Thank F...

Writing to remember is hard work. It's much more rewarding to sit down and pound away at the keyboard, willy nilly. I told myself I was going to bed at 10. I'm a big fat liar. The last two nights I got 6 hours of sleep each night. In my world this is 66.66% of the sleep I need in a night. It's not beauty sleep either it's just what I need to not melt down. You should see my ugly face.

At least I'm not fat, I've got that going for me. Anorexia has been a very successful weight loss regimen. You could fit my ass in my Ms. Bitch teacup. Shaq could palm my butt cheeks in one hand and still have room left over.  Cancer treatment perks. It took me a year to figure out how to replace the oversized photo of my forehead dominating the top of the blog. Tyra Banks, I love you, your forehead is bigger than mine.

Being a teeny little person like a bird with no feathers you have to pretend to be tough so nobody wants to fuck with you. The punk era of the 80's was kind of like being schooled by a bitter teacher. And being surrounded by intimidating kids taught me to act like one too, at least in appearance. Once you talked to me you'd figure out real quick that I was not like that at all.

I liked shows a lot though, and really, people watched out for you. In a good pit, the guys will protect you-- except from flying objects. I've been landed on, kicked in the head. I've gotten shoved into pits by accident. All kinds of shows can be dodgy. I practically had my ribs broken at Love and Rockets. I've never been so squished before. Punk shows were actually worse. This one was just packed. Daniel Ash *sigh... I couldn't breathe, but I had the best view. Front and center. Bitch spot.

I guess I'm not going to write about my stuff after all. It's too much. I'm getting dizzy, and feel nauseas. I am sleep deprived. I should just go to bed. I hope it's not my skull mets being naughty. I can't have that. I was going to write about that latest dx, but when it's time to retire, it's time! G'night

Bird Nerd, Gull Girl

Today while I was walking on the beach I had gotten almost to Pierpont when I stopped and stood looking at the ocean. I turned to my right to look back up the beach. I had been thinking heavy thoughts, end of life thoughts. I saw a very white gull, a large one, flying towards me, right at me. When it got to around, say, 10 feet away, it stopped and hovered above me, like birds do when they’re hunting. Or, in the case of a gull, eyeing somebody’s shiny chip bag, or paper-wrapped sub. It was odd. The bird looked like it flew right TO ME. It kept hovering there, making me look down to see if I had anything it could have mistaken for food, anything shiny, or interesting. Nope. Nothing. This went on for several seconds and at one point it veered so closely I shrank in surprise. I imagined how those rubbery water-bird feet would feel on my shoulders. I've been bitten by several gulls in the process of capturing injured ones on the beach, usually with nothing but my hands,so that didn't scare me, but I reacted anyway, it was that close. It was definitely there because of me. 

Finally it decided to land about 10 feet away, facing me. I took a step slowly towards it to see what that would do, it turned to it’s right, unsure, and stopped. So I slowly stepped back, it stepped forward to face me. We stood there looking at each other, waiting for someone to do something,then the oddest thing happened. It leaned it’s head down to the ground, dropped a small object onto the damp sand jumped up and was gone in the next second no longer interested in me. I was so taken aback for a couple of seconds I stood there processing what had happened. Did this bird just give me a gift?? I stepped towards it and a shiny light pinged off of it. I walked to where it was and to my surprise, as I bent closer to see it, I discovered it was a shiny, red, glass bead. The kind that’s decorative, maybe to put into a vase. It immediately reminded me of my birthstone, Garnet. I picked it up. Still in disbelief. What a weird thing to have just happened. 

I looked for the bird, it was long gone. I turned back down the beach, walked several paces, then for no reason I turned BACK around, walked about 3 steps and what did I find? Another red glass bead. I had not seen that other one when I was walking just then, I even looked around as it seems to have appeared out of nowhere, dropped out of the sky. 

I have no idea what it means, but a bird gave me a bead today, picked me to give it to. it was the strangest animal encounter I have had in a very long time. Maybe ever.

