Tag Archives: Bill Friday

Random String Theory

Or, everything is connected, even if we can’t see any of it.

The “random string” was lifted, by me, from a post by a fellow Pepper in an overnight Instagram story.  Don’t ever think that the eyes of the world aren’t watching, as we all try to write our way through these 30 Days of Creative Night that are National Blog Writing Month. 

It is day 2, and I’m already telling you that it’s hard.

But if that’s what I’m telling you, what am I telling myself?

I’ve done this before.  More than once.  More than twice, actually.  I don’t need to be told, “You can do it, Duffy Moon”.  My awareness is well aware.  However, the ONE BIG DIFFERENCE in this, from every other NanoPoblano is… for 2022… I’ve decided to fly creatively by the seat of my stretchy morning pants.  No advanced plans, no maps, no charts and graphs, no organizational schematic, narrative theme, or any other literary devise with which to cheat/don’t cheat my way through.  This year, my challenge to me is, park your ass in your comfy recliner and do not get up again until you start from scratch and finish the day’s post, and hit SEND.

So, yeah, when I just wrote that I’ve decide to fly creatively, what I should have said was, panic creatively.  Or, if all goes well, treat NanoPoblano 2022 as one great big exercise in undisciplined discipline.  And here’s why.  An infinitymillion years ago… say around, 2009ish… I thought my future in writing was going to be in some kind of long form, fiction or possibly thinly veiled as fiction, semi-autobiographical, fat book you can dog-ear the pages of while you sip coffee and get cinnamon grease all over your fingers at a great big Barnes and Noble near you.  Then, an industrial-sized dump truck of writer’s block landed in my lap and, over the next few months, I found that I could not write anything longer than the back cover of a matchbook, just above the “close cover before striking” warning.

Uh-huh.  In other words, I became a poet.  Or as my earliest online biography stole from Spike of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a “bloody awful poet”.  Also, just as ironically hilarious, I lost every bit discipline that I had trained my scribbler’s brain to muscle memory a story out of, on deadline.  I became a prose-crusted cliché, waiting for some muse to blow inspiration up my metaphorical skirt, before I could get any words onto the page.

And like any life that is totally devoid of discipline, whether that discipline involves mixing in a salad, drinking 8 glasses of water a day, or trying to regulate exercise, or sleep, or get enough fiber to adequately poop, an undisciplined life, an undisciplined writer’s life, is a very uncomfortable life when all you want to do is crap out thoughts, like magic from your fingertips as they clackety-clack over a keyboard, but you can’t.  Not anymore.  And you know that to change that, it is going to take some kind of dramatic action on your part to change what has become more than just a pattern, but a life.

Hello, November.

Remember yesterday, when I said that this NanoPoblano was going to be as much about you as it was about me?  Well, I mean it.  So, here’s what I’m asking today.  In the comments, tell me what change or changes you would like National Blog Posting Month to make in YOU.  As a writer, a reader, or just a human being.  

I can’t wait to see your answers.

An Enormous Eggnog Latte

Well, I’m back.

I was once told that the most important thing in life is just showing up.  I stopped showing up for things back in 2020.  Most of us did.  For me, that was the last time I shot my shot here in November, for NaBloPoMo, or what also goes by NanoPoblano in that portion of the bloggy-sphere I affix myself to.  I stopped showing up, not because of some hardship, or an unavoidable change in plans, but simply because I got bored.

Bored with my own story.

I discovered that it’s easy to get bored with your own story, because not only are you the one telling it, you’re also the one who lived it.  And I don’t know about you, but once I’ve lived a something, it really better have been damn spectacular to get me to relive it again.  And while my 2020 was different than what I expected it to be… and whose wasn’t?… what it was not, is spectacular. 

In brief, mine was UNEMPLOYMENT, PANDEMIC, CANCER.  Oh, and the Dodgers won the World Series, which was not boring, to me, but there was no way I was going to write for 30 consecutive days about the Dodgers winning the World Series for the first time in 32 years.

You’re welcome.

So, in November, 2020, after 17 straight days of trying to, in different and entertaining ways, tell the story of my “funny cancer”, I got bored.  I got bored, and quit. 

Also, you’re welcome.

