BEATNIK BEAT. WRITING SUFFERS. BUCKET LISTS TO PORT.

I'm staggering today, the result of the hormone injection and also Flomax [increases urine flow] that relaxes the smooth muscle walls of my vessels and arteries. Sometimes when I stand too fast or rush up a stairway, I get a stunned feeling and my temples feel pressure. First time I thought I was having a stroke. Now I stand still until the feeling passes.

The writing is not going all that well. I have many periods of fatigue, a side affect of radiation treatments when I feel completely uninterested in writing. All I want to do is sit and watch TV. Even reading seems too much effort. Still I get some writing done and exercise at the Firstenberg Community Center, and believe it or not, the effort seems to overcome fatigue for a time, but first I've got to overcome the fatigue and make myself get going. I've been craving McDonald's "Egg McMuffins" for lunch, and my vegan diet suffers, but I crave the feel of solid foods in my mouth. Chewy stuff. Something to get my teeth into. I still have banana, spinach, strawberry, apple with grape juice and soy milk smoothies for breakfast.  

At 3:15 I go into PeaceHealth for my 5th low dose radiation treatment. Not long after that, Mertie comes home from work, and we begin another weekend together. Long live weekends with my wife.

ANGIE'S CHOICE COMPLETED. ARKANSAS CHARLEY BEGINS???

Angie's Choice final rewrite done. Oh happy day! Gonna have my ever-reading wife peruse Chapter One to approve my additions to the dinner conversation. If I can catch her lively interest I know I'm good to go. Next decision? Got three novels to rewrite, specifically, Delinquent Lives, perhaps the more serious novel, or the one about the failed author turned porno writer who discovers that his fantasies direct his choices of women in real life, or I could continue the new novel I began yesterday which really excites me. Humn? Follow the excitement or do the serious novel? The new novel begins as per below:

Oh happy day!

"Arkansas Charley dragged smoke from a Pall Mall deeply into his lungs and peered down at the telltale wisp of smoke that leaked between the second and third buttons of his wrinkled Paisley shirt. Shaking his head morosely, he plucked two wrinkled tidbits of flesh from his left wrist where the metal watch band had gouged under the skin. Carefully, he balanced the tiny fragments of himself on the shaky tip of his middle finger and held them to the sunlight that streamed remorselessly through McDonald’s front window. To someone watching, Charley appeared to be giving a finger to the sun.

"The fleshy remains of himself on his finger tip were another sign of the inevitable decline all flesh was heir to. Down into the bone of himself, Charley knew and accepted that in a decade or so, give or take a couple of years, he would be nothing but a hank of hair and a piece of bone. Like all of animalkind, except for those beasts slaughtered young and rendered up for the tables of the globe, he would grow steadily worse until his decaying body could no longer support the thoughts and feelings, the actions that all humans called life. For now, he sighed to himself, he would have to give up wearing watches."