Handbill Handout

I'd like an everything bagel with butter please. Not toasted. Everything bagel? Yes. (Slicing). Everything bagel toasted? No, not toasted. Not toasted. Whaddaya wantonit? Butter please. Butter. Butter. Butter both sides? Yes please. Not toasted. Right. Thank you.

Cool and intermittently rainy.  Times Square glowing in the gray below my office. My parents were married 69 years ago today.  I've written about it before on this thing, most likely those were better than this because at my age my ability to express myself is eroding just like pretty much everything else. They lived long enough to celebrate 50 years of marriage but not 51.  Still a pretty good run, most people don't get that long.   I suspect most people don't want to, but I think my parents were glad that they did.  I've long suspected that I missed the good part for them.  Being the late in life accident that I am by the time I got to an age where I could begin to appreciate them as people and not just parents they were already in the long decline that leads to the six foot hole in the ground, even further along than I am now and the way I feel some days, well, I can understand them even better now. Not that it does them any good. One thin...

Part 10 J decided to leave the cemetery for the day.   A bank of grey (or was it gray? J couldn’t tell) clouds were looming in that particular way that clouds do when they aren’t scudding or floating.   J wondered what else it was that clouds did besides loom, scud or float but he wasn’t well-read enough to come up with anything quickly and thinking about cloud movement wasn’t getting him home any quicker.   Thunder murmured faintly in the distance and J took this as a sign to get in the car and start driving home. As J drove through the gates the sky opened up into a very, very ordinary summer rainstorm.   There was nothing noteworthy about the rainstorm.   There were no lessons in it or metaphors, no lightning of particular beauty, no actors blinking into the drops while slowly looking upward and being redeemed in some way or having something revealed to them for the first time. It was just rain. J turned on the windshield wipers ...

Part 9   The sparrow hadn’t ever crossed over the fence to the horse ranch next door.   (You remember the horse ranch right?   It was in Part 5). It hadn’t even gone close enough to the fence to even be seen by any of the horses.   Horses don’t see particularly far unless they try to and they don’t try to without a reason and a sparrow isn’t much of an incentive to make a horse look hard. The sparrow had more than enough food in the cemetery itself and the humans were, in general, harmless enough so the sparrow didn’t need to seek interaction with any more species than it already encountered in the graveyard.   I got tired of misspelling cemetery and switched it up right there in case you’re wondering why I wrote “graveyard”.   While you’re wondering things I bet you’re wondering why I’m going on about horses and a sparrow. Well, I haven’t ever read any stories that had an interaction between horses and one and only one sparrow b...

Part 8 Meanwhile there was a bird watching all of this action.   Or rather the lack thereof. The bird was a house sparrow and had lived in the cemetery its whole life.   I say “it” because I’m not sure what gender the bird was or if it even identified with a particular gender.   I’ve already pointed out that I’m not an omnipotent narrator.   The house sparrow lived its life eating grass seed that the maintenance people scattered about the cemetery augmented with the occasional insect, the odd berry and occasionally a bit of human food scraps scrounged from a trash can.   You wouldn’t necessarily think it was a nice place to do so but some people brought their lunch with them to the cemetery and tossed the leftovers in available trash barrels. You wonder what the dead would think of the living walking around them eating food but then you remember the dead probably can’t think at all, at least not in the conventional sense.   So it w...

Part 7 The water wasn’t particularly cold but it was refreshing. That was pretty much the only thing that went right for J for the rest of that day as he trudged from row to row looking for familiar nameslike a pilgrim with a defective map. The names were not giving J what he was looking for. There was an older woman gardening at her late husband’s plot five rows from the hedgerow who occasionally glanced at J’s trudgery but was mainly focused on weeding the half-circle garden plot in front of her husband’s stone and keeping ants off her hands. She didn’t know it but this was the last time she’d bother visiting the plot because her new significant other thought it was morbid and finally convinced her to move to a condo two states away so graveyard visiting was too logistically difficult.   Besides, the dead stay dead whether you garden on top of them or not. J trudged back to his car and decided to try his luck in a different section.  

Mid 70s but boy is it humid.  More rain coming later, they say.  They're changing all the bus routes that go from where I live to where I work a week from Monday. I've noted before that the never-ending changes that go on in this city and in particular the mundane ones color one's recollections of a given time in one's life.  I don't know why I find it interesting as it probably isn't important in any way to note the passing of things like tollbooths and bus routes.  Going further back I was wondering about the last time I used a token.  I don't remember what year it was, what season it was, was I going to work or something social?  I could look up when the city made it worth my while by having metrocards reduce the cost of my commute vs. what I was paying with tokens but that, for someone of my age, would be "cheating". Writing something down on the date of a transition somehow isn't "cheating".  Seems arbitrary, but this is m...

