Changed
Man
I take a castration chemo drug every day, Abiraterone Acetate, 1000mg in four tablets. To make it work, I take a steroid, Prednisone. Chemical castration keeps the prostate cancer from spreading to my bones via testosterone. Prostate cancer won’t kill me, Doctor Sharma assures me. Cancer in the bones could kill me and so we reduce that possibility as best we can. Low testosterone is a major industry target market, for most men feeling less vigorous than before. But…if you increase your testosterone level and thus increase your PSA, you may learn what price glory the hard way. I never see any warnings on the TV ads, and often wonder what the Society of Urologists has to say. Though why kill the cash cow? The waiting rooms of urologists are packed all day. Business is good when the prostate is bad.
So I start
the day with a good swift kick in the balls. I’m used to it now. And I get a
shot of Lupron every three months, female hormones in a time-release injection.
I’m not sure of the science of this, though medical journals swear by
immuno-therapy as the best treatment. God knows it’s much better than the radiation
therapy I endured for nine weeks. Radiation is like medical science meets the
Spanish Inquisition. It beats the daylights out of you, then two years later
your condition comes back but your prostate is so burned and scarred, corrective
surgery is no longer an option. Castration actually seems like a good idea
compared to more radiation. Heroin suppositories seem like a good idea compared
to radiation. Maybe you have had
radiation. Am I right? And chemo-therapy is brutal in many situations. My
wife’s beautiful hair is gone and it’s not coming back. She’s cancer free now,
quite healthy in fact, but she wears a wig when we attend a social function. We
all know people with cancer. We all know people who have had the different
therapies. As my brother’s physician, Doctor Fox, told him after a trip to the
emergency room, the hospital will kill you quicker than the disease. Life’s
full of surprises. God has a very strange sense of humor and we are constantly
amazed by what new thing He has thrown our way. A kick in the balls each
morning helps keep things in perspective.
Over time,
I have noticed I am a changed man. The castration, the female hormones, none of
it hurts in any way. But I am mellowing out. I’m not horny anymore, which is so
strange. My life has been dominated by cold-blooded lustfulness, as a
girlfriend’s astrologist mother told me fifty-three years ago. Capricorn is a
sign prone to this, she said. It made me feel better, for some reason. At least
it’s not just me, I told her.
This loss
of hormonal instincts has made me feel different about a lot of things. It has affected
my writing, lowered the competitive drive. In group this coming session, I want
to see if I can be more respectful of the efforts of others. I want to be more
helpful, look for the good in each submission. If this had happened to me years
ago, what might have happened? Would I have been a better writer? Would I be
more considerate? More helpful? Would I be less cruel?
The novel I have been working on for
a dozen years has fallen to the wayside. The Covid pandemic drained the life
right out of me. It’s hard to worry about imaginary characters when the people
around you are in danger. Still, I sit down and make a change here or there in
the manuscript. Time away from a draft is not always a bad thing. I can see the
whole story more clearly now, rather than individual chapters. Put in a China
reference in the first chapter that now appears in the sixth. Connect the two.
Make the heroin deal a red herring, the real deal being for Chinese Virtual
Reality code. Get rid of some side plots. Or convert them to the setup for the
next novel. I have nearly three hundred completed pages to revise. It ain’t
easy, but it’s not that hard. Making time is somehow easier now. The hangovers
less painful. The loss of my best reader/friend seems to send its own message:
Move on.
I grew a beard as my Manly Man
protest to the all the biological warfare on my virility. What started out as a
Papa Hemingway attempt is now closer to Poopdeck Pappy. I found by shaving the
mustache and some chin hair, I can achieve a kind of Planet of the Apes look.
After all, I too am amazed that humans can talk. Not much amazing gets said,
but the effort shows hopeful signs. Some say words are all used up but it’s
repeated words that are used up. See something on social media and share it and
a thousand others will be sharing the same thing at the same time. So I read
strange things, looking for the lost communication. Have I lost the ability to
write? Did I ever have it? What has
always been a problem for me is finishing projects. That’s why I love cooking, especially
on my Weber grill. I get an idea and try it out, change ingredients in standard
fare menus, and actually create something new and tasty and my critics are
right here, hungry and willing to try Swordfish Kabobs with Mango and Pineapple
or grilled pizza without red sauce on crusts bought at the bakery. The art is
not so much in the cooking as it is in the shopping. I make Swordfish kabobs
for five people and my food costs are under twenty dollars ($20). Being poor
enables me to do what my grandmothers did, take simple things and make meals
everyone remembers. And it all happens in one day. I never got that
satisfaction from writing. Or, back in the old days, I got so excited I sent
out unrefined drafts to considerate readers who were probably embarrassed by my
enthusiasm and need for praise. Testosterone! Vanity! I should have been
castrated years ago. Now I’m a shopper, a cook, a driver for family members
without cars. And people with anxiety come to me to tell all. Being stuck at
the grill makes me a captive audience. Does that make me a confessor? I don’t
think it’s quite that formal. It seems everybody has a lot bottled up inside
and I do the one thing that helps: I listen. There is a terror attached to
modern life that makes communication nearly impossible. With smartphones, we
can modify pictures of ourselves and add monkey ears and tails. But we can’t
say what we mean, can’t mean what we say. Why? Because that’s the same as
writing. The writer takes responsibility for what he writes and so must have
the courage to make it available to be read by others. On Facebook, for
example, some confess to depression and get daily reinforcement responses from
Facebook friends. The key is: responses. Someone says something from out of the
void. But the same person says something amusing and gets no response. The bell
doesn’t ring, the food pellet doesn’t drop into the bowl. Back to depression
posts, fishing for responses. Just being alive is not enough. The Internet has
created monsters, kids gang up on other kids and drive them to suicide, to
risk-taking, to mass murder. The behavioralism of social media was predicted by
Marshall McLuhan in the 1960’s. No reads McLuhan anymore. No one reads B.F.
Skinner. Beyond Freedom and Dignity was the book that ended his career.
Modifying the behavior of individuals generated enough liberal outrage colleges
like USF dropped the School of Behaviorism from its Psychology curriculum. Anthony Burgess and then Kubrick satirized it
in A Clockwork Orange. You can’t take away their freedom and dignity!
You can’t take away their AR-15s! What, are you some kind of fascist? So, we
settle for endless conversation. Why do people act this way, we wonder? And
every day on television there are at least twenty shows featuring murder as the
plot source. There are video games where shooting, slashing, and beating are not
only featured but are so graphically realistic you might as well be in a
building actually shooting total strangers. Why do people act this way, we
wonder? We are conditioning them to act this way. We are protecting their
freedom and dignity while they are exploring how many rounds of ammunition are
required to kill everyone in a gay nightclub.
