the erudite reader will not need me to recount the importance in my upbringing/downfall/ shattering of all social guidelines that Zap comix and R. Crumb had. they were like the early maps of the new world, showing that land existed far from where I was living, and that different people with different thoughts and speech lived there, people who somehow, miraculously, were not stuck down for the compulsive attraction they had to heresy and a very rich, full style of existentialism.
they made both look like fun, and a million laughs.
no, I won't list my Zap comix memories...forty years later, they would still scorch the pixels of my computer screen.
except I will talk about Mr. Natural.
he was about four foot high, with a three and a half foot beard, and was able to disabuse everyone of their spiritual illusions without really having any insights of value to substitute in their place. he had an answer for every deep question...that left the questioner more lost than ever. he was a curmudgeon, moody, sarcastic, demanding, impatient.
his own pursuits had about the level of spiritual enlightenment of Chico Marx.
Flakey Foont was his natural prey.
Flakey knew enough to seek understanding, but without a clue what it would look like. Mr. Natural could strip his illusions all day, point out his shortcomings and foibles, and Foont never came to realize that his quest for spirituality, unenlightened as it was, was light itself compared to Mr. Natural's cynicism.
perhaps R. Crumb was making a point about a holy man whose gospel is that nothing is holy, that that's the best one can expect. it's great having a partial map of that world...liberating...but I didn't move there.
Flakey Foont asks Mr. Natural, so, after all, what does Diddy Wah Diddy mean?
Mr. Natural says, if you don't know by now, buddy, don't mess with it.
when I move, I cough. when I cough, I get dizzy.
the shoulder tumor had taught me not to stand, not to lift. it still seems to be getting less painful, though I am doing mostly what it wants.
but this new thing is enforcing a quite unwanted sedentaryness.
but it means that most of my day is spent in something not too far from comfort.
except, perhaps, for dose days, like last thursday through monday.
those days, I need to be horizontal, I can't eat, and I feel like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth...the possessor of some unknown extraterrestrial weakness and nausea.
like Diddy Wah Diddy, I don't know what it means.
no one else does, either.
it could be The War Effort.
it could be the drugs seizing 80% of my energy budget for the War On Tumors. it could be that once life-compulsive tumor cells are being sloughed off, liquefied into my lungs like consumption, irritating everyone.
the bump on my shoulder...often called, in an attempt to allay the sense of its strangeness, my "booboo" or "bobo"...isn't twice its former size. it isn't half its former size. there are new, squishy, impeding areas of it. but...is it just new tumor, or old giving up the ghost?
yes, yes, Scott, you are tired, you are nauseous, you cough. take some tessalon perles...but watch, they may make you dizzy. drink more water. your labs look perfect, ekg perfect, you are tolerating the drug amazingly well. let's all hope this is all Nutlin-3 going to cancer cancelling town.
tolerance. tolerating. tolerable. toleration, Mammy Yokum! intolerant. doin' tol'able.
let's not wonder if it is instead the beginning of the end.
the needle biopsy has been circulating nationwide for weeks...someday we will know the results. the C-T scan will happen on the 14th of July, and soon after we will know if we stay the course or try one of what Dr. Gore says are 900 cancer drugs currently in study.
until then, Flakey...don't mess with it.
if the indications are good to miraculous, I won't quibble about wanting to get better in a way that makes me actually feel better. curing, instead of matching, toxicity.
and this is day 7 in the cycle...no more dose for three more weeks...of which each day is supposed to get better and better.
oh, yeah, the blessings column:
my miracle drug is not something I have to live in Bangla Desh to be in a study for.
whatever is being taken away from me...my voice is better than it was last summer. if I sit down for gigs, I can sing a long time and hardly cough at all.
with a boulder on my shoulder, feeling kind of older (Springsteen), I still don't think I suck playing guitar much worse than ever.
and I still get to do sessions at the house...doesn't seem like I'm out of contact with whatever sense of music I've always had. still have easy access to all my ideas, preferences, prejudices.
it's, like, huge.
this was my worst week, and I didn't know what I would be able to do. but I did three gigs and a couple of sessions. and I could be wrong, but I don't think I'm a liability yet.
so often in the last year and a half, I've waited for word. I'm pretty good at it. so often in that time, the second I got word, I longed for the days before I'd had it.
so it's ok that I'm not to mess with it right now. the present scrolls by, and is doable.
we want comfortable, but we'll take doable.
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