When you see naked kids bathing on the sidewalk, it's a good sign you're not in Japan anymore.
You would think that regularly commuting -- for lack of a better word -- between the Philippines and Japan would be a lesson in contrasts: Japan (the rich and powerful) contrasted with the Philippines (the poor and desperate).
Yes and no.
Yes, because it's quite obvious that Japan, being the world's second largest economy, has a leg or two (or three, or thirty-seven) up on the Philippines. For starters, you don't see nude, grimy children dunking buckets of dirty water over their head in the middle of a summer afternoon. Besides that rather simple and startling fact, things are efficient in Japan; things are shiny in Japan; things are smooth in Japan. The Philippines has a lived-in feel to it, or perhaps it's better to say a living-in feel to it -- everything's happening, at once, and it's messy and dirty and as chaotic as Japan is antiseptic.
But about a month ago on a cool Sunday morning in downtown Tokyo I was heading towards Takashimaya Times Square, home to the best bookstore in Tokyo, Kinokuniya, with a sixth-floor selection of English books and magazines that can't be beat. Up beside me came a shabbily dressed man, slightly dirty, pushing sixty.
"Do you speak Japanese?" he asked. (In Japanese, of course.)
"A little," I said.
"I didn't have any food today, and I'm feeling a little bit hungry, so..."
He left the rest unsaid. (In Japan, in the Japanese language, almost everything is left unsaid. Even the down-and-out don't waste words.)
I gave him a buck, feeling guilty for being so cheap, and guilty for being so rich.
An hour later, as I left the bookstore, the same man wandered by, and he approached me again, using the same spiel, but I saw no glint in his eyes that recognized me from our previous encounter. (Do all foreigners look alike? I wondered.)
Tokyo is very rich and very modern and it isn't very often that you encounter anybody down and out. They're there, yes, but you have to somewhat search for them, and most people don't do that -- search for the down-and-out.
In Philippines, in Manila, even in Baguio, where I live, you don't have to search too hard.
Manila is a big and throbbing city, reminding me of Bangkok, but it's also a city of contrasts. The downtown district has its share of bright and shiny buildings, but if you cock your head a certain way as you drive on by in your taxi you can see entire communities, if not generations, of families perched under the endless bridges, living in shacks. At night, on the sidewalks, groups of kids lay sprawled out, shirtless, some pantless, on flattened cardboard sidewalks. Poverty is such a part of life that it becomes to seem just like that -- a part -- and you learn to slot it into its appropriate mental box inside of your skull.
And then sometimes it comes walking up beside you, in small and not-so-subtle ways.
Walking down the road the other day, a shoeless man in a grubby black top walked past me, walking fast, walking sure. He seemed in a hurry. Suddenly he bent down, picked up something off the gravel, brought it to his lips and kept on walking, all in one certain, seamless motion. It took me a moment or two to realize that he had grabbed the remaining butt of a slightly-lit cigarette. He took one, two, three drags, then chucked it back to the ground. It had served its purpose. Nothing was wasted.
I watched him walk ahead of me, shoeless, on the sticky July pavement of the side of a highway in the northern Philippines in this small and cozy corner of our planet.
A week ago I was in Tokyo.
Now I'm in Baguio.
Sooner than not, I'll be back in Japan. (My head somewhat spinning.)
Tonight, a group of kids in the heart of Manila will sleep under the stars, inside of the heat, on a spread of cardboard on the sidewalk.
Tonight, that homeless man in Tokyo will find a corner of concrete to rest his head upon.
Seems like only a few weeks ago I was marvelling over the differences between my hometown, St.Catharines, and the hometown of my parents, Fort Erie. So far away, those two towns are. Almost, what, forty minutes by car. Almost a different planet, it seemed.
Almost.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
MY MUSIC REVIEW
I can't get that song 'When The Stars Go Blue' out of my head.
Is it me, or is it one of the strangest, most poignant songs you've ever heard?
(Then again, I hear about two new songs a year, but still...)
Is it me, or is it one of the strangest, most poignant songs you've ever heard?
(Then again, I hear about two new songs a year, but still...)
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
THAT DREADFUL DAY IN DALLAS, FOREVER
Vincent Bugliosi's new book Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy seeks to set the record straight, once and for all and forever, regarding the greatest enduring mystery of the twentieth century: Who killed J.F.K.?
