.
And, as a value-added bonus: a piece I wrote after and about my heart attack originally published in Cemetery Dance.
Wow, that’s a helluva an advertisement, isn’t it? Depression, anger, rage, cancer, AND heart attacks, and all for only $14.95.
Seriously, there is some humor in it…I think it’s funny anyway…so it won’t send you screaming into your kitchen looking for a cleaver with which to cleave me.
Somewhere on this website, there is a buy button. Press that button (hehehehe…eight or ten times preferably) and the book will be on its way to you.
Actually, it’s a beautiful book. Chad Brokaw, of Brokaw Imagination, designed a cover that has exactly the kind of shocking, slightly-too-raw feel I dig. My wife, LuAnn Salz, did the interior design and I’m lucky they were in on it. They kept it from looking like something published in a basement on a mimeograph machine.
For those of you who’ve been asking for this, thanks for pushing me to get off my lazy butt and get it done. I hope it is what you expect.
And – obviously – I hope you buy lots and lots of copies for all your friends. Maybe you know someone who’s fighting cancer right now and maybe this will make them laugh hard enough to spit chemo outta their nose.
That’d be cool.
Stay tuned because throughout the year, I’ll have a pile of signings and readings scheduled. Hopefully, we can get some cancer patients there and make them laugh hard enough to do that whole chemo/nose thing.
Posted in All Things Literary | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Okay, so it turns out the congressman who blurted out, “Baby killer,” during the health care reform debate is from my great state of Texas. Republican Representative Randy Neugebauer. In fact, he represents the 19th Congressional district, which is a bizarre district running from Hereford south to Lubbock and Big Spring and then east toward Abilene. Shaped sort of like a boot but with the heel taken out and the toe curled up.
But here’s my point: the man who screams baby killer (because he so obviously loves reasoned debate) just happens to be a birther, at least according to Think Progress.com. Not only that, he co-sponsored a bill to require candidates to make public their birth certificates. But when asked to do the same, he refused: “Congressman Neugebauer will not be submitting a copy of his birth certificate.”
(And let’s not even talk about the passive construction of that sentence, which makes me nutty.)
And lastly, we have a man who, according to CREW, asked the Federal Elections Commission to allow him – Neugebauer – to let his own campaign pay for use of his – Neugebauer’s – own yacht for campaign fundraisers. Uh…what? He wanted his campaign to rent his boat but only when his campaign used his boat for his own fundraisers?
Again, I love it when only the best and brightest are elected.
Posted in Random Thoughts | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Here’s the deal: the postings that fall under “The Cancer Chronicles” category are now offline, except for the first one and a couple of random posts. I, or Trey, will explain later. I leave you with this: it’s a cool announcement and will involve all of the readers of this blog.
Oh, and Trey, if you wanted a better explanation, then you should have written this post yourself.
Posted in ...it's technical, The Cancer Chronicles | 2 Comments »
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Him: “It’s too porous.”
Me: “Porous? Or textured?”
Him: “Well, that’s what I meant. Textured and porous mean the same thing.”
Said to me on a day, during a situation, addressing a problem. That’s the most specific I can be. Get me drunk and I’ll tell you more.
By the way, they don’t mean the same damn thing…at least not according to Merriam-Webster.
Textured: something composed of closely interwoven elements. In this case, a textured surface.
Porous: permeable to fluids.
Posted in ...uh...what? | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
“Dispatch.”
“Go ahead, 30.”
“Traffic stop. We’re on Route 6, headed west. “ I remember pausing and waiting for the car to pull over. “Hmmm, not really sure where we’re going to pull over. Hang on.”
I had noticed her just a few minutes earlier when I realized her car was on the wrong side of the road. I turned on my camera, thinking I might have a DUI, and began to follow. She came back to her lane and stayed there, though she was bouncing off the fog line and center line. So I lit her up to see what the problem was.
She never stopped.
“30?”
“Not yet, dispatch,” I answered.
After more than a mile – at a terrifically slow speed – I blasted her with my air horn.
