I'M DYING AS A MATTER OF FACT

Today is 122221.  Now, what grammatical term describes that numerical oddity? 

Anyway, it's been a long long time since my last blog entry. I think I know why. I'm dying of prostate cancer. My cancer is not the slow kind that causes doctors to say, "You'll probably die of something else." It's more aggressive and normal doses of hormones don't seem to stop it, so I'm recently taking massive doses of hormones. Those and other drugs I'm taking create fatigue. My peppiness is petering out.

Of course, I could die of something else with all the hormones I'm taking, but my heart and lungs are fine. I'd probably live into my 90s (I'm 84) except for the prostate cancer. My body's first reaction (huge drop in PSA) to the massive hormone doses caused the doctor to say, "Maybe 3 more years?" Good news, I suppose. 

Anyway, with that morbid info out of sight in my synaptic self, influencing all my thoughts, moods and decisions, I imagine my motivation to write may be waning. However, for a couple of weeks recently, I went on a submission kick and sent off a couple-a-dozen short stories that I wrote in the years before and after I turned 80. Results pending.  

As to poetry, another poem was published online today in Brief Wilderness. Interesting tale follows. The poetry editor thought the poem might be hard to understand, and I wrote a para to explain how easy it is to understand. They published my unpolished explanation along with the poem. Had I known that? Ah! Ahem, well?

This past year has been the most successful in all my years of submitting. To those few who still hang around to read these, thanks for your patience. Right now, in Starbucks, I'm pretty fatigued. Time to go home, sit in my recliner and doze off, watching TV.

GAMBLING, GAMBLING. LIFE'S ONE OF THEM.

Gambled a bit this morning at the Ilani Casino north of Vancouver. Lost but not much. Still ahead since winning 100 bucks in October was it? I only take $5 when I go.

Find photographer here

Prostate cancer news not so good. My plan is to make it to 88 or 90. However the PSA is increasing rapidly. Have telephone consult with my urologist next week. He's also more cautious in his promises. More later.

On the writing front, I'm hugely encouraged. Last three submissions of most recent short stories to the very best paying markets have garnered three rejections but all three included requests for more submissions. Same thing happened with four poems from my prostate cancer ms. Strong encouragement and invite to submit again. I know the work is good, but they also compete with the very best writers who go for publication in top markets. I might never crack those markets, but I'm in the mix now I believe. 

Three plans currently. Rework the cancer ms, put together a collection of short stories with the new ones plus a few older ones that have gathered good responses. Last, put together a collection of poetry that spans the years I've been writing poetry. The very best, the published stuff, filled in with unpublished I like. Submit these to prestigious contests.

NO FEAR LIKE SPIDER FEAR... OR OF A CLOWN

Today, my task is to complete a table of contents for a 76 poem ms of 8 line poetry. I'm entering it in a contest with deadline of June 30th. I guess I'll call it Wrestling Hanshan as is the longer ms entitled that I've selected the poems from.

I've been kind of down these past few days. This morning I went in to get a blood draw to test my PSA level. I was scheduled to go in June 1, but I held back. It's been six months since last test and I fear, for no good reason at all, the PSA level is on its way up. I'll soon know. If so, the cancer would be back. Last two days have felt very tentative and melancholy. I made the mistake of watching a video about Roger Ebert last night—Life Itself. He died of cancer. The man had no lower jaw, could not eat or drink the final years of his life. It was not uplifting to watch.

Yesterday, I rode the Max into Portland just to change pace. Read Milosz's poetry and sat around at sidewalk tables, watching people. Tried to write some poetry but haven't looked at it today to see if anything still clicks. The rewrite of the novel Ghoul World draws near, I think. The impulse to write poems seems to have eased.

BEATNIK BOOMER FEELS HAPPILY BLAH

Yesterday my wife and I visited my radiation treatment doctor, and he declared, "Your body's free of cancer." My wife's ecstatic, but I continue in my present calm state of one day at a time. Now, all I've got to do is concentrate on my bucket list item, but, wouldn't you know? After several days not writing that included Thanksgiving's pleasant visit of my daughter, her husband and my youngest son to eat ham and everything else vegan and to play board games, I've lost the impulse to continue writing. Even the happy PSA reading hasn't brought a poem, and the poetry contained in Up Your Ass inspired by my prostate cancer seems dull and silly. I see no opening ahead, no light of inspiration streaming in through the tunnel walls I'm walking in. I'm 79 years old and, interestingly, a hand-written rejection note from Fiddlehead was penned on my October 20th birthday, a birthday gift I just received in yesterday's mail. Will this period of writer's block pass? Who knows. I'm getting old, but the bucket's over a distant hill now, and I've a far piece to walk ahead.