If this is not the mother of all assassination books, then I don't know what is.
How can I be so sure?
Well, leaving aside the fact that it's 1500 small-print pages, the equivalent of thirteen regular-font books, how about this:
I've read the first two hundred pages, and there's already over one thousand footnotes, and, get this, he's only finished describing a single fucking day.
That's right: two hundred pages on November 22, 1963. Minute by minute. Hour by hour. In exhaustive, almost irrelevant detail. (Did you know, for example, that Oswald's older brother, Robert, ate a ham sandwich in his hotel's cafeteria late that night? Not just any sandwich -- a ham sandwich. Talk about details.)
Mama mia.
Of course, for assassination-nuts like me, it's pennies from heaven, this book is.
A year or so ago I wrote on this blog about my own mild obsession with the Kennedy assassination, one that started with my father's teenage scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about Kennedy's death, and fueled into overdrive by Oliver Stone's brilliant film J.F.K. I've read all the conspiracy books I can get my hands on, doubted most of them, been intrigued by a few. As Bugliosi makes clear in his forceful, blistering introduction, this is, quite simply, the greatest story of the past hundred years. No way in hell a novelist could create this kooky cast of characters, with so many diverting and delusionary subplots. Reality trumps fantasy yet again.
But the J.F.K. case is fantasy, or at least much of it is, anyway. Who shot from where at what time and for what reason? Madness lies down these precarious paths, me thinks. For if you start to delve too long into this hyopnotic funnel, you begin to see the entire course of the twentieth century reflected in its myriad depths. Communism, socialism, the military-industrial complex, craven political leaders and two-bit mafia hoods, lonely Marxists and frightened wives, all of them mixed together in a maddening stew of inneuendo and grief, vengeance and lunacy. You can get lost in it. (Some of us want to get lost in it.)
Bugliosi's intent, though, is crystal clear: to prove that Oswald, and Oswald alone, did it. Pulled the gun. Fired the shots. End of story. Case closed.
And, as I've said before, I have no doubt that I'll come to the end of this massive motherfucker of a book absolutely convinced of Oswald's guilt. Beyond a doubt. Without hesitation.
And yet.
In the J.F.K. case, there's always an 'and yet...'
Bugliosi states in his introduction that he ultimately had to finally put the book to bed and send his baby to the printers earlier this year, so there's no possible way he could respond within the text to any subsequent revelations, accusations, hyperbolations (?) that might pop up in the press regarding other theories.
A sensible statement, on his part, because as the foremost assassination researcher he simply knew that alternative ideas would pop up on a regular basis.
And boy, have they.
A few weeks back an Italian company that manufactured the rifle Oswald supposedly used to kill Kennedy conducted some tests and concluded: Impossible -- nobody could have fired three shots in that amount of time from that particular rifle.
The bullet fragments used to indict Oswald were found by some recent researchers to indicate that they all might not have come from a single bullet.
E.Howard Hunt, convicted White House burglar and lifetime C.I.A. spook, is recorded on his deathbed, by his son, stating that he, himself, and the C.I.A. did, indeed, have something to do with Kennedy's death. (Despite his own denials in his recent autobiography, where he states that he didn't have anything to with J.F.K.'s murder, but he couldn't deny that somebody out there might have helped Oswald out.)
And here we have, on the heels of Bugliosi's book, David Talbott's Brothers, which explores the relationship between J.F.K. and R.F.K., and the suspicions the younger brother had regarding the possible conspiracy surrounding Jack Kennedy's death.
And on and on and on.
The assassination of J.F.K. remains a vortex into which we channel our own beliefs and observations and obsessions about the very nature of humanity and history. Is fate changed by one man with a rifle? Can kings be cut down by peasants? Is there a secret cabal plotting and planning who lives and who dies? Can we trust those in authority? Can we trust our own eyes and ears?
There's something mysterious, almost celestial, at the core of this entire case, as if reality somehow sidestepped the regular course of human events that terrible day and led us down another, darker path. The twentieth century truly began to head downhill after that day in Dallas, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, I cannot believe that one simple, lonely, troubled man was at the heart of it.
