@blogging

Be a Blogger They Said!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

I don’t know how many times I sat down with my computer with the intention of writing this blog post. It’s frustrating no end. I write a few words then my brain just clams up not even allowing a single word license to start a sentence.

I guess after over five hundred blog posts, I can legitimately call myself a blogger. However, right now I’m feeling that my blogging mojo is taking a bit of a vacation. The last time I wrote anything on this blog was on April 11th, 2021. It was always my objective to produce a blog post a week. I was particularly successful in that after my myeloma diagnosis in October, 2019. Lately my resolve has been ground down by the utter tedium of my biweekly Daratumumab infusions and the overwhelming fatigue that are side effects of chemo meds. I can blame my chemo meds for my lack of productivity. I think that’s legitimate. But it’s frustrating none the less. Well, I can’t write worth a damn but I can sleep, that’s for sure.

Sleep! Wow, do I ever get a lot of sleep. It’s not unusual for me to sleep for 12 hours, say from 8 PM until 7 AM. Moreover, I’ll often nap sitting in my chair or even crash in bed for an hour or two during the day. Take today for example. I slept soundly last night with just one pee stop, then woke up again around six o’clock needing to pee I thought but no, I didn’t pee. I went right back to sleep and woke up at 8:28, two minutes before my med alarm. I usually get up by 7:30 at the latest, but not this morning. I actually woke up with a start, confused by the dream I had just had, a dream with my bedroom appearing as a recurring elements.

Over the past few days I’ve dreamt every night, and I’ve been able to recall my dreams. They always start with me in bed in the bedroom, confused by the room, where it is, and how to get out of it. I didn’t have a weird dream last night, but the night before, I dreamed that I woke up but it was so dark, I had no idea where I was. So, what to do? Slowly I got out of bed feeling around for a wall. I felt around tentatively for some time before I touched a wall and started off to the right feeling for something, anything familiar. I found nothing for some time then I felt what could have been the closet doors. I’d gone too far! So I backed down the wall feeling carefully for the door. Finally I found the door and opened it! And found myself just outside the bedroom by the washroom. That’s when I woke up, I think. On another night I dreamed that I was sleeping in the bedroom but that I had to wake up to go pee. This time I found the door easily enough, went out to have a pee, then leaving the bathroom I quickly realized that I was not in our house and that this place was totally unfamiliar to me. I immediately thought “Alice in Wonderland.” And that was about it just as I woke up, thankfully in my own bed and in my own bedroom.

The thing is that in these recurring dreams over the past week or so, I always woke up feeling trapped in a sense, at least trapped in the sense that I couldn’t find a way out of the bedroom, or if I found my way out of the bedroom, it wasn’t always in a familiar place.

Of course I immediately tried a little self diagnosis. The feeling of being trapped or unable to find a familiar place I felt might be analogous to the way I feel sometimes about my cancer. It’s a dark place with nothing familiar about it. Carolyn came to that conclusion too as she observed me going in and out of the hospital, taking chemo meds and being exhausted all the time. She psychoanalyzed me and came to these conclusions maybe even before I did!

The cancer I have is obviously unfamiliar ground, but it’s just a preliminary to death and dying. Even in my waking life I feel trapped by my cancer. There’s no way out of it. Or rather there’s just one way out of it because it is incurable. The way I see it, when I die I fall into a box with no past, no present, and no future. It’s a place, really, where even I don’t exist. I is a character that is only relevant in life and has no reality in death. Dying, then, is a process of the I fading away into nothingness.

This is enough for today. I’ve been sweating buckets just getting these few words out. I’ll try to get another post out in a week. I hope that by then I don’t still have a plug in the part of my brain that writes!

#68 What to write?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I’m finding it hard to get down to writing these days. I can’t seem to get settled. Part of the problem is that my pain doctors are still trying to come up with just the right cocktail of meds to deal with the pain I’m feeling even though I’m not on chemotherapy anymore and I won’t be for the foreseeable future. Being off of chemo and not finding any myeloma protein in my blood hasn’t had the effect of attenuating my pain much. But there are other things that are responsible for my restlessness too.

Like many of you I worry about the American election. I worry about the potential for mass violence and civil unrest in the US although I am heartened to read today that many influential Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump’s current craziness around the vote count, and that Pennsylvania and Georgia have provided Biden with a slim positive margin over Trump. The reality is that even if Biden is declared the winner it won’t be over for some time yet and as many pundits have pointed out, Trumpism is a long way from done.

Compounding the issues I have with the unpredictability of myeloma and the American election, Covid-19 seems to have gotten new legs all over the world and it has me concerned. BC hasn’t escaped its resurgence. I guess I could write about the over 400 new cases in BC yesterday and the obvious neglect of precautions around mitigating factors like wearing a mask or social distancing.

I could write about Norbert Elias and his distinction between involvement and detachment. Just as a teaser, I can tell you that Elias would say that the state of affairs in the US and of the world in general faced with a global pandemic is the result of too much involvement and not enough detachment. But maybe I’ll save this topic for later.

I suppose I could write more about my myeloma, but it is in remission. I’m not going to the hospital weekly. There isn’t much to report. The fact is, I may be in remission but I’m not living a pre-myeloma life. It’s up in the air. I should be back to ‘normal’ I guess, but I’m far from that. I’m in constant pain from a variety of sources: past surgeries, arthritis, congenital disk issues, cancer, and chemotherapy. As I noted above, my palliative care doctors are trying to put together a cocktail of meds to at least get me to a place where the pain is reduced to a point where I can do things again. So far, we haven’t found the magic formula but we keep trying. I’ll be getting an MRI later this month on my back. It’s actually two MRIs, one on the upper part of my back and the other, a couple of days later, on the lower part of my back.

So, I spend most of my days at home sitting in my recliner or going to my studio and rather aimlessly putting dabs of paint here and there. Sometimes I watch YouTube videos on sailing, shipbuilding, and woodwork, which is something akin to watching daytime TV in the old days. Every once in a while Carolyn will take me to the River Walkway and shopping. I stay in the car with the dog while Carolyn runs the gamut in the grocery store. I go to bed early, often as early as 8:30 and get up eleven hours later. I get bummed out probably more than I should. I’m generally quite positive, but the trifecta of Covid-19, myeloma and old age has got the better of me at times. Turns out I’m just human after all.

I guess I could write about death but I’ve gone a long way to exhausting that topic on this blog. But, come to think of it, I promised a reader of my blog that I would write about respect for death. In a recent blog post I threw out the question: “Of course, respect for life also means respect for death, because they are not separable. Life depends on death. We don’t respect death now. We fear it. What would respect for death look like?” This is quite an unusual question it seems. We easily talk about respect for life but we rarely talk about respect for death. It’s clear that we have a preference for beginnings and not so much for endings. Many religions get around this issue by denying that death is the end of life, considering it the beginning of eternal life instead. I want to leave this topic for a future blog post so I won’t carry on with it here and now. Maybe for now I’ll just watch a YouTube video on the rebuilding of the pilot sailing ship Tally Ho. The ship is coming along nicely. Planking starts soon.

Raccoon Life

This is what happens to raccoons who mess with dogs around here. It does have a strange look on its face doesn’t it?

If you have a special topic you’d like me to address, please leave a comment here or on Facebook. Don’t be shy. I’m happy to go off on most any topic, but of course I’ll pick and choose the ones I want. Questions about cooking would probably not get much of a response from me, but woodworking might. Should I write more about patriarchy and misogyny? It’s a subject near and dear to my heart. Hmmmm.