I am running in my dreams. Not running athletically, as I did and will do again, but pure running. Using a top gear to get from point A to point B as fast as possible. Often faster than probable, as these are dreams.
Last night I was a college student, a member of a racially diverse chess team whose final match against a hated rival took place on the main athletic field. I had missed the cut but was supporting my teammate in the final. And I had, apparently, hidden a very important ten-gallon can of school-color confetti somewhere in the event that we won.
We were winning. As I walked up the hill to the field, all my teammates were standing, silently gesturing wildly to me--which isn't easy--so that I would go get the confetti in time for our victory.
And I ran. I ran a dream-run that is the kind of elated moment that makes dreams such powerful icons and waypoints in our slim human existences.
The campus was a hilly mix of UC Santa Barbara and University of Maryland Baltimore County--home of the Retrievers, whose women's lacrosse team will kick your ass. These two sites were my father influencing the dream, as he taught for years at UMBC and lived for less but no-less-loved years as an emeritus faculty member just up the mountainside from UCSB--the Gauchos, I believe, which I am sure strikes the self-preservationist New Right trying to whiten California as a little uncomfortable, tee hee.
Anyway, I fairly flew down a hill strewn with eucalyptus and maple leaves--ah, dreamscape--and into the main athletic building, sprinting on tireless legs past a women's gymnastics practice, along the slick edge of the pool where muscled young men butterflied and sleek-legged young women dove. Up the bleachers around the indoor track and down the long just-waxed hallway of administrative offices--nary a slip in my surefootedness, nary a rasp to my breath.
Until I got to the corner storage closet, ripped open the door, climbed the shelving to the top, and dug through old parachute material from the faculty day-care center and stacks of construction paper spiders and pumpkins silently reviewing some Halloween past, to the ten-gallon paint-can bucket I so swiftly sought.
By this time the bucket had become a tin of Utz potato chips, familiar to anyone from Baltimore and without pancreatitis--about ten gallons of space in a recyclable tin can, filled to the lip with oily, salty spud perfection. Betcha can't eat just one. And when you are done, you go back to the Utz shop--yes, Virginia, there is an Utz shop, catty-corner to the second best cheesesteak counter on earth, in Cross Street Market--and swap your empty for a new full can: they will (hopefully) clean and then re-use your discard, and the cycle of greasy happiness will continue.
In a lovely and pithy bit of the political worming into my dream, I discover under my confetti can a student ID for Barack Obama, I think from the University of Hawaii, except it looks like he is a gawky teen, so maybe he went there for a summer program. Though I have never been microsephalic enough to consider the Birther movement anything more than a heady mix of cowardice, racism, and stupid-as-shit-itude, this ID seems to me to be a nice proof of citizenship if one is ever needed.
I clutch the can to me and--and I love this art about dreams, because I think it speaks to our human understanding that we spend too much time making mountains out of molehills--step out a side door right next to the storage closet and smack dab onto the edge of the field where my teammate is about to win the chess match, I think with the simple move of a pawn that closes off the last option of his opponent's king--another almost-socialist touch: this dream is clearly influenced by the fact that I am reading 'Stories of Happy People,' by Lars Gustafsson, the closest thing I have found to a Swedish Milan Kundera.
Then it stops. All of it. I have never been blessed with the coup de grace in dreams. They rarely end for me, bad or good. The nightmares are endless attempts to flee a fear or run to aid a loved one in sand too thick to move, or choking tears from behind iron bands strapping me to some table so that I cannot help a friend.
The good ones roar towards some fantastic crescendo that I am never there to see. I like to think that the cast and crew of these dreams, ignoring that I have been ripped away, complete their scenes, cheering, hugging, laughing, even as my twisting visage drifts up into their sky and fades like contrail sketches.
Back to earth and the now, and all this running and victory in my sleep are signals that I have started what can no longer be denied is the latter, end phases of the main treatment. One down, three to go--barring catastrophe.
I love that phrase--barring catastrophe. It is so human: find me a guy who can bar a catastrophe you will have uncovered a god living among us. The entire point of catastrophe is that it cannot be barred. Wealth, brains, three generations running the bank before you; nobody can bar a catastrophe.
Avert, maybe. Avoid, likely. But barring one implies that the damn strophe has already catted, as it were, and well, once that has happens, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
N and I are perplexed by the fact that I feel OK. We're bothered that I am less damaged: there is a sadness so deep in having come to that place that I don't even want to address it, but there it is.
After the Naulasta flu or whatever it unpleasantly was went off on its own to die in the bushes and left my body back to me, things have been...fine.
My counts are low enough to have to take the antibiotic pills, each the size of a Buick, that were such a tummy-rumbler last time. We took a suggestion to take them at night instead of the morning, to both use the stronger antinauseal drug that puts me down and to maybe sleep through any discomfort, and it has been...fine.
My hemoglobin, continuing a months-long trend of being the rebel in the family--the long-haired, black-fingernailed pouting teen who shrugs instead of talking and does whatever is opposite of the rest of us--has gone up, close to a whopping 10, which means I have fewer issues of fatigue. So that's...fine.
I go back to the DRs tomorrow for more bloodwork and may need platelets and maybe some other stuff, but we had a visit from a dear friend from Spain, a shorter visit with her mom, I rode the bike for half an hour, I did a bunch of work at home, I walked the city a bit getting food or running errands, and I feel...fine.
As Carlin says:'How are you?' 'Fine.'"...Hair is fine! What kind of an answer is 'fine'?"
Next month will be the "A" phase of this Hyper CVAD, and there promises to be very large doses of Vincristine, Cytoxan, and the Devil, all in a happy four day dance, I believe. So maybe it will be less...fine then. But so far this has gone so well that we are paranoid, worried, assuming that somewhere, waaaayy high up, hiding behind the contrails of my dream tears, lies...The Other Shoe.
Drop, you bastard, just drop and hit me and let's get on with it. Because honestly, if the last week and a half--horrid though it was--was all I, we have to go through for all of frigging October?! Well, shit, I'm not sure what I will do with myself. Do they still teach macrame? Maybe a nice fern-holder, with a tail threaded through a cedar bead that will sway in the breeze of the, well, I guess, the air-conditioner, or a fan, or something.
Of course, as the deeply religious Murphy-worshipper I am, I know that writing this will bring it all on. Writing it out is like not taking an umbrella; yer just asking fer it.
But, unexpectedly, oddly, and a little scarily, I think I'll be prepared for the other shoe. And if not, I'll go to sleep, and twitch my feet in dog-dream running, fleet and healthy, tireless, and fast. So fast.
