It is going to be a year in August that my mom died and with every passing month since then, I have had to see my father deal with both the loss of his wife and his own progression into cancer. It is hard to describe what cancer really means to people, yet every week I see it first hand in the Cancer Center when I take my father for his treatments. There is a hopelessness that takes hold of family and friends, while the actual patient tries to maintain a fragile spirit about themselves. In many ways, cancer is a shared disease. When your wife has cancer, you have it too, your kids have it, and so the nurses and doctors end up talking about treatments and test results, and they look at everyone in the room as patients, cause they know everyone is suffering. Months into the diagnosis, you learn everyone’s names, you see the same people, the same nurses, the same office people, and everyone knows you are dying. There are polite conversations every time, but in between there is always silences that stay with you. Food doesn’t taste the same. How can it, you are taking more medication now, more pills, more treatment, more of everything. The body tires of the blood tests, the analysis, the probing, the indignity of what seems unnatural. It is only the mind that continues to fight, to think and search of escape. Maybe this is why, I don’t have the patience for any serious films anymore. I don’t want to be serious, I want to be irresponsible, I want to laugh and return to silliness, to run back into childhood imagination, where I did not have to decide anything, live up to anything, be responsible. However, you are already on the other side of it. You already made some arrangements, you have looked down at a patch of ground, where the body will be laid, you have made compromises and you are satisfied with material things, but not your feelings. There still lingers the hope of a possibility, of life dragging on, but how and to where you don’t know. What is tangible is the earth, not the sky. Clouds you can see but never touch. The ground is beneath you, you tell yourself, it is here and you can dig into it and feel it for yourself. You want to believe in something, as you close your eyes every now and then and let the vision fade, breathe out this one life.

Roar of a GM engine, and gust of speeding metal on interstate road, some times I wonder, limitless is the sky, heavy the chains that try and hold me down, but I am young, strong, and heroic. The hero never falls, he only picks himself up and rams his fist into the wind, only God can calm his fury, but his hunger knows no bounds. I am he. Don’t think too much, just drive on through, miles the summer heat, but by my side my woman lays. The scent of feminine perfume and sweet thighs I have climbed. This is the summer of 91. My car, my girl, the road. My last ride before the storm. The final words to be said before the dawn of manhood and all that lays upon that journey.

Love is doing the wrong thing for all the right reasons and living through the consequences that result from it.

I was in a strange place today and thought I’d write something a bit more off beat….

For Love Knows Not You

I walk into this place, alone and morbid, saddened in heart, and perhaps desparate in attention.  The path goes on and stretches wide, but never wide enough, just long and whining down to other corridors, to other places, to stores and counters, to displays and makeup mirrors.  Teenage girls giggle and converse their lives and events.  Children cry and fingerprint the glass windows, their mothers tired faces try to smile and every now and then an impatient father looks at his watch.  This place smells of nothing.  It is clean and disinfected daily, the air conditioning is on, but it is never cold, perhaps too warm at times, filled with such masses, but it always feels close to adequate, like it is artificial.  I look up into the ceiling and see only more glass, no real sun, but there is a light that comes through and I know that this place is a temple.  It grows high and there is space, yet nonetheless it suffocates me.  I feel the endless procession of people back and forth, a constant flow of images, everything new, shiny, and cool.  Paranoid women and lost men, bored children misbehaving, a petri dish that has gone unattended.  We build prisons for ourselves and call them temples.