For no matter how much evidence is presented against Oswald, something in the deepest place within thinks, almost insists: There's something else. There's something else. There's something else.
It's the place where logic and rationality can't reach. The part of our humanoid core that refuses to acknowledge the obvious in favor of the ephemeral. Because even logic has its own limits. Bugliosis states that it's not logical to believe that the heads of the Mafia and the F.B.I. and the military-industrial complex sat down at a big brown table to plot the president's death. Puh-leeze, he practically writes.
Well, wait a minute. ("Hold the phone, Chuck," as Michael Keaton tells Henry Winkler in Night Shift.) We know for a fact that the C.I.A. worked with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. That they helped undermine the Diem regime in Vietnam. That they funded the contras in El Salvador to disrupt its corrupt government. That in the past few months they quietly helped Ethiopia overtake the Islamic warlords terrorizing Somalia. Is it not then logical, if not inevitable, to assume that they, or some other 'they' went further on that dreadful day in Dallas in the fall of 1963?
It is to me. If anything, the past thirty years of American intelligence has proven once and for all and forever that some nasty, nefarious deeds are being enacted, continually, daily, while most of the country is choosing their next American Idol. And my exposure to rotten-to-the-fucking-core regimes in Cambodia and the Philippines over the past few years has made me decidedly skeptical of governments in general, and especially those constantly proclaim that all is hunky-dory, folks. "Just believe what we tell you," the say. "Believe what we report," they write. "We're looking out for you."
But this is what I mean about logic: it takes a vacation when it comes to J.F.K's death. Because most people need proof, and the proof points to Oswald, yes, but, but, but, but. There's some much other, well, stuff reverberating through the ensuing decades to dismiss. We can dismiss it logically, yes, but logic has no place in the hearts of humans. Just because there's no direct, credible evidence pointing to the intelligence community's involvement doesn't mean it didn't happen. We infer, hypothesize, connect dots that aren't there but make pretty little diagrams nevertheless.
The case has become its own, monstrous supernova. In his introduction, Bugliosi wonders why, after all the years that have passed, there have been no deathbed confessions, given the supposed size of the alleged conspiracy. And no sooner has he typed those words than out comes E.Howard Hunt's son with his old man's recorded ramblings regarding the C.I.A.'s, and his own, personal involvement in the killing.
It's neverending, this thing is.
I sometimes wonder if the Kennedy assassination is a metaphor for life, or life is a metaphor for the Kennedy assasination: We study one day in infinite detail, and examine all the players, and look for answers, and look for reasons, and look for understanding, and look for a purpose, and nobody but nobody can agree on anything except that we don't agree.
But I'm rambling.
Besides, there's no time to waste. I have to get back to Bugliosi's book.
There is, after all, another thirteen hundred or so pages to sift through. (I mean, shit, I've only made it through the first fucking day of the case...)
Oh, and did I mention the complimentary CD-ROM that's included at the back of the book, one that includes an additional one thousand pages of endnotes?
Not to mention David Talbott's new work, Brothers, focusing on Bobby Kennedy and his own conspiracy theories, which is next on my shopping list.
I told you: It's neverending.
Thank God.
If this is not the mother of all assassination books, then I don't know what is.
How can I be so sure?
Well, leaving aside the fact that it's 1500 small-print pages, the equivalent of thirteen regular-font books, how about this:
I've read the first two hundred pages, and there's already over one thousand footnotes, and, get this, he's only finished describing a single fucking day.
That's right: two hundred pages on November 22, 1963. Minute by minute. Hour by hour. In exhaustive, almost irrelevant detail. (Did you know, for example, that Oswald's older brother, Robert, ate a ham sandwich in his hotel's cafeteria late that night? Not just any sandwich -- a ham sandwich. Talk about details.)
Mama mia.
Of course, for assassination-nuts like me, it's pennies from heaven, this book is.
A year or so ago I wrote on this blog about my own mild obsession with the Kennedy assassination, one that started with my father's teenage scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about Kennedy's death, and fueled into overdrive by Oliver Stone's brilliant film J.F.K. I've read all the conspiracy books I can get my hands on, doubted most of them, been intrigued by a few. As Bugliosi makes clear in his forceful, blistering introduction, this is, quite simply, the greatest story of the past hundred years. No way in hell a novelist could create this kooky cast of characters, with so many diverting and delusionary subplots. Reality trumps fantasy yet again.
