Thursday, December 27, 2012

it's all fun and games 'til you're picking brains up off the carpet


i was having a conversation with a friend from church a few weeks ago. they were telling me about a group of people, i can't exactly recall what church or organization they are connected with, who've taken it upon themselves an extraordinary ministry. i wish i could remember all the vitals of the conversation tonight. maybe, during the moment, the story seemed scary enough that i didn't want to hold onto all the gory details for the sake of my own peace of mind. anyway, if i remember half-correctly, the group has a contact within a local coroner's office or maybe just a well-placed ear to the ground. regardless, the job they have taken on is gruesome and grace personified all in one big ball of unconditional love. if the group hears of a suicide within their reach, they respond to the call and go to the affected person's home. there, they volunteer themselves to the family left behind to clean up the tragic scene after the police have done what they do. imagine the gift this must be. maybe it couldn't be fully comprehended or understood when the offer was made, but i think about a family who has lost a loved one whose life was so bloody hard or turned upside down that they chose death instead of life. the blunt trauma of the loss would be too much to take, in and of itself. "what could we have done?" "why wouldn't they let us help them?" "didn't they think about us?" "why, god, why???" the emotions, the guilt, the self-loathing would be too much to bear. add to that the physical mess left behind if the person committing suicide chose a gun as the weapon of choice to do the deed. carnage everywhere. literal bits of the shattered soul are all that is left behind, painting a canvas of terror for those forced to see it. cue this special group of people. a crew of angels on earth that have intentionally realized the impact of a suicide on a family. they understand the insult to injury cleaning up the remains of their lost love can be. and they take it on themselves to sanitize up the room. every bit. like it never happened. the emotional scars will be just enough, thank you very much. the physical ones they remove themselves.

amazing.

my guess is there are these types of groups all over our state, country, and world. that i wasn't aware of their existence only tells me that i am lucky to have never been forced to worry about it.

i have thought of this story and these types of groups a lot over the last two weeks.

i've thought about newtown, obviously, and "what it all means".

i've argued with friends and family about the impact of guns on our lives and our culture.

i've been saddened with the thoughts that, for many of those friends and family, they don't really want guns. they feel like they need them. to make them feel safe. to help them sleep at night.

what if someone broke in my home at night and wanted to hurt my family. not on my watch. not with my gun.

what if someone with a gun out in public was threatening the welfare of not only my family, but the innocent public? not on my watch. not with my gun.

that kind of paranoia makes me sad for them. it makes me sad for us as a country. that this is what it has come to. we are afraid of the hypothetical bogeyman. we realize the state of desperation that this "christian" nation of ours continues to perpetuate, and god love the desperate, but desperate is as desperate does. we fear what we don't feel like we can control, be that black scary people or scary disease or scary weather. and so we build our fortresses, both literal and figurative, against them all.

i don't want scary cancer again, so i take chemo, and while it beats the shit out of me, i must convince myself that the torment will keep the cancer away after my treatment. i get the fear, man. i do. the paranoia is strong with this one, too.

but what are we really afraid of? what rights are we so interested in preserving? who privileged us to only have to look out for number one? for those of us that go to church and are interested, like even one teeny bit, in the context of the four gospels, who the fuck have we let brainwash us into thinking the poor and the needy are the poor and the needy because they did it to themselves? what fairy tale world have we been raised in? what church has corrupted god's message of unconditional love? what part of "thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven" don't we understand?

buckle the fuck up, folks.

this shit is way past sad.

this is where we are. it's not a culture problem. it's a "me" problem. it's a "i am comfortable with my lot in life, no matter how fortunate my circumstances were compared to my brother on the other side of the tracks" problem. it's an "us" problem. it's a "we" problem. and we are acting like we don't give a shit.

two weeks ago tomorrow, 20 kids were gunned down in their school classroom and everyone went batshit crazy about guns, evil, and the like.

we've moved on now, though, haven't we?

have we?

my brother in law offered me some fresh perspective on the matter yesterday. he posted a link on facebook that has documented the 72 homicides in birmingham proper since the beginning of 2012. 72 as of december 15th. at least 57 of the 72 were gun deaths. 6 were from auto collisions. 2 were from blunt force trauma. 1 was from a stabbing.