Part 6 J’s childhood friend’s father served in Vietnam in the sixties.   He never talked about it, though J’s childhood friend remembered that when they went camping in the early 1970s and the truck with the mosquito-killing fog came around his dad would make the whole family get in the station wagon and roll up the windows until it passed and the fog cleared.   J’s childhood friend’s father died in of leukemia in 1975.   J’s childhood friend also remembered his father not liking the sound of helicopters. Agent Orange got sprayed by helicopters and was linked to illnesses including leukemia so you can connect the dots. None of these memories gave J’s self-esteem a shot in the arm so he discarded them like empty popcorn boxes and looked for a different headstone.   Also he remembered to drink some water because it was still pretty hot.  

Part 5   For reasons unknown to anyone but the Unitarians who owned the land the cemetery was laid out in such a way that sections of recent burials were adjacent to sections that were filled a few decades before.   So it was that J in looking for someone he knew stumbled across the grave of his childhood friend’s father. The grave was partly in the shade of a large hedge that abutted a horse ranch where well to do folks stabled their daughter’s horses (it was inevitably the daughter’s horse, given as a gift to assuage the guilt of weekend events missed due to chemically-fueled adventures with fellow finance bros).   The horse ranch was exceptionally well kept, the smell minimal even on the hottest August day. The only conflict between the horsey set and the cemetery was when the column of trees that preceded the hedgerow had been stricken by a virus and cut down thus opening a line of sight from the riding paths to the graves and reminding the wealthy of an...

Part 4 I keep misspelling cemetery.   For whatever reason I type an a for the last e but fortunately the ComputerMaticEditor 5000 that I type this typing on changes is for me so I don’t look like an even bigger idiot than I already do based on this body of work not to mention my day to day behavior. I almost added a u to “behavior” but then I remembered I’m back in the States where we don’t have time for such ridiculous things. I should get back to J at this point because it’s pretty damned hot at the cemetery with an “e” (in cemetery, not in “hot” obviously) and I don’t remember if I wrote him a bottle of water or not. J fortunately remembered to bring a bottle of water. Well thank heavens for that. J was actually pretty good at remembering things which might make you think that J was a conscientious person who was good at interpersonal relationships.   If it made you think that it fooled you because J was a self-centered asshole who looked out for...

Part 3 J started his cemetery time with the most recently deceased.   If I were a completely omnipotent narrator I could tell you why, sadly as someone who just does this for a hobby and gives it away for free I am not nearly omnipotent so I can only guess at J’s motivation.   My guess is that he hoped to run into people he actually knew.   The moral superiority one feels when one is still alive and knows someone who no longer is can be intoxicating.   One feels like one deserves to still be breathing air while the other person was either unlucky and fell to a tragic fate or somehow deserved to no longer be a collection of chemicals possessed by a delusion of free will. Those are the only two ways someone winds up dead as far as I can tell. They aren’t mutually exclusive either.   To some folks the death of (redacted) would be a terrible tragedy;   (pronoun redacted) was unlucky and the death was premature. Others would feel that t...

Part 2 Don’t be alarmed. Sorry, that sentence assumes that you were here for part 1, which ended with “The dead were quite but limited in what they might do only by the boundaries of imagination”. I suppose some of you might think this is the point where the story descends into a series of scrupulously detailed necrophiliac click-bait episodes designed to harvest your information for Russian hack-bots. I assure you that’s not the case.   For one thing, this platform has been dead for at least eight years.   Once the world jumped on the sites collectively known as “social media” the written word which for a few years had had a resurgence via e-mail, web bulletin boards and blogs died beneath an avalanche of pictures of Gene Wilder and Kermit the Frog with single sentences in impact font selling ideas like they were Burma Shave.   Mind you, Gene Wilder and Kermit the Frog were not usually in the same picture, much like the entire Burma Shave slogan...

Part 1 Right off the bat I have to tell you that the title is a lie.   The subject of this little story is a guy named J who didn’t actually live in the cemetery in the way that most people in the modern world define “living”, that is he didn’t get his mail there or sleep there (overnight anyway) or have a high speed Internet connection for his porn or whatever other entertainments one consumes over such a thing. Rather he spent his waking hours walking through the stones looking for names familiar to him, either possible relatives or friends or friends of relatives.   He started this habit the day after he retired because after years of working among the living and traveling to and from work among the living and taking his meals among the living he was done with them.   The living were boring and predictable in their habits. The dead were quiet but limited in what they might do only by the boundaries of imagination.  