But the J.F.K. case is fantasy, or at least much of it is, anyway. Who shot from where at what time and for what reason? Madness lies down these precarious paths, me thinks. For if you start to delve too long into this hyopnotic funnel, you begin to see the entire course of the twentieth century reflected in its myriad depths. Communism, socialism, the military-industrial complex, craven political leaders and two-bit mafia hoods, lonely Marxists and frightened wives, all of them mixed together in a maddening stew of inneuendo and grief, vengeance and lunacy. You can get lost in it. (Some of us want to get lost in it.)
Bugliosi's intent, though, is crystal clear: to prove that Oswald, and Oswald alone, did it. Pulled the gun. Fired the shots. End of story. Case closed.
And, as I've said before, I have no doubt that I'll come to the end of this massive motherfucker of a book absolutely convinced of Oswald's guilt. Beyond a doubt. Without hesitation.
And yet.
In the J.F.K. case, there's always an 'and yet...'
Bugliosi states in his introduction that he ultimately had to finally put the book to bed and send his baby to the printers earlier this year, so there's no possible way he could respond within the text to any subsequent revelations, accusations, hyperbolations (?) that might pop up in the press regarding other theories.
A sensible statement, on his part, because as the foremost assassination researcher he simply knew that alternative ideas would pop up on a regular basis.
And boy, have they.
A few weeks back an Italian company that manufactured the rifle Oswald supposedly used to kill Kennedy conducted some tests and concluded: Impossible -- nobody could have fired three shots in that amount of time from that particular rifle.
The bullet fragments used to indict Oswald were found by some recent researchers to indicate that they all might not have come from a single bullet.
E.Howard Hunt, convicted White House burglar and lifetime C.I.A. spook, is recorded on his deathbed, by his son, stating that he, himself, and the C.I.A. did, indeed, have something to do with Kennedy's death. (Despite his own denials in his recent autobiography, where he states that he didn't have anything to with J.F.K.'s murder, but he couldn't deny that somebody out there might have helped Oswald out.)
And here we have, on the heels of Bugliosi's book, David Talbott's Brothers, which explores the relationship between J.F.K. and R.F.K., and the suspicions the younger brother had regarding the possible conspiracy surrounding Jack Kennedy's death.
And on and on and on.
The assassination of J.F.K. remains a vortex into which we channel our own beliefs and observations and obsessions about the very nature of humanity and history. Is fate changed by one man with a rifle? Can kings be cut down by peasants? Is there a secret cabal plotting and planning who lives and who dies? Can we trust those in authority? Can we trust our own eyes and ears?
There's something mysterious, almost celestial, at the core of this entire case, as if reality somehow sidestepped the regular course of human events that terrible day and led us down another, darker path. The twentieth century truly began to head downhill after that day in Dallas, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, I cannot believe that one simple, lonely, troubled man was at the heart of it.
For no matter how much evidence is presented against Oswald, something in the deepest place within thinks, almost insists: There's something else. There's something else. There's something else.
It's the place where logic and rationality can't reach. The part of our humanoid core that refuses to acknowledge the obvious in favor of the ephemeral. Because even logic has its own limits. Bugliosis states that it's not logical to believe that the heads of the Mafia and the F.B.I. and the military-industrial complex sat down at a big brown table to plot the president's death. Puh-leeze, he practically writes.
Well, wait a minute. ("Hold the phone, Chuck," as Michael Keaton tells Henry Winkler in Night Shift.) We know for a fact that the C.I.A. worked with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. That they helped undermine the Diem regime in Vietnam. That they funded the contras in El Salvador to disrupt its corrupt government. That in the past few months they quietly helped Ethiopia overtake the Islamic warlords terrorizing Somalia. Is it not then logical, if not inevitable, to assume that they, or some other 'they' went further on that dreadful day in Dallas in the fall of 1963?
It is to me. If anything, the past thirty years of American intelligence has proven once and for all and forever that some nasty, nefarious deeds are being enacted, continually, daily, while most of the country is choosing their next American Idol. And my exposure to rotten-to-the-fucking-core regimes in Cambodia and the Philippines over the past few years has made me decidedly skeptical of governments in general, and especially those constantly proclaim that all is hunky-dory, folks. "Just believe what we tell you," the say. "Believe what we report," they write. "We're looking out for you."
