Smokey Joe

One thing about this cancer business that I've kind of avoided, until now:

What caused it.

Now, I'm a cause-and-effect skeptic. So many times things really don't cause things, or aren't the sole cause, or the principal cause, or even what we in the bar sometimes refer to as the legal cause. So many explanations are facile. Slavery caused the civil war; the clash of Islam and the West caused 9/11; man caused global warming. All have truth and a lot of untruth as well.

So, appropriately hedged, I have asked a passel of questions and read a lot, and now finger three causes of my head and neck cancer. In this post I light up the first: smoking.

My first cigarette was when I was 11 or 12, and I was smoking openly and regularly at 15. Unfiltered Camels. Compensating for something?

Whatever the underlying motivation, I sure loved cigarettes. Smoked about a pack a day. Opening the pack, striking a match, lighting the cigarette (and if she were there, my lady friend's) with a cupped hand. Playing with fire with slight of hand. Indoors or out, from breakfast until bed, and in bed until the lights went out. Surrounded by ashtrays and everything smelled like smoke, which means that to me everything smelled great.

The brand mattered. When my wife and I went on a drive south, I persuaded her to stop in Winston-Salem, so we could make a pilgrimage to the Camels plant. It was fine, redolent of smoke and machinery. And as you exited there was Old Joe, a Camel made of tobacco. The ancestor, I guess, of Joe Camel, the cartoonish mascot who came on about as I quit. Not sorry we missed each other; I always thought he trivialized a great product and institution. I took the stuff seriously.

I knew it was dangerous. We all did, and it was no problem at all. It was probably part of the allure.

Plus there is decent research indicating that smoking other substances was also unhealthy, and I sure did. Loved it. All the paraphernalia, the papers, the hookahs (later bongs), the roach clips. Pot was a pretty happy, peaceful world in the late 60's and early '70's. If you'd told me then it would still be illegal in 2010 I'd have called you crazy.

So things went until I was 33, when I stopped cold turkey.

So, some 25 years later, is it a credible cause of my cancer? The docs say yes. In fact I have a feeling they don't really know. But smoking today is so universally viewed as evil - well, it's a really safe answer.

If it was a cause of the cancer, was it worth it? You might as well ask if it was worth it being me, back in those days. If I'd had to identify who I was - you know, like lawyer/father/piano player/etc. - I certainly would have put smoker near the top of the list. Serious. Dangerous. Cool. Smoker.

Early Check-Out

Back when I used to think about doing myself in, I called it "Early Check-Out". As in, maybe I'll just go for early check-out.

I haven't thought about it in a long time (probably a good thing). But I recalled it while biking this morning. Not sure why. I'd rather be dead than exercising? If I swing left about a centimeter I will impale myself on that street sign?

Whatever the origin, it bothered me that, at age 60, I probably could no longer call it "early." So what other flip expression can I use to confront something monstrous like suicide?

Stingers

Here at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers, the intersection of the continent's biggest watershed, it's hot. Steamy hot. I was worried that while off on vacation the garden would dry up, but nuh-uh. It's the Amazon. While trying to do a little pruning at 6 a.m. I was stung on the hand. I wondered what kind of tropical bug had invaded - maybe something big and green, with a curly tail? - but it turned out to be a plain Midwestern wasp. Waited for the rush of whatever these stings are supposed to bring to your head, but it was just a sting.

"Wasp" is the handle for Lizbeth Salander, currently the coolest woman in the world. It's funny to those of us who remember the old secondary meaning for "wasp" - an acronym for White Anglo Saxon Protestant, and kind of an emblem for the male power structure in America. Lizbeth's the polar opposite. Since it's in translation, I wonder if it's coincidence.

But there are no coincidences, right?

Moo

Where are the Grown-Ups?

Once again, current American politics is facing a serious problem: financiers in global firms that have way too little market or risk discipline. And once again the politicians answer by delivering us a piece of crap, the 2010 financial "reform" legislation. It didn't need to be; there were some interesting ideas floating around. (My own personal favorites are to breathe life back into the Clayton Act, and to pass a 21st century version of Glass-Steagall.) But the lawmakers in this sorry excuse for a legislative branch just want to make their political points and move on.