5:30 am, humid morning with condensation on the window.

One of my sisters is moving tomorrow and in the process of cleaning out her house I wound up with my father's prosthetic leg.  It's in a plastic bag in the living room right now because contrary to what you may think it's not that easy to get rid of a prosthetic leg.  You can't give them to someone to reuse in America because of legal reasons and if you want it to go overseas somewhere you have to ship it to the appropriate charity (there are none nearby me) or if you want to give it to veterans for parts for other limbs you have to ship it too as the only nearby place that took them appears to have gone out of business, or out of charity, or whatever you would call such a thing. Mid 70s and severe thunderstorms in case you were wondering. This morning on the bus I saw a woman jogging alongside and when she crossed the street in front of the bus she faded into a reflection before reappearing on the other side of the street as though she had passed briefly into anoth...

Nice of Thom Yorke to supply a possible new title for this blog. Hot one today.  91 degrees and humid. 

Another shot this morning and I'm done until November it seems.  Regular doctor excepted and I think I scheduled a dental cleaning for September, never stops at this age I guess. Going to see Radiohead at the Garden tonight, appropriate since this is pretty much how I feel right now. Though they have a lot of material I don't really care about one way or the other but we'll see.  People whose taste I trust tell me it's a worthwhile thing to do, so do it I will.  Sunny and pretty hot.  I've been bad about including the weather in these things haven't I?  They're going to take my name away. Also haunting me:  I read this last month.  It's beautiful and won't leave my head. Not a bad thing I guess.  Maybe I should stop and watch the next house fire I see.

I won't know if I'm better for a while yet.  What was done to me depresses the antigen that would indicate whether or not I still have cancer so there's no point in testing for anything for several more months.  So I exist in a state of uncertainty which, if you think too hard about it we all do anyway so it's not a big deal. Meantime there's nothing to do but live life as if nothing's wrong and I'm usually pretty OK at that. Here's a 46th street summer sunset as an indication of normalcy. 

Well here we are, the Monday of the first week since March where I'm not heading to New Jersey to get irradiated.  I might have been a little too happy about that on Thursday.  Two out of three nights at my favorite NYC pub and the middle night at Keens Steakhouse celebrating my in-laws anniversary lead to many hours of napping or just laying around listening to birds and rain and cars going by yesterday.  Doctor Internet says fatigue normally lasts 3-4 weeks after treatment but could last up to a year.  Great.  Well on the bright side I have a medical reason to continue working from home a couple days a week.  High 60s, rainy this morning but mostly sunny right now.  Doors and window open and listening to the birds is a new favorite hobby.  Nothing clears the mind quite like it, and it keeps me from consuming media which for the most part is a good thing in our post-rational era.  I still have my Treatment Shoes, by the way.  ...

Final treatment this morning.  Didn't believe it was real until I walked in the room and saw them ripping my name and bar code off the molded cushion for my legs.  The whole morning felt vaguely detached from reality.   Made my follow up appointment, said goodbye to the gentleman who drove me (I'll miss him terribly and will be unable to ever watch a Yankees game again without thinking of him),  and practically floated onto the PATH train. Then I got to work and reality set in but that's not particularly important or worth documenting here. 45 sessions.  It felt like a mountain at the beginning.  Overwhelming.  I guess in the "What have we learned ?" column I have truly experienced that you can get through overwhelming things by just looking at what's immediately in front of you and not at the whole process.  Cliches are often cliches because they're true. High 60s and rainy this afternoon.  It was mid 60s and cloudy when I finishe...

44 down, 1 to go as it turns out.  They say I'll hit my irradiated goal in one fewer session than originally forecast.  I'll take it. I found out that someone I knew many years ago and was again briefly acquainted with on Facebook died over the weekend.  46 years old, pancreatic cancer, from the looks of his timeline it was maybe less than a year from diagnosis to death.  Sobering.  71 and sunny, by the way.  Boy the weather works well as a welcome subject change! Nothing much more to add today.  Maybe I'll have some kind of epiphany once the sessions are actually over, though the process will be far from over.  There's a little more drug treatment in my future and then a months-long wait until I find out if this all worked.  Meantime live life as usual I guess.  As a dear friend (and war vet) told me, "Celebrate all that is worth celebrating and keep dodging the bullets". 

