FORGE ON

Seeing someone make their way through the caverns of cancer and chemotherapy is an astonishing sight. Marvellous, because it reinforces how fragile our lives are; terrifying, because it illuminates the corridors of bullshit and trivialities that we routinely consider oh so important. To think of what we worry about, fret about, concern ourselves with! Does this person like us, or that person hate us; does this shirt go with that hat; does who I am correspond to what I need to be. These are the questions of life, the daily questions, and we could not live without them. I understand this. I ask the same questions. (Except the ones about the shirt and the hat. I usually don't give a shit. As my wardrobe choices attest.) But cancer is the great equalizer. It filters out the nonsense quite simply. I find myself responding to problems at work with an almost startling degree of detachment. It's not that I'm numb, or indifferent; it's just that nothing anybody can say or do or threaten seems all that important. I find myself looking at my own problems and the problems of others and thinking: Those aren't problems -- cancer is a problem.

I think the human brain is designed to worry itself to death, and I wonder why this is so, or why this has to be. If we could all live for a day like the sick live, the homeless live, the forgotten live, then perhaps we would return to our regular lives with a more balanced degree of proportion.

I don't know. Perhaps not. Perhaps we are made to allow the minutiae of life to overwhelm us. This is what I think sometimes. But then there are other times, nobler times, when I see the relentless way that humans move on and forge on in spite of their monumental difficulties, their monstrous diseases, and I realize that we, if we want to, can choose to hold ourselves to a higher standard of expectation, can fight and endure and simply make our way through life with greater and greater degrees of compassion and energy and laughter, can decide, can decide, to not allow our limits to limit us.

A SHORT GUIDE TO SPIT

Every so often the thoughts of yourself and the thoughts of others inevitably, simultanously intersect, if not collide. For me, yesterday was one of those days. The common intellectual conception shared by both myself and my old high school running buddy, Tim Ames, inexplicably, but somehow appropriately, centred upon of the most treasured common links that conjoin all runners, amateur or professional, past or current: spit.

Tim mentioned, via email, appropos of nothing at all, that there must be some weird kind of shit to be extracted from the DNA of the passing spit hocked by runners. And just yesterday, while doing some laps around the park that circles Baguio General Hospital (an incline a little too hilly for my present condition), I thought to myself, appropos of nothing at all, before reading Tim's email, that runners surea s hell hork a lot of salive on a regular basis. Symmetry at work in the human mind, I say.

(On an extended side note, I hold young Tim at least partly responsible for the only attempt, failed as it was, that I've ever made at sleeping in a hotel bathtub. Or any bathtub, come to think of it. For in the spring of 1991, while competing in the Ontario track and field championships, myself and Tim and Darren Deguire happened to share a hotel room for a few days. Fine. Hunky-dory. No prob-lemo. Except for the fact that both Tim and Darrin happened to be steeplechase runners, which meant that they finished their races a day before I did, which meant that while I tried to rest my weary legs from the preliminary round Tim and Darrin were able to stay up late and cackle their asses off while watching a particularly ridiculous movie-of-the-week that centred around teenage drug users, while I lay in bed only a few feet away, pleading with them to turn it down just a little bit, until, around two a.m., I had finally had enough, deciding that the bathroom bathtub would offer me a better chance of rest than spending the night amongst two relieved, exhausted runners laughing their fatigue away. That's right -- I tried, to sleep, in a bathtub. Lasted about fifteen minutes, if that, but still. I've said it before: runners, especially high school runners, are fucking crazy, the proof being that I seriously tried to catch some zees in a freaking bathtub, and by the fact that both Tim and Darrin chose, intentionally, to race an event called the steeplechase, which involves running around the oval track while jumping over obstacles and trying not to land in deep, glorified, puddles. But I've forgiven them both in the passing years, the bathtub incident having been long forgotten until, well, yesterday. Good times, good times.)

But back to the spit. Saliva. Hocking a monster loogie. These are topics related to running, not to mention life, that are vitally important yet eternally shunned. We don't talk about these things in our polite,
please-pass-the-butter times of ease. I feel it's damn well time to liberate salive from the intellectual cess-pool it's been relegated to in the past.

So, with that in mind, here's my purely personal, concise, highly subjective survey of spitting etiquette that may prove to be useful to runners and those who walk by them.

VOLUME -- If you run a lot you will spit a lot, and the longer you run, the more you spit. Add some GATORADE or water into the mix, and your spit will be frequent and thick. You will spit a lot, and if you don't let it out, you'll swallow it. Which is fine in the beginning, but swallowing spit is not even an acquired taste, so it's better to let it out.

AIM -- When you spit, avoid hitting other people, and avoid hitting yourself. When I was a novice runner running races, spit was new to me; spit was a novelty. I didn't realize that the spit I was unleashing upon the world was somehow, via wind or my own inverted trajectory, ending up on my face. So I would finish my race
with a weary heart and a very gross face. You have to spit outward, away from your chin and your chest; and try not to spit too far behind or in front of somebody. Wait until your alone.

RACES -- When racing, you will still have to spit, and so will all the other runners packed beside you, so be alert and aware of what might come hurtling your way. If you're doing cross-country, you'll have a lot of open space to shoot at. If you're running track, you're even more confined, possibly even boxed in, so be extra careful not to land a loogie on someone's back or neck or even ear, Something About Mary style.

And that's that. I've written enough in this space about the highs of running, but sometimes the lows are in order, too. Spit is a part of life, and you won't read about it in Runner's World, but you'll read about it here.