I think the Republicans deserve particular opprobrium from those of us who believe that the best solutions are free markets with goods and services that are properly priced. They did it before with Obamacare; they are doing it now with financial services legislation. These so-called conservatives think it is better for the country to let the Democrats pass massive legislation that is 80 percent crap than to fight and work to produce legislation that is 30 percent crap. Their calculus must be - let Obama and the Democratic hoist themselves with this stuff and we will pick up seats in Congress, and (oh joy of joys!) maybe beat the guy in his next election.

In the meantime, we get junk legislation that will never be repealed and the real problems in the country go unresolved.

What a waste. There are intelligent ways to address things like, say, over $30 trillion in unfunded Medicare liability. (That amount, by the way, is just about inconceivable.) Representative Ryan from Wisconsin, who is one of maybe ten grown-ups in the Congress, has such a plan, and it will probably lose him his job.

In the private world, a serious-sounding intelligent person with good arguments can usually hold the floor, change minds, and even inspire some measure of long-term perspective. Beats me why can't this be in the public world, but obviously it can't.

On the Beach

Back to the Republic of Equity

Where I was when things derailed.

For centuries there was a huge societal bias against debt. Good Christians were not allowed to be moneylenders. Debtors went to prison, not Chapter 7. The attitude seems punitive, archaic, vaguely antisemitic.

But maybe there was some ancient truth at play, one we could rediscover and reapply.

Debt means you use property you don't own. You borrow land, or a lawnmower, or most frequently - money. And you take this property you don't own and you use it now, because otherwise you'd have to wait and use it later (if you acquire it at all). Otherwise, and in the meantime, you have to go without.

The alternative, the going without, interests me. Many times I've found not having things meant finding substitutes that turned out just fine. When you go somewhere where's no Internet, no power, no telephone: you go to candles, and reading by lamplight, and talking.

What would happen if all the non-emergency debt were liquidated? Would we go to candles and conversation around campfires? I don't think so. But we might go to no 3-D TV, no 5000 square-foot houses, no $200 lunches.

That may be nothing to fear. But it also could be more painful than that, much more, what we really do fear, and so we kick the can down the road.

Coincidence

For some reason, today I am settling for a client the biggest insurance claim of my career, on Monday we close one of the biggest divestitures of my career, and on Tuesday Valerie the Westie and I drive East, starting the longest vacation I have taken in 30 years.

What else can I say but

God is great.

Beetles

At mid-afternoon it's 95 degrees here in St. Louis, muggy, dreadful. The peak of the annual Japanese Beetle invasion. Every morning before the heat is up, while they are still groggy, I parade the grounds with a cup of gasoline, sweeping the little buggers in. Better for the birds than spraying them with poison, but it's major Zen activity. Beetle by beetle. Except that many are couples coupling and there are even a few three-ways.

Their favorite victims, way more than the roses, are the leaves of a big pussy willow and a Harry Lauder's Walking Stick. Which is nice of them, in a way - the best thing about the pussy willow is the catkins in the spring and the best thing about the HLWS is its branches in the winter. Still, the leaves are like catnip - or sushi? - to the little bronze and green samurai, and I drown them in BP's finest by the dozen.

Sliding Left?

I've always been a libertarian, small "l", for domestic things like drugs and incarceration, but otherwise pretty firmly in the hawkish/curmudgeon/South Park conservative camp. Until lately - maybe it's been my close encounter with the hereafter, but for some reason I seem to be more sympathetic to some leftie stuff. Today's example: maybe we should get out of Afghanistan.

I have to say I am mystified by Obama's designation of this as a war of necessity. Maybe his statement is just cant - he has to say it, in order to support his I'm-Not-George-W meme. (We know! We know!) Maybe he believes it; I don't. In fact I can make an argument that the war in Iraq was more necessary than one in Afghanistan. But that whole choice-necessity thing is facile, and by now pretty tedious.

I think what we are trying to do is neutralize people who want to, and have a realistic chance of, killing us (again) on a massive scale. 9/11 must never happen again. I happen to think we've done a reasonably good job of keeping it from happening again, and with our improved intelligence and technologies - especially our ability to kill individual enemies remotely - I think we will continue get better at it.

Killing Taliban in Afghanistan, on the other hand, because they are Taliban, is probably a fine thing to do. Especially for the women and children of Afghanistan. I just can't see how it has a direct bearing, however, on how we neutralize our real enemy or prevent another 9/11. So, if this is right, the war doesn't fit the objective very well, and it certainly doesn't justify the cost and time of a successful prosecution.

