Dale Pendell's Blog

Dear Reader:

Please note that this is a posthumous post.

Dale wanted to finish his Thanatos posts but wasn’t well enough or focused enough to do so. He asked me to put something up as best I could.

After he passed I went into his journal and was able to cull what you are about to read. At this point in his illness he always kept his journal nearby along with his favorite pen but his handwriting, frequently hard to decipher in the best of times, became more and more challenging to read.

Please note that, as you will read on, one of his last remarks was “The pain outran the pen.”

I suggest care as he takes you through these last weeks. It can be a rough read at times.

– Laura, Mantis Hill

December 2017 : “Existential Disintegration”

January 2018 : How I Died – The Final Poison Path

##

December 1st – at ER in Grass Valley

Because of shortness of breath

(Dr Kelley worried about pulmonary embolism)

But the CT scan didn’t show any

##

“In a war of ideas, it is the people who get killed.”

– Stanislaus Jersey Lec

In “Unkempt Thoughts”

##

Today December 3

Marici visited

She and I spent enough time just “hanging”

where “hanging” covers quiet conversation

to sleeping – nodding in and out.

And Scarlett: it was difficult not to scare her off

from looking at her or calling to her

to addressing her from across the room

but I was determined that something move

So I asked Marici to please bring her daughter to me.

I had asked Scarlett when she came in with Dustin if she’d seen any mushrooms.

At first she seemed very excited

but then when she saw who was asking her

she just wilted behind her mother.

Did anybody think the band would be able to get it right this time?

Mushrooms.

So Marici was savvy enough to put Scarlett between herself and me.

I grabbed Scarlett’s hand which at first she seemed to like.

It all seemed very exciting.

She was just beginning to spook

when I looked her in the eye at very close range

then I said

“Scarlett, I’m very sorry that I’m too sick to get down on the floor and play with you.”

And I think we made some progress.

We tried to find a password we could remember.

Pass.

Word.

She alternated between obviously loving the voice,

but again being frightened

and embarrassed into total silence

and she looked at my arms a lot.

In my mind they were the skinniest type of transparent

and like a big play house.

Anyway I think there’s possibly a seed there

that might be nurtured in the future.

And so for that –

YES!

##

December 4th Monday

Margo from Hospice Transitions here

##

Sun and what is this? A poem.

It was a day of grace –

in the grass and spring rains

##

December 5th

It’s late but I’ve been sleeping, napping, shorter and shorter

It’s possible pain relief

##

December 6th Wednesday

11 am Cream of Rice

Today, to play

Then later that night:

Dale: “I’m scared.”

Laura: “Of what?”

Dale: “Existential disintegration.”

[I’d just been telling my therapist earlier that afternoon “It’s like watching him disintegrate.” – Laura]

##

December 9th

Back to the ER

This time for scan of the brain

They are looking for a “border crossing”

Scan is clear

December 11th

Agree to hospice

December 12th

Hospice

Notes from Laura

Dale’s last actual entry in his journal that I can read is December 6th

He asked for his journal and kept it by his side but didn’t open it to write in

So here are some of my notes:

12/14

Dale: “I’ve acquired a trunk!

Laura: “What’s in it?”

Dale: “Virtuous things.”

12/15

Dale: “I’m trying to figure out who I’m looking for.”

And later: “Blind-sided by the glitter of ivory!”

12/24

Dale: “We broke the spell… there’s no dark windows over there.”

And later: “Do you know the date?”

Laura: “What date?”

Dale: “My date with destiny.”

12/25

We’ve been reading aloud from Rough Cuts & Kindling:

Dale: “I’d like a list – I’d like a passenger list of this place before we go on –

The passengers they ran off and triggered…”

(long pause)

Laura: “Triggered? What?”

Dale: “I don’t know – the end of some list. End. Of. List.”

Then he added: “The colors of nouns… after you… I don’t know if I can capture the glowing.”

Laura: “The old poet is stirring inside you. Nice to see that seeping forth.”

Dale: raises his eyebrows like a shrug

12/29:

Dale: “What time is it? Can I swallow any poison? Are you keeping records?”

##

Note to you, dear reader:

Much of what you have read on these pages is all about pain. And more than painful.

As Dale said to me on January 11th “The pain outran the pen.”

I wonder if he’d been able to manage the pain and continue writing… that was all he really wanted those last few weeks. Unfortunately for both of us, for all of us, it wasn’t possible.

Most of the entries in November and December are fragments and about the pain he was in. If you don’t understand them, you are not alone. I was there and much of it doesn’t make sense to me either.

Massive amounts of morphine didn’t really seem to touch the pain.

And then the radiation made him nauseous and by my best account he never recovered from that.

He ate very little from then on. One bite, maybe two.

October 31st. That date marks the first incidence of nausea and after that he couldn’t keep down much of anything other than a few spoonfuls of cheerios with sugar and milk in the morning. He was hungry. He wanted to eat. I tried to encourage him but it became a useless task. Eating made him retch and retching caused off the scale back pain.

Not eating for so long caused his sodium levels to fall dangerously low. Thirty percent of patients on Stivarga have low sodium levels. The low sodium sent him into delirium. The delirium was further aggravated by the metabolytes from the morphine.

Once he went on hospice we stopped the Stivarga and they were able to transition him off the morphine and onto methadone which eventually provided superior pain control. And blessedly his mind began to clear.

Some of you may wonder why they didn’t prescribe methadone sooner – as I understand it methadone and Stivarga (or St. Ivarga as we called it) are contraindicated.

The second thing he asked me on December 6th when the fog that had wrapped itself around his mind began to clear was “What’s happening with my date with destiny drug?”

So the following day we initiated the process by asking the “first doctor” to begin the end of life process.

Getting the end of life drug – the ultimate Poison Path Elixir – became a high priority.

In California we are fortunate to have that choice available if a doctor assesses you have less than 6 months to live. But there are multiple hoops both you and the prescribing doctors have to jump through. You need 2 doctors 14 days apart to certify that you understand what you’re asking for and that you are capable of drinking the elixir down on your own.

By the time Dale was close enough to actually getting the drugs he was having difficulty swallowing, even a teaspoon of water was enough to send him retching and spitting, and he’d wake me during the night telling me he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to swallow the elixir – he had to drink 4oz in 90 seconds.

It was a concern we all shared.

Fortunately with the support and encouragement of all of us present, he courageously swallowed that final Poison, managed to keep it down and gracefully was able to end the pain that had encompassed him for so many months.

“Sometimes poison is the medicine.
Sometimes the action of this medicine
is as gentle as waking up,
but sometimes the world as you know it
is dissolved in a torrent of seeming madness,
so that another world might become visible.”

Dale passed on January 13th about an hour or so before sunrise.

I think his daughter put it perfectly:

“True to his nature, my father tested the limits of his final potion, defying expectations and breaking records. Some time between 6 and 6:30 this morning he crossed over to the great beyond.”

##

Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha!

##

Here at Mantis Hill we miss him terribly.

I continue to look to his words for wisdom, beauty, magic… and consolation.

I hope you will do the same.

##

Blessings from the Universe for All.

Laura Pendell
Mantis Hill
12 February 2018

Dear Reader:

Please note that this is a posthumous post.

Dale wanted to finish his Thanatos posts but wasn’t well enough or focused enough to do so. He asked me to put something up as best I could.

After he passed I went into his journal and was able to cull what you are about to read. At this point in his illness he always kept his journal nearby along with his favorite pen but his handwriting, frequently hard to decipher in the best of times, became more and more challenging to read.

Please note that, as you will read on, one of his last remarks was “The pain outran the pen.”

I suggest care as he takes you through these last weeks. It can be a rough read at times.

– Laura, Mantis Hill

November 1 Wednesday

Vomited last night when trying to eat.

##

Yesterday, finished revision of “Bones”, wrote to Andrew,

Also finished Divine Spark, posted it

##

Remember that nightmare:

between Rock and a Hard Place

where I was literally stuck – my trunk on top of my skull –

other side pressed against the horizontal outcrop

##

DAY OF THE DEAD

##

November 2, Thursday

3rd night at the Stanyan Park Suite

“This radiation sucks.”

I have 4:1 CBD/THC and Compazine

Still the effect is surprisingly fast and cumulative

Focused, yes, on the tumors in my spine,

but collateral damage to the intestines

After radiation:

Only 20 minutes today

Huge hydra machine combined with CT scan

like large army with x-ray mirrors, x-ray lenses, sensors.

Slowly revolving, 360 degrees around me

Then in and out of the scanner

Met Zen chaplain Jamie Kimmel in the meditation room on the first floor at Mission Bay

Then again in the cafeteria

Sent him my blog address

Wonder if he’ll go there and read

10PM: might not be so bad tonight.

Was able to eat rice and pork from the food cart across from the hotel

Early bed

##

November 3 Friday

Will go in for IMBRT

(Intensity Modified Body Radiation Therapy)

Yesterday not too bad until late evening.

Lower back right side

Took meds – back to bed

10:44 – the pain is (smeared) a bit – edgy, not so sharp … better?

##

November 4 Saturday

Home

Rained all night. Noon: still raining. Finally: it’s over.

##

Dinner: asked for lasagna – one bite and threw it right up.

Evidently more nausea than I thought. Vomit.

##

And Anna keeps getting infections – now she’s home on hospice.

Dear Anna:

I remember serving you string beans at sesshin.

I have cancer myself and will follow.

Love, Dale

##

'I can’t do what people tell me to do – so I guess I will remain the same.'
- Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding

##

November 5

Sunny!

We’ll go back to SF today.

Bring a book for Matthew at the front desk – The Great Bay

7:30 – 8:00 ate soup and 2 bites of tuna

9:30 vomited. Maybe ate too much or too quickly. Bad vomit, hurts around the base of the back.

Bitter. Very bitter. Damn!

Took a Compazine. Very little in stomach. Took canna.

It’s hard to retch – hurt too much.

##

Viet Cong’s Revenge

The AK47

Uncle Ho’s Trojan Horse….

Can we take the AK47s off the street. Please.

##

November 6 Monday

At the Stanyan Park

Night was so-so

For later today: nausea

CBD? Compazine?

First, PET scan: then more tests.

After that it was downhill —

didn’t sound like good news

##

Ask Nelson:

Where is the Buddha in all of this?

As soon as he crawls through here I’m going to bite him

##

Long ride home. lots of traffic :

I knotted up — a spot lower right back

Tired

Took a dropper of 4:1 CBD:THC

##

November 7 Tuesday

Pretty sore this morning and I don’t like the light-headedness

No food.

Weak from hunger and fatigue.

The nausea much worse – say, worst so far.

Subtle though – different from vertigo

Dark now. Spent all day inside, mostly horizontal.

Or maybe pain is a constant.

The procedures just crank out extra pain now … that there be relief later.

Bad Day. Bad Day. Nausea. High pain – 7 – in lower back.

Fight with Laura – I asked for chicken soup. She got a chicken, soup vegetables, spent hours cooking – then I couldn’t eat the special chicken soup I asked for.

Me: horizontal almost all day.

No Food.

##

8 November Wednesday

High pain – hitting some 8s.

All from lumbar area – very sharp strong pain.

5pm: spent most of the day in back brace.

Worked some in the herb kitchen.

HOT DAMN

That was a 10.

And not in a good way.

Was going to eat rice, pulled pork. Tasted good.

Then tasted the slice of avocado.

Had 1/2 glass of apple juice.

1/2 glass milk.

Seemed so safe.