But this is what I mean about logic: it takes a vacation when it comes to J.F.K's death. Because most people need proof, and the proof points to Oswald, yes, but, but, but, but. There's some much other, well, stuff reverberating through the ensuing decades to dismiss. We can dismiss it logically, yes, but logic has no place in the hearts of humans. Just because there's no direct, credible evidence pointing to the intelligence community's involvement doesn't mean it didn't happen. We infer, hypothesize, connect dots that aren't there but make pretty little diagrams nevertheless.
The case has become its own, monstrous supernova. In his introduction, Bugliosi wonders why, after all the years that have passed, there have been no deathbed confessions, given the supposed size of the alleged conspiracy. And no sooner has he typed those words than out comes E.Howard Hunt's son with his old man's recorded ramblings regarding the C.I.A.'s, and his own, personal involvement in the killing.
It's neverending, this thing is.
I sometimes wonder if the Kennedy assassination is a metaphor for life, or life is a metaphor for the Kennedy assasination: We study one day in infinite detail, and examine all the players, and look for answers, and look for reasons, and look for understanding, and look for a purpose, and nobody but nobody can agree on anything except that we don't agree.
But I'm rambling.
Besides, there's no time to waste. I have to get back to Bugliosi's book.
There is, after all, another thirteen hundred or so pages to sift through. (I mean, shit, I've only made it through the first fucking day of the case...)
Oh, and did I mention the complimentary CD-ROM that's included at the back of the book, one that includes an additional one thousand pages of endnotes?
Not to mention David Talbott's new work, Brothers, focusing on Bobby Kennedy and his own conspiracy theories, which is next on my shopping list.
I told you: It's neverending.
Thank God.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
WHERE THE ROOM IS WARM AND THE LIGHTS ARE BRIGHT
I can state with supreme, complete confidence that I'm supremely, completely tired of reading warm and moving and inspiring memoirs written by famous people who have come down with cancer, not because the books are bad, because they're not, but rather because they're good, and inspiring, and invigorating, and yet most of their authors passed away the same year that their works reached the shelves. They didn't make it. They lost. The cancer got them. (Cancer does that. It gets people.)
Gilda's Radner, the Saturday Night Live star, wrote a book called It's Always Something, and it was published posthumously after her death from ovarian cancer. It's sad and funny and full of life, and it came out after her death.
Liz Tilberis, former editor of British Vogue, wrote a book called No Time To Die: Living With Ovarian Cancer, and it's sad and funny and full of life, and it came out a year before her death.
Evan Hunter, the brilliant mainstream novelist and screenwriter (under his own name the author of The Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay of Hitchcock's classic The Birds) and even more brilliant crime novelist (under the name 'Ed McBain') wrote a book called Let's Talk: A Story of Cancer and Love, detailing his struggles with cancer of the larynx. It's sad and funny and full of life, and it was released only months before his death.
You see the pattern.
I'm not the one with the cancer, and it's something I rarely blog about because, really, who wants to read a blog about cancer? I mean, shit, I sure as hell don't, so why would you? But considering cancer is pretty much most of what I've been thinking about for the past two years, I figured, fuck it, let `er rip.
The thing is, these books lie. Not the books themselves, but the effect of the books, the ripple effect, the concentric rings that seem to indicate that anyone and everyone with cancer will slip through the water and keep on falling.
That's the point: They lie because they're so warm and wonderful and infused with the delicate tapestry of life, and yet their authors' ultimate fates makes one think that the cancer was waiting, waiting, waiting until the most ironic, opportune moment to strike hardest and strike last, but that can't be the case, because how many people have cancer, and are living with cancer, and surviving with cancer?
In the States, about 1, 300, 000 people will be diagnosed with cancer every year. That's not a typo. That's a hell of a lot of people. (Or, as Burgess Meredith would say in Rocky II: "A hell of a lot.") And that's just in America. How many people in the world have it? Glad you asked. Over 24, 000, 000. Twenty-four million. With more being diagnosed every, single, day.
