new model

talked to the techs and the nurse at the treatment today.

they say two weeks (as opposed to the five weeks I was told) is not too soon to be getting the sore throat.

they said over time it would become quite painful.

the nurse said they would be watching my weight. patients who lose weight during the treatments take longer to recover, they said.

when I start losing weight, the way they deal with it is by installing a feeding tube in the stomach. it's a day procedure she said, not mollifying my fear and revulsion at all.

she said that even though nothing tastes good, you have to think of the food like medicine and try to get it down anyway.

I thought I was starting to lose a little taste...guess it's nothing like it's going to be. three berry shakes still really taste good to me...and I'm going to give it hell before I go through that day procedure. if I have to eat two, maybe even three shakes a day...I'll just man up.

in the coming month, you'll get to see Scott Bennett without any taste. see if you notice.

she wrote two prescriptions...one for a temporary pain relief and one that is stronger, and is good just before bed to insure sleep.

I tried to sing a little in the car...the best you can say is that it was hit or miss. and I am hearing that won't get better during the radiation.

so I'm sending the alert out about the summer. once again, I do not know what I will be able to do, how much, when. I think the most likely stuff I will be able to continue is antares work, tracking sessions for me and others, then probably rehearsals, then gigs that don't involve much vocal work.

if exhaustion is a side effect, even when one can still eat and sleep, any interference with those won't be good energy wise. and healing, as to a person my bandmates have told me, is job 1.

it's not some new cancer threat. nothing permanent.

and can I really be surprised when a health undertaking is harder than first described? before all this started, I assumed anything I did would be harder to recover from than any doctor said.

wasn't ready for this, though.

I always considered the most poorly named deity in Greek mythology as Uranus, especially when mispronounced.

but today, my vote would have to go to Sisyphus.

he made the same mistake as Lucifer, daring to consider himself equal to the ruler of the heavens.

for punishment, Zeus condemned Sisyphus to roll a huge boulder to the top of a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down again where Sisyphus would have to begin returning it to the top of the hill. thoughout eternity.

of course, back then, no one was trying to run Pro Tools on Windows, so this was the most frustrating punishment they could invent.

and I feel that, being in a position to know to some degree what that feels like, however tricky and avaricious he was...ain't nothin' sissy about that man.

ok, it's official

the stuff I had been told to expect at three to three and a half and at five weeks of radiation is here after nine treatments.

the crowd at the Little Bear, I said later, would have killed us if we hadn't done an encore. you have to call that a successful engagement. but it was obvious midway through the first, acoustic trio set (that I kind of thought would make the four hour gig kind of easier for me) that the stuff I was singing on wednesday at rehearsal was not going to come out of my mouth saturday.

I've done a lot of gigs, I told Vickie, even solo gigs when I couldn't sing a note...some say all of them...I know some stuff about vocal triage, singing around the rough spots.

but if this is the honeymoon, as the radiation techs say, the marriage is not going to be pretty.

the techs always ask me about difficulty swallowing. I know why now. it hurts. it kind of messed up my sleep last night. it's not difficult...just hurts. lisa went to safeway at 6:30am to get me some ricola drops...and without singing the theme, don't know how she did it...and they seem a little magic now, giving real relief.

radiation end date is a month from today, July 21.

kathy said I've been singing a lot, and maybe a couple of days without singing will calm the sensitive pinpoint in my throat.

mostly, the weekend off treatments didn't stop this from getting worse (though it was a real relief for the muscular posture collar my neck has become) and it's back to suntanning five days this week.

I was wiped yesterday. what I did saturday, and the week before, took all I had. and it's a different kind of tired than I usually am after the Little Bear.

just as this singing stuff is different from the usual singing problems I have to surf...just as this sore throat feels different...new puzzles, new problems, new loopholes.

this new problem business is getting old.

now, it seems like a long time ago, and I'm having trouble remembering exactly what it was like...but I seem to recollect that, in the times before the tumor stuff, I had a multitude of health care issues that I was already dealing with.

having a new shipment of symptoms arrive C.O.D., and weeks early, is a little disheartening.

it may be time for the very thing I have allowed myself a good little vacation from.

perspective.