I would focus on how to climb down from this war and make a graceful exit. Just as we can tolerate no new 9/11, we cannot ever be in a position of evacuating our embassy on short notice and leaving supporters behind to be slaughtered, as we did in Saigon in 1975. Avoidance of that should be the objective in Afghanistan.

How? We find a reason to declare Al-Qaeda crushed and declare victory. How that? Well, finally killing Bin Laden or finding his remains would be nice. And if not that, I bet there is something else the Pashtuns and/or the Pakis could serve up if they were offered the right mixture of money and guns (in their hands, at their heads, or both). Whatever it is, we follow it up with a nice parade through Kabul, us and our allies, and we're gone. With visas and a great evacuation plan for our local friends, who I'm sure will make fine Americans.

So am I now a leftie? Who knows. Maybe just a guy who is very unwilling to see young people die except for a very, very good reason.

Stepping Around

So how do you step from a parochial blog about a guy with cancer to what it used to be - stuff I was interested in, and didn't care who read it. I guess you can go in baby steps - write about other people's medical issues - health care - or doctors as an endangered profession. Or about life changes, and aging, and backwards aging - or the current distinctions between generations that seem so slight compared to the generational gap that was the crucible of the '60's...

Nah.

I'd rather go off the road entirely.

Brooks has a column today that circles around what I have long thought was the most important political issue out there. I used to put it as a thought problem in Cold War terms: what if the Soviet system worked better than ours, economically. Would we opt for that, or would we accept a lesser standard of living in order to keep our personal freedom?

The Brooks piece puts it in the 21st century context because the question is fast becoming non-hypothetical. That is, there is now a working, competing model of capitalism, especially in China - what he calls state capitalism - which may well seem more attractive to some populations than ours.

The state version may be more attractive because it makes people more personally secure, or because it is more nationalistic. It may be more collective, or cooperative, or it may require more sublimation of personal desire to the greater good. But whatever its appeal to these other ideals (if that's what they are), the rubber really meets the road if the system wins economically. If it makes people richer faster.

An older version of this was the worry about democracy, and how it could last. Lots of Greeks wondered about democracy, and posited arguments why it was bound to fail. Like the idea that the demos would eventually take over the fisc and drive out the wealth-creators, leading to dictatorship. Variations on that.

And state capitalism certainly isn't new - I had friends at Princeton who thought that state-sponsored and -guided capitalism, plus antisemitism, was fascism. And therefore, the logic ran, remove the antisemitism and you might have an interesting system.

Nontheless the debate seems new, after the triumph of the American Century and the notions that democracy is good, peace is good, free enterprise is OK because it enables democracy, and even (the neoconservative premise that few still buy) democracy makes the world more peaceful. I'm still kind of stuck there. But my guess is that this state capitalism idea will be re-branded in America, trotted before us and championed by some element of the elite. And freedom will come to seem old-fashioned and - as Jon Stewart once said to Rolling Stone - overrated.

Back to the Desktop

I took a brief vacation from this enterprise, in part because I wanted to think of another approach to this stage of events. Last time, I said sayonara cancer but the bastard snuck back. I'm now tempted to say sayonara again - especially since I think the literal translation is something like, "if it be thus." Nicely ambiguous. None of the rest of the immediate candidates works - not good-bye, not farewell, not adios, and certainly not au revoir.

And hello... what. Again, lots of brave stuff last time, some of it now sounding hollow. Hello rest of my life, of course. But we all can (and probably should) say that every morning.

A few things have, in any event, changed.

• The music bands are disbanded. I am trying to work out my own style of piano, something St. Louis - a mix of New Orleans and ragtime, if I can. And if there is any way I can get the first phases of practicing the accordion behind me, it's theoretically perfect - a minstrel.
  
• I'm going to church, of all things, a relatively-high Episcopal place with the finest music you can imagine. A great place, I find, for my tribal connections. I went to an Episcopal church as I grew up, it was the place of my first paying job, and I went to an Episcopalian boarding school. I remember Mom and Dad so clearly while in the pew - ancestor worship, of a kind. So what if I'm an agnostic. If God makes any sense, God made me an agnostic. If God wants me to change, and if God makes any sense, God will. Inshallah, as we used to hear all the time in Saudi Arabia, with a shrug, an Arab version of whatever.
• And of course there's this new wardrobe. Only it's not really new. It's stuff I had in the basement, much from long ago. A double-breasted suit last night that I bought when we lived in London in 1985. Wait 'til I strap on my linen suit. Woo-woo.