So I realized: the books lie, in the sense that their authors' outcomes are both tragic and anomalous. Because the writers of those wise and moving books died, quite soon after, or before, their books were published -- but so what? There's 24, 000, 000 people living with the disease around the world. (And I stress 'living'.) Hardly any of them have ever, or will ever, write books about it. And they're still here. I just don't see them, and I don't read their stories.
Most people don't think about death every day, I don't think, but cancer forces you to, and it telescopes life, and it makes you realize that a lot of the nonsense we strive for and look for and long for is somewhat redundant and random. When you think about death a lot, life becomes all the more vivid. The good and the bad. The messy and the sleek.
I wish for once the bookstores were flooded with books by people with cancer who are still here, alive, working and shopping and trying to figure out how to work the remote control, because that's what people with cancer do: they live their lives like everybody else. And maybe there are a lot of books like that; I don't know. It just seems like the celebrities get all the press, and their books seem to be the ones that are eerily timed to coincide with their own deaths.
Sometimes I'm on a train, and I'll see somebody, anybody, a random person, and I'll wonder: Do they have cancer? They might. Or their sister does. Or their brother. Or their grandfather. I mean, damn, 24, 000, 000 people in the world got some form or another of the disease. And every day more and more folks are joining this not-at-all-exclusive club. ("Come on in! The more the gloomier!") So I look at the businessman or the schoolgirl and think: Maybe they've got it. Maybe it's there, growing inside of them, but they don't know it.
A morbid thought, but shit, if cancer isn't morbid, what the hell is?
And yet it's not. Not really. Because, if you think about it, what does cancer make us fear? The big 'd', death. And why do we have that fear? Because cancer makes it seem as if death is closer. Approaching. Gathering speed like a bullet train.
But death is all around us, all the time, and we start dying the moment we start breathing, and so why do we forget that? Life marches on, and we pretend that it's not going where we all know where it's going.
So what we're really talking about here is truly a matter of momentum. Cancer tends to accelerate our own fears of mortality. That's all. It makes the hey-everything's-going-good-I've-got-it-all-figured-out-pass-the-chips certainty of life come grinding, screeching, shrieking to a halt. (Cancer's momentum can do that.)
But I think that there's something, if not exactly good, at the very least mildly illuminating this sudden, almost debilitating paralysis. You're forced to reconsider life, and its values, and how you should start to prioritize your own do's and don't's. You see that life can turn on a dime, and that to think otherwise is to hold onto the blessed ignorance of a child. You begin to understand the absurdity of a world where American Idol's Simon Cowell can make thirty million dollars (U.S.) a year simply by entertainingly putting other people down. (Not counting the other thirty-eight million dollars (U.S.) he makes from doing a similar job on Britain's X-Factor talent show.)
The question remains: How can Simon Cowell, and all of his his fortune, and cancer, and all of its horrors, exist in the same world? (Science-Fiction writer Philip K.Dick once wondered a similar thing while reading the children's classic The Wind in the Willows and hearing that John Lennon had been shot -- how can those two events possibly coincide? But they do.) Grappling with these nonsensical things, you can better understand, dimly, that life sometimes has its own erratic plans, both absurd and alarming, and that yours, in turn, must change. Now. Immediately.
As 24, 000, 000 people around the world realize.
(I don't, of course. Not really. Again, I'm not the one with the cancer, and I feel somewhat silly writing about it. You can't understand what you haven't got. Take everything with a grain and a shaker full of salt. These thoughts are simply those of somebody who has been around the disease a bit in the past two years. I'm extrapolating, basically, trying to get a handle on the slippery unhandable nature of the beast. I'm failing miserably to do so, I think, but I will keep trying.)
So, in summary, these are the thoughts that sometimes swirl in my head: a lot of people have cancer; this is not right; Simon Cowell makes too much money, despite his undeniable entertainment value; and the fact that cancer and Cowell exist, together, is absurd and ridiculous. It's proof of the universe's madness. The untimely deaths of numerous writers only months after their books are published detailing their disease is another sign that something is askew in the fabric of the cosmos. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don't, understand, anything. (Which you might have guessed by now.)
And yet the fact that millions around the world live with the disease, live with it, live with it, and deal with the disease, deal with it, deal with it, refuse to give in to its persistent advances, gives me a glimmer of hope, which is more than enough.
