The Load

I've been wearing a heavy hat that has weighed me down for awhile now.  You don't know me, but I will confess to you now that I am a terrible coward.  I am also a man with an immense ability for imaginative thinking.  This last part is surely largely due to my being an only child.  I grew up quiet in rural Ohio and then in my own home state.  As an only child, you must entertain yourself much of the time.  You have to make up things to do without playmates.  Often, I would take things I'd seen and make up games.  Take Tarzan and King Kong, for instance.  The movies.  Daring and adventure.  I'd play Tarzan on a rope tied to the branch of a tree.  I'd imagine I was on Kong Island.  How'd that work out?  As an adult, I slept in the jungles of the Amazon alone with natives in their jungle camp.  WTF?  I watched Sea Hunt and floated around in the clear coastal waters off the beaches of south Florida where seahorses and fish with tattered brown skin that mimicked the Sargassum weed thrilled me.  The result?  Later, I would get lost in underwater caves at 150 feet, and flub decompression charts on deeper dives where I almost made a mistake that could have paralyzed me.  Again, double WTF?  

There are a million more examples.  Later I would realize that I enjoyed the pretending most.  

So. . . when a spot popped up on my arm a couple weeks ago that was small and red and crusty, my mind went into overdrive.  It itched and burned at times.  It was on the skin above my elbow, the one I can't straighten fully after busting it up in a kick boxing gym, the one that has bad arthritis in it, the one that was hurting from straining it too much in the gym.  The pain was shooting, and so I imagined for certain that the spot was melanoma and it had metastasized and spread into the bone.  

Stop it.  I'm confessing here.  

I called the dermatologist's office, but I couldn't get in for five days.  I was sure this was a fatal delay.  The spot seemed to be growing, the bones hurting now down my forearm and into my hand.  I was sick with it.  What if I had to go to the hospital?  What would happen to my mother?  What if I had days to live?  I had a student once who died within days of being admitted to the hospital with melanoma.  Only a couple. He was a big, blonde, handsome boy, a real charmer.  When the other students learned of this, they were devastated.  There was no time for planning.  I've never planned anything.  What would happen to my house, my money, my stuff?  There were things I thought of destroying before I died.  Did I want to leave all those journals, the pictures. . . the evidence of what had been my life without me there to defend it?  

I was having trouble moving from room to room the dread was so deep.  I was using the last of my Xanax to cope.  

Yes, yes. . . I am telling this for your amusement.  

I even bought some Willie's Remedy.  I asked A.I. if it was different than other THC drinks that I don't like because they make my heart race and me paranoid.  A.I. told me Willie's wouldn't do that because they use more cannabinoids so you don't get the THC dump.  

Uh, just an aside--it is true.  Willie's is rather gentle, but know that it sneaks up on you.  It begins in about fifteen minutes, but it keeps growing for about an hour.  Just one shot over ice.  It didn't make me paranoid, only stupid.  It's ok for sleeping.  

Yesterday, I had my appointment with the doc.  

"How are you?"

"We'll see."

I showed him the spot.  

"You're lucky," he said.  "It is a pre-cancer.  I'm just going to freeze it off."

He sprayed it with liquid nitrogen.  

"Leave it alone.  You can put some petroleum jelly on it if you like.  Don't scratch it.  It will heal in about ten days."

I stripped and he checked the rest of me.  No other problems.  Just old skin. 

The weight was lifted and I was fairly filled with helium as I floated across the parking lot to my car.  I called my mother to tell her.  She had been worried. . . about her.  She had called my cousin on the coast to tell her so that she would come take care of her if I went to the hospital.  

I was happy for mom.  

I drove back to my house, sat in the car for a minute, then decided to celebrate.  I went to the Cafe for a strawberry French soda.  

When I got back to my mother's later in the day, she said, "Prayer works."

"Not always," I said.  "When I was a boy, we all prayed the school would burn down, but it was fireproof."

The entire incident, the fear, then the despair, the wishing and hoping and, yes, the praying, reminded me of the old joke about the desperate man betting his last dollars on a horse.  The horse is doing well around the first turn, and is running second down the far stretch.  "Oh, God, please, please, please let him win," the man pleads.  As they come around the last turn, the man's horse begins to take the lead.  "Oh, God, oh God. . . please, please, please. . . ."  Coming down the home stretch, the horse takes a commanding lead and the man's mood begins to lighten, and without thinking he shouts, "O.K., God,  I'll take it from here."  

Yea.  I felt like indulging in some guilty pleasures.  

"You look a lot happier," my mother said as I made a cocktail.  

But just the one.  After dinner, I would have a Willie's.  

And so. . . the photo.  This girl was experiencing joy close to rapture.  She had just gotten a Haagen Das ice cream and was skipping and grinning with childhood pleasure.  She made me laugh.  That is how I felt leaving the doctor's office, so the picture seemed apropos today.  

After dinner and after cleaning up, I sat down to keep my mother company for the evening.  We watch t.v.  After the news, I usually watch some crazy shit on YouTube for awhile before I put on a program we can share.  For the past few days, we've been watching "East of Eden" on Netflix.  I wouldn't give it a high recommendation, but it was better than many things on t.v.  It is Steinbeck's take of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel, and the postlapsarian world set in early 20th century Salinas.  

But before that, I watch brief things about photography or sailing or a lot of strange Japanese food things. I have become a Japanophile.  Here is what I watched last night.  I've watched several of these.  They are strangely calming and seductive to me, a sort of quiet existential moral ceremony to succor the soul in a spiritually chaotic world. 

Try it.  You might like it, too.