The Big C

Well, the Republic of Equity is going to have to wait a bit. The Dictators of Debt can continue their evil ways without my stuff, and I'm sure they're relieved. I have a bigger, more personal, and much easier-to-write-about thing going on.

I have cancer.

The road here:

A soft-spoken well-dressed guy I have known a little for years was taking over as my dentist. Our first visit was mid-March, and he does this macro head exam, taking casts, making models, shooting x-rays and photos and generally poking around. Plus he felt my neck, and, with his fingers on the left side, said "What's that?" I said, "Dunno." He said, "Get it checked out." He was quite insistent. "Get it checked out right away."

I had noticed it before, while shaving. I thought it was a sort of muscle, kind of buff. That's it.

So for the next six weeks I went through appointments broken and met, no big sense of urgency. First my regular doc, who sent me to an ENT, who did what's called a needle biopsy, and that didn't show him enough, so I went in for a real cut, under general anesthesia for the first time since I was five. (That was for a tonsillectomy.) He said the results would usually be - I like this term, it has a certain hauteur - "unimportant."

They put a drain, not a lot of fun, in the neck for the next couple of days, and upon my going in to have it dismantled and removed it fell to the nurse practitioner to reveal that the results were, well, important. Cancer in the lymph node.

I wish none of this were happening to me, obviously, but it's pretty interesting. The lymphatic system acts like a little storm sewer system in the body, separately from but in coordination with the blood circulatory system. Cancer cells travel to lymph nodes, and accumulate there. That's what they found. The cancer is metastatic, which means the cells are coming from a primary cancer somewhere else.

So the next step, of which I'm in the middle,* is to find the primary cancer. The first step was a PET scan.

PET scans are one of these jobs where you lie down on a tray and they move your body in and out of a tube. Fine, but they take a while and I was desperate for reading material. I resolved to memorize great speeches or great poetry so I can reel them out at future such times. As it was, I tried making lists, the first being a list of old girlfriends. I told this to the techies who run the machine and they loved it. (I wish their lives, by the way, on nobody.)

Yesterday we** met with a radiation oncologist, who tells you what to expect, generally, from the radiation treatments that are almost surely ahead. He gave us a first report on the PET scan and it sounded good. No evident cancer outside the head and neck. Something may going on with the right side, in an epiglottic fold***, but it may not be what they are looking for. All of this is pretty consistent with the better-case predictions I had heard.

Now on to the decision to move from the suburban hospital where all this has taken place so far, to a city teaching hospital, which is what practically everyone says to do. In particular, move to the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes, which does indeed sound like a first-class place. I don't know the pros and cons. Why wouldn't everyone do this? Cost? Doubtful, I don't think the teaching hospitals are any more expensive for those of us who are insured. (And they are more likely to take on the uninsured.) Suburbitis? (You know, too many black folks in the waiting rooms at those big downtown hospitals...) Maybe, but that's not me. The doctors? My guy at Suburb Hospital, which itself has a terrific reputation, said it is comprised mainly of docs from Barnes (Washington University, actually) who don't want to teach. So they play more golf? OK, fine, but to me... unimportant.

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* Up with this I will not put! - WC

** "We" ain't royal. We is me and Mrs. Strays.

*** The Epliglottic Fold sounds, to me, like a place where Jabba the Hutt might hang out.

On the Road from Kansas City to St. Louis

The winter of 2008-2009. What a trip.

I Am Starting to Get It

There was a book or a blog or something that was pushed at me for years called Empire of Debt. It predicted pretty much what is happening now.

They were obviously right but I think they got the metaphor wrong - at least if it's trying to describe the problem. The problem is not that it's an empire - it may be, but that's more of a descriptor than a critique - the problem is that it is a Dictatorship of Debt.

Hence AIG. Hence the US government, the ultimate debt junkie. Hence Goldman Sachs, which I am sure is well on its way to becoming the next Trilateral Commission in the eyes of the conspiracy theorists.

Their solutions are all based on the idea of reinflation through debt. Defer the problem to the next generation and the next and the next; stand at the arterial money flows and siphon off small percentages of huge torrents of cash; shrink the number of players at the top. (Bye-bye Lehman - too bad you didn't have enough friends on the way down.)

The answer for the revolutionaries: convert the Dictatorship of Debt into the Republic of Equity.

More later. Back to work. Keep the day job.

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No. 2: Baskets O' Loans

Is our ability to deal with the downward drop in residential real estate impaired by the fact that economic ownership of the mortgages is scattered - held "out there" in the market? How do you administer that?

Well, wait. There is someone - let's call him the Collection Agent - who is in the chain and has a list of debtors. When they make a payment, the CA checks it off, takes a little piece, and sends the balance along. At the other end there is someone - let's call him the Distribution Agent. When money rolls in the DA looks at his list of holders, checks them off, takes a little piece, and sends them their share.

So the CA knows who is going into foreclosure and the DA knows who is going to have to take less than expected.

So this time, in contrast to No. 1 below:

When it's time for the debtor to give up, he surrenders ownership of the house to the CA (which holds for the ultimate owners) but the debtor can continue to live there as a tenant. Rent is enough to cover major maintenance, insurance, taxes, and costs of administration of the arrangment by the CA and the DA, but zero is applied to debt service. The tenant has to keep the place up. The ultimate owners keep the loan for, let's say, 10 years. At the end, or if the property can't keep a tenant on those terms in the meantime, it's sold and then the CA, the DA, and the ultimately owners divvy up any proceeds.

Solving the Crisis, One Issue at a Time
No. 1: Foreclosed Homes

I'm starting to get it. The torrent of words that is roaring past on the economic crisis is at levels of 5000, 10,000, 25,000 feet. Way over the head of the problems. Leaving us with: put new money in giant institutions at the top of the pyramid and eventually we can all borrow our way back to health. And now add this: let's couple it with WPA 2009.

Nah. Break it into pieces and fix each piece.

Today: the huge inventory of foreclosed homes, which is expected to grow even larger.

Our traditional approach - throw out the debtor and auction off the property - is a fair way to get back to true value but on a massive scale it is just going to dig a massive short-term hole.

Instead: when it's time for the debtor to give up, he surrenders ownership of the house to the bank but can continue to live there as a tenant. Rent is enough to cover major maintenance, insurance, taxes, and costs of administration of the arrangment by the bank, but zero is applied to debt service. The tenant has to keep the place up. The bank does not have to write down the asset - so long as it can keep a tenant in there on that basis, it can keep the loan on its books in full. For, let's say, 10 years. At the end, or if the bank can't find a tenant on those terms in the meantime, it's sold and then the bank takes the loss. Or keeps the gain.

Takes no new cash, stablizes the residential market.

Next: homes where the debt is parcelled out and held in securitized pools.

River Bottoms - St. Charles County

There are broad vistas right up close to cities on rivers - people won't build there, it can flood, we know it well in this confluence of the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Illinois.

So we have this, 20 minutes from downtown.

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2009 just cannot be more troubling than 2008, can it?