The 18-week marinade

Just after acupuncture today,
I barely recognize myself...
Chuck Connors in The Rifleman? 

On Friday morning when I asked David if it was time to start the chemo, he replied that I needed to marinate a little more first. And the marination has continued. Have felt so very drugged...and now coming down, way down. Today I am far inside myself, dreamy. I am seeing people through a telescope.  

I was reflecting about how my Buddhist practice has changed. Now it seems to be all about noticing and reflecting on my mental states, talking with people, and writing. I used to do more than that. I used to sit every day, and I used to map out the future. There was always, there always seemed to be, somewhere, a future, or at least an imagined future perfuming the great matter of life and death... 

BBQ anyone?

But then any degree of certainty and the future disappeared. And I thought for a time that it was possible to be neutral about that, to only not know. I see now that I was still filling in blanks, to some degree - mostly with death.

Now I am assuming that the cancer in my lungs - or must I use the cursed word nodules? - will be crushed by the cytotoxic tsunami in which my body now marinates...and if it doesn't, angsting about that now will in no way prepare me for it. Sure, there's not knowing: I most certainly do not know. But there is always some sense of the outcome, it's there, it effects things, I don't even have to think about it. I don't think a positive attitude necessarily makes positive things happen, it just makes everything feel like less of a thorn in one's flesh.

Don't know if I can give the talk next week. Feels like getting into a car accident and trying to give a talk as you're flying through the windshield...Danamaya suggested just doing what I can, that that is enough. She is probably right.

P.S. My eyebrows hurt today. Which I'm assuming means they're about to fall out.