RIDDLE ME THIS

I've meant to write more here, but time is just not around my life any more. So many visits to the hospital and it's a lousy way to lose your life's little allotment. I started this maybe two weeks ago:

Nobody wore German health shoes back in the 60's, did they? Or ate whole wheat bread? Or rode their bike everywhere. But I did. And I still ride, still eat only good stuff, still refuse to destroy my feet or back with bad shoes. I also swim, walk, do yoga-type exercises, take time to smell the roses and appreciate life, have good friends, etc. etc. etc.

And yet, if the genes don't fit, or perhaps if they fit too well, then you are fucked. and if the shoes fit, well, you wear them.

Got the damn bad genes, I guess, and so now, here I am, riddled with cancer.

Quelle horreur. And it's not funny. However, I think about my favourite Monty Python skit and say:

"It's only a flesh wound!!!", and get into fighting stance.

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Today's precis April 16, 2019 9:30AM :

I am Orange 22 - the chemo colour unit and chair number. I feel like Dead Woman Walking, on her way to the electric chair. I sit in 22 and listen to more of the endless blather. Oh, they are all professional, friendly, and very helpful, but this is a crap hand in a crap deal, and I find myself thinking "I hate you, God" - a blasphemy that could send me to my afterlife hell, but right now I don't care. I only hope that my higher, healing self, which always took over when I was doing massage therapy for the last forty years, and which let come to life a person and awareness very different from the self I had come to know in "normal" life. Just hope the higher me takes over this process while I go away and sulk.

It's so depressing. I want to cry, but that would only depress me more. I had planned many chores to get done during this brutally boring day, but now I just want to shut the door to everything. Bad attitude, I reckon, but "to thine own self be true".

I expected, - and still do expect, - more, and better, from life.

I was part of the entertainment at this hospital a few years ago - appeared here three or four times for patients and families condemned to this health sentence. I'm not singing now; this experience is the opposite of the life-affirming privilege I have enjoyed as a musician and performer. How quickly things can change.

KABOOM!

I did sing a bit this morning at home, when I found a tune I'd written about a month ago in Mexico - before the sounding of the death knell. It is called "Living Free", and when I think of it, I can return mentally to the beach where I was when I composed it, watching a boat skim over top the waves of the ocean, someone standing forward in the prow. I can feel the good air rushing past me when I become that boat person; I can see the shore line - even see myself standing there watching. I see the world, which the songwriter me says I'm happy to leave behind. Little did I know then that I just might have to do that. Ah, well, having a child was good; doing massage was good; my lovers - even the ones who couldn't really be there for me - they were good. And then the music. That was the night's "lovely tune". Beware, my foolish heart.

Maybe I'll listen to my own yet-to-be-released CD. I just have to wait for my sister to get here with my bag. If it's ready for manufacturing soon, I hope to celebrate its birth. If it's posthumous, then I hope everyone else celebrates it well.

Yesterday, after buying some drugs the hospital prescribed for me, I saw a Lucky Money envelope lying on the sidewalk. I know them from many years ago, when I was teaching and living in Kensington Market. They usually had a $2. bill in them for the Chinese New Year. Yesterday's envelope, when I picked it up, had a $20. in it. Lucky me, eh? Just full of luck - and now, poison drugs.

3:30PM Well, to be honest, and except for a period of time when I felt like one of the Parkdale rubbies - drunk and leaning over too much, and slurring everything I said (Wuuuuh th' heh's goin' on, ennyway, eh? Hey!! yur priddy cute, y'know? Oh oh, sorry, sorry, maaam. Don' min' mee, I'm juhsanoldrunk! Yaaaaaah. Hevva niyz day, eh?). Except for that interlude, I felt OK, - tired, but much better than I had thought would feel. It helped a lot to have sister Lucy for aid and for company, and the nurses were very helpful. I could almost say I didn't feel a damn thing. But I was pre-drugged. We'll see later, when they wear off, how I fare.

Showed a couple of the nurses the page for my benefit concert on May 5. Gotta keep on advertising...

The show must go on.   zoechilcoeveryvoice.blogspot.com   hughsroomlive.com (calendar May 5).

Got to my son's house where my daughter-in-law made a lovely soup and bread for dinner. Thank you, Morgan. Chris came home, and we had a little visit. 

And now to bed. It might be a long cold winter coming up.

The tired old lady with the bad bad baby belly, getting the poison drip

The tired old lady later that night

The relatively youngish girl last July speaking prematurely but accurately expressing the future events, and saying WTF?
but still wearing the t-shirt that says "Gracias a la vida", which means "Thanks to Life".