The Point!?!

Alright.  Where were we?

So somewhere in the depths of chemo therapy……

Hold on.  There’s something I need to explain about chemo therapy.

My tour of the battle fields of chemo therapy lasted around six months.  The strategic battle plan according to Dr. Meyer was for me to endure closer to nine months of unrelenting bombardment.  But.  It did not work out as planned.  My body cells revolted.  That is.  

My bilirubin count kept rising up in protest.  

Apparently I am one of a minority of odd folks who have an abnormally high bilirubin level under normal circumstances.  However, when my count…  my belligerent numbers… rose to over twice the normal level allowed…  It became necessary for us to halt the treatments.  Temporarily.  This happened twice within the planned course of our cancer eradication campaign bringing heaven-sent relief

But, I’m getting bogged down in the details again.  The point.

The Point!?  Herr Doktor Professor!!

Da…  Yes!!  Zhe point.

The point is that my chemo campaign, my chemo treatments, which ended up taking about six months in 2010.  Well.  

How to say it?

What they don’t tell you is……..

The first thing I asked Herr Doktor Meyer was:  Will there be any side- effects from chemo therapy?

His stone cold answer:  No.  None whatsoever.

The second thing I asked Herr Doktor Meyer was:  Are there any alternative or adjutant treatments which I might use during the course of

chemo therapy to help facilitate or ease the impact of chemo…?  For example, any dietary recommendations, vitamins or herbs…..

His quiet (How dare you be so impudent!) answer:  None that I know of.

The third question:  Will there be any long term side effects from chemo therapy?

His straight ahead answer:  A blank stare.

I guess, dear reader, you’re getting the picture.  Or rather, it’s all there in the WORK folders!!  In admittedly rather abstract digital color.

Anyway.  The point is:  The effects of chemo don’t end.

The effects of chemo don’t end at the buzzer.  At the end of treatments.
The effects of chemo don’t end six months after the end of treatments.
The effects of chemo don’t end a year later.
The effects of chemo don’t end two years later.

The effects of chemo tend to hang around indefinitely.  
Like the wounds of war.

“Yesterday….  All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it seems as though they’re here to stay
Oh I believe in….”

A case in point:  My good friend Jay.  Jay was diagnosed with late stage  colon cancer in 2011.  He received the fullest and most technologically advanced cancer treatments available at the time at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.  He endured the chemo cocktail with the oxaliplatin administered via the pump… the real “Cadillac” treatment… or rather, several Mercedes, a couple of Porsches… and a 1955 Buick Roadmaster in mint condition

Jay endured the Deluxe Chemo Bombardment Campaign for six months.  He now experiences (2018) Chemo-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy in his hands and feet making it difficult and painful for him to walk and impossible for him to play the piano.  As a result of chemo-induced weakening of his heart muscle, a common, but rarely mentioned side

effect of chemo poisoning, he was required to receive six stents in the blood vessels of his damaged heart, a pig valve and a pace-maker so that it might keep pumping.  He has experienced a permanent loss of much of his former hearing capability as a direct result of chemo.  His memory has never fully recovered, a side-effect known as “chemo brain”.  Chemo-related damage to his endocrine system has brought about late adult onset Type 1 Diabetes.  Not to mention PTSD.  Yes, that’s right.  

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is another common, rarely mentioned, side-effect of chemo therapy.  Just like war.

And even after he received his “top of the line” cancer treatments at Mount Sinai, he still found himself at Stanford University Hospital several years later where they were able to successfully remove a quarter of his left lung along with several new spots of metastatic colon cancer…

But surely he would be dead without all this advanced chemical therapy and amazing modern wizardry!?  Miracle medicine.

Surely Our Amazing Jay! would not be with us still… without all of this

Miraculous Modern Voodoo Science!!   

Wish I could say the same for oncologists in Humboldt County.  I went through seven oncologists in seven years.  They just can’t seem to survive around here for too long.  Ah, the collateral damages of war

So.  Somewhere lost in the deep chainsaw-screaming woods  

Somewhere drowning in the polluted depths of chemo…  I made an important decision to hire someone to help me with my little art project.

I think it was around 2011.  But.  My memory is foggy like… Humboldt County weather… like Time Itself… like Humboldt Fog goat cheese

They don’t call it “grey matter” for nothing!

I hired:  Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Though not necessarily in that order.  And not the mythopoetic ones that you may be familiar with.

Joseph was/is a commercial artist, a professional photographer, a fine art printer, a father of a young daughter, a husband, an organic gardener, a chicken grower, a drone pilot, an old home remodeler…
Let’s just say.  Joseph is a very busy man with a plethora of skills which many local artists here in Humboldt County find useful.

What interested me in particular with regards Joseph back in 2011 was his immaculate digital print-making abilities, his broad photographic background, his well-equipped photography studio and… most importantly…  his years of experience with the computer program Adobe Photoshop.

You see.  It became apparent quite early on in my experiments with the digital medium, with the computer, with Photoshop… with the entire process of trying to create an “alternative aesthetic reality”

Well.  How to say it?

How about.  I simply was not born with the “Apple Gene” that appears to be hardwired into the current generation of primate humans.