WAHOO!!!! WAIT A MINUTE.

The number of days remaining to me for the pursuit of my lone bucket list item, i.e. to get someone other than myself to publish one of my novels, has increased hopefully. My first PSA [prostate-specific antigen] test measured at 0.02 at the three month mark following the radiation treatments. The test measures the protein produced by both cancerous and noncancerous tissue in the prostate. As the prostate grows so does the protein content in the blood. Five point zero [5.0] is the high limit for safety. I'd be ecstatic save for the outcome of the presidential election, my natural tendency to imagine the worse and the fact a small amount of blood is oozing from the head of my penis today. I wonder what that means? It's got to be bladder or kidney cancer. Right? After all I was told secondary cancers sometimes result from radiation treatment of the prostate. 

I'm reading a poetry chapbook Duwamish Head by Richard Hugo put out by Copper Canyon Press in 1976. That's the year I got sober in Cheney Washington and, sober, attended  a party celebrating the end of a two week writer's workshop at Eastern Washington University to which Richard Hugo and James Welch unexpectedly arrived dead drunk after a long dark spur of the moment drive from Missoula Montana. Welch's Winter in the Blood had not long ago come out in 1974 and Hugo was at the top of his game. Just the sort of drunken shindig writers have been famous for since the days of Homer and Dionysus, and there I was a sober observer of the doings of what to me were the immortals who were driven to drink by celebrity and the suffering that informed their writing. Ah yes, to suffer is to write. Ahem.

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.

HAVE BEATNIKED MY WAY TO COMPLETION & NO PROSTATE CANCER!

Found image here....

Today is all happiness and joy. Two great things happened today. Just now, I finished the last rewrite of the novel, Ghoul World. Last night, anticipating the completion, I had already dispatched inquiries with ten page samples to three agents. One of them came back immediately. A form letter that the agent is too busy to look at inquiries at this time.

Today, an hour before I completed the rewrite, I departed the doctor's office with the knowledge that my enlarged prostate is probably not cancerous at this time. The PSA test revealed a smaller number than last time. Though still above normal range, my PSA declined from 6.1 back down to 5.5. It appears my numbers, when graphed, create a sawtooth, up and down, with a small increasing average. Plus my doctor put a blessed digit up my behind and proclaimed he could find no nodules or bumps on my prostate. Somehow, that digi-check and proclamation is more reassuring than bare numbers. 

BEATNICK WRITES PROSTATE CANCER INTO HIS AUTOBIO

When my father turned 77, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I recall the time we stood side by side at a public urinal in Dayton, Ohio when he said, mournfully, "I guess mine is the aggressive kind." He died a few months after he turned 80. The cancer had spread into his hips, spine and into his brain. From that time, I've been waiting for my own aggressive prostate cancer to appear. 

Since arriving in Vancouver, WA. 7 or 10 years ago, I've been expressing that worry to my new physician, and we've been testing my PSA. I've watched it climb above four [0 - 4 is normal] and into the fives. A growing prostate is common in elderly men as almost everyone knows, but not always cancerous, then, a little over a year ago, after my wife switched me to a vegan [according to her, cancer fighting] diet, my PSA declined to 4.7, then 4.3, but two weeks ago my PSA made a 2.8 point leap to 6.1. The leap was enough to cause my doctor to set up an appointment for 3 months from now to check my PSA again. I'm 77 as this situation begins to unfold. Already, in my vivid imagination, I'll be dead sometime after I turn 80, and I'm slightly pissed my doctor didn't give me a rectal exam on the spot to see if cancer nodes might already be malforming my prostate. I believe I'll have many things to say about all the odd ways my life feels to me with this intensified worry plaguing me—death portrayed in emotional movies I see with my wife, incidents recalled from my past, sports games that ought to seem trivial now, but I still get worked up over, my suicide attempt when I was 31—or was it 32—everything that enters my head is suddenly coated with a patina of unsettling emotion. This sudden leap in PSA also slightly alters the question I began writing this blog with: Can I get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I die [with the new stipulation, of course] die of prostate cancer? Just saying it aloud scares hell out of me, and that's why I'm saying it. 

The photo is of me and my dad during WWII when I felt like an orphan, living with my grandparents, and he was working in Bridgeport, Connecticut, making bombs long before either of us had the slightest worry about prostate cancer, the number two cause of death in the male half of the population.