BOOMING BEATNIK'S MIND COMES AND GOES

Twelve more days of radiation treatments under this machine to go. Dr. Siddiqui tells me we'll wait three more months [time for the prostate to normalize] to take a PSA test and find out where we stand, i.e. did we get it in time before the cancer spread elsewhere in my body? A PSA of zero would be great, a 2 is not so bad. 

I wrote a new cancer poem yesterday, "Tabled Memories", and I've had three good days of work on the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer. From time to time the fatigue caused by the radiation treatments make my mind feel like a pool full of slugs. Everything I write during those times seems awful, then a light comes on, the slugs slip away, and I know I write as well as many others who have been published. This morning I'm awfully tired again and uninspired, but I want to finish this last rewrite of The Porn Writer so I can get queries about it into circulation once more among the agents. Of course, it's been some time since I sent any of my novels out on query status. I'm starting to feel guilty again when I walk into the office where file cards are strewn about on a card table next to the outdated 2013 Writers' Markets book. 

Lastly I had a moment of self awareness yesterday while lying on that narrow table above, waiting for my irradiation to begin. The kind of moment when you see beneath the obvious and get a glimpse of some synaptic setting that underpins your personality at a fundamental level. The techs had stopped the process because one of the computers fell asleep and had to be reawakened. They requested, as they always do, that I lie very still. As I lay there clutching the ring they give us to hold so that our elbows don't fall off the table edge and ruin the process, I caught myself feeling quite proud to be lying so still and proper for them, the obedient little boy part of me. Smug it was and proud as proud can be. I didn't necessarily like what I saw, but our deepest selves, our un-mirrored selves, are just the sort of things that trip us up. I was watching a documentary tonight about Richard Nixon. I just realized he was like me too in his deepest self.