I'm back *crickets

There are a lot of things people say to you when they find out you are in the fight for your life. One of the them is that you must "be positive!" You must! Everything depends on it, if one is positive one cannot fail! Keep your chin up - I tell my cancer girls, because once you lose hope, you are fuuucked. I leave that last part out, but that's a foregone conclusion, they already know that. Cancer people are kind of given a crash course on silver linings, you have to find them. Anywhere possible. Like, "Oh my favorite spoon is clean!", or, "I didn't throw up after the last meal and I didn't lose another pound today!" 

As far as the advice-givers telling us how happy we need to be while scared out of our fucking minds that cancer is spreading to the brain today, or the liver, or the lungs ( those are my next options ) I wonder how many of those people live their advice while only facing nothing more but having to show up to work the next day? Imminent doom. Those happen to be my favorite words right now, I've used them enough lately. Imminent doom! How many people follow that advice not facing imminent doom, and you are telling ME to be positive. 

Be Positive is the catchphrase for all that befalls .. someone else. 

It's hard to not take it a little hard because, what do you think I've been doing this whole time, not being positive? How am I even still here if I hadn't mastered that yet? 

I've been at this for nearly 10 years, almost 5 of those being stage IV. I'm facing my imminent doom every second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year. Thankfully I can include the word year. C'mon now, don't you think a person facing a painful, dehumanizing death is allowed to complain now and again? 

I think the biggest mistakes healthy people make when talking to someone with cancer is to advise them when they are not asking for advice in the first place. Throw on top of that the advice is coming from someone who has never even had cancer. It's wise to resist the urge to counsel a person on a topic when you are the novice, not the person you are counselling. It can be taken as insensitive and really annoys most cancer patients, but they will never tell you to your face. If you look at it that way, it seems ridiculous anyone would ever try, naah, aaaall daay loong. There's that and naming every person they've ever known who has had cancer, who have died. Those two things got to go. BYE BYE.

Now, we can start to have a convo. 

What is the worst thing that usually happens to you in a day? Late for work, long line at the DMV, need to get laid, laundry piling up? To me, these are not real problems, these are normal life occurrences. They are temporary. You deal with one thing then move on. Maybe you deal with something for a week, or a couple of months and move on. There is no moving on from stage IV cancer, and we still get to do all of those things regular people get to do, except work, I miss work. I miss money. But more, I miss MY work. I know we are all going to die, blah blah blah, but I am otherwise healthy and I am not ready, I am not old, I am not lazy, I kick ass in life, I need to be here, I love life, I love everything about life, except people who sit in the fast lane going 65. 

When your job is, fighting for your life, you don't get a minute off. There is no break ever. I clock in the second I wake up, actually, I don't get a break at night either. My shit goes 24/7 around the clock. It's the mind, it has a way of erasing the horror so one continues to want to live. It makes me consider the pain of natural childbirth, not the epidural-childbirth experience, natural, full pain, from childbirth. The mind has a way of forgetting that intensity, otherwise mothers may want to stop at one. I won't know, cancer spared me the joy of having my own.

I go to bed with towels and changes of clothes. I drench my clothing and sheets every night from alternating hot and cold sweats. All night long I wake up drenched, take my clothes off, towel off, switch sides of the bed, put a new towel down, put new clothes on, repeat, repeat, repeat. By the morning my head is soaked, my neck feels like there's a rope around it from perma sweat and chills. I'm very cold, very wet, from sweating and freezing all night long. It is completely possible to be hot and freezing at the same time. I have a way of comparing everything to the hell of chemo past, and this comes really close to it, so it's got to go. I'm working on it, but these things take time when you're using holistic medicine.  

Being told to be positive by a healthy person can be very hurtful to a cancer patient. It sounds like criticism. Don't do that to us. We have to be positive, and are. You don't see most of what we go through. The thing about me is I don't candy-coat the truth. Society has it twisted, it teaches us that being brave is acting positive. Wrong. That is for you guys, it is an act. Real bravery is in being HONEST. I've taken a lot of shit for being honest, but I'm not going to stop, I'm not doing it for you. Rip off the bandaid already, you aren't the one dying.