I can never hear that word without seeing Spinal Tap, having come to Graceland to get cheered up when their memphis gig cancelled, standing around Elvis's grave. and we see them with the camera actually in the grave, looking up.

"well, this puts our problems into perspective"

"yeah...a little too much fucking perspective, if you ask me!"

that's why I've taken a break from it, being present with music and life kind of as I've known it, putting parentheses around the things that remind me that this summer is unlike any other. looking at possibly having permanent damage to my voice, my guitar playing, or my continued me-ness gave me a little too much fucking perspective for awhile.

but it may not be so bad to remember, if things get a little harder for awhile...we're playing for all the marbles here. "we're captives on the carousel of time" says Joni...but when that carousel starts slowing down and you feel the ride about to end, we feel more than a little desperate.

I am working for, playing for, fighting for the brilliant and sacred gift of being able to launch into "Louie, Louie" any damn time I want to, especially at a gig when those people need to dance! I have throughout my life put up with innumerable sore throats, endless fatigue, and a whole lot of physical hangovers in order to do just that...say what you will about aging, but when I had a house solo gig three nights a week in my late twenties I spent all of every week twice as trashed as any week I've had in my fifties.

radiation is weird. I've adjusted my definition of "you don't feel anything". it's kind of like an operation...no, you don't feel anything. anything you might normally feel if you were awake through it.

but you respond to it. meaning you feel it in different ways. I feel my heart rate increase during the treatment. feel my SCM tense up. I feel the surgery a month after it ends...in a hundred strange ways.

my body is aware of what is happening to it, in ways my consciousness is not.

like my old girlfriend catherine used to say..."it don't go nowhere."

in the perspective of normal life, with its normal levels of denial, a cold sucks.

this is like a new weird mutant strain of cold, one you have to learn about and suss out and find the best ways to ease.

one that might...we don't know...get worse for a month or more.

but I'm getting to see the longest, greenest, most bountiful day of the year. again this year. and I want 30 or 40 more of these. I want them.

under that perspective, I'll drive to this unnatural western medicine hi-tech church of the mad scientist, and thank everyone involved, God, my friends, and life for this debilitating procedure dedicated to conservation of living. miraculously enough in this case, mine.

Reader's Digest, when I was a kid

and woke up in the middle of the night, was something to do. like the internet today.

I could go to the upstairs bathroom, down the hall, without alerting my parents...certainly there was no TV in a safe range (nor any programming after midnight, not even the waving flag and the Star Spangled Banner. it was back in the day when "why stop, ever?" was considered crazy talk) and certainly no music to be had at that hour. even the transistor radio under the pillow was a high crime, if found out.

the October 1960 Reader's Digest, however, was on a shelf in the bathroom. and I am shocked how much of its content I remember.

less the condensed book, which I always skipped...less "I am Joe's Urethra" or "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met"...less "What the Communists Really Want"...I didn't really even need to increase my word power so much...than "Points to Ponder" or "Towards More Picturesque Speech", "Quotable Quotes", "Laughter: the Best Medicine" , even "Humor in Uniform". and the space fillers at the ends of the articles seemed at the time to me to contain real acquired wisdom- and seem so to me still.

Reader's Digest (not Readers' ? did they think they only had one Reader?) always had this vibe, which I loved, of old people trying to include current references.

it was like the Carousel of Progress, first at the World's Fair in 1964, then at Disneyland, and I think still currently at Disney World, where you'd sit in a small room of seats that went around the perimeter of a circular building, stopping to see dioramas that showed the state of home technology in twenty year increments. "yeah, we don't need an iceman since we got this new electric refrigerator" "oh, it's almost time for George and Gracie...better warm up the radio!"

when I went to Disney World in 2001, they obligingly had an exhibit for the year 2000. it included a voice programmed oven and, I think, a Mac laptop, along with a widescreen TV showing video games. the child yells out, "wow! I finally got up to a thousand!" the oven responds, "setting temperature for a thousand degrees"

smoke and hilarity ensue. ah, the follies of convenience!

reading the birth control pill jokes, wry observations on contemporary morality ("in Hollywood, the comandment seems to be 'Love one another...and another...and another'"), and stories of then-contemporary scientific advances ( "this is a pilotless, completely automated plane. nothing can go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...") now seems like riding the Carousel of Progress. while the theme is still, "it's a great big beautiful tomorrow...shining at the end of every day...", there's an unstated caution behind it all...ok, ok, we give, this is where life is going, but don't let's go too far too fast.