After attempting to work with Photoshop Elements 8, on and off for a time, on my 2006 Apple desktop computer, it became apparent to me… and especially after Señor Death arrived on my doorstep officially in 2009

I realized one… that… I needed help building my “alternate parallel aesthetic universe” from digital clay… pixelated sand-stone-sky.  

And two… being at least five-ten years away from self-acquiring the skills necessary to erect my grand visionary temple of ecstatic sacred art  

As I was working against a truly profound “dead-line”, in other words

I realized that I needed a workman!  A mechanic!  An atelier!  A well-equipped, modern technologic studio!  

A private army of self-sacrificing devotees.  A trusted banker, if not my own bank.  An international architect.  A renowned master builder.  An entire society of well-established trade guilds and generations of “father-to-son” highly skilled workers.  Not to mention… several hundred years of absolute, rock steady focus and superhuman effort

I needed a vehicle which could deliver… Monstrous Aesthetic Ecstasy!
An instrument which could generate… Overwhelming Sacred Profundity!

Grandiose Truth! and Glorious Beauty! “the likes of which the world has never seen…”

of course, of course

Only, without the insidious priesthood… the sordid religious organization.

All the Capricious and Deceitful, Ego-Maniacal, Self-Serving Mummers!!

I did mention the fact that I can’t stand organized religions!!

Didn’t I?  

Yes, of course…  See the Sermon of the Disgruntled Water Cowboy in the Egg Baskets folder of the Confessions section of OmWork.

The point is.  The point is

Is there any fucking point at all to this insane rant!?!

Is there any point at all to this fucking absurd life!?

What in Hell am I doing here on the ramparts of my own grave spouting this ridiculous… “sound and fury”… nonsense?!

What am I blah-blah-blahing… on and on and on… about?!

I’m no friggin William Shakespeare!!  I’m no bloody Pablo Picasso!!

What was I thinking!?!

What was I thinking hiring a poor overburdened, broken-down, wretched  mule… and Joseph?

What was I imagining I could accomplish?  Going off like Don Quixote chasing windmills in 2011 fresh out of the chemo “killing fields”!!

Trying to resurrect a lost world… a planet doomed to be destroyed at the hands of a mad primate…  an entire species of maniac mammals hell-bent upon pursuing an elusive chimera called “happiness”

Happ  i  ness.. . . .

Cool crisp sheets  a black-  and-   white television
                a working air   con  di   tioner
   on your wed ding   night                          in a quiet room
                 at the Capri Motel
                                        in  D  e  s  tin,    F  l  o  r  ida
                                                               no less than
     in the truly    m u y  ha   p pay   year
                              nineteen-hun  dred   and    si  x t y-  nine

                                                          tee deum te deum....

Jesus, Mary and Joseph…  I lost my mind.

Buddha, Tara and

That’s it.  That is the only possible explanation for this madness.

Or, is it?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

     “Originally bardo referred only to the period between one life and the next, and this is still its normal meaning when it is mentioned without any qualification.  There was considerable dispute over this theory during the early centuries of Buddhism, with one side arguing that rebirth (or conception) follows immediately after death, and the other saying that there must be an interval between the two.  With the rise of mahayana, belief in a transitional period prevailed.  Later Buddhism expanded the whole concept to distinguish six or more similar states, covering the whole cycle of life, death, and rebirth.  But it can also be interpreted as any transitional experience, any state that lies between two other states.  Its original meaning, the experience of being between death and rebirth, is the prototype of the bardo experience, while the six traditional bardos show how the essential qualities of that experience are also present in other transitional periods.  By refining even further the understanding of the essence of bardo, it can then be applied to every moment of existence.  The present moment, the now, is a continual bardo, always suspended between the past and the future.
     “Bardo can have many implications, depending on how one looks at it.  It is an interval, a hiatus, a gap.  It can act as a boundary that divides and separates, marking the end of one thing and the beginning of another; but it can also be a link between the two—it can serve as a bridge or a meeting place that brings together and unites.  It is a crossing, a stepping-stone, a transition.  It is a crossroads where one must choose which path to take, and it is a no-man’s-land belonging to neither one side nor the other.  It is a highlight or peak point of experience and at the same time a situation of extreme tension caught between two opposites.  It is an open space filled with an atmosphere of suspension and uncertainty, neither this nor that.  In such a state, one may feel confused and frightened, or one may feel surprisingly liberated and open to new possibilities where anything may happen.
     “Such moments as these occur continuously in life, unrecognized; this is the inner significance of the bardo states as Trungpa Rinpoche taught.  He spoke of them as periods of uncertainty between sanity and insanity or between the confusion of samsara and the transformation of confusion into wisdom.  “They are the heightened qualities of different types of ego and the possibility of getting off ego.  That’s where bardo starts—the peak experience in which there is the possibility of losing the grip of ego and the possibility of being swallowed up in it.”
     “Wherever there is the death of one state of mind, there is the birth of another, and linking the two there is bardo.  The past has gone and the future has not come yet; we cannot catch that in-between moment, yet it is really all there is.  “In other words, it is present experience, the immediate experience of nowness—where you are, where you’re at.”

pp.53-55  Luminous Emptiness   Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead  Francesca Freemantle