Chemo heads smiling in pictures..that's fake, yet we all do it, smile for the camera, hide the pain. Have you ever done chemo? You don't want to smile, you want to just die. It's the worst pain you can ever imagine, and it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and after it ends, it never really ends. The pain, the damage, the debilitating exhaustion lives in you. It's worse than having mono for 10 years. That's the closest thing I can think to describe that one aspect as best I can, and I'm only referring to the exhaustion, not anything else, and there is a ton more. 

This disease leaves no aspect of your life un-fucked. You say things like- the exhaustion is only one small portion of this treatment, that, and not sleeping. For years. In a world where people bitch about slow internet, they can't relate. Forget having a family or working, or having a relationship where you make future plans together, or getting a puppy because you probably won't outlive it. This all sounds so terrible, and then you might wonder how in the HELL can a sane person continue on knowing they are utterly fucked? How? I'm positive, bitch!!!! The odds against me are stacked 99 to 1, and I think I actually have a chance! Dumb and Dumber. See, I'm positive. I just proved that shit. BOOM.  

There are so many horrible things that go with this disease that you have to broaden what's acceptable and minimize what you can, even when nothing's minor, or minimal. If you don't, you will become desperate. Cancer is not a disease to get if you are a weak person. You have to be ready to fight, and fight, and fight, never stopping even at the moment you are told that NOW you are officially fucked, so then you give it your last big-Ass effort anyway, because that is what you do. I could teach a class on how to survive, but instead I'll just keep doing it. 

When I see people saying things about their friend who has passed on, my stomach almost flips. She was so brave *gag, she was so positive *barf, I never heard her once complain *double stick my fist down my throat. Were you there, in her bathroom, as she pulled out handfuls of her own hair? How about when her shredded mouth bled from sores and throbbed from pain, and all in just the first two weeks of what was going to be 16 weeks of pure, filterless HELL. Was she smiling and being positive then? That is the truth nobody sees. Nobody saw me like that except my bf. Nobody. You will hide. When it's you, you will hide too. Nobody will see the truth, you can write about it like I'm doing right now, but nobody will see it. You can't let anyone because that is the only thing you have, your memories of who you were. You grip that shit with an iron fist and hide like a dying cat under the porch. Nobody will see me weak- you tell yourself. 

Cancer (victims - lol. My dad used to say that a lot and I'd correct him) patients "let their hair down" when no one's around, and cry in the shower. Healthy people and their judgments of how we are supposed to act are just more bullshit for us to process. Frankly, we have this huge thing to grapple with, ergo, the truth is more often hidden before it can be shared. Call it "self preservation" but we can't stand to console you. We should be the ones being consoled, but the truth is you can't usually handle it. We are the strong ones, it's backwards--- so please don't tell me to be positive. I have been for years, I deserve a credit, a lot of credit. 

What makes me stand out from 99.99% cancer patients I know is that I tell the truth, brutal as it can be, and I always have. I've alienated plenty of people over the years with my posts regarding Big Pharma, Komen, chemotherapy. Many of my fellow "cancer sisters" turned out to be judgmental and nasty to me. And guess what? Now people are following suit. I took a lot of flack for my words in the 9, almost 10, years. And now what was unpopular is being spewed all over facebook like gospel, as if these people were with me all along. All I ever wanted is to help people, and be helped. But most people are closed, therefore this path has been lonely. Safety in numbers right, as soon as my opinions became more widely accepted more people started mirroring my words. At least the tide is changing somewhat but it sure is hard being a pioneer, it's lonely and you take a lot of negativity being thrown at you. In the end you get no credit so it's a good thing I don't care about that, it being a purely egotistical issue.


I don't need to be anyone's hero. I have great days, and terrible days. I am not a people pleaser. When I was a kid I felt I needed to be. I learned very young that most people present a false face, are driven by fear and ego. I only wish to please my own soul, and those on similar paths. I can serve people better than way anyway, that's how it works. Life is really a solitary journey, so this is more than okay with me.  

