through the nasal cavity, etc

thanksgiving come and gone. hard to believe that 2 yrs prior we were in a hotel in boise, id for thanksgiving, one day away from returning to portland after a weeklong drive across the country, after 35 proton beam treatments.

say, that reminds me. how interested are you in seeing some endoscopic transsphenoidal surgery? probably a lot, right? just click here. i didn't have endoscopic (meaning incisions were made in my case) but still. the general uproarious effect is the same!

now december just lays there in front of me. asking me to care.

Portland & the NY Times, thurs

monkey cloning at OHSU

assorted ocean and yachats, ore

here's a bunch of photos from a trip to yachats

no words

margaret and i had the grand (mis)fortune to stumble across this on tv last night.

from playtime by j. tati

humboldt again

i'm reposting this video from august in honor of the fact there are quite a few folks from humboldt in town this wknd. by coincidence mm's story, that she just published, is set in arcata, at the minor theatre.

audio file of radio emissions from Saturn

you can listen to the planet saturn here. then be sure to go here and compare the sound to Forbidden Planet.
more info from the cassini site here

actually, all that got me thinking so i dug around and found some more sounds of space from the European Space Agency. check it.

Moon, The

i've been getting a little geeky about astronomy lately but this is sincerely cool. gives me goosebumps and that tingle in my stomach

hdtv movie of the moon

The movie consists of two sequences - one shot over the western region of Oceanus Procellarum. The other is a fly over of the Moon’s north pole region, flying over the northern part of Oceanus Procellarum to the north pole.
more info here

dennis k. v. tucker c

the mainstream media, if they regard Dennis Kucinich at all, are prone to marginalization and reduction. which is predictable but still annoying.

you can say long shot or no shot, or you can make jokes, or you talk about his wife instead of him but every time i hear dennis kucinich speak my cynicism is punctured, neutralized, mitigated. i can take a deep breath for a moment and trust that it isn't poisoned. Seek him out and read what he has to say and see if you disagree with any of it.

Coincidence put us in the same room in homer alaska w/ him in 2005 and he was just as impressive there, speaking casually and off the cuff.

NY Times & Portland, take 2

twice in one week, this time about the disgraced and 'despicable'
PT Barnum like showman who ran out of town oweing buckets of cash
but who is rising, phoenix-like, in seattle. That is, if you consider the ascension of self-promotion and hucksterism as per se rising. Something about it leaves a bad taste in my mouth but i can't pinpoint exactly what. Part of it is perhaps that i've reached maximum saturation level w/ portland's food culture and those who discuss it.

maybe it's just me though

autumn, and other bits

saw this item about a lawsuit online today. brought me back 2 yrs in the amount of time it took the photons to reach my eye. A photograph w/ time-travel facility. for this you see is the MIT dorm in Cambridge right across the street from the park we took Maxwell every night 2 years ago. When we weren't here, that is, for my radiation treatment.

seeing that structure has several levels of strange but the simplest one to convey would be this:

we've been living in the past the last couple months. It's mainly because of our book, the co-written his/her, husband/wife, patient/caregiver memoir, the writing of which has forced us into a sort of semi-constant state of reliving unpleasant moments in all their stark unpleasant detail. What i had tied up and shelved in my mind as a sterile antiseptic box named Surgery One has now been pulled down and unwrapped, freeing a swirl of specific moments and general memory, some better left forgotten: the jerky ride of medical turmoil, the emotional highs and lows based on numbers on charts and interpretations of graphs, the malevolent stink of a friend's misguided email, the acrid bite of black fear, the hazy fog of post-surgery, of late-night MRIs, of a black and uncertain future. Real good fun.

Obviously, it's been really f**king difficult to write about. Both of us have wondered about the sensibility of doing it now, about the value of doing it at all, trying to think if the whole project has any value at all except to us and if so, why the hell are spending free time, weeknights and weekends, reliving these horrible things in horrible detail? Merely to exorcise? What is it we hope to gain from this experience?

One choice tidbit has been pulling the word 'chordoma' up from the ocean floor, as for 2 months we thought i had chordoma instead of chondrosarcoma. There was some hope heading in to Surgery One that i had a pituitary tumor, which would have led to a different world. not to be. the distinction between chordoma and chondrosarcoma was not known to us then. i suppose it didn't really matter. any way, found this today which addresses some of the difference.

so, we are trying to balance all this unpleasant-ness w/ fun, whatever that might mean and whereever we can get it. last night went to the laurelhurst to meet D & L
and see brazil, which is still real great. if you've seen it you'll recognize this:

japan - video

here's a video from tokyo/kyoto back in 06. it was an early experiment w/ cutting a bunch of footage together, using the limited effects of windows moviemaker. i've had japan on my mind a lot lately. don't know why but watching ozu a few wks back was probably a contributor as is current book i'm reading part of which is set in tokyo. look forward to returning ...

NY Times & Portland

we cancelled the Oregonian a few wks ago, mostly b/c they're not a good paper [typified by their generally backwater editorials and that specifically ridiculous sunday cover story about an old man teaching his granddaughter how to shoot and kill birds] and have been receiving the ny times, which increasingly seems to have portland on her mind. today there was more love for portland. bikes. culture. etc.

black fog of depression

"...a patient’s psychological functioning may be affected by the psychological implications of receiving a potentially life-altering diagnosis, the direct effects of the tumor on mood and cognition and treatment side effects..."

wow this seems obvious. i suppose it's good that it's being studied though.

article can be found here