my current radiation schedule brought to mind one of my favorite Reader's Digest jokes.

the schedule is every day at 11am, with Saturday and Sunday off.

and it brings up the most mixed feelings.

like when the dentist's office calls saying they've had a power failure, and can we schedule your filling for next wednesday instead of today.

today suddenly seems much much brighter. we're almost thrilled for the cancellation. but they will be taking out another week's worth of decay when they get in there. it can't hurt less, and you still gotta go.

my first couple of radiation sessions, I thought it was my imagination that things immediately seemed tenser in that area of my neck afterwards. now I accept that that happens. it eases back during the day...and when I lay down and the SCM muscle is spared its assignment of keeping my head up, it's very good for it. the mornings are the best time in general, until the radiation again.

it was said to me that it would be three to three and a half weeks in, that I would start getting tired...five weeks in I would feel a sore throat...also watch for dry mouth, and food losing some taste.

today is treatment 8. and I feel like all of that stuff, in the smallest ways, is there. along with the stiffening every day, and...do I have more tinnitis than I used to?

it's actually kind of an affirming discipline. as long as I say yes, no pain. but shaking my head no really costs me...

I'm a human being. human beings aren't meant to absorb this amount of this kind of energy this quickly.

neither, I suppose, are cancer cells.

women have to get pregnant to get this kind of glow.

weekends off of the treatments are such a mixed blessing. 11am rolls around, and I don't feel worse. what up with that?

the joke is:

the man who minded Big Ben lived in the clocktower. he'd sleep soundly every night, right under the big bells.

one night, a power failure stopped the massive clock.

at exactly midnight, the man sat bolt upright in bed and hollered, "What the hell was that?"

that's my body at 11am Saturday.

p.s. (I'm not going to condense the other important Reader's Digest stories in my life - "'Druther Be Mad", "Wanta Borrow a Jack?"....unless there is unbridled reader demand.)

kind of like flying

first radiation treatment today.

they see people one every fifteen minutes all day long. the time spent in the machine, which had been said to be 15 to 25 minutes, is more like 5 to 7 minutes.

and they're right. I didn't feel a thing.

or, rather, I imagined lots of things I wasn't really feeling...as might happen when nothing is stimulating you but you're hyper-sensitive to any noise in the sensory system. is that a burning? what is that over there? am I hearing something?

but, no, if I were to complain about this treatment, then I'd be off the scale if some treatment actually did affect me someday. no time, no pain, no loss of ability, no nausea.

my neck is massively stiff...not painful, but hard to turn...maybe related to the music I've been doing...possibly, just the way it is. I imagined that the stiffness was worse after the radiation.

probably not.

so I decided it's kind of like flying.

flying...in most ways...isn't painful. it's artificial, synthetic, weird...but only a little uncomfortable, and pretty much doable for most...

until you start to think of what it is you're doing.

I've had energy practitioners fill me with light.

howe different is this, really? I mean, isn't radiation energy?

it's different.

like, Captain James Pike on Star Trek different.

I just have to think of it like bagpipes.

granted, it's a squealing, pitch insensitive, toxic sound.

but if you have a great producer who uses only enough, in only the right places, in just the right way...some good hypothetically can come of it.

I wanted to make up a list of 35 jokes, so that every day I went to radiation, I could give the techs something to make them glad I was there.

I used to do that when some faraway repair place was fixing my stereo amp for two years. (!) obviously, leaving a message when I called was superfluous. so I'd leave a joke.

"Why did the chicken cross the Moebius Strip? To get to the same side. Call me."

it was kind of reassuring that someone beat me to it. there was, in the waiting room, a scrapbook of (I assume) patient compiled humor.

some I'd seen. embarrassing church bulletins. children's quotes on love.

I had not seen the humorous nutrition doctor bit.

*Is exercise good for you?

NO! your heart has only a certain number of beats alloted to it. once they're gone, you're done. There is no reason to ever make it beat any faster.

*Will exercising your stomach make you thin?

NO! exercise makes muscles grow!

*Is vegetarianism a good idea?