Had taken Zofran

But felt vomit twinge – went to the bathroom

And tried to retch – the pain around the band that circles my back like a bolt.

The pain around my retch band was so intense – (now I know what a 10 is) —

that it cut the retch in half. Just immediately. Stopped squeezing.

That wasn’t the last. Happened two more times, each one resulting is a “shock 10 pain” and an aborted retch.

Took a wastebasket to the side of the bed.

O.M.G.

Please, please, never, never want to go through that again.

##

9 November Thursday

Another high pain back day. All in that lower lumbar belt.

##

Wendy is working in the herbarium.

I know she wanted to work with me more … maybe Saturday.

##

High pain numbers all day.

Ate some oatmeal this am

##

10 November Vet’s Day Friday

Pain down .9 pct (that’s with MS Contin)

Appetite 9.1

Still extreme fatigue.

Lousy feeling.

Pain.

##

Saturday 11 November

10pm lots of soreness but maybe not as bad as yesterday

Note to Wendy: better way to find locations where I collected plant specimens

##

Sunday November 12

Laura is terrified of losing me

A CARD

ANY WAY WE CAN

##

Monday November 13

Pain 6-7

Upstairs 6

Downstairs couch 7

##

Tuesday November 14

email note to Nelson – catch up

maybe get a kid to do repairs

##

Wednesday November 15

High Pain 8

##

November 16

I feel like I’ve been shot through the breast.

Entrance around left nipple

Exit wound: more below left scapula

How it happened …

ain’t no man to say

##

Nancy L: the quality of the pain has changed

If/any pain free (without) (unreadable)

##

November 17 Friday

A self (unreadable) of my night: and at sleep if can

General pain

This last night: no or… one, interrupt extra next

##

18 November Sunday

Nelson visits am

##

19 November Sunday

Called Chris Hall and cancelled the talk at Sierra College on The Great Bay

How was I going to get from parking lot to the library? Do they have a wheelchair?

##

20 November Monday

In Denial:

very sorry Chris I was in denial

Dream/collage/permeability/ watch out

This crossing was linguistic or proto-linguistic

When Laura and I were awake asked her about the piles of blankets, piles of blankets –

Hints of works, nite/leasing the dream warehouse!

I admired how well Laura was handling the dream warehouse –

Laura: told me “dust offering”

##

November 22 Wednesday

Maintenance mode: slept on bed OK

Right now: 3 or 3-4

I think this is the best I’ve felt in weeks.

So, sure – we’ll start Stivarga

##

Leave a note to Marici:

A lot of my dying has already gone on –

but I don’t want you to be completely out of it

so that you think my death is sudden.

##

Meeting with Margo from Hospice Transitions:

hospice means no active care. No scans. No labs.

Stivarga = St. Ivarga

So … brain can be a refuge

If Stivarga gives six extra months

of which you are sick two

that’s a good trade off…

(?)

##

A to do list:

Letter to Marici

Call Phil about being assist doc

Drawing paper and colored pencils for Blessings

Jen – need dedication

Dale – need dedication

##

Thanksgiving Day November 23

A Good Cry

A deep cry with Laura

== a piece of music did it ==

I see I am just like everybody else
I don’t want to die
I’m not afraid of death
In with Socrates on that point
& Zen study
But I don’t want to kill myself
it’s just not what life should be doing

& yet I’m not sure there is any alternative

##

30 songs on thumb drive

100 songs?

Rock “Purple Haze”

Jazzy

Pharoah

Moby

##

Heard a hit of Alone Again Or…

I could be in love … with almost anyone

Had a good cry

worked on listening to more on a stick

figuring out how to do the next one

Pain 2-4 >>>>>

listening to music

<<<<< Pain 3-5

##

24 November Friday

That all children realize that all magic is within.

And for Kaden, first to ever hear this story.

(And for Scarlett who never heard it but got to read it herself)

10:15

can’t keep up the writing

Or… it’s the wrong writing

Or… I write the same thing over and over

Time for visual art.

Or… Blessings only

Blessings
From the Universe
For All

##

Read over old posts:

I do see (unreadable) now

Maybe 3 to 1

A slow gradual improvement then BOOM

“Big Jack Pot”

But (unreadable) not to be missed

Or … a (rather) sudden uptick in pain

Days 3-5

Today 4.5

That goes on for weeks

Then a respite

##

November 25 Saturday

>> Laura sends me P/T revision

##

The Search for Appetite

How to find something I want to eat.
Everything that looks good – changes color if I sit down to eat.

##

November 26

Sunny.

Today’s Blessing:

today I felt hungry

but afraid to eat

##

November 27 Monday

A good day to watch for blessings

Mantis Hill to UCSF to Mt Zion with a stop at The Apothecarium.

I drove the first half

Slightly too late … retch

Saw Nancy L at UCSF

##

November 28 Tuesday

Dr Kelley

##

“ volcano” – find. Bring out.

procedures & bed & comfort

So… more St. Ivarga

Food – DP puled “what don’t called”

YOW – couldn’t eat at Denny’s

Tried to retch

Pain kept building

Very discouraging visit at UCSF actually

Dr Kelley sees lots of, several, hot spots that could be treated different ways –

but if the “St Ivarga” doesn’t work

on all of them

I lose

##

November 29 Wednesday

slept most of the day – hardly left the house

pain is 5 mid back, lower back

pain is 6 – short of breath because of pain when I expand chest

##

P/Thanatos October 2017

October 2,3

Stanyan Park

Always busy. These trips to China Basin first 4PM for the MRI which took several hours.

So by this morning, October 3rd, with all the car time yesterday and all the MRI time (in and out, breathe in, hold, breathe out) I’m sore and would like to curl up for a few discreet tears.

Today Laura droves us across town to Mission Bay, UCSF’s “oncology central.”

Get all the blood drawn so Dr Kelley will have her labs in front of her when we meet in another hour.

It’s crazy.

Listen: give as much energy and focus as you can find for poetry and art, for music and science.

**

Who is this?

**

Mostly, though, you go along with the program, which brings us to my situation.

First chemo drug didn’t work. That’s the bottom line. There are numerous new spots in the spine: nothing huge and obvious enough to explain all of my pain. But plenty enough to explain most of it in several different way.

Numerous spots in the spine, one in the lumbar: L2 That one is off to the right side.

We’ll try Stivarga

Once a day with food, no fat, side effects (30%) anemia, not getting up, fatigue, CA down P down watch for infection, watch for mouth sores, use baking soda/salt rinse, keep blood pressure log, your voice may change, nausea, monitor for skin allergic reactions

Trip home pretty sore and painful.

October 5th

Took 315 mg morphine/24 hours

Chris Hall and Rose and Fiona visited.

Chris asked if I would read from The Great Bay for his three classes at Sierra College Rocklin Campus. We agreed on November 20. But it will depend on my pain level. I hope to comply.

*[on November 20 I had to cancel.]

October 8

This pain management is taking an altogether too large a chunk of my time and energy – all packed for UCSF/Stanyan Park

Of course, we’re translating a more or less serial pattern of events into meaningful action which after all might be a stretch.

**

Monday October 9th

Morning: Fire on the mountain!

Electricity went out last night around midnight. Thought: not a good sign. Started smelling smoke.

By morning there was a lot of smoke but with the electricity still out we didn’t see what was happening until we got on the road.

Then we saw the smoke columns. Surrounded. Fire in October!

No time to turn back, we had to continue to San Francisco. We had medical appointments.

**

October 9th afternoon

We had left Mushroom, our laptops, all my extra meds and they are evacuating our street. We called our neighbor Trevor who rescues the cat and finds a boarding place. Grabs the laptops and the meds. So all is safe.

How competent! What a gift.

**

October 10th

4 hours under anesthesia plus 2 hours in PACU – all to embolize blood with nano-particles for tomorrow’s cement pour.

Spent the night on 6Long (Neuro-Transitional Unit).

Pain management was good. Every 2 hours or so, taking 20 or 30 Roxi. Hospital bed was good also, sides to put pillow against, raised back, soft mattress.

Lots of good care, a few miss-ups left stranded. Hope it was all worth it.

**

Wednesday October 11th

Felt pretty good in the am.

Then long day on 6Long waiting to get back to the 3rd floor for the “vertebroplasty” – a cement plug in T9

Pain management good. ‘Course I had nothing else to do but rest. A few emails. Didn’t even read much. Just rested with the Morpheus.

7pm: back at Stanyan Park

Laura reminds me that Dr Chin remembered me and the booklet of my Bodhidharma paintings I’d given her back in April when she did the biopsy. She has it on her desk – an honored spot.

Next up: IMBT radiation of T10 to L2. Next week.

*

October 9 – 11:



Wettest winter in history/hottest summer in history

Largest firestorm in CA history

From 0-117,000 acres in FIRE STORM

*

Volcano in Japan earthquake

Some cities reported seeing dragons on the wing

Puerto Rico being left to die in secret, hidden by the death spasms of Donald Trump in terminal narcissistic meltdown into paranoia

The Republicans bear the brunt of the blame for they do nothing and he is their responsibility

*

12 October

170,000 ACRES OF CALIFORNIA ON FIRE

All my hopes rest on being able to balance the pain meds

Resting is easy

*

October 13h Friday

High pain this morning – very hard to get comfortable in bed.

Back pain (lower) about 6, 6 ½

*

To Do:

Jen contract, Jeremy: send drawings all scans, Jeremy: finish layout?

*

14 October 2017

On vampires:

We all have a few of these among our collected friends

That is, if you’ve lived a normal life with even a modicum of kindness and confusion after 50 or 60 years you’ve probably collected, among your friends, one or two vampires.

Their first (and salient) characteristic is a demand for special treatment – that they have to be treated differently than ordinary people because of … [ various causes ].

Which can be either trauma (these are the victims) or sometimes, some special gift – a gift of psychic sensitivity or of profound empathetic power. These people will demand that you walk on egg shells that you look ahead and self-censure yourself, that you don’t say anything emotionally or psychically shocking. In short, that they be treated as children.

It’s dangerous to have vampires visit when you are sick. Vampires ignore your condition.

They will drain your energy, ignore a request such as “I have to rest now.” And leave both you and your caregiver exhausted and reeling.

15 October

Isaac’s bday

[lots of calculations here about dosages – fills a page]

By noon I have come downstairs, showered, shaved, had a BM and have some degree of pain management. My day started well, took my MS Contin at about 8:40, back to bed, 9:30 BM, roxanol, then 9:45, 10:45, 11:45 took another dropper. About 15 mg of morphine. I have, you might say, high tolerance.

*

At the hospital in that little room on 6 Long with the a/c so loud and either too hot or too cold to sleep. Isn’t sleep considered an important part of the healing process? I mean, jeez.

17 October Stanyan Park

Note to me: write up the OD story and the ex-con story

[ ]

I asked Matt if he had found any of my Pharmako/Thanatos, he asserted he had.

After a while I got up my nerve and shrugged “Well, anything you like?” or “Well, what did you think?”

“Well,” he said, “on that one page I cringed.”

Matt added, “Where it said… ‘fast’.”

Whew. Great relief. It was supposed to happen that way. Thank you.

18 October

Got an email from Ofra. She was my first ever live-in girlfriend. She’d found my website.

I tried calling her. She didn’t answer but then called me back.

It’s so funny
that somehow she reached out
when it’s kinda too late
for me to respond.

I think she went to the extreme, to Crown Heights, Chabad, where God is the “Holy Land.”

I’ll send her some scans of some pictures from more innocent times. I’m happy in every one.

