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.