Good evening Tumor Rumor Consumers

I am laying in bed, concentrating on what I fully intend to be a virtuoso performance of a full night’s sleep, and thumbing a short dispatch into this poison piece of glass to let you all know I am thinking about you and wondering how you are doing. How are you? Are you cool and good?

I am in that part of the chemo cycle where the worst of the side effects have faded into a background annoyance. They’re still there, but I can go about my day without making any of them the focal point of my plans. Mostly I just feel really run down and old, but myself. Just in time to get plugged back in and dive back down into the shit in a couple days.

It’s weird to be simultaneously apprehensive and bored about that. I know it’s going to suck. I can’t avoid the suck. I only hope it doesn’t get worse than it has been. It will be interesting to go to yet another infusion center, and to get the stuff pumped in later in the day instead of first thing. I wonder how that will change the experience.

I was really grumpy today for various reasons, most of which don’t matter. Not least of the causes being that I get mad at myself for being in a bad mood when I am having a day where I can physically accomplish things. I hate feeling like I am wasting a good day. That is a nonsense statement, as time is spent no matter what, and frustration is as valid as joy as long as you’re aware of the feeling and why and how it’s happening. Doesn’t mean we don’t all fall into the fake idea anyway. I was fully wallowing.

So, it was a pretty cruddy day from sunrise until the early afternoon when someone dropped off what I can only describe as the Platonic Ideal of what a banana cream pie is in this universe. A pie I didn’t know I needed until it was here. A pie that, together with Ellie’s arrival on the scene after work, combined to give me a second Monday on top of the orginal Monday. Beams of sunlight shot from the sky to frame this pie in a heavenly glow. This was a good fuckin’ pie.

That pie reminded me too of all these immensely affecting interactions I get to keep having with people that I used to take for granted. When I do get out of the house I will run into acquaintances I barely really know, who will hand me things they have made for me, and tell me the nicest things, and make me want nothing more than to make them my new best friends. Then I will see one of my best friends and they’ll shuffle around with me and listen to me babble and not mind that I lose track of myself and don’t ask enough about what they are up to and all I really want is to know everything my friends are thinking and doing and dreaming about and you should know that and tell me those things if you are comfortable. Then I will see a stranger and have a silly joyful conversation about why looking up The Aquabats! based on the description on my t-shirt will probably not go exactly the way they might expect. All these people in my goddamned neighborhood are the people that I meet when I am walking down the street, they’re the people that I can’t be me without. It’s corny as hell but I believe it deep down.

Whether I have been annoying you for 40-something years as family or chosen family, or we just met and you still don’t get why I am obsessed with street lighting and ponchos, I am incredibly lucky to get to talk and share and joke with you at whatever interval we allow ourselves. I win the lottery every morning. I am so thankful to be reminded of that, with pie.

Anyway, all of that to say I am in a pretty good mood now at the end of the day, thanks to my friends and modern medical science. I have one more day of normal human me and then it’s back in the loop. If you’re on them streets tomorrow you’ll probably see me because I intend to make the most of it. Gimme a high five or some other suitably dorky salutation and I will tell you all about my last out-of-body experience.