I KNOW we had fights, but gee, for kids we had some pretty good times.

dp: write to NAB for more Great Bays. Be sure there are enough for the Sierra classes.

Maybe a good week to write to Nik.

Dear Nika:

I’ve missed you.

19 October

Dale, give this day to yourself. *[It didn’t happen.]

So: pain

So: 11:55

Home Care Nurses call here at the house.

12:55 Transitions and Palliative Care coming over. They interface with UCSF.

Good to have something local.

Too much of every day’s entries are about pain management.

Setting up Durable Power of Attorney, meeting with a Social Worker, they want the POLST form on the fridge. Bright pink. You can’t miss it.

What kind of response? Full treatment, Selective treatment or Comfort Only? That is, can we save you, can we save you from yourself, can we save you from the hole in the wall? I don’t think we will feed you, but, like – if I already blew up and were settling as a delicate ash – should you try to capture me with a bit of acrylic spray?

**

October 20th

Do you need any help? Yes, to put my shoes on. To stand upright after that astounding rain flurry. Almost an inch. All come down midnight to one.

Some people just want it established on the record that “help” has been offered. The hardest thing, I tell my old friend who is visiting, from my reclining chair, is to get into some kind of sitting position where I can enter text onto my laptop. Funny how everyone thinks they have a solution to it.

Stop.

Oh yeah. There’s ways to do it. Nelson has a friend in publishing. And, oh yeah, there’s dictation programs.

Stop.

Do you know anyone who actually uses the dictation program? No. But we’ve solved your problem. There’s ways to do it. I just wanted you to know that if there is anything I can do I want to help.

Well, there’s a list. But that’s carpentry work. I’m still in the recliner. There is a subtler form of energy vampirism – mostly they are calling for help from their own insecurities and fears. They take advantage of the suffering – I want you to call me every time you are going in for a medical procedure — like that’s an inconsequential request.

I want to help. Can you take steno for Christ’s sake?

TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME.

Wendy came by. The Jepsen Herbarium at UC Berkeley does indeed want to acquire the Kuksu Herbarium. Say some 800-1000 specimens.

Wendy: “Anyone who reads your field notes is going to become a better botanist.”

**

21 October

Canceled the “ many friends and wives Berkeley and Marin and San Francisco gathering” Got a glimpse of the seduction of the “Men’s Group” as in “Members Only.”

But Laura was much more deeply invested in the gathering. She feels betrayed and let down. “I looked on them as my real family, my support group, all I see is NOT. We asked them to give up the Men’s Group for one night, and they couldn’t do it.”

What I heard: they would not expand the group, even temporarily. Even for one night.

How can you even call that medicine?

October 22nd

12:45 started work in the Herb Kitchen.

**

Can we survive this?

No.

One of us can.

And perhaps our love and trust.

Laura: I love you.

Dale: That’s a good start.

L: I’m afraid I’m going to lose you.

D: That’s another good start.

L: There are times it would be easier to lose myself.

D: And I can feel that.

This is by its nature unmanageable, out of control.

Almost a definition of cancer.

Let’s put those bits of herbs and veggies in the pot. The deep fear. The hopeless fear. The dreadful fear. Put it in the pot.

23 October

Hard evening yesterday.

The best we could do was hold each other while we cried.

25 October

Spilt the OJ. Wow. That helped a lot. (Not.)

No major damage just lots of sticky clean up. And I don’t bend.

Then Laura cut her thumb chopping fruit.

Hello.

Hello.

That was more challenging.

Used to be “emergency!” was just my thing. Not now.

Read the California Assisted Suicide Report. There will be a meeting in town. I guess we should go.

Slept on the wedge, well. Afternoon pain may be 4. Used wedge to read. Then got tired, pulled the wedge to horizontal. Slept some. Somehow didn’t hurt myself.

October 26th

Slept a lot with some comfort on the wedge. But Autumn sun punched through. Love punched through. Useless as man or beast. All I’ve thought about for these last 2 weeks of pain, never quite controlled, is how to put an end to it. This graceful overlap of morphine, sleep, Sun. Autumn enough to prove that. Yes. Okay. It’s worth it.

Again.

Worth a short cry.

Worth a confession of love for my partner.

“I’m NOT DOING MY PART>”

But yes.

If you still have the energy to do the extra work — I can still enjoy another nap with my feet in the sun.

5pm downstairs in the chair nodding

Laura home.

Pain 4.

*

Friday October 27th

Bad dream.

Three times with my head jammed sideways against a rock in a crevice of rock of a lot of rock.

In one my truck bumper resting over my head

That is, trying to give direction: between a rock and a hard place.

Back from skin clinic.

Dear Dr R was okay with me lying down on the examining table.

She froze off several arm spots and took a biopsy for my right chest. The ugly looking spot. And the new question: is it worth taking them out or “at this point” just watching.

Painful trip

Homeward was better.

Three dives, one up, two down.

Saturday October 28

3pm on the porch

A perfect fall day. There is a chair that is comfortable to sit in. A little reading. Rare these days.

To Do:

Finish Ebaugh edit.

Poetic thoughts for Gwyllm.

Checks for Marici.

Does it seem that the pain has lessened a notch?

Some hope that way.

*

29 October

9:30 only small pain, bm, back pain is lower right.

Laura transcribed as I read the Sept journal.

Most of the days spent blissfully sleeping or nodding. So there!

Nodding but there is only the background MS Contin on board.

Then in the evening lower back pain came back.

Couldn’t eat much.

Took 2 extra droppers.

So discouraging.

I was just thinking today that with days like this one, this pain free, I’ll fight to stay alive.

But the cancer is still alive

And that’s what I think I felt this evening.

But remember

A month ago I was taking twice as much morphine as I have been recently and pain 5-7

Today okay 3-6, 3-5.

30 October Monday

About noon: pain fairly mild 3-4 lower back first on right side shower helped hot water right on the spot I’ve been very active packing. May pull back onto nap soon.

With the back brace, drove 1st ½ to SF

What happened? Why do I feel {relatively} pain free?

Sat up the rest of the trip. Well, side-wise.

Ate a whole Jr Burger.

All firsts for the last 2 months.

Then in the go figure department the considerably ugly skin growth on my right breast came back benign.

How many months since that has last happened?

And a low load of narcotics. Three extra droppers until 8pm

At Stanyan Park in the suite

Driving both Laura and I wondering

Maybe something changed

Maybe ….

Maybe miracle

Radiation tomorrow

Tuesday 31 October

First day of radiation

Easy enough in the body cast

Shorter

The Stereotactic burst evidently over a small area

They’ll go from T 10 down to L 2

Hope it helps

And doesn’t make it worse.

Back pain is still moderate

But now at 5pm some faint nausea, big time fatigue

Still losing weight.

Was dreaming a poem for Laura.

Love you.

I must have taken a heavy dose of radiation

I didn’t expect the nausea or the vomiting

Which hurt all the way around the belt of muscle and bone

And whatever else is there at the bottom of my spine.

Worse than bearing down

Maybe because this treatment goes through the intestines

That was a 9

Darlin?

Yes.

Let’s go watch the World Series.

Those Who Still Have Bones

Matt and Jacob visited us at the Stanyan Park in San Francisco. We had the suite that night, so we weren’t all four cramped on a chair and a bed. Two visitors, yes. Experiments with more than two at a time have been less successful: the intrinsic dynamics of groups stimulates the bones, even with generally quiet people.

In Tracks Along the Left Coast, Andrew Schelling quotes a letter from Jaime de Angelo to his old mentor Franz Boas: “I don’t enjoy visitors. I want to be alone. I seem to resent all people except Lucy and Guiomar. I don’t want any living people around me. I am dead and they have bones! as the ghosts said in the old Shasta story”

The way the Shasta tell it, a man follows his woman to the Land of the Dead, but the people there all stay away from him. Old Man Coyote, who was wandering through, had to explain it to him: “the people won’t let you stay here. They don’t like you because you have bones.”

Maybe the young man had to make up a song, a medicine song, right there on the spot to get Old Man Coyote to show him the way out.

They don't like you because you have bones.

***

So skeletons are a mark of the living, and all those without at least a foot into the Land of the Dead have them. There are huge differences, however, from one person to the next, in just how many bones they have, how many bones they carry around with them, and how much noise they make with them.

Maybe it reflects how closely each has, themselves, come to the Land of the Dead. My liver donor Matt has been pretty close to the Land of the Dead, both through circumstance and then through choice. With Jacob, much as I love him, there is always a hint of a party going on. And one thing those of us without bones feel especially distant from is a party.

My brother is that way also: always a party in the works. I used to think that had to do with the lush side of his nature: a chance to drink—but now I think it has to with this thing I’m calling “Loud Bones.”

***

A man with a huge loud frame all saggy and hanging came into the Radiology changing room, helped by a somewhat younger but still hoary man who was probably his son.

It looked as if he’d weighed at least 300 pounds until rather recently, but less than two hundred now–way less: his arms and his legs were almost skinny and half the size of the openings they stuck out of in his pajamas, and his skin had that wrinkled and excessive look to it. I was trying to figure out how he had ever fit into his triple-x underwear.

This man had been there. He hardly had a bone in his body. I mean, he had big bones sticking out everywhere with this loose skin hanging on them—but those bones didn’t count—those were ghost bones.

“So are you one of the ‘successes’ here,” he asked me, louder than he needed to.

Actually, that was the perfect icebreaker. I laughed out loud.

“So how old are you?” Asked far too directly for my sense of propriety. I wanted to talk to him but I didn’t want to be bullied. Started my own inventory, on his body.

“My name is Scott,” he told me, evidently deciding to meet me half way.

“I’m seventy,” I told him. Scott was laughing because he could see that I was doing the arithmetic in my head. Scott was seventy-eight. Maybe he’d been a cop. Maybe that was why he was so pushy.

But there was still stuff he wanted to know. Scott’s son, no spring chicken himself, had come over and was folding clothes and trying to get his dad into his open-in-the-back gown and also, I think, to keep him from getting too rude. But Scott wasn’t finished. He skipped everything that was non-essential. No small talk, no miscellaneous information, just what was vital for him to know.

And, exactly, he was asking my own questions.

“Dale, are you a fighter?”

That caught me off guard. And off guard I got close to his face and shrugged.

“I don’t even know,” I complained.

Scott wasn’t buying it. He waited.

“Okay, look,” I said. “IF I had a decent chance of success; IF I still had a chance to do some kind of beautiful or useful work in the world; THEN, sure, I’ll fight. But if I’m living in pain and can’t do anything for myself or anyone else, I’ll gather my sweeties and kiss them goodbye and I’m outta here.”

We had a long hand shake as I left.

“God bless.”

Two men without skeletons: how they talk.

“God bless.”

Walking down the corridor, feeling the pain from each step go around my back, I wondered if endure might be more to the point than fight.

 

Aug 26

It is well to have those who laugh on one’s side
--Nietzsche

And, sometimes, to face defeat.

Raiders on fast ponies.

Swords and short re-curved bows

Dunhuang, in a dream.

Monks hiding sutras, scrolls in caves.

Silk Road. Singing-Sand Mountains. Lakes dry for a thousand years.

Sliver moon rising in the pre-dawn east.

Defeat.

Others keep faith

That the wheel will turn.

Justice may be empty

But I would still feel joy

if that sick and cowardly man
Choked on his own tongue

*

Trump pardons Arpaio

Payback – for Sheriff Joe’s assistance in his racist agenda questioning Obama’s birth certificate.

And Sheriff Joe sadistic coward, with his prison camps and institutionalized brutality.

