arrival, the

2 yrs ago yesterday we awoke at a Red Roof Inn in Syracuse, NY. It was crisp and autumnal and the complementary coffee from the lobby at checkout was brown swill. We got into the van with Maxwell and drove through town to Aaron's house. He and I had never met in person before but we had shared some extended online screenwriting commiserations and it seemed silly to not stop in and say hello since how often am i in Syracuse? Afterwards, we drove through town, across the campus just to see it. We bought bagels and coffees and got onto the highway, headed toward Boston. It was our shortest actual day in terms of driving, but longest in terms of what lay before us. Getting in to Cambridge, finding the Residence Inn, checking in, unloading the van, seeing my parents, going to dinner at an atrocious restaurant nearby, waking at 6am [after an already restless night] due to the monstrous chirp of the fire alarm in our room requesting to please be changed and my well-intentioned but poorly made decision to attempt to pull said fire alarm off the wall triggering an immediate call from the front desk and subsequent visit from their onsite technician – it was the longest patch of 24 hrs imaginable.

on 9/26 we met w/ Dr. L, i had an MRI (my 4th that yr), had a CT scan, got my face fitted for the mask that would hold me in place for 25 proton beam radiation treatments (plus 10 photon treatments).

on 9/29 I had treatment #1

Tu Fawning

these guys call themselves Tu Fawning, which
apparently translates into 'we are real damn good'.
no, really.

latest, at wk's end

sunday is our 7 yr anniversary. doesn't seem possible but here we are 7 yrs prior

i continue to wrestle/battle w/ some dark days and emotional turmoil (which is great fun for marg!) aided no doubt by our continued work on the book. we are well past the point now where each word has completely lost its emotional charge which makes editing difficult. we've (re)lived through the brain tumor experience many times over in our heads but we forget the sheer force that the story inflicts on the casual, uninitiated bystander. it certainly is a conversation killer. when i've been introduced to people at parties and it's come up i may as well have said that i was gang-raped. people aren't sure what to say. what's (in)appropriate?

switching gears (sort of):

dave sent this over yesterday.
i can't stop reading it
(be sure to use scroll feature to
read the whole thing)

good news and bad news

first the bad:
greg oden may be out the whole season
unbelievable. particularly as relates to the prices my dad had to pay to get the same
game package as last yr.

the good:
the cassini spacecraft has taken new saturnian moon photos.

demarcations and points of entry (w/ video)

so, we are coming up on some key pts in september. 9/16 will mark me and mm's 7 yr anniversary and 9/19 will mark the 2 yr anniv of us leaving for a wk long van drive across the u.s. ultimately arriving in boston, wherein we lived in a residence inn for 2 months so i could get proton beam radiation for the remaining parts of my brain tumor.

boston was a strange period, both in terms of the brain tumor year and just in general in our lives. it was both quick and endless, dark and light, high and low - it represented me getting reprieve from the tumor but it was surreal and odd, at the intense pitch that being in hospitals and around the infirm and the direly infirm can trigger. it was very much like living underwater. the two of us in separate air bubbles that would bump into one another on occasion. also surreal: to be back in the state where i was born, in the city where mm lived for much of her childhood, where some of my cousins and mm's friends still live. working on the book has churned some stuff up so yesterday i started to look at some video bits that i'd shot out there, nearly two yrs ago. spent last night and this morning cutting together what you see below.

a primer: every day mm and maxwell and i left the residence inn (kendall square) walked down to the charles for an hour long walk around the esplanade. my parents were present for our last wknd (also our first), helping us over the hump emotionally and financially. and then there was the long drive back across the country, further from boston, returning to portland, back to an uncertain world w/ tenuous margins...

arrivals

and september arrives from nowhere. spent the holiday wknd
attending a variety of gatherings, some family, some friends.
marg and i continue to work on book and have arrived at a
comfortable working rhythm, ironing out the kinks, making
decisions where readability is not the only determinant but
an important one. we're trying to be true to the experience
and yet avoid bloat. it's tricky given 2 voices, 2 separate
experiences that revolve around one collective one. blah blah blah.

meantime, trying to get some action going w/ the movie. bit by bit and drop by drop. saw melville's "army of shadows" yesterday. amazing and inspiring. reading the mother garden by robin romm. only a couple stories in but it's damn good.