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Wednesday, April 8

Update: Life on the Road and Other Tormenting Tales of Travel


Good lord do I hate doctor consultations. I mean really; there's only so much up and down, heart beating in my throat, shaking hands and general roller coaster-like activity that one meek person can handle. Here's a thought: maybe I'll just give up now. I mean (statistically speaking), I'm fighting an indefatigable enemy. The doctor told me today that there is a one-hundred percent chance that this relentless foe will make a comeback. No matter how much chemotherapy and radiation we douse him in. No matter how many blunted scalpels we throw at him; Goliath will return. It's just a matter of time. Three years, seven years, ten years (maybe), but he'll be back.

So what are the months of my life spent in cancerous isolation all for then? The intricate scientific complexity of chemotherapy and radiation are really more like hulking blunt objects that doctors, behaving much like ancient cavemen or as the participants in a fancy Biblical stoning, can blindly and rashly hurl against my head and body. Some people live and some people don't: that's what happens when blunt objects are hurled at human bodies with reckless abandon. It all comes down to what the body can handle. If it so happens that we can handle the damage inflicted by hefty pointed objects, then we heal and eventually recuperate. If not, then we return to the dust of the earth.

Chance. That's all we're left with. Like a game of roulette, probability rules the day, and the meaning of my life boils down, in a precise and quantifiable manner of course, to numerical relationships. Everything is a number. A statistic in someone else's study (and that's if you're lucky):
that's the inherent scientific value of a human life. Well I don't buy it. Neither is my life so easily quantified, stripped of its subjective meaning only to be lost to the ages. Time is the only agent with the power to strip my life of it's meaning. No fragile mortal coil possesses this ability: to draw meaning, as blood is drawn from an artery, from my life.

I will only breathe free in the air of my fire.