It’s not that they deserve death, but that they’ve done nothing to deserve life.

*

29 August

One half dropper every hour midnight to 9:30

*

On Sheriff Joe

By their silence on President Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, the Republicans have declared that racism, along with tax cuts for the rich, are enough of a coalition to form a winning strategy.

For the Democrats winning strategies have not been their strong point in the last half century.

30 August

Darren came to fix the hot tub – the sensor got too far out of whack. He’s heading off to June Lake Loop for vacation.

Afternoon, Wendy B. came by. She was leading some specimen collection for the Yuba Watershed Institute, and I asked her if she’d be interested in seeing my collection: the Kuksu Herbarium—a thousand pressed specimens covering forty-five years. She said yes.

A wonderful afternoon. A real botanist! Knew almost every plant she looked at. And she says she will help find a home for them. Yes! And help clean up the damaged specimens. Yes!

**

Trump is the symptom, not the disease

*

31 August

I must have hurt something moving boxes with Heather. Lower back pain is at a whole new level.

*

FIRE ESCAPE

Why should the government interfere with American Business by setting arbitrary standards and regulations? Why not let the MARKET decide?

Fire escapes, health and safety regulations

More government meddling and micro-management of PRIVATE ENTERPRISE.

(Let the buyer beware, as we love to quip in Latin.

Is that STUPID or WHAT?)

**

***

An even bigger challenge that speaking truth to power is just to speak truth at all – free from self-delusion or reality-delusion.

**

– a painful day – took more pain meds but just got spacey and would nod out trying to read

*

1 September Friday

Restless last night maybe because I took a late dropper around 10pm but not bad, just frequent wake ups, this am, in one hour naps, through the morning. Very sore in lower back. So, twelve hours between morphine drops, still didn’t have BM until 10:30 – must have been really loaded yesterday

**

In The Age of Earth Denial

The earth keeps trying to send us messages

The quieter angels are taken for granted, or missed entirely. The beautiful angels are put in boxes, cages, or jars, or sold like slaves on the block.

Only the more terrible angels seem to grab our attention – and even then, are attacked or denied by those who find their gospel inconvenient.

The game is to monetize nature.

Here is what the plants and animals that would be destroyed by this mountain top removal strip mine are worth in dollars and here is the value of the coal in dollars clearly it makes sense to go ahead with the coal mine –

IT’S JUST SIMPLE ECONOMICS!

***

A concept that thoroughly stumped a team of planetary archeologists who visited Earth a million years later. Some said that “money” was a heavy metal, some said it was fossilize plants, others said it was just an ever shifting social ranking system of the dominant bipedal species.

Some said it must have been a neuro-toxic substance emitted, under certain conditions, by the brains of the humans on the planet. No one could guess how it worked or why it led the planet’s human inhabitants to destroy all that was beautiful there.

**

Today’s prices. Yesterday’s prices. Prices from the Rio Negro. Prices from Shangri-La.

Or Paleolithic.

***

NATIONALIZE NOT PRIVATIZE

***

The Denier Mind Set

So much goes back to Ayn Rand.

Just amazing.

That brainless, right-wing anarchism.

Earth denial. Mother denial.

***

September 2

Mornings are a little rocky. So much lower back pain. Trying to get my guts moving.

September 3

One dropper every hour midnight until 8

***

Looking back, disengaged.
Even into late historical times,
I realize that most of my life I have lived in a deep trace-like
Totally encompassing, overwhelmingly thorough, and over-the-top state of
HORNINESS.

*

And that I lived in such state utterly without perspective

(No different from a lot of men.

Or even most men.)

But if so, how does any man maintain even a modicum of decorum.

[I’m almost nodding out again]

It had all the power of a fetish – over spans of years would be general – or what to me seemed general

I once set up an elaborate scene just for a chance to look down a woman’s blouse as she bent over.

And that, that Dionysian madness, is our HOPE!

***

4 September

[lists of pills, times, dosages, blah, two pages, blah]

Pain level was fairly severe this am, pain level +7 or 7.5

5 September

Rocky am by around 8:30 I’m noticing a lot of pain this am 5, 6, to 7 on the “10 scale”

Heather came and worked 12 to 2:30 we made one pass through the mail room corner

6 September

Scrip didn’t come

I always seem to be behind the pain curve

Took pills and droppers

Back pain seems to have notched up a couple of points

*

We are quick to say no but then too obedient not to comply.

& (shame attack age 14):

Dale in San Diego

how I would prove to my parents that I was serious about summer school begging them to let me go that I would meditate outside their bedroom all night but, obediently, after an hour, I went to bed.

7 September

[calculations of dosages and meds]

8 September

[list of meds and dosages]

*

Shame attack #5673

1963:

With Jane Klimes and her parents

Bragging how I taught myself how to read

9 September

[Meds, dosages, pain levels]

10 September

Saw Andrew in Berkeley

Mostly a fog

Doctor’s appointments

11 September

Monday at the Stanyan Park in San Francisco.

PET machine is broken, so we’ll have to stay two extra days.

Lots of pills, lots of extra droppers

Walking from Telegraph four blocks to Andrew’s car yesterday reminded me how weak I am

Today – walked about 4 blocks down Haight to gelato shop and over on Cole and back

Losing weight. Try snacking every 2 hours.

12 September

[med lists, snacks]

[doctors, nutritionists, pain management]

13 September

Going for PET/CT

*

Home!!

Laura did all the driving

A man in the PET/CT – youngish, scared and nervous – I wasn’t strong enough to buck regulations (“No Talking”) and ask him what kind of cancer they were checking for – he did say

“It’s all happening so quickly”

I’ll do better next time.

*

Looked at my herbarium data base code – first program was in PASCAL – later I rewrote it in C – a little over 1300 lines of code. I can read it, but a project like that … how did I do it? I was still in school with gobs and gobs of homework.

*

Hard boiled eggs: cold water bit of salt boil 10 minutes pour off water let cool

**

How To Deal with Whipper Snappers

Best way: ask your grandfather.

Oops.

Can’t.

Too late now.

Maybe 50 years too late – that’s why old farts still haven’t solved

the “How to Deal with Whipper Snappers” problem.

*

Nurse Nancy says: maybe have something to divert you while you eat, instead of having to focus on chewing each bite.

***

14 September

Pretty good night. Pain never above 5.

To Do Today:

Replacement check to Marici

Poems to Gwyllm

The Practice of Poetry:

the discipline is to wait.

as in ambush hunting: waiting to be given a poem.

Thus we develop the “haiku eye.”

*

Gonna bake bread.

Thought of Rexroth:

TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME

15 September

Got my PET/CT results:

it’s two pages, technical.

The good news is that my brain is “unremarkable.”

*

16 September

Getting harder to find comfortable positions.

I’m scaring Laura too much – with pain outbursts, full body tremor at night

17 September Sunday

The medicine men came. This morning read poems. Jacob recorded it.

18 September

To Do:

Finish will.

Put contracts on stick.

[meds lists meds lists … ]

19 September

Lots of back pain – lower back pain 4-6 all day despite lots of morphine

20 September

Sometimes the morphine doesn’t touch it

Hard to mail off a letter

Working on the will

21 September

Bad night, lots of pain, no good position.

Breakthough pain 6-7

***

(the overdose scare)

***

22 September

Slept and rested all day – still tired from yesterday

Nancy, my pain management nurse, on vacation – her stand in totally freaked that I had diluted my drops with some whiskey.

Oh! No! no! no! “Maybe it’s degrading it.”

Then said “no more roxanol.” Said the doctor wouldn’t prescribe for me if I were mixing it with whiskey.

I said “no more phone calls.”

I said “I don’t want to talk to a doctor who has never heard of laudanum.”

Woke up at 7:30 with lower back pain 6-7

This is a scene from hell. A bizarre war-on-drugs hell.

23 September

1:15 am: very sore

3:00 am: super sore

Took 18 pills/droppers/doses in 24 hours

26 September

[more of the same]

I managed to put in several hours at the computer to lay out Jeremy & The Mantis

27 September

21 various doses but in pain all day and all night

28 September

Much the same

29 September

Around the same: 18 doses

Let’s just say, a bad ending to the month.

***

The Divine Spark: Hard AI and the Poet.

Laura and I had stopped at a café connected to a small casino in Nevada. We were headed east—maybe it was Elko.

I’d been thinking about hard AI—about Ray Kurzweil:

little machines loosely called “life-forms,”

“consciousness” having little to do with anything.

Little semantic sleight-of-hands:

computability equals intelligence,

brain equals mind,

logic equals thinking,

brain equals computer.

The whole scene is thick with earth denial: we don’t need food, we don’t need bodies.

Mountebank, slipping highly abstract nouns between the shells:

intelligence, consciousness, brain, mind, “smarter,” “more powerful,” —

once you buy the basic con, that it is all measureable by teraflops, no, who would need a body?

Cyborgs: dream on. Or do they?

One of the other booths was filled with a Mexican family: Papa and Mama, four or five kids from eight or ten to fifteen or sixteen. Some one had said something really funny, because they were all laughing as hard as they could—eyes wet, minute after minute:

It began with the laughter of children.
--Arthur Rimbaud

And went on, minute after minute, faces red, the whole family, a good ten minutes:

delicious, out-of-control, unstoppable laughter.

Journal notes for How I Died

**

Aug. 1; five doses

Too much history for me to speak what I see

****

nis nū cwicra nān

Þe ic him mōdsefan

mīnne durre

sweotule āsecgan

None now still quick
left to share my deepest heart

So many fallen / death of kings
the poets, the painters,
all my teachers
gone now
and myself
hardly started

****

Here: a tearful night of recriminations.

****

Aug. 4 Friday

Muggy today. Trying to let it go.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

****

Aug. 5 Saturday

Read with Gary Snyder and Jason Wirth at the Open Book to launch Jason’s book on Dōgen. About a three hour commitment and I did fine.

Water spirit feelin
Springin’ round my head,
Makes me feel glad
That I’m not dead.
--Jim Pepper

****

Aug. 6, Sunday

Another shame attack. This one is not even shameful.

I was working in Calistoga, bottling my root beer, and was in the bar beneath the hotel where I stayed. There was a band, or I think there was, and I asked a really cute Chicana girl to dance. And we did. I was ok I guess, if perhaps expressive. When the next song started her boyfriend danced with her. Totally out-classed me with understatement.

So, this memory, with its accompanying wince and blush, arose because I was reading Patrick O’Brien and there was a scene where the sailors danced all night with the natives on an island in the Pacific, and after reading that I’d had some general reflections on dancing as a traditional social mixing, like a DMZ, and how Wendell Berry noted the importance of square dancing as a way to touch people other than one’s spouse, and then I jumped to that dance scene in West Side Story, and all of a sudden it’s over forty years and I’m sucking wind in Calistoga.

****

Later in the day I caught another one:

I was book-scouting. I had a box of low grade hardbacks that no one wanted, and stopped at a used book store—I can’t remember where exactly—but north of the Bay Area. The guy didn’t want them, even in trade. I begged and finally he gave me paperback trade—but said that I couldn’t use it on art books. He knew exactly what I was doing. I went to the mystery section and he had half a dozen nearly new Raymond Chandlers. I took them all.

The book store probably failed.

Was that shameful, or was I just being “smart.”

Yeah, right.

****

August 7, Monday

morphine dripper at 10/ oxy pill at 11:15; big one at 5.