i'll wait a second and let those numbers sink in. remember, we are talking homicides. people killing other people on purpose. not accidents. not drunk driving situations. in birmingham, in 2012, when people wanted to kill other people, at least 80 percent of the time, the killers were using guns.

cue the hypothetical bogeyman.

cue our paranoia.

cue us thinking that we need guns. to protect ourselves. to protect our families. to protect "us" from black people "them".

ever since i heard the story about the suicide clean-up ministry, there's a part of me that has wanted to find them and be a part of them. what if we all participated in one such job. if not after a suicide, maybe after a homicide. to go in, clean up the death. taste it. feel it. and then have to clean the american horror story out from underneath our fingernails.

jesus christ, people. like, literally, most of us choose to believe the words that came out of his mouth included...

"thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."

and so, what does that mean? does it mean running out to pee-wee's pawn to grab all the ar's we can before the "gubmint" comes to take our guns? does it mean keeping our foot on the necks of the needy and bullshit ourselves into believing they did this to themselves? does it mean that we are totally cool with letting disease rot inside the uninsured and kill them off because by the time they went to the er it was too late? is it merely turning the channel away from the local news when they lead with another shooting in low income housing?

folks, i don't think that's what it means, man. and if the america you believe in believes in these types of things, i'm even less of a patriot than i thought i was.

truthfully, though, i don't think this is what you believe in. not in your heart.

you're just paranoid. or scared. and i get it. i am, too.

we don't have to be this way. america shouldn't feel this way. so, stop it.

the world is full of shit. and guns won't save us.

only hearts full of grace, hearts like those that serve on those suicide clean up squads will lead to any real change. so, maybe we pay a little more in tax. maybe we can't buy weapons of war or mega clips. maybe someone without a job gets considered with the same amount of healthcare as you do. is that really so bad?

and if your answer to any of those is "yes", what does that say about you?

what does it say about us?

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

this isn't the day to talk about this
(part ten)


ignorance isn't bliss. it's ignorant.

i've already given a friend a hard time about stat-ripping since the newtown massacre went down. "this country has stricter gun laws than us and has more crime. more death."

yada, yada, yada. we need more guns, not less. arm the teachers. arm everyone. arm the world. death to us all! yada, yada, yada... the hunger games is real. we kill children on tv for our own entertainment.

rabble, rabble, rabble. we're much more civilized than that. that would never happen. our country would collectively change draw the line in the sand. right there. no children killing children on television. NEVER!!! 

no, i won't bother with too many statistics. i'll just share one and one prediction, both from demandaplan.org.

as of this morning, the site cites that 5155 people have been killed by guns in this country since the night of the aurora, colorado shootings on july 20. since mass gun death is already on your brain, think of that number in all caps.

FIVE THOUSAND, ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE people in LESS THAN FIVE MONTHS.

fucking ridiculous.

FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND predicted to die in the next four years.

fucking ridiculous.

guns don't kill people. people kill people. with guns.

fucking ridiculous.

we all have mass gun death on the brain, because, this time around, kids were involved. sweet, innocent children.

we've heard the reports now. sweet, innocent children doing nothing more than spending their day at school. maniac breaks in. shoots each child between two times and ELEVEN times.

we've had nightmares about what those bullets did to their little bodies, ripping them to pieces. we've hoped and prayed that they didn't know what hit them, because we can't stand the thought of a child suffering. we've already started removing the images and the thoughts from the front part of our brains, haven't we? we can't stand to keep thinking about it. we've got other things to do. we've got to go on with our lives.

god bless that small community of newtown, but thank god it wasn't trussville, right?

wrong.

because it could've been trussville. or chalkville. or huffman. or your child's school. or your grandchild's. it just wasn't on friday.

and for 5155 families in the last five months, it happened to them in their home, their place of employment, or somewhere else. some place, any place that they didn't expect to die from a bullet from a gun being held by a person.

fucking ridiculous.

just because we were lucky enough this time to not draw the short straw, does that mean it's okay to not change anything?

it's not.

i'm telling you, man. it's a bad way to live.

you keep telling yourself you're not going to have an ak-47 stuck in your forehead until you do.

you keep telling yourself you're not gonna get cancer until you do.

you keep telling yourself that our country's fascination with fucking guns is not going to come back and bite us. and then it does. over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over. and over...

you get my point.