For cancer is but a microcosm and distillation of the fears that ground us all. As I said, it's life, speeded up and shoved in our face. And if one can live with that ultimate fear, that impending rush, and grapple with it, gripping it in a headlock as best as one can (and possibly even giving it a noogie), and then even move forward, step by cautious step, than perhaps that says something about us as humans, about us as a species. Life is fucked and the world is unfair and cancer arrives with a random, vicious glee, but we go to work and pay the bills and do what has to be done and thus tellingly, in our own small way, inform our ultimate maker that no, no, no, we will meet another day, certainly, but not today, motherfucker. Get out. I'm shutting the door to you. Go away. Not today. Not today. Not today. There's somebody else at the door, so step aside. There's a cake waiting to be baked. There's a book waiting to be read. There's a lesson that needs to be taught. The humdrum bullshit of life, humming its glorious hum. Perhaps it's enough.
So step aside, you cold and heartless beast. It is chilly outside, almost frigid, and there are friends ringing the doorbell, and we must answer it, now, before it's too late, before night falls and the dusk descends. We must invite them inside, where the room is warm and the lights are bright.
Gilda's Radner, the Saturday Night Live star, wrote a book called It's Always Something, and it was published posthumously after her death from ovarian cancer. It's sad and funny and full of life, and it came out after her death.
Liz Tilberis, former editor of British Vogue, wrote a book called No Time To Die: Living With Ovarian Cancer, and it's sad and funny and full of life, and it came out a year before her death.
Evan Hunter, the brilliant mainstream novelist and screenwriter (under his own name the author of The Blackboard Jungle and the screenplay of Hitchcock's classic The Birds) and even more brilliant crime novelist (under the name 'Ed McBain') wrote a book called Let's Talk: A Story of Cancer and Love, detailing his struggles with cancer of the larynx. It's sad and funny and full of life, and it was released only months before his death.
You see the pattern.
I'm not the one with the cancer, and it's something I rarely blog about because, really, who wants to read a blog about cancer? I mean, shit, I sure as hell don't, so why would you? But considering cancer is pretty much most of what I've been thinking about for the past two years, I figured, fuck it, let `er rip.
The thing is, these books lie. Not the books themselves, but the effect of the books, the ripple effect, the concentric rings that seem to indicate that anyone and everyone with cancer will slip through the water and keep on falling.
That's the point: They lie because they're so warm and wonderful and infused with the delicate tapestry of life, and yet their authors' ultimate fates makes one think that the cancer was waiting, waiting, waiting until the most ironic, opportune moment to strike hardest and strike last, but that can't be the case, because how many people have cancer, and are living with cancer, and surviving with cancer?
In the States, about 1, 300, 000 people will be diagnosed with cancer every year. That's not a typo. That's a hell of a lot of people. (Or, as Burgess Meredith would say in Rocky II: "A hell of a lot.") And that's just in America. How many people in the world have it? Glad you asked. Over 24, 000, 000. Twenty-four million. With more being diagnosed every, single, day.
So I realized: the books lie, in the sense that their authors' outcomes are both tragic and anomalous. Because the writers of those wise and moving books died, quite soon after, or before, their books were published -- but so what? There's 24, 000, 000 people living with the disease around the world. (And I stress 'living'.) Hardly any of them have ever, or will ever, write books about it. And they're still here. I just don't see them, and I don't read their stories.
Most people don't think about death every day, I don't think, but cancer forces you to, and it telescopes life, and it makes you realize that a lot of the nonsense we strive for and look for and long for is somewhat redundant and random. When you think about death a lot, life becomes all the more vivid. The good and the bad. The messy and the sleek.
I wish for once the bookstores were flooded with books by people with cancer who are still here, alive, working and shopping and trying to figure out how to work the remote control, because that's what people with cancer do: they live their lives like everybody else. And maybe there are a lot of books like that; I don't know. It just seems like the celebrities get all the press, and their books seem to be the ones that are eerily timed to coincide with their own deaths.
