Cancer Humbled Me

Cancer humbled me, first with its awful, white, splitting tits.  It spread them over my face and made me motorboat sounds of acceptance between them.  I went “Pppppppppppprrrrrrrrrrrrr I’m a make it alright.  Livestrong.  Ppppprrrrrr.”  Cancer humbled me that way.  I was on some kind of metaphorical knee before all kinds of things.  There are so many kinds of things one can find one’s knee sore before.  For example:  Cancer humbled me before a tree, before a lee, before a bee, before Crocodile Dundee, before Chablis, before a golf tee, before Bruce Lee, before Germany, before another’s knees, before sickened patrons of Hubee D’s, before disillusioned patrons of Weaver D’s, before the most awesome sets of titties.  But most of all cancer humbled me before me. 

Cancer humbled me into taking a time management class.  Every day is so precious, so I decided I shouldn’t waste it.  Lists were necessary.  Cancer made lists necessary-this humbled yet totally empowered me.  30 mins a day to personal hygiene, at least, and at most 1 hour (including showers, shitting, pissing, pruning, and preening).  4 hours to productive work.  2 hours to cardiovascular and toning exercise.  8 hours to sleep. 1 hour to meditate on how your to do lists have failed or succeeded in their execution.  1 hour to making more lists that are more successful.  1 hour for time management class.  1 hour for reviewing one’s to do list after class.  That left about 5 and a half hours per day in which I could call my own.  In that time, I could read the classics, contemplate great truths like dying, the value of friendship, man’s brutality to man, etc, or I could

Cancer humbled me until I couldn’t realize what was important anymore.  I was satisfied with thin gruel, water, the occasional chewy sliced ear of dried fruit from Trader Joe’s.

I wish everything would go ahead and die.  I don’t necessarily want to have to kill it myself.  Cancer humbled me into laziness.  Like the tree, cancer humbled me into the desire not to be me, to be anything but me, to be a tree, without mind, without the need to find another mind not a blank white orange rind, without the need to need to feed  or breed or have a creed, but to be ok with being treed.  Cancer humbled me, like a pack of coon dogs.  I sit outside my parents house, high up in a tree.  I’ve painted my hands black and I handle shiny dinnermint wrappers and broken mirrors, daydreaming about nothing, about glitter, about a nothing so vast and glittery I may as well be an ancient astronomer enamored with the oblivion of gazing at night-skies.  I wish everything would go ahead and die, or at least we decide on everything being deep-fried.  Cancer humbled me into liking everything deep-fried, even broccoli, nature’s little trees, even baby carrots, nature’s parrots’ knees.

Cancer humbled me into leaving that ignorant, lying piece of shit.  I got so cancer-humbled I mumbled, “I don’t like that little shit not one little bit.”  But I fumbled it, and God heard, “I done licked that riddle-shit like a riddle-tit.”  Cancer humbled God, so he didn’t give a fucking sod, and only acknowledged what I said with a sleepy nod of his humbled head.

Cancer humbled me into shutting myself in a room and reading yr novel with a shit-ton of humbled gloom. Doom gloom in my room.  I couldn’t find a broom so I swept what I wept into yr buttocks’ cleft and declared my doomgloomroom upkept & yr buttocks unkempt.

Language is so awful that my paw-full of my craw-full is plain unlawful.  I don’t give a fuck about Tuck or his rucksack of ruckus.  He can kiss my tuckus or buck us with a fuck-crack I’ll suck back and buck back until his luck backs downtown and his fuckcrack looks like a frown on which I wouldn’t go down. Fuck Tuckus!  Why won’t Tuckus fuck us? 

Cancer humbled me.  I shrink into my own head.  Around crowd thoughts of being dead.  What shall I say before dying that shall be memorable?  Shall I die lying? And not just lying down.  I mean being untruthful in a way which is rueful.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a science experiment and a scene in a splatter movie. To conduct some ghoulish tests on spiders, scientists constructed forests of "frankensquitos" — made from parts hacked off their mosquito compatriots.

What do you do with a 65-foot-long coffin? Undertakers in Truskavets, Ukraine, erected what they claim to be the world's largest coffin, and now run a side business you wouldn't normally associate with funeral homes: a death-themed restaurant.

And yes — death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he can't get it to restart. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else. In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School put forth an article stating that there is a second kind of death: brain death. Even though your heart is still pumping, and you're still able to breath on a ventilator, if your brain stem is down, you're dead. This theory was made law in all 50 states in 1981, so now in the U.S. we have two kinds of death: real death (cardiopulmonary death) and what some doctors call "pretty dead," or brain death. A cell biologist, on the other hand, may have a standard more rigorous than cardiologists or neurologists. They might want to see all one's cells dead, which we call putrefaction.