DAY 033 -- "Empty Space"

After days like this, we both need a breather.

Empty space is not the same as no space.

For now, that's all I've got, except this otter sizing up a fish head. It will have to do.

Thanks for sticking with me.

More as we go, El

DAY 032 -- "Exact Blurring"

My bent has always been toward the textual, but I’m feeling more visual lately, and it’s just too damn bad that I’m not a sculptor, or painter, or photographer, or pole dancer. I will dabble in design, and sometimes stumble on a successful capture, but in my next life, I’m going for out-loud, stand-up comedy.

That may not work either, because I love improvisation, but I need to rehearse it a few times. At least with the printed word, it takes heckling longer to get here.

This pic is today’s attempted artsy-fartsy improv, well-rehearsed. And, sometimes, at least for me, a picture’s worth a single word.

 Like this one: fatigue. The big eyes, the endless hallway and floor legends, now all too familiar after weeks of making the treatment rounds, yet still feeling at once alien and comforting.

My cancer “script,” as written by the Docs, has been fairly well-cued up: We won’t know the net effect of all these daily frontal assaults (and a few reconnoiters and flanking maneuvers) until we re-run the diagnostics in a few weeks, but so far they’ve been spot-on with the side effects:

The skin burn, the pain, the nausea, the anxiety, the dry mouth, the hard swallowing, the dinosaur bowels, and now, the fatigue.

It comes quickly (no, in this case “quick fatigue” is not oxymoronic), and though it’s short-lived, it does freeze my frames with little warning. It’s almost narcoleptic. This can be a problem if I’m doing something requiring my full and attentive attention. (You may write your own joke here).

“Sudden sleep” is one way it’s described, and because I’m always aspiring to be a creature of balance, I guess I’m also suffering from sluggish insomnia.

I’m at the edge of one now. It’s after midnight, and again I’m giving you yesterday today. I’ll leave you with this photo. I took this just exiting the elevator on the radiation floor. It was rushed and presents here with its blurring clarity intact.

Whenever I see this sign these days, I exhale a lifetime of dumb choices, arrested, we can hope, in time.

More as we go, El