I've been wearing the same pair of old New Balance every day to treatment because they're easier to slip on and off without untying so I can quick change in and out of clothes for treatment.  I can't decide if I'm going to throw them out or bronze them or just put them in the back of the closet to look at and remember after I'm done.  Must remember:  Nostalgia is poison. If I have the slightest thought of romanticizing this season of my life in the trash they must go.  One week to go by the way.  A bit less because of the Memorial Day holiday.  They tell me I may even get my full dose in 45 sessions instead of 46 so I may even be done on Thursday and not Friday.  We'll see.  I'll believe it when they tell me not to come back for a month. 85 and sunny, by the way.  I've been hiding in the AC since I walked to the corner for lunch. 

Low 80s and sunny. Six treatments left to go.  Recent words of wisdom from the gentleman who drives me: "Jose Bautista went from forty home runs to shit on a stick just like that". "All these guys calling in with their ideas got paper assholes."  I still have no idea what that means and I'm afraid to do a web search. I'll miss him when this is over.  I suspect I may also miss the weekday structure that's imposed on me.  I mean I won't miss it per se but I think I'm heading toward trouble work wise because I can set my own structure and due to certain changes at my workplace (mainly the move to t his kind of disaster ) I may behave in a manner not healthy to what's left of my career.  Ah well, I've been continuously employed since the age of 16 so I'm due to be among the ranks of the unemployed.  It's only fair to both me and the kids who will benefit by being promoted in my absence.  Then again I've metaphorically ...

"What the fuck is that, a bear?"  The gentleman who drives me to treatment had just noticed a brass colored metal sculpture (it could be brass for all I know, unlikely that it was bronze) of a cheetah or leopard outside a Walgreen's in Bayonne on our way in.  "They must have that thing bolted to the sidewalk otherwise the junkies would take it for scrap metal.  You know how much money you can make from scrap metal?"  I said "Probably a lot?" based not on any practical experience but based on a subplot on "The Wire" that I had seen years ago. Low 60s and cloudy, by the way.  It's been one of the wettest May weeks I can remember.  I've gotten really really good about talking about the weather.  It's been unusual and noteworthy so far during my treatment period and it's a benign thing (see what I did there?) to discuss as the radiology folks push, pull, adjusted, mark, cover and elevate me before the zap starts.  The la...

30 down, 16 to go after this morning. The feeling of unreality continues.   My driver continues to do interesting things like admire the stonework on a rich person's house that we drive by every morning.  "That's some nice stonework" he says.  I'm inclined to agree since I don't know anything about stonework so I wouldn't know the difference anyway, plus my driver used to pave stuff for a living which means he was in a related field so I trust him. 72 and sunny.  I should probably go back to doing the weather since I haven't changed the title here. "All I'd done in better than two decades was to tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and step off" - Denis Johnson, "Ad Man", summarizing my career.

More than halfway done but still a decent amount of time (4 weeks) to go. The constant fatigue at this point gives life a soft-edged glow and the vague feeling of being adrift, floating, with occasional waves of panic crashing over one's head that are registered and reacted to and then distracted away by something because it's too tiring to be panicked for too long. Somebody's really warping that fucking plastic blue ring though.  I'm not getting it close to back to round anymore. Different guy handled my transport this morning.  An ex sales guy who talked way too fucking much and interrogated me about my life.  Eventually I took my phone out and pretended I was answering work e-mails.  I like my regular driver, a retired, blue collar guy who when we drive by this place says things like "Man, a life-sized fucking gorilla don't come cheap". Otherwise we might chat about whatever nonsense is on the sports talk radio or the wacky morning DJ's he s...

23 down, 23 to go.  I haven't had any epiphanies or come up with any more cool stories.  I started going in earlier today, leaving my house at a little past 7 instead of 8:30-ish.  The traffic is worse earlier.  That's not news.  It was around 50 degrees this morning and it might hit 90 on Thursday.  I hope my air conditioning works. 

16 down, 30 to go give or take, means I'm about a third done. Someone's really been working over the ring so it's hard for me to get it back to round on a daily basis.  I'll keep trying since there's not much else to do once I'm on the table. There were some different noises out of the machine today but I didn't ask about them.  The folks that I deal with on a daily basis are nice but they try to keep it moving, get us in, get us out and I appreciate that.  Maybe at the end there's more talk, I don't know.  The magazine selection in what they call the "Male Sub-Wait Area" (that's where you stand or sit in your gown after you remove whatever clothing you need to remove, the "Female Sub-Wait Area" is next door) is pretty poor.  I picked up a Sports Illustrated the other day and started reading their NHL Playoff Preview and quickly realized I was reading last year's preview.  So I've been doing my part by leaving re...