NO! cows eat grass! chickens eat corn! meat is a more efficient way to get vegetables!

*Are fried foods bad for you?

YOU"RE NOT HEARING ME! foods are fried in vegetable oil! case closed!

I might have to leave something there in the book.

I've had it happen several more times now. coming to Jim's for the session today. pulling up to the Little Bear. coming to Christy's for rehearsal.

what it is, is, that I am doing something in my present life that, because of the shadow of the possibility of it all being taken away, feels a little more like Scrooge revisiting his boyhood as a ghost. why...there's the Little Bear...I could walk to it blindfolded!

like a dream redreamed, with a little shadowy spooky cusp...but basically the site of some very special musical experiences.

leave it to Jim and Vickie to be at the very peak of their abilities when I played with them at the Ice House. drat. but they were also at the very peak of their generosity, which is always legendary, and made me feel like I was right up there with them.

I felt like a homemade CD...all the music was there, but I was lagging a little behind the metadata. breathe here. say something funny here. you always make this mistake...watch it.

I realized how much like a security camera I am onstage, panning and scanning the audience constantly. yeah, my neck cut back on that a batch...

but so far, all the kids are letting me back on the team.

and the audience...

it was better than the end of It's a Wonderful Life.

it's as if George could not only revel in the support of innumerable friends and relatives...but could make them stay and listen to three hours of him singing, playing, and telling jokes!

ok, to me, that's waaaaaaaaaay better.

at Christy's rehearsal, she played me a new song she'd written.

and I felt like, ok, the subscription rate to my life has gone up a batch. but, dammit, please, please don't cancel me. I'll pay it.

I just can't help reeeeeeeeally wanting to see what happens next.

incentive spirometer

that's the plastic device that my first nurse, Polly, continually referred to as a "bong".

you exhale as much as you can. then you fill your lungs, and a blue plastic piece rises along a numbered axis. the top is 4,000...whatever units it is, cc's of air by volume or whatever.

the top of the column is sealed over with the thickest plastic of any of it...I guess so people won't see a modified version for sale at Freaky's...

right after surgery, I was in the 2,000 range. yesterday, I made it to 3,500.

I'm glad I have a suck meter. I'm glad I haven't pegged it. I thought it augered well for the gig with Runaway Express yesterday.

I think I could have hit the suck meter a little harder during that gig. I actually may have had a suckier performance at some other time during my life.

I have a triptych on my wall upstairs that I made from three Littleton Historical Museum posters one summer, when I played there with Runaway Express, Jubilant Bridge, and Upsidasium!

I'm just returning from a place where my continuance gigging was seriously threatened. and, technically, the threat isn't quite over. it has served, as it should, to make me remember how much I love life, me, music, playing, and gigging. and I do. I say it like the Cowardly Lion...I do believe, IdoIdoIdoIdo.

and the Littleton Historical Museum series is the good stuff of gigging...well attended by appreciative people, kinda ok money, a genuinely beautiful setting, and I like Loreena who has always run it.

it's also had its share of peacock poop.

I'm not speaking figuratively. there was a tall tree over stage left, my traditional spot with Runaways. when the peacocks weren't parading around front upstaging the music and causing oohs and aahs, they would be in the tree cawing loud bursts of criticism or competition. (our band had never signed with NBC)

my memories of the Littleton gigs included sometimes actually getting rained out, sometimes just spending hours wondering if we would, doing the cover-my-PA dance, dealing with heat and sun and running sunblock and insects and allergies

and an avian Jackson Pollock on high, making a splatter masterpiece of my shirt.

seeing "our" stage set up at the Museum yesterday as I drove up, Jim's van, Chris's drums, a waiting vacancy stage left, was a little like going to the field in Telluride and seeing the stage outfitted for the Bluegrass Festival, or going to Rockerfeller Center and seeing people skating on the ice rink and the biggest anywhere tree lit up. a place that exists all year, changed for a special time, a time I am somehow to play a part in.

it was like a dream.

a dream I had fought hard for for a couple of months, and face more fighting in the months to come.

but a dream that contained as well the allergies and rain and my hopes and insecurities throughout the years.

it was like the first day back to school. the familiarity doesn't gradually mount...it hits you all at once, every step bringing you back to structure, taking your turn on the hot seat, A minuses and C plusses, and caustic teachers and the girl sitting in front of you you can never never talk to, and teachers who inspire you throughout your life, and jerks on the playground, and the human endeavor.

yeah, make no mistake...musically I literally live for it.

but there it all was at once...and, how would I do tonight?