So there's cause for celebration, and I look for ways. Today I'm thinking about splashing on some Obsession for Men, and going to the zoo.

Whistler

Been through the end of the process, the bad trough, but coming back up.

Reminding me of an episode from a much longer story:

It was the early '80's, I had gone home to Cleveland because my father had had a stroke. At the time he was separated but had a girlfriend (not the reason for the separation.) When I arrived at the hospital Dad was flat on his back, with the doctor, me, my stepmother, and the girlfriend standing around the bed. Three of the four at bedside were obviously wondering what their role in this drama was going to be.

Dad was down and aphasic, which means he couldn't talk. Over the many months that followed he never did regain his ability to speak in whole sentences, but it became clear that the brains were still there. I think he wanted us to know this right away - he certainly could see that there was a certain amount of, ah, tension among the onlookers, and he certainly hoped for support. He was bright-eyed and trying to buck us up but without words - this most verbal of men - he was struggling.

So he broke into a whistle. Not aimless - a tune - with his eyes moving to each of us to see if it connected. I'm OK, I'm here, don't give up. I thought I understood, and said yeah Dad, that's good.

As the months went by and the women bailed out, he continued to try to use music to communicate. He could sing better than he could talk. Once, as I explained again the lay of the land as to the ladies, he began to sing "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan." He was a tenor, really a fine tenor.

But the whistle is what sticks with me. Here now, from me, three years younger than he was then: a tune, whistled. I'm here, I'm OK.

Done with That

Radiation is over. Should be a couple of weeks of recovery, then Big C goes back into the rearview mirror and I resume motoring, looking for Margalo.

Apart from the massive machinery, the process involved a bunch of lovely people. Dot, Stefanie, Matt, Jeff, Kimberly, Leni, the always-cheerful Cecelia. They are receptionists, techies, nurses, who see a steady parade of people with cancer. The Siteman Center puts 200 people a day through the type of radiation I just finished, and those folks I named and dozens of others are the guides. Their jobs are not easy, with long hours, in a lower level with no windows. I sometimes think what I do is important, but not really, not compared to them. Ave.

Prayerless

I dined this evening across the table from Jeff, a guy in the tree business. Jeff had a more interesting day than I had. While I did my usual Sunday combo of domestic chores and reading the Times, he was taking a massive Black Locust off the roof of a house, a tree so big that tomorrow he'd have to bring in a 100-foot crane to finish the job. (We'd had a mini-tornado in Webster Groves.)

But even more remarkable than his productive day in a bucket truck was his interest, once he found out my position, in making sure I knew he was going to pray for me. Told me over and over. In fact, as I was leaving and saying good-bye, Jeff grabbed my shoulder and engaged us in prayer right then and there, in the restaurant.

This was the most arresting example of the prayer business that seems to attend almost every expression of sympathy I hear. We are praying for you. Our prayers are with you. I have been hearing this for a year, almost every day, and get me not wrong: I am for it. I am flattered and grateful for the expression and perfectly ready to entertain the notion that it will do good. But - how to say this without sounding churlish? - I am skeptical of the idea.

I'm sure my problem is that I have only the simplest possible appreciation of the process. I understand it thus: you address a petition to God, God hears, God acts. But why does God act? Because of the prayer? Does God not act if there is no prayer? If I were unlucky enough to have no one praying for me, would God ignore me? Who prays for them?

Now I didn't raise this with Jeff. This guy brings down trees for a living, and judging from his build and his callouses he probably does a lot of the work bare-handed. He could strangle me with two fingers, but instead he's calling in the Deity on my behalf. Still, there's a problem. I bow my head as he prays and I thank him, warmly, gratefully. honestly, and... patronizingly. There's a hypocrite in the room. It isn't Jeff.

And I am doing great, and who am I to say that all these expressions of prayer, whose sincerity I do not for a moment doubt, have not made the difference? I can only think of one way to true things up a little. From now on I will pray - me, praying, ha! - for those who otherwise have no one praying for them, and hope for the best for all of us.