I still have cancer, and I'm probably going to die from it. I don't care to be the one people speak about when they say, "She was so positive, and never complained." I know, and everyone, when I say everyone- I mean everyone with cancer knows this is complete bullshit. Nobody does that. If they were to I would feel pity for them as they died a lonely death following a very lonely, false, Disney movie, A Walk to Remember- life. Let's be real. This isn't a movie, it ain't a t-shirt.

I've had a harrowing time this last couple of weeks. honestly, you are lucky, or not, to be reading anything from me at this moment. I was seriously considering bowing out of this play. The hours suck and the pay is shite. But, something drew me back again. Though my body felt it was shutting down it's slowly regaining some semblance of it's former shape, albeit 15 pounds less. 

I feel like I'm walking around without emotional skin. What I did recently  broke something within me. I don't know if this is the beginning, or the end. What a silly thing to say, both are illusions. Wow, it's late, I am not going to edit this thing. Sawree, I hope it doesn't suck, but if it does, I don't give a damn, this was cathartic as hell. 

Boobs- they're not just for dinner anymore

Nope, no better.

Jesus, why isn't there a .. oh, of course there IS. There is a pill for dat. Problem is I don't believe in taking those types of pills. Coming from a person who once let a magical street hobo stick his finger into her mouth, one would think I might not be too particular. But, you would be wrong. I can be very particular. Or just unravelled and confused.

Depression is like a heavy wool blanket, and it's not the nice heavy either, it's oppressive-heavy. Who am I to complain, I'm not doing chemo. The stuff I'm doing is not without side effects to be fair. Are they the long-term damage to my heart kind of side effects, liverkidneybraintillyoudie-side effects? No. And THATS why I suffer through the endless thoughts of "Am I doing the right thing?" "Is it too late?' "Am I ultimately going to die from cancer anyway?"- beCAUSE the other way is a dead end, and I know it.

This way is the harder road in every sense other than the pain of chemo. That's a big comparison. The reason I compare the two so often is because if I were a river, chemo is the ocean that I never want to reach. The oncologist is leading me towards that as if I am going to wake up one day and want to burn every cell in my body with poison. No fucking way will I. I would die in my bed up to my eyeballs in cannabis oil before I would EVER succumb to that pressure, uh-uh.

I have a headache, it's either the crying, or better news-I took too much Evo? Hmph. That's weird. My current oil is really dilute, so I have no fucking idea how much to take. It's literally like this: I'll take a tablespoon, wait, take another one, wait, another, wait.
Too much THC will cause a headache. That's just dandy, since I'm dying to do a coffee enema, that might clear that right out of there.
.

Naked butts get you read

This is a bathroom post. It's more like a toilet post. When I painted this bathroom (at night) was I sober? I know I was, but ...

There is no escape. Even when a person dies, they remain on earth. I guess.

Why do they keep making crystal deodorant? Because, it sucks. And, I'm the idiot who keeps buying it.

I wonder if the guy sitting on the bench behind me during yoga at Patagucci was looking at my folded and squeezed hoo ha when he thought I couldn't see him? Every time I did a down dog I looked at him from between my legs. He was always reading, except for this one time...

Did you know it's impossible to cry and swim at the same time? I've tested this out for years. It didn't work today either.

It's been said that during a person's lifetime they swallow 3 spiders. How in the fuck can anyone know that?

41,000 people die from breast cancer every year, when is it going to be my turn?

I don't want to be typecast as this nude guy

Oh Bloggy thingy, I haven't seen you. I have been meaning to write, but I always put it off. For someone with a solid work ethic, this whole procrastinating thing is seriously bullshit.

You know when you know a thing, you know it, but you don't feel it until later. When I was really young, a teenager, people would always tell me that I seemed wise beyond my years, I was an old soul. That's well and good, so then why did I fuck up so much, old souls are idiots too?