Mild physical nausea, seamlessly wedded to a spiritual malaise. And an extraordinary sadness. Some is family pain. Some is the political example being set by Trunp and his Republican base: greed and lies become the new morality. Integrity is for “suckers.”

& then there is me. Just wanting to blindfold my eyes and sleep and sleep.

If I were drinking ayahuasca I’d call for the vomit bowel with deep gratitude and await the purge and then the blessing of the stars.

****

Reading the news that Frederic Brow story—The Weapon”—from the fifties came up: “Only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot.”

****

8 August

Rather Fight than Switch

That was a cigarette ad from the early sixties; a series of actors with black eyes sticking to their Tareytons. In a psychedelic vision I applied the phrase to America—that America was the country that would rather fight than switch–that we would never follow the European lead. We’d be the last country on earth to adopt universal health care, or universal free education, or any other liberal policy. I thought that during the Nixon years, and it’s still true.

That was the theme of my book on prisons. And that particularly nasty American vindictiveness.

It’s a legacy of slavery and the Civil War. There is a deep-seated meanness in the American spirit. Those are the people who cheer for Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Think about it: who is the meanest, baddest guy? The chain-gang guard, or the plantation field boss.

And there are a few really nasty people who know better, or should, and moved by motives ideological or in class-interest go to great lengths to hide that the real goal of “Free Market” is free labor, backed up by the government to protect them from strikers, labor unions, leftist governments in Latin America, or popular direct action.

So that corporations can skip taxes, or declare bankruptcy, but people can’t. That corporations can sue governments, but groups of people can’t sue either.

They fly the banner of “Free Market,” but that is the last thing they want. They want monopoly, and government protection, and government bail-outs, and a permanent under-class to whom they can pay poverty wages and government subsidies.

****

August 9 Wednesday

Why I don’t Facebook

I did try it. Back when Facebook was still new. Or, let’s say, new-ish.

I think I lied about my age, and maybe my gender, but I used my real name. That made me nervous. What was I getting into?

I’d read somewhere that anything one posts is there “forever.” That made me nervous also. And then there were a lot of questions about personal stuff. I kept thinking they should have a Miranda warning: “Anything you say may be used against you.”

I’d spent too many years underground, living like a spy.

But with heroic perseverance I kept going. Maybe it is some kind of social phobia, but I had sweat on my forehead. What was I going to do if I had to choose “Like” or “Don’t like” in a public way? I was going to need tranquillizers.

When I finally got my account set up, it was worse than I thought. There it was, right along with “Start here”:

“Dale, you have zero friends.”

*

I never went back. And I’m sure it’s just as well. I’ve read a number of studies showing strong correlations between social media use and loneliness. And between social media use and depression. And between social media use and FOMO, “fear of missing out.” I know that’s what would have happened to me.:

Dale, you have zero friends.

[You’re supposed to laugh.]

Besides, Zuckerberg sold out to the Russians.

***

Aug. 10

Thursday

Mostly at the barn, in the office. I’m not sure I got anything actually done, except that I did format and print out my “to do” list.

***

Is It Inevitable that Mankind Destroy Itself?

And if it were only a matter of species suicide, other than the soft weeping of a few angels, breezes would still sing over our bones.

But, considering our record, as a species, it’s likely we’d take most of the large mammals down with us, in a massive extinction event.

And sitting there, on a mountain of bones, is a spoiled child, saying “Ha-ha, I win, I win.”

Pig, rooster, snake:
eternal wheel.
Or nearly so.

***

August 11

Friday

Woke up with severe vertigo. Barely made it to the bathroom, hanging onto the walls and crawling.

I stumbled back to bed and put a pillow over my face. I just wanted to go back to sleep. This was too much. The pain meds were gone, the room was spinning: it was not a world I wanted to be a part of.

And somehow, blessedly, I did sleep. When I woke up again, an hour later, Laura helped me with the Epley maneuver. Which helped.

Too scary. Please don’t let it end like that.

***

August 12

Saturday night Jeremy Bigalke and Soraya and their two boys arrived.

Some people are perfect guests. They see the right things and they have fun with the right things. Like swimming in the pond. Like Magnus listening raptly as I made up ridiculous stories. Like enjoying simple food. Like watching the Perseids and raving about the long slow bright tails. About seeing the spotted fawns, and the young poults with the mama turkey.

***

Aug. 13, Sunday

Kat Harrison visited! Lovely, if short. She’d never been here to Mantis Hill.

Then in the evening Laura and I drove down to the Stanyan Park in San Francisco. So we’d be there for all the medical appointments at UCSF beginning Monday morning: the psych counselor, blood draws, picking up some tincture at the cannabis store; Meeting Drs, Robin Kate Kelley and Carling Jade Ursem.

Oh yes, and then the chemo infusion at 6pm, and then a very long and painful drive home. I managed to drive one leg, from Vacaville to Olivehurst. I had to use a bathroom in the worst way before we got to Marysville. It was clean. Since I wasn’t buying anything I gave the Indian man running the convenience store a couple of dollars as a tip, told him “Restroom was clean. Thank you.”

Confused him at first. But I could see it was going to warm his whole shift.

***

August 15

Tuesday

Met with Jen in the afternoon. The illustrations for Jeremy and the Mantis are coming along great. This book could win a prize.

***

August 15

Tuesday

The Worst and the Best Things about What Governments Do–

Worst: having an Army.

Best: having a Post Office.

***

Shame Attacks #666

How did this one come up? What was the chain of associations? Laura was driving us to town. Something about love, as in being in. Or love as a “thing,” like a penny in one’s pocket, or a penny lost, all depending on a word, “do you?” Or “don’t you?” Or, even more sublime, unspoken.

O Great Divine Madness, you make me laugh, sing, or weep.

I was in second grade, seven or eight years old, in my room which I shared with my younger brother. I had the class picture out, 8 ½ by 11, or maybe 9 by 12, with a tiny one inch picture of every kid in the class. I was getting ready to kiss the picture of my girlfriend. Her name was Joan.

I remember her as being nice, but other than being secretly “in love” with her, there was no special relationship between us. Looking at her picture I could see it was smudged from other times I had kissed it. I’d tried to rub it, but that only made it worse. I kissed her anyway.

Just then my younger brother walked in. I put the picture down as quickly as I could, but I knew I was caught and I’m sure I was blushing deeply.

“Did you see?” I asked.

“Yes.” he said.

I was in second grade. Which sets a new shame attack date record.

***

Memories, this one not a shame attack. Maybe two and a half or three and a half years old is too young to have shame. That’s an interesting point worth returning to: when do we learn shame? Is it a cross-cultural universal? (Freud had something to say on this issue.)

(Present day psychologists, of the therapeutic variety, seem to view shame as a wholly negative emotion, as something to get free of… so that we can return to a shameless infantile narcissism?)

***

At the Balboa house, where I lived until I was seven, I shared a bedroom of the garage with my older brother. It was a narrow longish room, and our beds were on opposite sides of the narrow part of the room. There was a window above some built-in bookshelves between us. Everything in the room was white as best I can remember. I think it had been an add-on room and the walls were something like sheetrock with thin batten boards, all painted white.

When it was dark, after we’d been put to bed and were supposed to be going to sleep, highly mysterious patterns of light would sometimes move eerily across the walls. The light was in large blocks, squarish or rhombic, of several textures. The blocks of light were always in motion. Sometimes one block of light would seem to split into two blocks and move in opposite directions, overlapping, wrapping around a corner, or disappearing into the ceiling.

And while I can remember the movement of light and shadow on the walls, somewhat, the primary memory is my sense of wonderment. That part is so strong I can almost step into it. Where did the light come from? Why did it silently move across the wall and the ceiling?

My brother and I would talk about the lights. The light patches were most like sunlight that comes through a window and makes vaguely trapezoidal patches on the rug. At some point we connected them to car headlights moving somewhere down the peninsula, but this hypothesis, which I didn’t quite accent at first, did not wholly dispel the feeling of mystery.

The Balboa peninsula was mostly open space in the 1950—vacant lots outnumbered houses. We had no neighbors on the south side—there were three or four vacant lots n a row, so headlights from several blocks away could easily come in the window. And lacy curtains on the window further disguised the light. There was a shade on the window but in those days we never pulled it down.

We tried to connect the light moving on the walls and the cars. Once in a while, if the surf wasn’t too loud, we could hear a car out on Ocean Boulevard or some other street, and if we did, it would have been after we had seen the moving lights. That was what made a cause and effect relationship so difficult to establish.

But mostly what I remember, the most poignant part, was that the presence of mysterious phenomena, and the sense of wonder, was the norm, not the exception. Like all the lint swirling in the sunlight that came through the high window above the front door in the morning—“Like stars,” I’d think.

Today, watching my old cat come across some new phenomenon of shape, material, or shadow—something carelessly dropped onto the floor or onto a stair—helps me to connect with that Mind of Wonder. There is a process she goes through: first staring, then maybe sniffing, and then a gentle bat with a paw. Then the new phenomenon is cataloged, accepted into the Realm of All That is Mysterious That I Live With Everyday.

***

August 18

Joanna and Aurora here.

Louis Blue Cloud comes by to bid on the deck.

Ruth called: said she likes reading the “How I Died” sections. And the political rants also.

Yay!

One really only needs one person to write to.

And that person could be dead.

Or not yet born.

***

The Legacy of Slavery

Nothing specific about the Germans; people used to say that: the “German Character” needed a strong leader.

Gurdjieff said that the Germans were the way they are because of the frustration in having to wait until the end of the sentence to find out what the person was talking about.

But on the level of individual psychology, we might find something. George Lakoff sees a link to authoritarian fathers.

[enough lashes on that bloodied back—move on]

Still and all.

Prisons, there’s a legacy.

***

Gut reactions: “Getting Away with it” by Sam Waterston

& I’d forgotten how Steve Bannon (now out of the White House and back to Breitbart)

was involved with BioSphere II

& the importance of gut reactions:

***

August 19

Saturday

Joanna and Aurora left. Fun to be around, and motherhood has matured Joanna in amazing ways.

She did say (only a slight exaggeration) “It’s been two years without a full night’s sleep.”

Well, let’s see: mother and child in the same bed; and Papa on the couch.

That happened in the sixties also, but there it was mostly single mothers. (It always added a certain awkwardness if one were to stay over.)

Along with this, bottle feeding, even as adjunct to breast feeding, seems unfashionable. “The child might experience ‘nipple confusion’.”

This doesn’t leave the dad a lot to do.

And everything first for the baby.

Better that the passion that engendered the child have some priority. Children respect that. That they are not the center of the universe all the time. Which just frustrates them.

but, as they say, styles changes.

***

***

MY KID BEAT UP YOUR HONOR ROLL STUDENT

Or something like that. A bumper sticker from the eighties.

My sense of humor is perverse enough that I can give a chuckle to the wit of the bumper sticker. It’s Good Ole Boy stuff, and it makes me think of Orwell’s essay on the working class humor greeting cards. Or their American cousins: “This house insured by Smith & Wesson.”

But. Except. There is an underlying resentment that is not at all funny.

And also, evident daily in the Trump presidency & the remarks of his die-hard supporters—his core supporters, I mean. That is, not those who support him for business reasons—“get the EPA off my back and restore my right to poison the river,” or “give me a tax break.”– who want to be able to endanger workers and let “the market” solve the problem rather than the government. Or who want a freer hand to make a fast buck on shady trading on Wall Street.

