smeagol and meryl streep

What follows is a transcription of the handwritten journal I kept before I could get out of bed and to my computer. For the time being, we are all caught up.

January 4

Key to convalescence: Lie. The best sort of lie? Laughter.

Things are wretched—now that’s funny! Any given moment of relief may proceed an altogether excruciating moment—a real knee slapper!

Sure, genuine laughter has its palliative effects, but genuine laughter is gold in a coal mine. Best bet: accept your Chilean black-lung with chortles; do your friends and colleagues a favor—they love you, they really do, but jebus! stifle a moan now and then will you?

If you happen to stumble upon that gold of genuine laughter, guard it like Smeagol in the bowels of the Misty Mountains. At least begrime its effulgence to match the luster of the lie-laughter. Crying “Wolf!” is fine but you have to rough-up some sheep on your own to frame the lupine phantom.

[Aside: Tearful crying will be dealt with later, I’m sure; but for now, the rule is this: never, ever, in sickness or health, falsify a cry. Unless you’re Meryl Streep and it’s in the script, I can think of no real call for it. (Ladies, man-up and take your piddling traffic ticket with a little dignity. Gentleman, woman-up and quietly cuss when you stub your little pinkie toe instead of going into labor pains.) Because genuine crying is the coal more precious than gold—a rarity with no commensurate exchange rate.]

January 5

I have tried and failed to calculate the permutations of pillow arrangements in order to more dramatically convey how nearly impossible it is to get comfortable after a week in bed. I am currently rocking four pillows and each can be manipulated about ten ways. So I figure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways that my efforts to achieve body-ache relief have been confounded and mocked.

January 6

Today’s discussion: The difference between “delicate” topics and “indelicate” topics.

For instance, a delicate topic for me right now concerns the majority of Hominēs erectus’ [sp ?] ability to perambulate erect vis-à-vis my negligible capacity for the same. I get jealous, spiteful, and consider a clandestine defenestration—only two of which I can viably perform at the moment but each of which I will/ would survive, all the more incapacitated. Sticks and stones would break my bone and seething just hurts my jaw so . . . swallow, Socrates.

Back to the delicacies. (Maybe foie gras or machine washing cycles come to mind but no, no, no, banish those thoughts before we proceed. Seriously, you’ll want to. I’ll wait.)

Slate clean? Here we go . . .

Query: Is the proud occasion of my first non-supine bowel movement in over a week a delicate or an indelicate topic? I can see arguments for both and as such should probably just end this journal post as it stands.

That being said . . . mark today as the day of my first big-boy potty of 2012. Confetti discouraged. Just call me Champ or Slugger or Bronco or something. I’ll pat myself on the back for you, so stay seated. Unless you’re already mid-standing-O, then take your time, settle-down at your earliest moment of relaxed exaltation.

Also of note and as prelude to the above winsome event, I stood out of bed today without relapse into convulsions. You’d think this would be the happier feat of the two, but you’d be wrong. Very wrong.

January 7

To prove my existence as a member of the global colony of cosmic mites, I have been dating my journal entries with “2011”s. A classic blunder. A blunder, however, in its dying days . . . 1] in the adult-sphere what with the checkbook becoming a thing of the past (barely holding on by a blue-haired thread ahead of you in the check-out line when your car is illegally parked and running and open to video-game-trained carjackers with your woefully out-of-fashion chihuahua nipping at the crack you dutifully left for it despite your rush to get a pack of smokes and a canister of breath mints from the Super Walmart when a Chevron would have sufficed). . . 2]in the scholastic sphere where, I can only suppose, proper dating continues to be prerequisite for completion of handwritten tests to do with (if memory serves) Indians—the tomahawk kind, water—both its elemental components and the planetary fraction thereof relative to terra firma, Huck Finn’s “nigger”-less (indelicate?) adventures along the just-as-mighty-as-a-woman Mississip—Old Person River, etc, etc.

Also of note, I have finished this month’s chemo pills and will await the early effects, partying like it’s 2011.

Later that day . . .

Big-boy bath.

Of note, 24 hours seizure-free. Don’t I get some sort of token?

January 8

Enough

Swing wide the shutter . . .

Morning!

Wait, retract! start with cracked

Jalousie; gently let the sun

Appear upon your risen-ness.

The day is long and calls

For rain.

January 9

Made it downstairs. Wore myself out.

January 10

Went to the library. Put on a one-man-show entitled "Buffoon: An Amateur Walker-User's Story." Let moms and little girls pass. Wore myself out.