5155 in less than five months.

stop this shit. stop telling me it's better this way. stop telling me more people with guns is the answer.

please, stop it.

if those bullets ripping through those children isn't enough to change your mind, your mind is likely not going to change. i want to say, "shame on you". that's harsh. i'll just think it.

the same way you think i'm foolish for thinking that eliminating guns from our country and culture is a pipe dream and dangerous in its own right.

you're right. it wasn't your gun or your negligence that destroyed those children's bodies and lives.

it was someone just like you. just like me. someone that never thought it would happen to them.

only it did. and, god rest her soul, she was shot in the face, too.

it's time to change. it's past time to change. it's over time to change.

please, let's change.

Monday, December 17, 2012

"this isn't the day to talk about this"
(part nine)


"I know karate. So, it's okay. I'll lead the way out."

For me, it will be this quote that sticks with me the longest I expect.

Only a child, a bright-eyed, innocent little boy full of piss and vinegar could (most likely, subconsciously)  block out the fact that the world around him was falling to pieces, stay calm, and move out of the chaos.

kids say the darndest things.


Saturday, December 15, 2012

this isn't the day to talk about this
(part eight)


anything you can stat-rip, i can stat-rip, bettttaaaa. i can stat-rip anything better than you. no, you can't. yes, i can. no, you can't. yes, i can. no, you can't. yes, i can. yes, i can. yes, i caaaaannn!

i was told that i had a 97% chance of my cancer never returning after it was removed in 2009. 97%. those are pretty good odds, right? statistics would say that i was in the clear. i wasn't. it came back.

i can tell you how many gun deaths this country has suffered just this year.

you can tell me about other countries with gun control laws considered stricter than ours and how those laws have led to more death and not less.

i can tell you about japan.

you can tell me about mexico.

to twenty sets of parents in newtown, statistics don't mean shit. they lost their sons and daughters yesterday because some maniac chose to gun them down in their classroom. statistics would tell them that this kind of thing had less of a chance of happening in their small town than my cancer had a chance of returning to my body. it happened.

and so, now what?

statistically speaking, newtown, specifically sandy hook elementary, is likely to be the safest place on earth from now 'til the end of time. these things hardly ever happen anywhere. they certainly never happen in the same place twice.

i feel better already.
this isn't the day to talk about this
(part seven)


"if not us, then who? if not now, then when? will there be a better day for it tomorrow or next year? will it be less dangerous then? will someone else's children have to risk their lives instead of us risking ours" - john lewis

how long is long enough to mourn and remember a tragedy you are not directly related to? who sets the arbitrary time line which defines what is appropriate now and what is appropriate later?

as i mentioned last night, there are those people who genuinely are making efforts to connect on some spiritual level with the families in newtown. this attention they are offering is undivided and unwavering. i say again, the world needs those people. for those people, if they need to wait and have this conversation later, god bless them, because they bless us all.

i choose to connect on a different level. i choose to hear and see and read about and think about and be horrified of the events in newtown. i keep those children in my mind as i type these words. i do not dishonor their being taken from their families. i take offense to it. as we all do.

yesterday was absolutely the day to continue (not begin or pause or stop) this conversation. that a highlighted and brutal event broadened our scope of horror towards gun violence in our country was inevitable. that it didn't happen again today only means we are lucky.

has anything changed yet?



this isn't the day to talk about this
(part six)

ed: thanks to sarah for giving this place a delightful dose of mom's perspective last night. 

amy, katie, and i were out to lunch celebrating their birthday yesterday. i had been at the store, disconnected from the world 'til then. at some point during the meal, i checked my phone.

sarah had linked to the first story i'd seen of the shooting.

her comment was simple and profound, "this is horrifying..."

for the rest of the meal, our attention was divided. we talked about going to see a movie but ended up back at my house, eyes glued to cnn, our mouths agape.

i thumbed through twitter, constantly refreshing for reaction and new information. it was a trainwreck. we couldn't look away.

for the rest of their lives, one of the most tragic days in the history of our country will be remembered on the same day as their birthday.

on some level, that makes me sad for them.