Or those who think Trump will help some pet cause—give Christian churches political and legal power to legislate some particular moral code: anti-homosexuality, anti-abortion, pro-Christian prayers in public schools, etc. And there is always racism: a hundred years as a wedge between working classes and their shared economic interests and still going strong. Blame it on the immigrants. Let’s just lie shamelessly and claim that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Africa—that was Trump’s entry into politics.

(And how the gut-level racists must have gritted their teeth for every day of the eight years that Barack Obama was President!)

*

But beyond these obvious sources of support that would be either pro-government or anti-government, depending on the transient inclinations of the Leader, there is a class of Trump supporters for whom he can do no wrong.

These are his loyal supporters who love watching him beat up on honor students, and love to watch him reward bullies, and want him to do it more. These people have been shamed. They’ve been “dissed” by those with hipper and more cosmopolitan ideas. For this group, Trump’s politics are mainly inconsequential.

One Trump supporter complained about how he was “put down” for his beliefs in High School!

(Poor Baby.)

So now they get their come-uppance.

*

Not Much PC Here

Oh dear. I’ve laughed at some pretty vile racist and ethnic jokes. I guess that makes me bad and lacking. And as a white man I share whatever collective guilt for what my white ancestors did. My black ancestors also, though no one talks about that. What a terrible can of worms. And then rewards are offered for whichever identity group is the best organized to be professional victims and have a seat at the top table, so that they can get their share of whatever obscure group of peasants is currently being enslaved.

Sorry. But it’s often true.

I don’t go around calling black people niggers, but I do resent that I am somehow castigated for having the word in my vocabulary. Racism is ugly, black or white. Period.

*

It used to be that as long as one did not try to violate a person’s rights or opportunities because of their race, you could still have private feelings and could privately laugh at vile racist, sexist, feminist, Polak, or other ethnic jokes. I think that’s all we should ask for. It’s a slow process, and every backlash sets us back decades.

If my thought dreams could be seen,
They’d put my head in a guillotine also.

And speaking of dreams, you self-righteous finger-pointing hypocrites, you stand accused, tried, and found guilty.

JUST LIKE THE REST OF US.
(Some say we were born in sin.)

*

My kid beat up your honor student kid. Ha ha. While every year our technological society more and more devalues any kind of work or ability except that which makes money—lots of money.

We all have some collective guilt.

We have created an economic system where the heros are those who can “screw the other guy.” Those who can “get away with it.” And who can laugh at the suckers “all the way to the bank.”

We value those who are clever and fast talking and good at making shady deals.

Is that really work at all?

“There’s no law against it.”

Actually, lots of times there are laws, and even if not, that doesn’t make the work “honest.”

*

We all share the guilt here. We killed God and overturned ”morality.” because we deconstructed right and wrong and found nothing left that was “fundamental.”

In this sense Donald Trump is our first “postmodern” president.

Trump is the perfect corporate capitalist: interested only in his personal profit.

***

Buckminster Fuller thought that with the advent of wireless electronic technology, the power of the sea kings, the “Great Pirates,” would be broken. Because they couldn’t understand what was happening just by looking at it. And thus freed from their slavery to commercial interests, engineers would institute a rule of the wise.

Lots of engineers in the Chinese bureaucracy.

Instead, more and more, the only talent that is regularly rewarded is an above-average IQ: just enough smarts to be able to navigate computer menus, and a predatory instinct to steal the lunch money of the duller-witted.

Many kinds of “strength” that were once recognized as valuable—from physical strength, to handling animals, to an honest character, to benevolence, to courage, to neighborliness, and to simple if dim-witted integrity, have been devalued.

Labor is not honored. Nor, always with a few obvious exceptions, is manual skill.

“Strength” is only valuable if it makes money. A shameless quick deal that gets you something that was someone else’s is called “being smart.”

“They should work and be exploited. They’re not as smart as I am.”

***

I heard a man say: “You want to hear a really scary fact: half of the population has an I.Q. below 100.”

Actually, they aren’t the ones causing the problems. The opposite is more true.

Buddhism traces the sufferings of the world to the klesha, or “poisons.”

Greed, malevolence, and confusion.

Mere IQ points don’t bring wisdom. Or character.

***

***

20 August

Sunday

Cleaning up. Need to finish list of web site projects. Need to do SOMETHING on my to-do list.

Where do they keep all that saved time?

***

***

21 August Monday

Eclipse of the Sun.

I have a dope addict mouse in the herb kitchen.

I’m losing weight. Need >2200 KCals. Maybe start drinking protein shakes,

like old times,

kicking drugs and trying to stay alive.

***

22 August Tuesday

Trump as the ultimate red herring—
flashing his moons
while his cronies and his family
loot the treasurey.

***

The opiod crisis: a self-study

***

Verlag Peter Engstler has published Geistertanz (“Ghost Dance”), a collection of twenty of my poems in English and German, in an elegantly designed chapbook.

***

***

Aug. 24

Thursday

Spent yesterday in the herb kitchen, brewing up my meds. Some of this glassware I’ve moved around with me for sixty years. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to use my 1,000 ml. graduate, one of the more beautiful pieces of laboratory glassware ever blown. And how deeply satisfying to my have fine pipettes, my 5 ml. and 10 ml. cylinders, and all the beakers and flasks I could ever want. And to get to use them.

Two of my most-used pieces of apparatus, a large clear hydrometer jar, and the alcohol hydrometer to go with it, I found in my grandmother’s garage. I could never have bought that kind of glassware. My grandfather, whom I never met, had been a lawyer and had ended up with stuff like that being stored in his garage.

I lusted for low form Pyrex beakers, and not just semi-micro sizes—I wanted some big ones. Ditto Erlenmeyer flasks. I would spend hours in high school when I should have been doing homework paging through the VWR glassware catalog, checking off all the stuff I wanted.

I started an organic root beer business in the early seventies just so I had enough reason to buy a whole selection of filter flasks, and highly accurate measuring pipettes.

It was over twenty years after that, when I had started researching and writing Pharmako/Poeia, that I discovered the mother of all laboratory supply houses: “CFRI.”

Chemicals for Research and Industry, with their green dragon sign in front of several large warehouses in the flatlands of Oakland, was a dream come true. CFRI made a specialty of buying up seized labs at government auctions and reselling them at deep discounts. Every size and shape of obscure glassware could be found. One could spend a day wandering the aisles and still not see everything.

They also sold chemicals: highly useful chemicals that were otherwise a big hassle to obtain. The great drug chemist Alexander Shulgin once quipped that they should at least remove the evidence stickers before they put stuff back on the shelf.

*

The DEA hated them. DEA agents would park outside on the street and hassle customers leaving the store, asking for IDs, getting names, asking questions. CFRI went to court and got a restraining order.

After that they were a marked company. The Government hassled them in every way they could, constantly. Bureaucratic hassles. Tax hassles. EPA hassles. CFRI fought on for several more years, but finally had to crumble.

I’ve got a CFRI sweatshirt.

***

next: August 25. The Divine Spark / The Mexican family at that restaurant in Elko.

July 18

At UCSF, with Dr. Katie Kelley, my oncologist. She has never minced words or been anything other than completely open. She is also a researcher and a mother with a life. I feel blessed.

We asked Dr. Kelley about our plans to go to Africa in March. Laura had found a fabulous safari site in Kenya, and with some extra effort had just booked us onto several safaris, as well as two nights in Giraffe Manor, where the tall giraffes stick their heads in through the windows in the upstairs dining room.

Had I doubted that I would be fit for travel in ten months? I sure recognized it now. Dr. Kelley, I think, was slightly shocked. And that was enough to, somewhat immediately, assume a more defensive strategy. As delicately as possible, Dr. Kelley outlined (once again) that with metastasized liver cancer, too many things can change too quickly

Maybe I’m not sure that I ever believed I had that much stamina. Could I do it in a week, a week from today (no); in a month (unlikely); in six months (???),

On reflection Laura and I quickly agreed that Africa was a continent too far. That there are closer places to get licked by the long blue tongue of a giraffe. At this point Dr. Kelley, who had not completely enjoyed her role as killjoy Prophet of Doom, told us about Safari West—a half-day’s trip on our own latitude.

***

Next appointment was with Nancy Lopez, N.P., of Symptom Management Services. I was skeptical at first, but no longer. I was doing pretty well with oxycodone, but wanted something shorter acting as backup for break-through pain—which was pretty often. We agreed on morphine.

***

New Age Friends

And in my circles, there is always New Age advice: “It sounds like you are going to have to learn how to make friends with cancer.”

Oh Really? If I make friends the cancer you think the cancer might be nicer to me?

You don’t think I should just frag them all with a grenade? On sight?

And more:

“Why do you think this is happening to you? What do you think it is trying to teach you?”

Such remarks are usually followed by a curt dismissal of Western Medicine. And also of the whole scientific tradition: that is, that truth can be separated from falsity by experiment.

***

Like the “alternative healer” who treated my first wife. She had lupus. And so our friends said “Oh, go see this AMAZING healer . . . he works with [circle which apply: energies, colors, auras, herbs, …]

And you can’t say no: your wife is sick, very sick.

Like,

“No, I’m not going to go to that quack.”
“Oh, you’re just going to let your wife die, huh?”

So we go. She’s suffering. Of course he doesn’t take insurance: it’s cash up front—and a lot of it—a lot more than a licensed doctor would charge. And he has a two page handout explaining how paying him money is part of the healing process—that if you don’t pay money you can’t get well because you are not being responsible for yourself.

So we borrow the money. But that was just getting in the door. The doctor holds crystals and advises the patient to stop wearing silver jewelry: it’s blocking her energies. Then we shell out another two weeks wages for a bottle of vitamins (but very good vitamins).

When she had a flare-up, her temperature spiking into dangerous heights, he folded his hand, shook his head, and said “Well, you made your choice. You went to Western medicine. I can’t help you.”

S.O.B.

***

Western medicine, with much attendant suffering and many false starts has been seeking out evidence-based, replicable, scientific knowledge for some centuries now. All of the doctors and researchers at UCSF are on salary—none of them are getting rich. They work long hours, they treat rich and poor alike, they are astonishingly selfless and compassionate. The anti-intellectualism of my generation, and the frequent dismissal of science, is a cause of deep sadness for me.

***

That anti-intellectualism, so long a part of America, that had such a resurgence in the Sixties, does not stop with denying medical science. It also denies climate science. I know a physicist (who should know better) that seems to think that leading climate scientists such as James Hansen or Michael Mann are ignorant of atmospheric physics, that they are stupid, lying, or just trying to hang onto their jobs.

It is, I’m sorry, useless to try to convince deniers with evidence. They get their views from spiffy denier blog sites with big budgets. They don’t read the scientific articles. Both Science and Nature seem to be part of the conspiracy. They cheer at funky put-downs of nerdy scientists naïve enough to go on right-wing talk shows for “debate.”

***

My best friend for several years working at a start-up in Silicon Valley was an “IQ Chauvinist.” He was a brilliant engineer, an amazingly strong mathematician, and a fun guy to work with. But he had no respect for anyone ignorant of his own specialties. Or for people with children (“why should I pay taxes for education—I don’t have any children”). Or for environmentalists (Ozone hole, hoax; rising temperatures, wrong).

Sigh.

***

July 19

A pleasant day at Mantis Hill. Cool enough so that, for a change, we didn’t turn the swamp cooler on, and the house was quiet.

It is beginning to seem that my back pain is not gong to go away.

And that, as I feared, this may be the best I feel for the rest of my life.

***

It’s been difficult to work. “Work,” well, ok: I do know what real work is. It’s been difficult to write, that’s what I meant—to write with any plan, thought, or discipline.