I mean, after all, I'm university educated, internationally experienced, but I still once spent the night, or part of it, in a bathtub, so high culture you ain't going to find in this space.

LAUGHING AT CHILDREN

There is nothing that does not amaze someone who is less than two. You can peek behind a couch, or a corner, and reappear, and disappear, and reappear once more, and the look of astonishment on the face of said child is something approaching the divine. You were gone! You were back! Now you're gone again! Now you're back again! Will wonders never cease.

Having recently been around a child of less than two for the first time in, well, ever, I guess, it made me remember all that I've forgotten. Or not even remember, because, technically, who can remember anything below the age of four? (Except Ray Bradbury, who claims to remember his own birth, which I sincerely doubt, but given how great a writer he is, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, who am I to question the man who wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine?) The attention span of such a toddler is basically nonexistent. The embarrassment factor of such an infant is also basically 'nil'. They will throw up their panties and show the world their patootie with unabashed joy. They will burp and fart and walk around naked without blinking an eye. Nobody's told them yet that there are some things that some people consider distinctly wrong, or impolite, so they will growl at you and cry at you and poke at you and attempt to wrench your glasses off of your face and chuck them to the ground. And laugh while doing it.

This particularly child speaks two words that I have heard: 'mama' and 'baby'. 'Mama' because she has, well, a mama, and 'baby' because there is another, even newer baby in the house, less than two months old. Problem is, the child's new vocabulary is not limited to the intended recipients of such vocabulary. Everything is 'mama' and 'baby' -- me, the couch, the TV, the empty beer bottle. No limits exist. Other words emanate from the child's mouth, but they might be Klingon, or Venusian, for all I know.

But the child knows. That's the important thing. The child knows that this world is her world, and soon, later, eventually she will learn that she must share it, more or less equally, with others. In the meantime, though, the world is her oyster. Which is kind of a riot to watch.

WHAT I'M TRYING TO SAY

There are so many things I want to write about, like the way I can be watching a play, here, in the Philippines, or rather a series of plays, and find myself instantly transported back to my senior year in high school, where myself and my class performed our play then watched some plays, as terrible as our own, as we stifled our laughter with grim smiles and unstoppable tears. Or the way that proximity to cancer simultaneously slows the nature of time itself down to a crawl, a gesture, while also somehow speeding life up, bring death nearer and nearer with each passing sigh. Or the sight of the clouds touching the mountains, almost drowning them, a fine mist that means no harm. Or my belief that we don't grow up, ever, and instead remain locked in time, held hostage by our own childhood dreams and beliefs, the nexus of responsibility and maturity a fool's game perpetrated by those who wish to hide their essential, youthful heart. Or what it feels like to watch a film in a cinema after ten, twelve months of having celluoid dreams reduced to the heartless size of a television. Or the way it is to experience, for the first time, an emotion like grief, one you've heard about but never truly understood except as an academic concept common to the human species. Or perhaps a comment or two is more than enough. Perhaps I do not need an extended essay to solidify what I feel. Perhaps a week from now, or a month, or a year, or a decade, I will look back on this post and sense what it is that I was trying to say -- something about the futility of words, the necessity of words -- and I will smile a self-satisfied, reflective smile, and wonder about my own extended efforts to say what I mean as fully as possible, with as much depth as the deep end of the swimming pool of your early childhood, blue and vast and filled with swimmers smarter and stronger and more aware than yourself.

VARIOUS SHADES OF LIGHT

For a good many months I've been reading at night without the benefit of a bedside lamp, the kind that people in the movies switch on reluctantly when a late-night phone call commences to wake them up and move the plot. I had been relying on the overhead bulb to illuminate my pages. It was fine, that bulb; it did what bulbs are supposed to do. It shone. I could see. Well enough to read. But I wanted more.

Now I have a small lamp to guide my eyes, and it is bright, bright enough to make me wonder why I had put off getting one for quite some time. The bulb is long and tubular, the neck gray and winding, the base aqua-green and plastic, the switch black and functional. (It does what switches are supposed to do.) Truth be told, it looks like some kind of prop that might be found in a movie about alien greenhouses. Not pretty. But who needs a pretty lamp? A lamp isn't supposed to be quaint; it's supposed to shine. Period.

This one does. In fact, it glows, goddamnit, which is all I ask of a lamp. I could give two shits if it blends in with assorted knickknacks that line this room in this house in this country, the Philippines.

I need a light that will make the words glow, mine and others. I need a light that will make me see clearer and deeper, from alternate angles that the overhead bulbs always seem to miss, almost intentionally. I need a light that will make me see, make me believe, make me persist in the necessary illusion that its glow will endure a little while longer, that I will find some kind of truth beneath its heat. That I will receive. If not a revelation, at the very least a pause, a respite, a thirty minute gap through which I can try to discern where the artificial light ends and some kind of authentic light can commence, transitory and unstable as it may prove to be.

THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND?

A few days ago, while walking down the street in downtown Baguio, I saw something I'd never seen before: two blind people, a husband and wife, or brother and sister, or friend and friend, holding onto each other, tightly, the one in front guiding the way, the one in back following, and I realized that the old expression is not true, not right, not altogether valid, because these people, shimmering in the sun, who some would call handicapped, did not look misguided or out-of-touch or without-a-clue, but instead seemed sure of where they were going, and certain of how they would get there.