Friday, December 14, 2012


this isn't the day to talk about this
(part 'sarah takes the wheel')

the empathy i feel for today's events is smothering. i am truly horrified. my breaking point was hearing a reporter talk about watching parents walk up to the school and double over as they learned they were taking their precious love of a child home before walking away from the crime scene. and then there were the parents who walked up to the school only to learn they were leaving empty-handed. spirit-crushing horror...

in my worldview, there is nothing in the universe more terrible than children dying. not a thing. it's the most ungodly horror i can think of. this applies to any manner of dying, too, including starving, HIV, accidental drownings, car crashes, head injuries, cancer, abuse/neglect...

i have to admit that one of my thoughts today, in the midst of sorrow, was "maybe at least now no one can  argue about gun control when the equivalent of a kindergarten classroom and a half at paine was killed by someone with a gun." surely the conversation changes when children are victims. this could be our "in." a turning point. a tragic but historical moment in time when something happens.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

or not.

once again, i was idealistic and hopeful. you may not know this, but i'm kevin's yang. i'm a glass half-full kind of girl. and i'm wrong a lot of the time. so i was really disheartened at the gun control haters i've read from in the last several hours.

kevin will be the first to tell you that i am psycho-crazy worrying about our children. all. the. time. i am constantly imagining the things that could happen to them in all of the most bizarre of circumstances.

every morning i ponder the sweet smiles and waves and kisses blown and "i love you" signs that the big girls and i exchange through their school bus window. them being on a bus terrifies me. them being in a car with anyone other than me terrifies me. them being in a car with me terrifies me. i trust nothing and no one when it comes to our children. that includes kevin. he knows this. i am never fully comfortable until they are in my reach and sight. is it because i think the world is out to get them? no, not really. but i can not bear the thought of losing them, and i am chronically worried that this may happen in a preventable circumstance. i did not say any of this was healthy. i'm just being honest.

guns have always scared me. people with guns have always scared me. not because i've worried someone was going to put one in my face (like happened to kevin twice in 2 months just a few years ago). we all saw that 90210 episode where scott shot himself when playing with a gun. i went to the funeral of a sweet teenage boy who lived in our townhomes who may or may not have intentionally/accidentally shot himself (i've always thought the former, having observed how mean the boys on the bus were to him and walking home with him in the afternoons). i love many people who i know own guns. i've shot one myself on my grandfather's farm (i was nauseated much of the time, replaying the aforementioned scene in my head over and over). i know that there a lot of people out there who do act responsibly with guns and can fully support the arguments that are made for "a right to bear arms." i do, in fact, get this.

i acknowledge the "people kill people" argument. this is true. they do. it is as good as the "god made adam and eve, not adam and steve" argument in my book, because without guns we most certainly would not have the news story we had today. there is no other comparison. yes, there are mass casualties through other means, and there are individual casualties through other means, but nothing compares to the immediate and near certain damage inflicted by a bullet. anything that can be done in a split second with no going back can not be a good thing.

it may be shocking, but i also empathize with today's shooter. i have tried imagining what he must have been feeling today and for months ahead of time. what brought him to this day where this seemed like the thing to do? how horrible of a place he must have been in to feel that this was what he had to do. unimaginable pain was surely in him. call it evil or whatever, but people who kill people are still people. and i wish for him, in addition to all the victims, that he did not have access to a gun. i could write for years on the role that mental health might have played in this event, but removing barriers to treatment and solving mental health issues in our country is considerably more of a task than adopting a "no guns here" policy. at least there are models for successful gun control in other nations.

i agree with kevin that something needs to happen. it needed to happen before 12/14/2012, though, for those sweet little babies who were caroline's age and grade and probably talking about watching polar express in their pj's next week before their holiday break. some of whom probably drove their parents crazy this morning and got yelled at or time out before they left for school because being in kindergarten has only strengthened their perceived powers of persuasion and stubbornness. their families will never know peace again.

the time is now. i appreciate that leaders are not discussing it today, but it is most certainly time. it is time for something to change. time for us to question what has been and why and how we can truly keep our world safe for those we love. we can't keep our sweet babies in a bubble or in the basement or anywhere totally safe. but we can definitely do our best to remove the dangers to them along the way.
this isn't the day to talk about this
(part four)


one of the phone calls i made to sarah today found her crying on the other end.