It’s been difficult to find the motivation.

So I thank you, old friend, for your interest.

In the Bardo of Increased Permeability, besides easy tears for the least tragedy, there is a whole band of imps encouraged by the breach in the defenses,

My old nemesis, “She’ll Be Hurt,” and her big sister, “She’ll Be Angry” are still in the mob, somewhere, I’m sure. But they have been upstaged by “You!? Gimmeabreak” and “Don’t You Think You’re Being A Little Dramatic, Dear?” And, of course, “No One Will Want to Read it Anyway.”

Sigh.

Pull down thy vanity, I say, pull down.

Well guess what kids. . . .

Maybe it is “You’re Being Overdramatic” who is in denial. Death threatens her. She wants me to be in denial.

So, well then darling, you little shit: here’s the deal. I can offer you immortality. Now shut up for a while.

(and she is so afraid of death
she accepts the offer:
I can feel her backing off


Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered.

***

July 19, 20

Down to UCSF. “High-Risk Post-Transplant Dermatology Clinic.”

***

21 July

Trump and his Extended Family of Liars

How do you deal with shameless liars? With those who have embodied the capitalist ethic so completely–that is, that the only good, the only virtue, is self-interest–that they have become mockeries of civil beings. And of human beings.

Adam Smith took a basic sense of fairness, shame, and integrity for granted. Perhaps he missed that it was his own “economic man” that poisoned the social contract by its definition.

***

American history is already so thick with blood and corruption, with being the bully in the neighborhood, that we all have to ask whether or not the American Republic worth saving? I do know conscientious anarchists who answer that question “no,” that it is not their job to save late-stage corporate capitalism. And I know conscientious Buddhists who don’t believe it is their place to work for social change at all, in the political sphere.

And Lordy, they may be right. And as far as saving “the masses,” a lot of them have joined the reactionaries. We may have to accept defeat.

And tell sad stories of the restoration of kings.

The slave owners stacked the deck against democracy over two hundred years ago. Only men of wealth and property (= slaves) were given extra standing as a bulwark against the demos. When the property owners finally lost the presidency in 1860 they said “Oh, we only support elections when we win, our property is more important than the Constitution.” When Barack Obama was elected they announced that they would oppose every word he uttered, even if the words were their own.

So now they have their revenge. But let’s clarify a few things.

*They don’t believe in “states rights” unless it suits them—look at Jeff Sessions restarting the War on Drugs,

*They don’t believe in “original intent” in the Constitution either, unless it suits them—-look at “money is speech” and “corporations are people.”

*They don’t believe in “fiscal responsibility” either, except when they are out of power—which party has created the biggest deficits, and which party has brought them down?

What do they believe in? Tax cuts for the rich, consistently. They also are quite aware that without chains, shackles, and bull-whips, literal or economic, people won’t willingly work until they drop, which is what “master” wants them to do. They used to make up names for “theories” to defend their raiding of the public till, such as “trickle-down economics.” Now they don’t bother: they just tell lies.

Trump lies. Trump Jr. lies. Jared Kushner lies. Jeff Sessions lies. Mike Pence lies. This is not gut instinct: this is recorded history! Not one with the honor of a frog.

You could wash your hands of the current farce—it would be less headache. Besides, it’s up to the majority party to stop the debacle, and thus far they have shown no inclination to do so. So: pursue art, or money, or spirituality, or pleasure—all democracies fail, all republics fall.

Yeah. Or. Resist.

***

22 July

Wrote for three or four hours—too much maybe—missed my nap. But wrote easily

***

28 July

Can’t do it. So much is personal and family stuff. And has little to do with my dying.

And I need my journaling . . . for myself. And I can’t do that if I’m thinking of it as a book.

***

29 July

worked in lab, cleaning up. First .

30 July

3 pills, one s.

31 July Tuesday

3 pills, 2 s.

How I Died: Journal Notes, July 2017

***

July 1

Slept most of the day. Went 20 hours between pain pills.

Andrew Schelling called, may visit. He had some good advice on selling papers.

The pain was clear: lower back, lumbar band. The oxy helps with the bone pain but not with the skin chill.

***

July 2

At least I’m writing in my journal everyday (not).

Spirits very low. I wake up to pain. That’s my first awareness.

Seems like nothing has been getting done for months now. Days and weeks go by with no progress in finishing the Ebaugh book. Nor in finishing my will or preparing other estate matters, such as they are. Seems like most of each day is spent sleeping.

I pulled the starter chain to get Laura’s mower going, but I was super careful… I don’t think that was the trigger. Then I bent over to cut a clump of tough grass with big shears. Now I’m back to where I was three weeks ago with that high “rib” pain.

***

July 3

OK. I’m making to-do lists. Just getting the mss. already written in print is too much.

***

July 4

lots of back pain.

Still getting used to taking pain meds on a schedule.

***

July 5

Remember, sooner or later, Coyote gets to the controls.

This is both good and bad.

1. No matter how well planned anything is, Coyote will find a way to fuck it up.

2. Coyote will fuck it up. (Even if we depend upon it.)

Such as, say, government. Or nuclear power.

***

July 6

Stef’s internment. I got a ride up the hill to the Cherokee cemetery. This wild, beautiful woman. Jerry T. has compressed disc, and now carries a fold-up stool in a cool shoulder bag, like a bandolier. He let me sit on it for a while, the mensch.

At the house I mostly hung out on the couch with Jake, Mary, Moses, and Louis Blue Cloud. Sara G. saw me and stared at me like I were a ghost.

***

July 7

I awake to pain. The pain is my first sensation. So, generally, mornings suck.

But somehow I managed to do the 11 x 17 layout for the mantis book. That was huge.

***

July 8

Saw Dr. Allen, Dr. Joel Alter’s protégé, and had a cranial-sacral treatment. In some amazing way without a clear scientific explanation, he let my body release the upper pain, from the rib just at the bottom of my right shoulder blade. And brought it back to “base pain”in the lower back.

“Pain can get stagnant,” Dan said. He even struck a chime held over my body. It’s kind of woo-woo but I could feel it vibrate all the way into T9. I had a good half-hour of bliss, and that’s hard to buy anywhere.

***

July 9

Blurb for a new CBD book:

“A clearly written and informative book on a complicated subject. Cannabis is a multi-faceted and many-gifted plant. Medical marijuana is not a panacea, and is not substitute for the extraordinary skills of modern scientific medicine, but as this fine book shows, Cannabis in its many forms is now an important part of the Western medical tradition.”

Saw a Facebook post by my daughter that explains why Sara thought I was a ghost.

She’s frightened, I guess. Still, she gave the impression that my end was imminent. Lots of people saw it, and Laura has already fielded a couple of phone calls and emails from friends discreetly inquiring if they needed to come say goodbye right away.

Choosing one’s death is not really a personal decision. That is, it’s not a private decision.

We have wives, friends, children, and we belong to them as much as to ourselves.

I guess I looked pretty bad, though. People keep telling me.. See, I’d skipped my pain meds. Seemed superstitious, but respectful.

Stef.

The internment and all.

*****

***

July 10

a taste of nausea in the morning., though I slept better.

It’s hard to keep track of which symptoms are from the cancer and which from the medicines, or the medicines taken to counteract the medicines.

When I was young and enlightened I was sure that I would never go down this path. Ha ha.

No one who has lived an inner practice—that is, has structured their life around examining their own nature—fears death. Dying, however, is its own matter: rarely clean, swift, or heroic. More often messy, painful, and with expression of various bodily fluids.

During the American Civil War any man wounded in the gut knew that the wound would be mortal, and that it would be a slow and painful death.

A Confederate commander, facing a Yankee attack, ordered his troops to “shoot low—they’ll have more time to meet their maker.”

The warrior ethos overcomes fear of death: “It is a good day to die.”

In most cultures, of course, that does not mean that there is not fear of the dead.

Psychotropic plants may have played a role in the origin of religion—but not a necessary one: death is plenty enough motive.

***

Clipping my nails, filing the rough spots with an emery board—

“Oh, we can do that for you.”

Resist! That’s the mortician speaking. She’ll also apply a little rouge, I suppose.

In this situation, say “No thank you.”

“Well, when you can’t, we’ll be glad to take over.”

Call this chapter “The Importance of Everyday Tasks.”

***

How I Died

The idea is that this will be published posthumously. I am hoping that it will be a long book. There won’t be . . . a lot of revision.

Then someone said, “No, lots of revision. Life is constant revisioning of revisions.

ARISE!
What was that?

An original idea.

***

Mostly my mind keeps clicking across the stage.

During my prostatectomy the surgeon had to shorten the urethra—pulled it in and re-sewed:

“It’ll shorten your penis some,” he said.

Least of my worries. Still, no man wants his dick shortened.

“Can I sell the extra inch?”

Still.

And then one rather hot day, peeing sitting down, I wet my own scrotum.

Sigh.

“When I can’t wipe my own ass, put the pillow over my face. Promise.”

Yes. Let’s tell the story “open kimono” and boldly go where every man one has gone before.

Everyone.

Except you who still have bones.

***

July 14

Everyone has good days and bad days and everyone has been sick. So we all know how hard it is to work when sick. Therefore, what I’m saying is that the bad days generally pass without comment.

***

July 17

Foreknowledge of mortality—kind of a gift for a poet. I mean, sometimes people are asleep when it comes—they miss the whole thing.

I mean Jeez. Think of Socrates.

***

I’m worried that I’m going to blow this book. By its definition, I won’t be able to revise it. The whole project is rather shameless.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
--Nietzsche

And wasn’t there a character in a Bolaño novel, an artist, who killed himself so that he’d have a memorable opening that people would talk about?

How I Died: Journal notes June 2017

***

1 June

Time to get the will in order.

Which is to prompt one to consider one’s stuff, from clothes to tools to art to books to anything else that takes up physical space, to assets, to real property,

to obligations,

to the necessary organizational work of finding pertinent documents: book contracts, deeds of trust, all that stuff,

and personal papers: notes for books and articles, correspondence, banker’s boxes full of paper, of perhaps minor, but not zero, literary value. Letters with other poets, other authors, editors . . . and also wives, children, lovers—what to do with them?

And how to disperse gifts and property—there are so many could use a hand.

And finding executors, and those to accept power of attorney.

Yuk.

And e-files and accounts—have to have passwords listed for “electronic executor.”

And then there is a literary executor.. have to get my files somehow organized by book and article. In some way that is simple and obvious.

Yuk.

Tomorrow, to think of that: today I want to write.

Want to, but too tired.

And too sad.

***

7 June

Two months ago I was writing every day about sub-Roman Britain. Like I’d been given liberty—shore leave on an enchanted island. Now there are gaps of a week even between journal entries. A wave of melancholia will pass over, like a dark cloud suddenly obscuring the sun. They seem to come out of nowhere, sometimes accompanied by a slight nausea. Hello Jean-Paul, it’s been a while. Clinic appointments and treatments take precedence over all else.

Stopped near Camp Beale on the way home from UCSF and took a sample from the dark rocky outcrops sticking up from the meadows. Some of them remind me of stone circles I saw in Wales. I thought it might be basalt, but this was meta-volcanic: more like a greenstone, much older than the Sutter Buttes eruption.

***

13 June

Back at UCSF. Had a PET/CT. The used a radioactive fluorine isotope attached to something that passes for glucose, given after a day of fasting. Because cancerous tumors are more active than normal tissue, cancerous cells absorb more of the glucose. The detectors, precision high-tech themselves (looking for the gamma rays from the positron/electron annihilations), and software to create a three dimensional map (taking into account lag time in the detector tubes) from not all that many events, and of course the mean distance an anti-electron travels before annihilation (not far).

