When I grow up to be president and want to declare martial law I am totally going to consult the lady from the Spurtle infomercial (also, none of this is funny)
Time looks like a cornfield that has become
the investigation sight of a plane crash. Like
with regard to time and the state of my life and country
I don’t even know what I’m fucking looking at
half the fucking time. Is that an arm? Or my
dog? Or a no. 2 pencil?
Like all I know is “school day”
and “non-school day.”
The names of days, months, hours, minutes — utterly irrelevant to my life
most of the time. I mean it seems that way.
Sometimes.
Often.
Last week, before school on a school day,
I met my gp here in Tucson. A person I found on the internet (a medical site, not like craigslist) who was female and looked nice and after texting a few friends who know things about doctors I decided to “establish care” with and during our “establishing care” visit we talked a lot, naturally, about the cancer thing because that’s, you know, “the” problem with this lemon of a carcass the universe handed me. in fact, we talked so much about the cancer I almost forgot to tell her about Crohn’s stuff and the thyroid thing and there was a moment, toward the end of my visit, where I was like
“Do I tell her about the rest?
Will it scare her off?
How do I slip this information in, casually?”
So I just awkwardly blurted, as she was clarifying my prescriptions,
And also I have Crohn’s, and I was laughing when I said it and
we were wearing masks so I have no fucking clue
how she reacted to my weirdness (we’re all fucking weird; your weirdness doesn’t make you special or inherently good, etc. everyone is fucking weird — even the people who are trying so hard to pretend that they’re not).
And then I was like It’s a lot. I know.
And if this is too much for you, I will understand.
I think it was too much for my g.p. In Flagstaff —
Like we were on a second date!
So she’s my g.p. now.
A fact she was probably totally fine with until
I started cackling about my autoimmune disorder and muttering nervously
about being “too much patient for her to handle”
like I’m the Lizzo of the medical profession.
Got too many health problems for a doctor to handle! (But imagine that line being rapped. Sung? Rapped? Rapped.)
I’ve been listening to The People’s History of the United States while I’m in bed at night. Somehow I never read this (though I know all about it), and I find the audiobook mightily comforting right now.
Sort of how like reading about the science behind my type of cancer can sometimes be comforting: it helps make things make more sense.
Other times, knowing too much just fucks me up more.
Truth is potent, and nothing will ever make complete, perfect sense to me.
I am both in awe of and horrified by anyone for whom life appears
perfectly logical and rational and pregnant with meaning all the time.
I think such people exist. I think they are often incredibly stupid or
incredibly mentally unwell or on some hard shit or all of the aforementioned.
But we can listen to science and multiple voices and hope to get closer
to something that resembles coherence.
Coherence. What a word.
On Friday — I think it was Friday? — the president met
with the MyPillow guy to discuss martial law.
I’ll just let that float there.
Coherence, man.
Remember when anything was coherent?
The Hill looks like a war zone ahead of what used to be a peaceful transfer of power.
The country is so, so terminally sick with racism and stupidity that we’re going to need a fucking miracle cure at this point.
Like, at this point I feel confident that I might outlive American democracy.
I am sorry if that sounds harsh, but my fellow white Americans
have not exactly filled me with the holy spirit of hope and renewal.
So I’m taking care to notice the details:
I had a great week of classes, and the week ended with an all-school
assembly to discuss the future of education (yes!). This morning, walking Abe, I ran across a baby prickly pear growing in some stones.
Prickly pears generally live about twenty years.
Some, at this time of year, are an impossible-to-describe shade of purplepink.
We have a large, old one that grows at the back of our yard, but this
was just a pup. Good luck, I thought, to the baby cactus.
And I meant it.
I think I’m mild-to-moderately depressed.
Isn’t everyone?
I told Sarah that Tucson suits me right now.
I mean that even in an ordinary year, I get a little
fucked up in the head around this time, and last year
at this time (exactly, I think) I was diagnosed with stage
iv breast cancer which I’m still very much dealing with and
so I’d be sad this winter anyway because, yeah, it makes me really
fucking sad when I stop and think about the fact that I have stage fucking
iv breast cancer. It also makes me really fucking sad to think about what
has happened to my country, and about the pandemic, and all the people
who died this year and didn’t need to die, and about how fucking irredeemably evil about ⅓ of my fellow white people are and holy shit.
It’s too much, so I try when I can to drown myself in details like the light
and baby prickly pears and teaching Abe how to put his paws to his face when he wants a kiss (yes, Abe likes to be kissed on the face — never before known another dog for whom this was true) and the arrangement of the cozy “Zen garden” I’m slowly building in our ginormous yard. I swallow my pills.
I notice that I am less than a week away from the end of an Ibrance cycle and
I am not ferociously ill.
I feel okay.
Fairly good, actually.
And I’m cherishing those moments, too. Moments where I’m not in pain. Moments where I’m not sick to my stomach. Or too tired to walk the dog.
And while I’m enjoying the good, safe moments, I a cannot in good conscience merely ignore the other moments: when I am afraid because I have good reason to be afraid both as an American and a frail mortal being.
Tomorrow, not a school day, I drive up to Flagstaff for the night and
the next morning, lord willing and the creek don’t rise (thanks, Sarah for placing that firmly among my list of used idioms), I will be receiving my first dose of the Moderna COVID Vaccine.
I feel emotions about this ranging from:
relief to rage to profound grief.
I am not “happy” about receiving the vaccine.
I, like all Americans, have lost so many precious months of my short life.
I may well have a considerably shorter life than some and so perhaps my anger
is a bit bigger and sloppier.
This is why I have a good therapist, medication,
and cannabis.
I am grateful for the vaccine,
but I am not happy that it had to come
at such an unspeakably horrible cost in
my country. I am not happy that all of this
from the pandemic to the insurrection had to happen
at a time in my personal life when I was already losing
so much, when I was already grappling with
so much grief. I am furious that grief was added
to my preexisting grief and your preexisting grief
and your preexisting, grief, too.
So gratitude and happiness,
as it turns out, are not
necessarily one and the same.
