some random thoughts about crabs.
(still curable, by the way, talk to your doctor)

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (T.S. Elliot)

astrology is what it is. too ludicrous to take seriously one minute, too uncannily accurate the next. i ignored it all together until i realized that most of my close friends were born within a few weeks of each other, all cancers.

tiff and i were biking along in the increasingly frequent sunshine last night, spending our daylights savings and talking, of course, about cancer. how one day, for reasons known only to itself, a single cell blinks, says "i'm different now" and goes on to evangelize it's progeny in the merits of growth..

there are so many moments where, instantly and irrevocably, everything changes. this singular novelty seems to typify cancer both astrologically and histologically. my summer-born friends all appear to have entered the world with an immutable and persuasive uniqueness.

cancer and its aftershocks are unexpected and unwelcome in our life. i feel as if we have come unstitched from the well-worn and comfortable quilt that was our life. conversely, we have both awakened from the long afternoon nap of habit and begun to remember the amazement of being in love, the wonderful privilege of parenting, the pleasure of good work, and the daily wonders that we'd accidentally learned to take for granted.

as a doctor i hereby prescribe everyone 24 hours of cancer. tomorrow you will be miraculously and completely cured. today, however, you have a shining golden ticket to be honest about your priorities and revel in the small wonders that cross your path.

even now it lies there, lurking at me...the largest turd ever produced by a non-elephant toddler, blocking our only toilet, refusing to be swept away to the land of poo and out of my life forever. when i pictured being a father i saw long walks in the woods, talking about the miracles of nature and the fantastic imaginings of human thought. i didn't so much see myself tending a crock pot and flipping diapers-fillings into the pooper. turdomegaly is a terrible disease in children. for all the child-rearing paraphernalia we DO have, we seem to lack a plunger.
pawsing for thought

Stella with her eyes on the prize.
I'd been wondering what this blog was gonna be about know that we've sold our trailer and settled down for the short term. Looks like it's gonna be about cancer for a while.

Cancer is the process of unregulated cell growth. Like suburban sprawl, a tumor represents unplanned expansion, and much to our surprise we recently found a fully formed subdivision in Tiffany's left breast. In the span of one week we went from saying "let's get this checked out" to talking about a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, multiple reconstruction surgeries, and 24-hour round the clock "three's company" reruns. Honestly, they haven't mentioned the reruns yet, but I figure it's the only form of torture left, so it's bound to come up eventually.
I've always had a love/hate relationship with doctoring but right now I'm thankful to have so many smart doctor-friends who are helping us understand what's going on and what to do about it. It's turned out to be an unexpected blessing to have friends that we can call and say "tell me about fake nipples..." This weekend we're working hard to learn all we can. We know the left boob is a goner now that it's turned against us. (this aggression will not stand, man) We're trying to learn about the value of doing a bilateral mastectomy, chemo, hormone therapy and all the weirdness of reconstructive boobage. It's overwhelming and confusing.

I want to state for the record that I'm married to the bravest person I've ever met. This no idle distinction when you're in the running against my friend Barry. Tiffany's first question about replacement was "can you get fake boobs that come with tassels?". The truth is, dark humor is serving us very well and I'm a little glad there hasn't been anyone around to witness the new heights in inappropriateness that we've achieved.
The support from our friends and family has been the most amazing thing that's happened to us in a long time and we really feel blessed to have the people in our lives that we do. Cheers to Brittany for letting us know that she was taking a shot of Jager for tiff's boob. Cheers to Ryan for painting his body pink only to find out that oil-based paint burns a little. Cheers to Barry for saying the right thing at the right time. Cheers to the Berkeley family for trying to fly here at a moments notice. Cheers to the friends who have cried with us a little and our sweet Oregon neighbors who have shown us so much love. We're definitely gonna be all-right.

A big question these days is "what is healthy?" Is it being cancer free? Is it chemotherapy? Is it having a plastic bag of silicon implanted in your chest? Is it radiation? It's hard to know right now.

We're lucky to have planned this next month for a long vacation back east with our friends and family. I don't know about chemo, but time and love are definitely key parts of the cure.


(looking back over this post, the pictures seem a little out of place with the topic. but they were all taken yesterday while we were out on an epic walk trying to sort some of this out. secondly, what's a good picture for talking cancer?)

what do yo get if you cross Lassie with a cantaloupe?

a melon-collie baby...

yesterday i sold the airstream. the silver train-car that sheltered us from kentucky to oregon and was our home for almost a year, the place my where my daughter learned to walk, a small constant space with ever-changing uncertainties outside it's door.

two years ago we decided to move to oregon. tiff had a job that promised a place to park our trailer and i figured i could find work. it took us a year to get out of lexington. many thanks to our friends who spent a year leaving parties at our house with more than they'd brought. thank god that two close friends bought new houses; our bedroom is set up at cousin sam's house and set up so exactly that it makes me feel like a historical figure visiting my own museum when i go there. almost as soon as we got the house empty and rented, tiff's job evaporated like pee on a woodstove (only a stink left in the air). so there we were, trailered up and no place to go. i got a job by phone, and i gotta tell you a speaker-phone interview with five people you've never met is a weird thing. it's hard to charm a disembodied collective of strangers. the trip across the country was stunningly awesome, unhurried and unplanned. we slipped into the province of thought native to all travelers where coincidence is a companion and schedules laughably inconsequential. that is, until we rolled into corvallis got out some maps and realized that there wasn't really any place to park a trailer around here. the trailer became a classroom for some tricky life lessons. how to live in a trailer park, how to exist with a wife, child, and two dogs in 74 sq feet of space, and how beer helps you accept the teaching that life lessons have to offer. finally the rain came and the trailer became an uncomfortable ark barely afloat in our sea of discontent. times were bad then and there's no more to say about that. we left the trailer with a small sense of defeat and a large sense of relief; our health and happiness had begun to suffer. happily ensconced in our 450 sq foot palace, dry, and with so much room to stretch out, i'm not sorry to see the trailer go but i'm very thankful that it got me from there to here.