Nineteen

Nineteen radiation sessions down, eleven to go. I am fine. Much less impact than before at this stage - don't really know why. Maybe I'm getting used to it. I should be, since if you count the last go-round it's a total of 49 so far.

I also am getting used to it in the commuter/schedule/routine sense of things. I pull off the parkway at the last possible exit, slide into a non-obvious turning lane, roll up into the parking garage, punch in for a ticket, blast ahead of the other guys who are still trying to dope out the machine, go up a couple of ramps and usually am into the same space, a little off the track, you kind of have to know about it. Then walk into the hospital, plugging in the Ipod so I can listen to Fresh Air. Down to the lower level, click in with my bar code card, validate parking, then go back for zillions of electron volts. Ho hum. Another day at the lab.

Maybe that's it. The orderliness. Anyway, an end in sight, and better along the way than expected.

Fool

Further to the last. Dark and ironic are not necessarily something to aspire to, and it's not my first encounter.

About 45 years ago I authored a piece in the Horae Scholasticae, the literary magazine that was published at my New Hampshire boarding school. The Horae and the boarding school are both, at least by American standards, venerable.

The piece was a poem, based in part on a bet. I bet another guy - I'll call him Wisner - that I could get a piece into the Horae. My idea was that if I goosed up the language and staggered the lines and avoided rhyme, but kept it morally upright, they would publish. I showed him the piece. Wisner made the bet because he thought it was a crappy poem, but also because of my creative use of upper case at the beginning of each line, which he did not think would fool the Horae's Editorial Board. It's also possible he did not care if he lost.

I won the bet. Here's what came out in the next issue:

That huge "F" was the Horae's idea.

I was an instant celebrity in that small, fraught world. Although the Editorial Board may have missed the irony, the masters - as we called our teachers then - did not. My English master, a wonderful Brit who loved booze way too much - said, "The last guy who did this was on a train home that afternoon."

The Rector was not amused. An autere Episcopalian bishop, he called me in after consultations to which I was not privy. His offer, rather than to send me home, was to make me stay On Bounds (meaning you couldn't leave the premises) indefinitely, stay over two days into Spring vacation, and pay the republishing costs. I took the deal. It seemed to me, well, ironic that the most severe sanction was banishment, but the next one down was a kind of imprisonment on campus.

The poem was an ironic piece, if also adolescent and crude, and the local literati gave it a mixed review. The chair of the Editorial Board, no doubt miffed, said, "I can't believe you would do something so stupid." Another member of the Board was vague as to whether he had spotted the secret message and pronounced it the finest work ever printed in the Horae. In any event the edition was republished and the poem replaced with a drawing of a flower or a bucket or something. The originals were confiscated and, they say, burned. Except a few.

The poem derived not only from my bet with Wisner. About six months earlier, in the Fall of 1965, my parents had announced that they were separated. It was not really unexpected; my father had fallen rather conspicuously in love with someone else. Home in Ohio that Christmas, I saw him only for a little time, in a rented house. A sad holiday, and even I, the most hardened prep school toughie, came back to school hoping they would wake up and pull it together.

In February, hearing nothing, I called my sister, who was married and lived in Connecticut. I said, "Are my parents divorced?" She said yes. She thought it was terrible they hadn't told me.

I wrote out the poem the next week.

I'm sure I wasn't put on the next train home, and instead was roped to the school, because the Rector knew the history. He felt sorry for me, which I hated. But I did not hate him, and I loved my parents throughout. I was just blind-sided a little, and more careful thereafter.

OK Yeah the Last One Was April Fool's

Meant to be kind of dark and ironic, especially the reference to sunblock.

Amazing

Today's radiation was unbelievable. As soon as they turned it on, the raygun circled around my head, searchlights rose up, mellotronny music swelled up. A host - or at least a couple of dozen - of vestal virgins appeared before me. They escorted me up, up, up a celestial ladder and there before me, after all these years, was St. Peter. Who said, "What have done for the wretched of the earth? What have you done that had no benefit to you at all - was just the right thing to do?" I mumbled something about United Way. He pointed a bony finger toward the Down escalator. I descended, and at the bottom was Satan, I guess, although he looked exactly like Richard Nixon. Who said, "Hey, you didn't want to be up there anyway. All your friends are here. It will be like a beach in the Bahamas, only really, really, really hot. Wear sunblock."