"you're crying?", i asked.

i knew why she was crying. it's because a classroom full of children kissed their mommies and daddies earlier this morning, smiled on their way out the door, and then had their lives taken from them by a crazy person.

the idea of those scared children, being shot and killed in what should have been the safe haven of their classroom will be a haunting nightmare to me, sarah, and every parent with a beating heart tonight. and then likely the next night. and the next. and the next. and the next. and for as long as it takes to shake the idea that this could've been our children. who knows how long that will take. longer than your typical news cycle.

here's why this conversation, this gun conversation, this something needs to happen now with a quickness needs to happen today.

because there is nothing in place that would prevent this from happening tomorrow. in another town. to another group of innocent children or adults.

nothing.

wrapping my head around that idea makes me want to shit myself.

what if we wait 'til tomorrow when we could've done something different. something better for the greater good. but we dragged our feet due to some arbitrarily set time of mourning. what then?

more death is okay?

that's pretty a fucked idea.
this isn't the day to talk about this
(part three)


there seems to be three areas of pushback at folks like me that don't agree with the idea that gun control should be one of the primary thoughts this evening.

"it's too soon. give it some time to breathe. today should be a day of mourning."

"guns don't kill people. people kill people. what? do you want to ban cars, too, since drunk driving kills many, many more people than guns?"

"jesus, come back. it's time."

to the first sentiment, i respect it. there are people of this earth that are genuinely sharing their worry and concern and prayer with those directly affected by the gunmen today. the world needs those people. i need those people. i am thankful those people exist. sometimes, i wish i was one of those people.

moving on....

to the second sentiment. if you can logically correlate an act of intentional gun violence with the unintended consequences of a drunk driver, you should own neither a gun or a car. and you scare me. people with guns kill people. people with knives kill fewer people. people with a blunt objects kill fewer people. people who drink and drive are a plague, but, again, their intent is not to kill another. their bad decision may, in fact, have dreadful consequences, but it is not the same. today gave us a coincidental comparison of two madmen. one in connecticut with a gun. one in beijing with a knife. the numbers were eerily similar. the one with knife sent children home or to the hospital injured, scarred physically and emotionally, and possibly traumatized for a long, long time. the one with the guns sent children home dead. dead, dead. children, man.

to the third. come on, man?! evil isn't more prevalent now than ever before. we just get to hear about it all. jesus is back, y'all. his idea and his ideals allegedly live within us all. wishing him to come back is a cop out. he's here. and he's likely very sad right along with the rest of us. so, what are we going to do about it?
this isn't the day to talk about this
(part two)


i always look forward to fajita friday. for the food. for the company. for the conversation. on days like today,  it's a lot of fun and very fulfilling to sound back and forth with my brother-in-law, joseph.

some of what follows may have been talked about around the table tonight, and some may have just brewed over the course of processing the day's events and the reaction to the event.

it is my opinion that there is no better day to talk about the shooting or shootings that have happened and will happen than the day of the shootings. what better time to focus on the issue that is close to your heart than when it has your undivided attention? the over-saturation of our country, world, etc. with guns is something that i think about almost daily. but there are days that those thoughts are clouded or divided by other thoughts like my falcons or bobby petrino or work or family or how terrible cancer is or how atrocious chemo can be or american horror story or the walking dead or dark knight rises or you get my point.

today, from lunchtime on, i thought about the tragedy in newtown. i absorbed every bit of that i could. i cried at the horrifying thought that it could have been my caroline's kindergarten classroom. i prayed selfish prayers of thanksgiving that it wasn't. i wished good thoughts towards the families of the victims. i didn't think of anything else. well, barely anything else. it was a couple of my best friends' birthdays. they got some of my attention.

but the thought of that fucker having four guns and the thought that our country refuses to take a more intentional stance about the easy access to those weapons made me so, so fucking mad i couldn't stand it.

i still can't.
this isn't the day to talk about this
(part one)


this is probably going to fail miserably, but too many of my thoughts about today and the massacre in connecticut are longer than 140 characters, and people are too easily annoyed on facebook if they aren't interested in an opinion that differs from their own, so i am going to try a little micro-blogging and see if it inspires something more long-formish later down the road.