i punched my ticket on a one way silver train
too damn tired of being the same
i'm going to wash my sins in the oregon rain
and maybe then i'll come home again

women i've loved:

i used to live with memory
but i knew she'd never change
i started hanging out with luck
but she was never true
i flirted with destiny night and day
but i knew her mind was made
i fell in love with tomorrow
but she wasn't what i thought
i had a threesome with here and now
but there wasn't a future in it
i moved in with apathy
but she never cared about me
i hooked up with hope
but she was just a tease
i fell in love with truth
but she was too hard too handle
i've got a crush on coincidence
but she's hard to understand
my heart was made for love
but i've got more lovers than i need

This week we took vacation at home. It was the first time since we got here that we decided not to go anywhere and just catch up on some hanging out. Some time with friends, some cooking, some movies. Some time watching instructional breakdance videos from Netflix.
Two weeks ago, Tiffany abandoned Stella and I and fled to the Caribbean with some other morally deficient women. Left with the task of rearing our child and preserving our homestead, I did what any modern man would do, I called for help from my mom. My mother managed some meterological mama mojo and we had sunny skies and warm weather for her entire stay. I think a 3-generation hike is a pretty rare occurrence and I'm thankful for it. Our little apartment accommodates guests reasonably well, but sleeping in the same room with Sasha Rottenweiler, the worlds snoringest dog, has left me with some mild hearing loss.
Stella continues to learn new words and is refining her interpretive dance of suffering and despair. Regardless of our other short-comings as parents, we apparently are consistent- Stella sometimes takes herself to the bedroom for a tantrum, the only place fussing is allowed. I, too, have to spend a few minutes there, now and again, when I'm feeling fussy.
Thanks to her generous aunt, Stella has a new trampoline, tea set and tent which she endeavors to use simultaneously with interesting effect. Here, Sasha waits her turn. Sasha, surprisingly, has turned out to be quite the gymnast; her front flip with double-wag is flawless.
Spring is here and I'm finding a wet spring to be preferable to a wet fall. Everything is greener than a sea-sick leprechaun and the air is warm and fresh. We are a few weeks from heading back to Kentucky after almost a year's absence and I've got a Christmas-eve's worth of excitement about spending time with my friends there.

One of our theories about living in Oregon was that, although the winters make Edgar Allen Poe seem chipper, we live close enough to the mountains to enjoy the snow. We recently tested this hypothesis on Mt Bachelor. I had signed up for a 4 day emergency medicine conference at Sunriver Resort just west of the mountain and true to our specialty's spiritual roots, the conference schedule was 7-10am and 5-8pm with an open bar. In general I don't feel much of a kinship with doctors, but I like most ER docs. The conference was full of folks drinking coffee, beer, or both, and when the lectures ended the room emptied like a fart-filled elevator for the ski slopes and back country. Tiffany, with her love of going fast and her genetic inability to acknowledge consequence is a natural skier. I, on the other hand am clumsy to begin with and am downright dangerous when I've got potential weapons strapped to each appendage. So we hoped to find some middle ground by going cross country skiing. We were able to rent a little ski trailer for Stella and headed out on the gently rolling and groomed trails.
a brief physics problem:

A 185 pound man attaches a 50 pound trailer to his hips and straps 2 pieces of waxed wood to his feet. How far can he go uphill on ice without using his face to gain traction?

Needless to say, the next day we tried snow-shoeing. We headed down a short trail to Todd's Lake and were captivated by the snow formations created by the meandering streams 4 or 5 feet beneath the surface. We were able to see Mt Bachelor poking through the clouds and generally had a pretty good time.
Stella, unfortunately, has been intermittently ill for several weeks with a couple different bugs that have been floating around the community. We are, therefore, doing what I call survival parenting. At this point she can play "Crackwhore 6", the video game, while playing with a lighter and gasoline in the street if she'll just let me put her down for a few minutes without crying.


(picture: stella finds yeti scat)

Our feudal lords, Justin and Lina, have fled to Hawaii for a couple weeks, and as their loyal serfs, we're keeping an eye on the property here. Yesterday, a shiny black Cadillac Escalade slid off the road into their front yard and their neighbor, Lois the vindictive, was out there chewing the guy out before I could get there. "I've seen you driving through here. Always driving to fast! See what happens when you drive that fast. Look what you did to those bulbs they just planted.", she said. There's something that warms my heart about seeing an insurance salesman with a nice haircut and a cadillac truck getting dressed down in the street by an old feisty woman. (think rottweiler on a steak) If i hadn't had Stella with me, she probably would have lit into me too; it seemed like she was really on a roll. Cute babies are like kryptonite to the anger of older women. When I'm good and old, I'm gonna rent a baby so I can meet hot elder-chicks at the nursing home.