I could not have wanted a better setting to find out.

I date, rightly or wrongly, my playing with Runaway Express back to 1986...at least that is when the first project of theirs I played on came out. the band was already a country by then, with long standing traditions and a rich culture, and its own regional accent.

in the years since I feel like I've learned much about that culture, hoped to become one of the preservers of it, maybe occasionally added something to it. and thanks to the grace of the other members, I feel like I can respectfully travel within its borders pretty freely.

but I stop short of calling a Runaway Express gig "comfortable".

there's always a new song, a new turn, an arrangement changed on the fly, someone's part to cover when they're not there, some bit of musical business we haven't executed in ten years that sending out a cue for wouldn't hurt.

I am my least comfortable when underchallenged.

so, yesterday, I was thanking God for these people, in this place, not only for the symbol of continuance when my continuance had been threatened, but for these people, who I knew would, to a woman, be pulling for me...and for this assignment, which I had spent so much time covering before. I knew I had a state of the art safety net for anything I found out in real time I was just not able to do right now.

and I knew that Daniel, Ernie, Chris, Butch, Sally, and Jim had spent a lot of time hearing me really suck on occasion. like, 5,000 cc's.

they could stand it.

so it was a little like the dog reciting Hamlet. the point for me, as for a lot of the audience, wasn't that I could have executed the soliloquy more clearly.

the point was that I was there doing it at all.

which in a way is always the point. certainly for Butch, who had had a recent roll of the dice that determined it wasn't his time yet to go. and is it less so for those who go through personal drama, or depression, or financial strain, or any of the thousands of reasons people decide just not to try so hard?

it's so fucking stupid that people think they can find any relief at all by making things harder for someone else, when the wonder of it all is that so many people are doing so much despite all the stuff that could rise up to stop them. we're all here each day because it just ain't our time not to be yet, and we're damn lucky.

my cancer stuff isn't really so different an example.

I had a lot of incentive to peg that spirometer, to suck hard there and not at the gig.

and I think that's how people are going to write it down. weak, short of breath, unable to turn my head, maddeningly stiff in my shoulder, getting over breathing tube laryngitis, I held down the third guitar chair for an hour.

Dr. Nemechek, your miracles are working.

happy June Fools' Day

I feel that, overall, fools are way too important to only have one day a year.

and one could do much, much worse than being a fool for June.

in these days, climate has taken on the unpredictability that weather used to have when I was a child. yet the color wheel of the seasons, changing the light on a mountain pine in four gradual but distinct ways like a 50's color wheel splayed over a 50's aluminum Christmas tree, has not been completely lost.

and a younger group of folks should not have as much idea what's coming as someone like myself, who is just getting let out of 52nd grade today for summer vacation.

but there's a part of me, either eternally primitive or compulsively skeptical, that is surprised every single damn time. look at that light! look how green it all is! it's kind of actually getting warm! maybe we could have lunch...outdoors! maybe it's time to invent the short sleeved shirt!

wow. never saw all that coming.

now, by July, we don't need to invent anything else for Summer, and plans routinely include ways of coping with 100 degree heat. outdoor parties and gigs are in full swing, with tarps for rain and fallback plans for wind.

and as far as being a U.S. Beatles fan is concerned, for a change, it's good to be US.

when With The Beatles, their second album, came out in the U.K., it included no hit singles and

four American R&B covers. songs we can't live without, true...but Meet The Beatles, in America, contained "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There", and, save "Til There Was You", all originals. I say, a better LP.

we paid for it with the movies, where non-Capitol labels got to release film soundtrack semi-Beatles albums. my life is better for hearing the George Martin film score instrumentals and all...but if they were all drowning, I'd still save any one of the dropped actual Beatles songs instead. a little throwaway number fron the Help! album called "Yesterday", for example. you should look it up...not bad, really.

by July, we've heard Sgt. Pepper's, and we are starting to get the hang of Summer.