Nothing.
So then I hit the siren horn. A short honk.
Nothing.
“30?”
“Hang on, dispatch.”
With lights going, I cranked up my siren and just let it go until, another mile down the road, she noticed me. She pulled over immediately and I told dispatch where I was.
When I got to the car, she looked at me with eyes marked by endless mileage. She stared at me hard, though not unkindly. Mostly, she just looked tired.
“Oh, Officer, what did I do? I was thinking about something else and…I just…what did I do?” Her voice broke a little as she looked away.
“Well, ma’am, you were in the other lane a little. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
When she looked back, her eyes were full of gratitude. “Thank you so much. I just - Thank you. My legs. It’s – ”
It was then I noticed how red her left eye was. Not red from crying, not red from rubbing, but a deep, bloody red inside her eye.
“Ma’am?” I said, shocked. “Are you okay?”
She sighed and the intensity of it shook her entire car. “No. I have some problems. I have surgery Tuesday. On my legs. It’s - No.”
We talked a little about surgery and I pointed out the giant scar running the right side of my neck. Her eyes got pretty big as I traced the length of the thing from the top of my ear to the middle of my neck.
“But you are okay?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think I will be.” When she looked at me this time, there were tears standing in her eyes. “I don’t think I’ll make it. I might not be here.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be – ”
She shook her head. “No, I won’t make it.”
I was stunned. What could I say? What is there to say when someone is that absolutely convinced of a mortality that isn’t some abstract construct years in the future? It’s not a matter of facing death at the end of a lifetime. This woman was at the end of that life, being 86 years old. It wasn’t abstract or theoretical for her. It was next week. It was a week away and all I could think about was how she was counting it.
By the week? Her last week?
By the days, maybe? Seven days…six days?
Or maybe something more odd. Maybe she was counting hours at 168 left.
Unable to say anything remotely approaching intelligent, I asked her about getting home and told her I’d be glad to give her a ride if she needed. Smiling, but with tears staining her cheeks, she shook her head and said she was fine.
I wished her well and immediately felt like an ass for doing it, and let her go. I watched her drive away as my Lieutenant, who’d been in the area, arrived.
“Thought we might have a pursuit,” he said. “I’ve got some stop sticks.”
I don’t remember what I said to him, I’m sure it was something stupid because I couldn’t get my mind off that woman. She was heading home, maybe to family but maybe not, and she’d wait for the next seven days. Then she’d go into surgery and know, when the fucking anesthetist put that goddamned mask over her face that that could well be the last sight she’d see. Not family, not friends, not an old lover who made her tingle, but a face hidden behind a mask.
I found myself hoping they gave her something before she went into the OR. Grind it up in her Wheaties or her prune juice. Just let her fall peacefully asleep looking out the window or talking to her daughter or husband or best friend. Just don’t let it be someone behind a mask.
Death is the big piss off for me. I hate everything about it. I am not convinced there is anything afterward so it just seems like a big damn waste to me. Worse, we know it’s coming. Because we are sentient (most of us, anyway), we live with death hanging over every moment and it drives me bugfuck.
But worse than the concept is the reality. I don’t want to know it’s coming someday and I sure as hell don’t want to know it’s coming now.
Fuck that.
That woman, who I pulled over because she wasn’t driving particularly well, was facing my greatest fear: to know it’s coming.
Look, maybe she’s wrong. Maybe she’ll get through the surgery just fine. But she knows she’s elderly and it’s an invasive surgery and the elderly don’t always do so well, at the time or in the immediate afterward.
Either way, she was facing a nasty possibility with entirely more grace than I’ll be able to muster if I find myself in that same situation. Yes, she was crying. Yes, she was distracted. But I’d be raging and howling like a low-rent Allen Ginsberg.
She, on the other hand, had simply nodded, given my hand a slow squeeze, smiled as well as she could, and driven away.
That was that. She was in my life, she was out of my life.
Posted in CopStories | 3 Comments »