25% done, more or less.  What have I learned?  Not much.  It's not a learning experience, really. I have become well acquainted with a rubber or plastic (not sure which) coated foam ring that's around 8 inches in diameter.  You hold it in your hands so they have something to do while you lay on your back on a table that's elevated and then irradiated.  Well, presumably I'm the one being irradiated but since you feel nothing who can tell? The ring is blue, kind of a Microsoft Word blue, maybe a little lighter and it's usually oval when they hand it to me so I make it my mission to pull on the long sides so the ring is more round when I give it back.  Today it was pretty round, and I was pretty pleased, and it's Friday and I don't have to go lay on the table for two days so I'll put this one in the win column. 

Drop your pants, wait in the waiting area, lay on the table, clank clank whirrr and done for another day. That's what weekday mornings are like now and will be until after the unofficial start of summer (but hopefully before the official one).  Just about 11% done with this part of the process as of today.  Normally boredom would be a bad thing but I'll take 89% more of these kinds of weekday mornings.  Excitement in these instances is a bad thing.  Trying to make use of the time but the treatment abhors a multitask.  Too noisy to do much but try to doze and blank one's mind for a few minutes.  Which, I suppose, is productive in itself.  It's rare today to be away from any stimulus other than a fake blue sky ceiling and mechanical whirring.  Sorry, can't answer that e-mail right now, I'm being irradiated.  Feels like I'm at the bottom of a mountain, though every day is a step up.  I guess.

Well now I've gone and done it.  I started to tell a story before I knew all the stories have been told .  He's not wrong, I wonder where the arc of the one I'm telling will wind up. 

If you happen to be young and male and heterosexually inclined and someone proposed the following scenario you might automatically assume it was a prelude to a fun time.  Scenario:  You arrive at a place of commerce with the foreknowledge that just about the entire cost of your activities there will be paid for by someone else.  At said place you are brought to a changing room and given the following instructions:  "Take off all clothing below the waste, put on this robe and go through that door which leads to another room".  Sound fun? It ain't necessarily so.  Because for the next 30 minutes or so what you'll be doing is laying on a hard table until your shoulders shake and your back spasms while being run back and forth through a cat scan machine and simultaneously a mold is being made of your lower body via the use of some kind of squishy material inside of what looked suspiciously like a plastic bag used for leaf and lawn clipping disposal....

I nearly batted a thousand, but no. The numbers:  13 out of 14 samples were not cancer.  1 was. The number on the cancer are 7 on the Gleason Scale off a 4+3 which means it needs to be addressed but is, in the opinion of the three doctors I've heard from so far is "very treatable". I am told I can shop around for treatment.  "Definitely not an emergency" they say.  "Treating because of your age, you're relatively young".  It's good that people are now finally adding the "relatively".  I've been ready for the "what's going to kill you first ?" calculations for a while too. It's also nice to have an excuse to give even fewer fucks than ever. So I talked to a few doctors and decided to go with a somewhat inconveniently located place instead of a familiar but even less conveniently located place because the doctors said I had the same chance of cure either way.  Still mystified as to why I have to travel to...

I was supposed to get the results ten days after the test. The doctor went on vacation so it was another seven days.  The time passed as it inevitably does. I did some stuff while the time past.  Worked, ate, drank, slept, stuff everyone does.  Not really worth documenting. The appointment day came and I waited at home and I waited in the waiting room and I waited in the exam room.

Do a search on "trans-rectal prostate biopsy".  Or better yet, don't.  It's not something worth investigating if you don't have to have one. To prepare for one of these one must get an enema.  Self-administered if possible unless not possible or unless that kind of , what do they call it, "play" is your thing.  It is definitely not my thing. However my significant other was kind enough to pick up the equipment for me.  Super-kind in that she bought me the "extra" size, as in "extra volume", i.e. more salt water to shoot up your ass.  I had that one coming for years, I suppose. I successfully executed that step while home alone.  Turns out it is surprisingly refreshing, so much so that a brief run through an internet chat board concerning proper execution included threads cautioning folks to not do it more than once a week and not to drink the stuff.   It wasn't that good for me, folks. The procedure itself is fairly undign...

4.2 It's probably nothing but at your age you should check it out. It's a crappy test. 4.3 but we don't take your insurance.  We can cram the tests in before the end of the year. We can't do the test because your insurance won't cover another one this soon.  We can do this other more invasive test. So we did.

Better than the one I put where people could see it which is exactly the reason to put it here.