So now, what is there for me to write about that I won’t find boring, and you, by extension, won’t find boring before I do?  I’m not sure.  Yet.  I know my life is different than it was on November 17 of 2020.  I’ve moved three times, the last time, all the way from California to New York, and I could probably write at least 10 posts about how, on April Fool’s Day, the day I arrived on Long Island, I couldn’t understand why the thousands and thousands of trees along the 495 looked like barren telephone poles, rising from the mud on each side of the big road.  But, guaranteed, that would bore you and me, so before I start down that literary goat path… yeah, anyway… New York.  And, after the leaves began to make their appearance later in the spring, I realized that I was, without really planning on it, writing another collection of poetry.  But this time, things felt different, they read different, when I read them back to myself, aloud.  I mean, it was my words, my voice, but some shit had shifted from the last time I put things together between the covers of book.

And maybe that’s what I’m actually doing here now.  I’m saying “Hi” to you again, whoever you is, this time.  This time, when I might have something to say that means more to you than “funny cancer”, or some hyper-broody poetry, written a decade ago, by someone who thought they had it all figured out, then figured out that they hadn’t. 

But enough about me, or we’ll both get bored before day 17.

This time around, besides sharing me, I want to get to know you.  Because, since this blog life is more about sharing than it is about what I had for breakfast… which, so far, is two cups of black coffee and one enormous, homemade eggnog latte… but you didn’t need to know that.  This time around, I will be writing, sure, but I will also be reading.  I will be reading you.

And that’s enough about me for today.

But do me a favor.  After you’ve read this, or, I don’t know, after you get bored with reading this and quit, leave me a word about yourself in the comments.  Just a line about who you are, and why you’re here.  And tell me what you don’t think is boring about yourself.  Because that’s going to make a good first day for both of us.

And with all that, I’ll see you tomorrow.

Some Backstory: “There Will Be Blood”

Silence. Followed by,

“That’s not good.”

I suppose there are a lot of things a person can say when an innocuous trip to the bathroom turns into a toilet-full of blood. In my case, due to many years in the church, and a still-in-tact holy reverence for not wanting to piss-off God at a time of crisis by exclaiming things like,

“Awww, shit!”

or,

“Ohhh, fuck no!”

I tend to go to that inward, generally understated place of expression. That place where I take into myself all the external control of an airline pilot who knows his plane is going down, but still believes that if he acts calmly and rationally, he and everyone sitting behind him aren’t going to die.

Yep, I’m THAT guy.

Even with THIS.

Although, I’d never had a THIS before.

So, about the blood. This was the first symptom. Turns out that there are only a few possibilities for what “blood in the urine” is a symptom of. But since I had not experienced extreme urethral pain during urination (possible kidney stones), or an extreme beating in the ring like Apollo Creed’s kid experienced at the hands of Ivan Drago’s kid in the movie Creed II, that left the only other high-percentage possibility for what “blood in the urine” is a symptom of. Renal Cell Carcinoma, or in plain language, kidney cancer.

This all began at 5:21 pm, on a Thursday in August. In the meantime, through all the exchanging of emails with my doctor, and appointments made for lab work to be done on Saturday, I spent the next 36 hours alone with my thoughts, and peeing blood. Then, on the morning I was to head for the lab, the blood in my urine stopped.

Just in time for the pain in my kidney to start.

Pain that got so bad so fast, I skipped the lab appointment altogether, and went straight to the ER. This was the second symptom.

Side note. Let me take a moment here to affirm that hospitals really do have the best drugs. Because by 10 am on Saturday, the pain that woke me up 5 hours earlier was all the way gone. By 11 am, all the blood and urine the lab was supposed to have helped itself to at 8 am was drawn into vials or drained into cups . By noon, I was being gurneyed into the imaging room for a CT scan. And before 1 pm, I was being told by the ER doc that the CT scan showed a mass on my right kidney that was troubling enough for him to schedule a second CT before I could even change out of the grippy socks on my feet and the hospital johnny, flap open around my ass.

Finally, as I was riding the gurney back through the halls from ER to imaging, that was when the third symptom hit.

The third symptom was fear.

(c) copyright 2020 William S. Friday