Essays to write: “Earth House Hold – Fifty Years After.”

Let’s take a look at Snyder’s seminal essays and weigh in on the progress of the Revolution

***

BAD DREAM # 4067

Traveling by air I was given, by chance it seems, the TSA pre-check. I didn’t have to take my shoes off or anything. They just waved me through. So I said to the TSA guy, “Don’t you know who I am?”

And he said, “Oh, we know who you are. We just don’t care anymore.”

Did that really happen, or did I make that up?

***

16 June

Defending the Quarterdeck. Not a bad title.

or.

Watching the Sand Fall

The glass was turned long ago for each of us. But waking up to pain with first thought in the morning gives the sand an extra weight—making it more like gravel than sand. Noisy gravel.

Or:

The pirates have stormed over the sides and boarded the ship. The captain and his mates have retreated to the quarterdeck. We are ready for a siege but there is no plan or strategy to retake the ship.

Self-advice:

“Try not to lose on time.” (In the chess sense.)

***

19 June

“How I Died” Now there’s a title!

“How long a book is it?”

what is needed, always,

for any of us, in such extremes,

is an open structure: malleable plot lines,

lots of room for cadenzas,

even a new movement.

That is, more or less complete on each page.

Usual plot devices, such as the cliff-hanger, or a sub-dominant chord that needs resolution,

is rather to tempt fate.

Still to do:

“The Public Drinking Fountain”

a rather beautiful idea now becoming scarce.

Privatization is the perversion of society.

Still to do:

“False Pregnancy” or, “The Restoration”

that once again we believe ourselves to be rational animals.

People will deny science to defend materialism.

And will deny history and their own senses to maintain the myth of rationality.

I have not recorded any of the medical shit that’s been going on. Starting chemo. Infusions on the cancer ward. Side effects.

I fear for Laura. I am little comfort to her these days. Our love is amazingly strong and our humor is good—we can still make each other laugh, and do—but her fortitude astounds me.

***

21 June Solstice

Hard day. I skipped a pain pill. I was reading and forgot. Lots of aches and sore sports.

Nothing particularly to compare with BIG pain, but it is wearing in its consistency.

Also it is prostratingly hot: 105 degrees and humid enough that the swamp cooler is mostly ineffective.

Stef is back in the hospital. That dear wild woman. We’ve been in the hospital at UCSF at the same time several times over the last two and a half years. So hello dear one. Heard you are having some hard days. .. I had a reverse myself. Luck. And blessings. D.

My daughter called. She asked how long I had to take the chemo. Had to explain to her that it wasn’t a cure, more like a rear-guard action. Buying time with however much of the chemo drug I can tolerate.

Which reminds me. All that time I saved with time-saving gadgets … is it in a bank somewhere? Can I draw it out?

***

23 June

Awoke, dull low-level pain—skin around my lower torso hyper-sensitive. Kind of like shingles coming on. But I think it is a reaction to the chemo (Sorafenib).

I guess I’ll probably die in pain. Cancer in bones has gotta hurt. It’s not the pain I’m worried about, but the lingering.

My teenage fantasy: falling from a great height… even an airplane .. the “existential” reality of the fall seemed perversely appealing.

Nowadays, when such fantasies flit by, it is usually a firing squad. I would HATE HATE HATE being strapped to a gurney.

OR, there is always the stutterer’s noose, like Phil Oakes. That’s why we stutterers keep being reborn as stutterers.

OK, tomorrow, I will get to work. Start cleaning and sorting and putting away—there are piles of books and papers and clothes and stuff from pockets, and shoes on every flat surface and most of the floor.

All in a heat spell.

Sure. Tomorrow.

Maybe I can hire some help, though even that seems beyond my strength.

Or will.

POLITICAL:

Heard a Trump supporter say he liked him because he was “honest.”

Sometimes it is hard to have compassion for all deluded beings.

Some support him from spite, surely, for having been vaguely insulted.

Some, nakedly and shamelessly, for profit, for more wealth.

The predatory can always find a victim with less street-smart, or with less intelligence, or with too much trust, or with less legal power, or less money, and fleece them.

We could try to kill them all, but without changing the competitive, greed-based monetary economy, it wouldn’t help.

Other than some sense of moral justice.

***

The side effects of the chemo… tolerable is not pleasant. But no cure.

It’s like Nathan Bedford Forrest cutting Sherman’s supply lines when he was in Atlanta—it slowed him down and retarded his movements for a while, but Sherman’s deadly army was quite intact.

At some point there will be a trade-off between quality of life for more of it.

From what I hear, or hearing between the lines of some of the doctors and nurses, there is a lot of variability here.

The mistake that healthy people make when imagining this scenario, sometimes shaking their wise sagely heads when hearing of the extraordinary and desperate measures that some take to prolong life, is that the choice is a private one. It’s not.

When Dr. J., in our medicine circles, pain and paralysis gradually claiming more and more of his body each month, made us promise, on psychedelic honor, to put a pillow over his face when he couldn’t wipe his own ass, we agreed. But when he said it was time we didn’t agree—we told him he was still too important a part of the magic of the circle.

He tolerated us for several more months, maybe even more than six, then said enough was enough, that he was leaving in three more days. He died in his sleep. Or something like sleep. It wasn’t suicide, it was just like a shaman taking flight and not returning.

Every enlightened Bodhisattva knows what to do
when his eyes turn to the earth.
What will you do?

--from the Miscellaneous Koans

***

23 June

The lack of energy is striking. Not so much being sick, more like an old vintage car, not primo but without a lot of visible damage, just out of gas.

Malaise, Depression, Fatigue: the three wicked sisters.

***

24 June

It occurred to me that the kind of shitty way I feel right now may be the best I feel for the rest of my life.

Drama queen!

(sayeth the imp on my left shoulder)

Got to make the effort to call out for some help: house, secretarial, & land.

***

25 June

My goal is to maintain this journal as long as I can.

Call it “Pharmako/Thanatos”

Drama queen!

Silence! There below decks!

The general permeability lets them in.

“Is this all the crowd you could draw?”

As a balance the bird songs are really peaking, especially at dawn.

And I’m loving the woodpeckers.

Scalp is itchy, but hurts if I touch my hair, as if I had slept on it wrong.

Every room is collecting more stuff: books, clothes, boxes. It’s starting to look like one of those houses where old people live.

***

Politics:

Trump and his cronies are a total disaster. And the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are giving him a free pass. I can’t watch the news.

I wrote “The Triumph of the Lie” before the inauguration, and little has changed.

MYTHS: (#27..) Heard a man say, “what’s scary is that half the population has an IQ under 100.” Actually, they are not the problem. The problems are the ancient poisons: greed, malevolence, and confusion. They are equal opportunity diseases. It’s the smart and clever ones who cause the most suffering.

***

The HEAT has been debilitating. Triple digits for over a week.

Another paradox: air conditioning adds to the carbon load, creating need for more air conditioning. This is not a win/win situation.

Book to write: THE BOOK OF SHAME

The shame attacks are continuing, triggered by some obscure association, or by, it seems, nothing but a breeze. Some are from memories twenty-five or fifty years old, from an inept response in some quite distant conversation—words on the stairs coming by one more time. Another is just a bad line I put in a poem forty years ago.

They mix with the peeping songs of the goldfinches.

Shame attacks, micro, mini, and maxi.

Deep in a French cave, a wooly rhinoceros painted life-size on the calcite wall, an obsidian projectile point stuck in a crack as an offering, now completely encrusted with limestone. The sensitive farmer turned off his lantern so we could feel the cave in darkness. I climbed into an alcove that looked like a perfect acoustic amplifier and pulled out my Jew’s harp and sang and chanted a song to the calcite while I twanged. At the first note someone had said “what was that!”

The farmer knew, and waited until I was done, and then a bit longer before turning his lantern back on. He had a huge smile. The other tourists said “That was a beautiful recording, what a wonderful idea to bring an aboriginal recording in here and play it.”

And the next day at another cave, there being a member of the party who sang in a choir—a REAL singer—they asked him if he would chant and sing with the lights out.

That’s THAT shame. Duh! Triggered, as best I can reconstruct it, from Laura saying something about bats, me thinking then of caves, and then that cave.

Sigh.

Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
--Bob Dylan

Maybe I could start classifying the shame attacks, could write “The Taxonomy of Shame.”

The times you let yourself get walked on.

The times you made a dumb, half-conscious response when you knew better.

How about all the times you hit a wrong note? Jeez….

Listen, we all peed our pants and shat our diapers.

I been slapped. I been spit on.

My name should have been Matt, as in doormat.

Or that time sitting on the grass with friends and that dog trotted up behind me and lifted his leg right on my back.

And I have been frequently sold.

***

It’s like a long freight train, coming into the yard, moving so slowly I can see each car. They are all flatcars and on each one a scene is being enacted. Right there, that car: that was a business deal I blew. When the next flatcar comes by it is a really clichéd simile I used in a poem forty years ago. If this train were my biography I should be on Aid to the Totally Disabled.

Oddly there are never visitations of events that were intensely embarrassing at the time, such as stuttering events: the time I called a girl on the telephone and had to hang up because I couldn’t say my name while she kept saying “Yes? Hello? Who is this?” Or stuttering my way though a presentation at a seminar. This train is all diddly-shit stuff.

I just . . . watch them trot through.

Even recording any of them is too much of a nod,

well, except for science.

I never asked for your crutch
so don’t ask for mine.

***

Then there are alternating waves of anger. I’m surprised I’m not having hot flashes.

I just had a wave of anger at my father’s smug and willful ignorance. “I don’t think our government would lie to us.” Or, after the killings at Kent State, “Well, they were throwing rocks.” Did I kill myself trying to wipe the smirk off his face?

Maybe.

***

Loving kindness. The Dalai Lama said that I think. Love your enemies. Jesus said that. Those who lie and persecute us are our teachers. That’s in the Shodoka, chanted every day in Zen temples.

Sigh.

***

26 June

to UCSF, to report on how I’m tolerating the sorafenib. Which is not well.

Skin rashes on face and torso, some hive-like eruptions on my forehead, scalp itchy, nipples hard and sore—I can only tolerate the softest fabrics. Chill-like goosebumps on my sides. The lower back pain is more like the sound of the surf in the distance.

***

meditation on grass: Carl Sandburg, Matsuo Basho. And my own, from long ago:

makes me smile

those grass roots

cracking cement

***

So we will quit the sorafenib for a week, until the skin reaction dies down, then start again at half the dose.

Going now for the other half of the treatment: infusion.

This is definitely “life on the cancer ward.”

Survival of metastasized liver cancer is not good, on the order of a year. But almost all of those people had cirrhotic livers. Survival rates are not well characterized for patients with healthy livers. One to eight years is the best Dr. Kelley will conjecture. I can’t say this to Laura or others, but my particular cancer feels pretty aggressive, so I think five years would be a fine goal. It could be more, of course. It could also be a lot less.

***

27 June Mantis Hill

Very sore. Right posterior rib area.. hurts if I take a deep breath, or if I try to lift my right arm. All I did was to bend over and reach out to pet the cat. Skin reaction still strong. Pain in hands and fingers.

***

28 June

Severe neck pain.. can’t turn my head very far.

then spent the day at the local hospital, xray and CT scan to check for “PE”

(pulmonary embolism).. Being extra careful… but it blew Laura’s day as well as my own.

***