Sometimes I'm on a train, and I'll see somebody, anybody, a random person, and I'll wonder: Do they have cancer? They might. Or their sister does. Or their brother. Or their grandfather. I mean, damn, 24, 000, 000 people in the world got some form or another of the disease. And every day more and more folks are joining this not-at-all-exclusive club. ("Come on in! The more the gloomier!") So I look at the businessman or the schoolgirl and think: Maybe they've got it. Maybe it's there, growing inside of them, but they don't know it.
A morbid thought, but shit, if cancer isn't morbid, what the hell is?
And yet it's not. Not really. Because, if you think about it, what does cancer make us fear? The big 'd', death. And why do we have that fear? Because cancer makes it seem as if death is closer. Approaching. Gathering speed like a bullet train.
But death is all around us, all the time, and we start dying the moment we start breathing, and so why do we forget that? Life marches on, and we pretend that it's not going where we all know where it's going.
So what we're really talking about here is truly a matter of momentum. Cancer tends to accelerate our own fears of mortality. That's all. It makes the hey-everything's-going-good-I've-got-it-all-figured-out-pass-the-chips certainty of life come grinding, screeching, shrieking to a halt. (Cancer's momentum can do that.)
But I think that there's something, if not exactly good, at the very least mildly illuminating this sudden, almost debilitating paralysis. You're forced to reconsider life, and its values, and how you should start to prioritize your own do's and don't's. You see that life can turn on a dime, and that to think otherwise is to hold onto the blessed ignorance of a child. You begin to understand the absurdity of a world where American Idol's Simon Cowell can make thirty million dollars (U.S.) a year simply by entertainingly putting other people down. (Not counting the other thirty-eight million dollars (U.S.) he makes from doing a similar job on Britain's X-Factor talent show.)
The question remains: How can Simon Cowell, and all of his his fortune, and cancer, and all of its horrors, exist in the same world? (Science-Fiction writer Philip K.Dick once wondered a similar thing while reading the children's classic The Wind in the Willows and hearing that John Lennon had been shot -- how can those two events possibly coincide? But they do.) Grappling with these nonsensical things, you can better understand, dimly, that life sometimes has its own erratic plans, both absurd and alarming, and that yours, in turn, must change. Now. Immediately.
As 24, 000, 000 people around the world realize.
(I don't, of course. Not really. Again, I'm not the one with the cancer, and I feel somewhat silly writing about it. You can't understand what you haven't got. Take everything with a grain and a shaker full of salt. These thoughts are simply those of somebody who has been around the disease a bit in the past two years. I'm extrapolating, basically, trying to get a handle on the slippery unhandable nature of the beast. I'm failing miserably to do so, I think, but I will keep trying.)
So, in summary, these are the thoughts that sometimes swirl in my head: a lot of people have cancer; this is not right; Simon Cowell makes too much money, despite his undeniable entertainment value; and the fact that cancer and Cowell exist, together, is absurd and ridiculous. It's proof of the universe's madness. The untimely deaths of numerous writers only months after their books are published detailing their disease is another sign that something is askew in the fabric of the cosmos. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don't, understand, anything. (Which you might have guessed by now.)
And yet the fact that millions around the world live with the disease, live with it, live with it, and deal with the disease, deal with it, deal with it, refuse to give in to its persistent advances, gives me a glimmer of hope, which is more than enough.
For cancer is but a microcosm and distillation of the fears that ground us all. As I said, it's life, speeded up and shoved in our face. And if one can live with that ultimate fear, that impending rush, and grapple with it, gripping it in a headlock as best as one can (and possibly even giving it a noogie), and then even move forward, step by cautious step, than perhaps that says something about us as humans, about us as a species. Life is fucked and the world is unfair and cancer arrives with a random, vicious glee, but we go to work and pay the bills and do what has to be done and thus tellingly, in our own small way, inform our ultimate maker that no, no, no, we will meet another day, certainly, but not today, motherfucker. Get out. I'm shutting the door to you. Go away. Not today. Not today. Not today. There's somebody else at the door, so step aside. There's a cake waiting to be baked. There's a book waiting to be read. There's a lesson that needs to be taught. The humdrum bullshit of life, humming its glorious hum. Perhaps it's enough.
So step aside, you cold and heartless beast. It is chilly outside, almost frigid, and there are friends ringing the doorbell, and we must answer it, now, before it's too late, before night falls and the dusk descends. We must invite them inside, where the room is warm and the lights are bright.
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