Mallory's Camera

It’s been a warm winter, and it continues to be a warm winter. One should be grateful except, of course, one is never grateful. I wonder why that is? I suppose it’s some lack of basic religious training.

I’m writing a shitload, only just not here. Although I suppose I should get back to the piano scales. Man does not live by attempts at virtuoso piano performances alone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the cancer diagnosis of someone I don’t actually know. Also Craig next door was just diagnosed with liver cancer. Faithful readers will remember Craig as the redneck neighbor who got drunk last fall and regaled me with a 15 minute monologue about how he just luvs to eat pussy, eating pussy is his favorite thing in the world, take him to McDonalds and he’d order pussy –

Great, I thought, I’ll remember to keep Rutger and the Meezer away from you.

He hit me up for a beer run a couple of weeks ago – his license has been yanked – and since I am oddly passive when it comes to the matter of resisting strong-minded people who want to use me for random errands, I complied.

“Doctors took some blood, think they found something,” he announced cheerfully. “Liver. Want me to come in for a scan.” He’d loaded up like eight bags of empty beer cans into my battered Veedub and was looking forward to getting, as he saw it, something for nothing.

“That can’t be good,” I said.

He shrugged and began to regale me with all the things doctors had found wrong with him and repaired over the past five years. Stints in his heart. Pills for his blood pressure.

“But your liver,” I said. “That’s pretty serious. Think you might have hepatitis?”

“Oh, I got hepatitis,” he said. “Had it for years.”

Last weekend there was a knock on the door. I, of course, was in my filthy flannel nightgown and bathrobe though it was 11 o’clock in the morning, but I figured it was Craig and my unappealing appearance would keep my cats even safer.

I was right.

“They found cancer,” he said.

“Gee, that’s too bad,” I said.

“Janice is really broken up about it,” he said, Janice being the woman who he lives with, who supports him and who he’s not above knocking around when drunkenness morphs into belligerence. “She’s taking it worse than I am.”

“Gee, that’s too bad,” I repeated.

By no stretch of the imagination could Craig and I be considered friends and yet I did feel sorry for him. He’s not a stupid person, in fact he’s quite bright, possessed as well of considerable personal charisma, and as I slammed the door in his face, I thought about another world in which Craig had not fallen early into a life of drug-taking and petty crime but had actually gone to college and done something with his gifts. This is the same world, of course, in which the Little Store continues to thrive and prosper.

MC’s cancer diagnosis is another thing entirely, because MC did do something with his gifts. He had a successful career for years as something the world looks upon quite favorably: He was a TV anchorman! Small market, of course, Oklahoma City. But still: a TV anchorman!!! After he stopped being a TV anchorman – a transition I don’t altogether understand but in my mind I’ve devised a scenario in which they didn’t like his hair – he fell into a deep depression. I could relate. After all, I was once an editor at People Magazine!! The fall from grace is never easy.

But MC spiraled into a deep denial. He never actually processed the rejection, instead reconfiguring it in is mind so that he, in fact, had rejected them because he was a Buddhist who lived without the world’s background music. Well, of course, intellectually we all do that and we’re all correct in that conclusion, to a certain extent. All is vanity. And yet, and yet, and yet… I would see him rationalize his despondency and his depression, rooted in rejection – this rejection and all the rejections that had come before it – and I would think, You’re full of shit, MC.

And now, of course, he literally is full of shit – that’s one of the symptoms of his particular type of cancer. And I am bowled over by the parallel. The old Susan Sontag meme: Illness as metaphor. Who says God is not a graduate student in semiotics?

In other news, I finished A Singular Woman, a biography of Stanley Ann Dunham, the woman who gave birth to Barack Obama. An eccentric woman struggling to bring up her son and at the same time imbue meaning in her life? What’s not to identify with? If anything, his casual rejection of his mother makes me dislike Obama even more.

And I watched Another Earth which I found myself liking a great deal, for its minimalism, for its observation of a relationship that’s just totally wrong and for its refusal to give any kind of logical explanation for the science fiction premise at its core. The film just accepts the illogical science and uses it to create a beautiful image: a great blue spinning planet in the daytime sky.