Expecting Rain

7/17/07

Late afternoon. Took a look at Macklin Smith’s book of poetry, Transplant, as a way of finding a compelling epigraph. Cool stuff, but its too early in the game for chemical descriptions. I highlighted some lines for later.

I play in a band. Last night at practice I was lamenting the possibility of my libido taking a sabbatical. The drummer said, “Don’t worry, your sex drive will come back.” I said, “I know, but I hate to see it go. I’m going to miss it.” Then I said, “Seriously, having cancer has gotten me to pay closer attention to who I am and what I do. Take for instance my gambling. I was at the casino the other night and the cards took on a new meaning. I could look through them! Call it magical thinking. Maybe it’s my new eyes, perhaps a heightened sensibility to the Ace as the thing in itself! A sense of the Kingness of the facecard rather than the particular card dealt. My band mates looked at me with a sense of awe, or better, curiosity, the way a quizzical crowd looks at a monkey masturbating at the Zoo. Is he nuts? We were rehearsing Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” for the upcoming Dylanfest at The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor. The lyrics to that one always leave me wondering why he doesn’t just come out and tell us how he really feels.

It rained all day. (The curse of the blinking cursor) Now it’s doing it again, and again. O.K, I’ll write something. The modern tendency to assign psychological reasons for why one gets cancer is a worthy topic. I must have done something wrong. Rather than God’s punishing me for my dissolution and debauchery (the Christian view), it must be an attitudinal flaw, a symptom of existential isolation and loneliness (the secular view). I can’t help but think the new age psychological mumbo jumbo is simply a secular substitute for a supernatural mindset hard wired in the human psyche; disease as having a connection with intention. A condition that assumes words like blame, fault, and guilt has something to do with cancer. As Sontag puts it, “Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control.” In truth, as she goes on to say,” no oncologist convinced of the efficacy of polychemotherapy and immunotherapy in treating patients has contributed to the fictions about a specific cancer personality.” Tommorow.