For all that I've learned and all that I've lost, I still do really stupid shit. I believe in things that probably won't ever be. I give people way too much credit. Most people just don't care as much about anything other than their own agendas. I care far more than the average person. About everything. Not politics. I don't care about laws and rules that other people make, whom I don't respect, or know, or agree with. But almost everything else in the practical world matters to me. And if I look at it more closely I shouldn't care about what anyone else is doing. Deep down I don't. This concern is superficial, it was handed down to me by my culture. I've been told what I am supposed to care about. Now I'm trying to undo it all.

I spent a few minutes today moving ants so that my pool water didn't kill them with my flip turns. How can anyone ever call me an impatient person? Why isn't this a paying job? All day son, all DAY. Best sighting today- hawk sharing a wire with 2 finches who must have been shitting their finchy little pants because the hawk was eyeing them. This hawk must have been a female, it was in brown phase, It was huge. They can see very far, it could see the green of my eyes from where it perched, easily.

Tonight I said fuckit and took a lot of oil. Like, a lot. Like, double. If I don't wake up until 2 or 3 tomorrow, this is why. But, CANNABIS OIL CURES CANCER and FUCK CANCER so if I don't wake up that early it's okay, I should be dead anyway. I was told 1.5 - 3 years is all I had and it's been over 4. I'm still here and you can suck it, cancer.

If I don't go to bed soon, this blog will read shthaogaosnt,aertkeshfodsvnadlr34woi!

Writers block

hmph. It's been so long I've created writers block. There are really only a few things that matter.

I am still alive, I did it. The cancer is also still alive, so I must continue to live my life to kill it. I am working on this daily. Right now I am working on it.

My cat of nearly 17 years had to be euthanized 2 weeks ago tonight. I can't believe it's been 2 weeks already. Boogies ashes are in a box with his name on it. I put the box inside his crate so he can be at home. I'll take it down soon, maybe tonight. Nights are the worst, maybe tomorrow then. I cry everyday and probably will for as long as I live. If I had thousands of dollars I would clone Boogie, I have his DNA.

I think the terrible things that come in 3's, came. First, my precious uncle died, then dad went into the hospital with pneumonia, then Teresa, mom's bestie for 63 years dies. I thought my dad would die. Nope, he didn't, but Boogie did. Someone had to go, for it to be terrible news in 3's. Boogie saved my dad's life for now, I guess. This year has been fucking gnarly, and to make it even stranger, all of the other days where someone wasn't busy being sick and dying, things have been exceptionally good. Go fucking figure.

The CO is kicking my ass. Not exactly news. When I'm awake I feel like I could fall right back asleep. I am so grateful to have cannabis oil, and I feel safe with that option, but implementing the plan is hard. I have to force myself to take it knowing I will be going back to that place of inability. The saving grace is that I take it at night so at least I'm not peeking out of my curtains like a crackhead. All day long I feel like I'm recovering from the night before. Just when it feels like it's worn off it's time to take it again. Le sigh.

My sister and fam are coming soon, 3 weeks until they stay with me. I hope my sunflowers will still be towering but since they are blooming like fools I fear they will be on the outs by then. Everything dies. I will someday die so I better get some shit written down before I do. I have a crapload of stories, especially that one involving a dirty old mans crooked finger, The Haight, underground tunnels.. how am I still alive? Cancer take me down, right, youth couldn't take me down, what is cancer going to do?

I love looking at my sunflowers everyday. I planted them for my uncle back in March. The tallest ones grew to reach the roof. My uncle can see the flowers from his chair in the sky, in his corduroy shorts and polo shirt. Spike's sitting on his lap.

My sadness runs deep because I loved deeply. I keep reminding myself of that, but it doesn't lessen the heaviness. If only I knew what really happens to us when we die. What effect would that have on my behavior now, don't I already live with a keen awareness of my mortality? Who else thinks about dying daily if not a cancer patient?

I see everything as it should be seen, as temporary. Knowing my depression is temporary helps endure it, but it doesn't make it go away. I still have to sit with it. I know it will eventually pass, but being in it with no relief in sight doesn't seem to help one feel less depressed. Between what one knows and what one feels... why can't we in life complete a lesson and then just move on never having to face the same thing again? Instead, every day we have to face life, death, and figure out what to eat for lunch.