Thursday, December 13, 2012


“do you have a relationship with jesus christ?”

 merry chemo christmas, all. humbug is one way to describe how i feel this morning. starting a cycle is never easy. 28 days feels like a long time to not feel good, and, truthfully, it is. this will be a different kind of christmas, in that it’ll be my first year that I’ve celebrated the holiday at the same time i’m likely to feel all different kinds of bad on the special morning. i’ll be exactly two weeks in, and the medicine will have reached its full levels by then. will it be my feet, or the intense heartburn that started last cycle or the normal fatigue and nausea and diarrhea and normal “how do you feel?” “shit-tastic.” stuff, or will it be a glorious combination of them all? we shall see.

physically, today i still feel well. i only took my first pill last night. it’s going to take a few more days for things to ramp up and get weird. i should be able to taste my fajita friday dinner tomorrow as god intended. that will be nice. i should be able to get one or two more really good workouts in, which will hopefully help me feel a little better on those days that i can’t. limbo is doing their holiday get-together on saturday. i should be able to appropriately enjoy catchphrase and making a fool out of myself when that bastard timer goes off in my hands. i can’t wait to see everyone and enjoy the comfort and company of people that I care a lot about. i'll be able to get around at the huge falcons game sunday. i hope they don't lose.  

and then, the next week will happen, and things will start to change. some predictability, if nothing else, comes with having completed five cycles of chemotherapy. i no longer hold out hope that i won’t feel bad. i know i’m gonna. at this point, it’s all about managing the side effects, anticipating them in a way that it doesn’t come as a massive surprise when it becomes a real exercise in pain tolerance to go and sit down in the bathroom. when i have to shift the weight around on the bottoms of my feet to avoid the most sensitive of hot spots. when i will not be able to taste my food. when i’ll regret eating that food because there’s a good chance i’m going to feel a pretty intense burning in my chest for a couple of hours afterwards. when the fatigue hits at 1 o’clock in the afternoon. the world will see me as fine. “you look great, kevin!” so, i’ll look like a pussy when it’s all i can do to move out of the office. when my gums bleed at the slightest touch of the toothbrush and become so sensitive that cavities don’t sound so bad. when shifting the weight around on the bottoms of my feet doesn’t help anymore. when it all hits me all at once. when i realize that i couldn’t be being more of an asshole at home because i can’t get up and outside my own self-loathing. chemo, man. it’s a helluva drug.

merry christmas?

people are funny.

a lady recently asked my cashier if she had a relationship with jesus. how are you supposed to respond to that, really? such a mindless and rote way of evangelizing. how many times has she asked someone that question? how many times has she received an honest response? probably very few, but, deep down, i wonder if she felt better about her effort, her work for the greater good, her reason for the season. it’s all speculation. i wish she would’ve asked me. this morning, it would have turned into something more interesting. something more than she expected. something different altogether. of course, i wouldn’t have been mean. i just would have been honest. people hate honesty. so do i.

i’ve had cancer. and then it came back.

 “do you have a relationship with jesus?”

 Who knows, ma’am. i have no idea what the reason for the season is anymore. what would you say if i told you “no.”? would you invite me to your church? would you hand me a tract? what’s your role in this, footsoldier or savior?

 the reason for my season this year will be my children. my family. my friends. my standing up to my cancer and my fighting the good fight for that hypothetical one person that may see my battle and buckle up themselves.

 i love my god. don’t get me wrong, please. i think my creator loves me.

 i hope it’s okay. it’s not, necessarily, that i want to take christ out of my christmas. but, just this once, i think he’s going to end up on the backburner. he’ll be there with me still, right? that’s how it works?

 who knows how it works?

disciplined in my journey, i’ll travel on. there is something to be gained from the valleys just as there are the hills.  

“you look great, Kevin!”

yeah? cool. thanks.

“do you have a relationship with jesus?”

eh. can i get back to you?

“do you have a relationship with jesus?”

not today.
but i'm listening.