Magical Mystery Tour came out in the U.K as a double E.P., six new Beatles songs that didn't invent a new season but fit comfortably, ambitiously, into the new studio tan style of Sgt. Pepper.

ah, but stateside, Magical Mystery Tour was fleshed out into a full LP, with three single A and B sides that sit close to the apex of The Beatles' studio achievements. Capitol giveth, and Capitol taketh away. but the U.S. LP version was later adopted for all rereleases of the record in any format.

anyway, the U.S. Magical Mystery Tour is July to me. not reinventing, settling into High Summer, in high fashion.

by August, it's been dang hot for awhile. school's dreaded stutltifying structure has been cast off for eight weeks now, the slaves emancipated...but just as a few rebels are starting to wish the heat would break, the most free thinking of children can admit to kind of missing school in a few incredibly limited ways.

outdoor parties are looking for something a little different as a theme...outdoor gigs are running smoothly without much surprise...

no one really wants to do June again.

and The Beatles, who signed an eight album contract after Revolver and after six months of working on Sgt. Pepper jokingly wanted to name it, "One Down and Seven to Go" (reflecting on the incredible labor of doing that a batch more times), recorded The White Album.

August.

the girls are coming over tonight for a 24 bit 44.1k Full On Destination Straight Through listening of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

the Memorial Day lunch they made yesterday was a masterpiece. eaten in the back yard, with the remastered Exile playing through the window as if it were a new record blasting from a college dorm. we all sang afterwards, and I played, watching what had come back and what hasn't quite. still very short of breath and more than a little stiff.

but I am the June fool this year, and this is Summer for me. any health shadows (I go in for the CAT scan today, to start the determining of a radiation program, probably to begin next Monday) are hard to feel in the Summer sunshine of returning health. I'm dreaming of doing three gigs and a rehearsal or two this week, with very loving tolerant folks who will graciously accept what I can do now.

I won't be doing any Beatle head bobs. I don't know how fragile my voice will be. I'll be sitting a lot. I have an abiding pain in the neck, probably karmic for being one.

but as McCoy says, it's life, Jim, life as we know it. (well, he said the opposite, but you get it...)

and as I always tell the unvarnished truth when I get a good shellacking, it seems to be when the real crisis has let up that people start to feel how damn fucking hard this has all been.

I remember in sixth grade when Bruce Gustafson and I went after the same fly ball...neither caught it, and his head caught my nose.

I ran bleeding and crying to the school nurse.

my nose was broken. she said, do you hurt?

my body was in shock, adrenalin pounding. no, I said.

she said, then why are you crying?

today, I know why I was crying, and would expect her to know more about why than I did. at the time, it was a real puzzler when she put it that way.

I said, I'm bleeding all over my favorite shirt.

the second operation was supposed to be a finite mission, to remove one small piece.

the nurse who worked on my IV was kind of the first clunker of my whole experience at Swedish. I have kind of stellar veins (maybe it's good I never met Keith Richards. or Anne Rice)

but she had trouble making them work for her.

I've been kind of good at just doing what had to be done, accepting what losses come up. but I felt a little at that time (incorrectly) that the major shadow was passing.

I almost passed out. I felt hassled, angry, nauseous, as she went from arm to arm.

when I woke up, I was impatient to know how it had gone. and of course, til the meeting later, no one would say.

when I found out he had been troublingly close to spinal nerves, and left a cuff in there...all impatience vanished. right into shock, and taking in the shadow. ready to accept and work.

the girls are starting to have some little breakdowns, seemingly about small things. I get it. the real deal is that this has been hellish for them, and they've been supernaturally strong and giving.

but now they find they are bleeding all over their favorite shirts.

because we don't feel the shadow we felt. and feelings we've had come up...hurt. anger. impatience, annoyance, inconvenience...all of the things that it makes sense in the realm of life to feel...just no sense when fighting a shadow of death.

all of our healing continues, bathed in the energy and prayers of our support networks. things are well enough that we may strut and fret again, our hour upon the stage for the time being granted continuance.

I will encounter my limitations this week, and I will hold the perspective of how small they are compared with what I feared. but I'll also hurt, tire, pant, and curse some.

all of which will fade away, tonight when Sgt. Pepper begins to play.

I have vacated my life for the past six weeks. my Summer Inhabitation of it now begins.