2020 has been a proverbial kick in the dick.
We're living through an international pandemic. The rest of the world seems to have gotten its arms around. The United States is the equivalent of a monkey trying to fuck a greased up football. It's to the point where getting a haircut in 2020 is like buying weed in the '90s. The only difference: instead of waiting in Long's Drugs or Baskin Robbins parking lot, I'm sneaking into bootleg barbershops in people's back yards and asking if they can "clean me up" in the parking lot of the apartment complex. I'm Californian, work at a nonprofit and my wife is a teacher, even if we both blew people for money, we'd not make enough to **buy a home** here. I have been out to eat in public once in six months, in an outdoor dining spot. I can count the number of people I've "violated" social distancing with under five fingers- but it does mean that I don't get to see most of my friends bc most of them aren't local, which means we'd have to travel to see each other, which, in a COVID-19 world, is becoming rarer and rarer.
We're also in what looks to me to be a Race War where only one side is 1) fighting and 2) allowed to be armed, and you can assume from the comment I'm not on the armed side, and I never will be for reasons that may or may not be explained later in this. The racial vocabulary the nation has adopted sound more like 1968 if George Wallace was the incumbent. I half expected a cross burning on the White House Lawn, and **nothing they say** will surprise me. However, I imagine I will be constantly depressed by the framing of my people (protesters are all looters and rioters). The people they show on camera are almost always black and brown people). There's a massive move by the right to frame things in such a way as to create fear into the suburbs- that they won't be safe if there is a move to the left. That happens to be the most diplomatic way to say, "if you let niggers in your neighborhood, it'll go to shit- you won't be safe because you know you don't trust those niggers." Everyone says, "that won't work, it's not 1968" and "the suburbs are already brown..." Being a Black kid who grew up two ways, rural and suburban, I can tell you the suburbs I lived in **didn't want Black and Brown people.** I have no faith that the suburbs are as different as people think they are...which you should read as: "These racist ass tropes will offend people on the left, but as offended as the left will be, this will **resonate** with the right and with WAY WAY WAY more of your white friends that anyone wants to admit.
We need to remember we live in post-reality TV generation, where we can witness something happening in what we perceive as real-time. They specifically crafted and edited to create characters where only people interact. If you doubt me, it may be because your real-life friend groups were mirrors of these edited creations, and for that, I genuinely feel for you....but I digress. The ability to "edit reality" dramatically changes the landscape- because it makes the landscape whatever you want it. It's been about 95 days since George Floyd's death, and there have been peaceful protests all over the country for three months. The conversation about "peaceful" protests and the other kind is one we don't have time for today but know I stand on this principle- **people are move valuable than property.** But as a media framing, you'd assume that the "protests" stopped, and all that is happening is "rioters are burning up the streets," which you can create with editing. As a collective, Americans are not the most thorough at the examination of evidence and have been known not to read the directions and just "wing that shit. We can be easily persuaded to believe what people want us to think rather than what might be right in front of our eyes.
And with all of this happening, I have not had my cancer screening like I'm supposed to- my appointment is next week, but it was supposed to be three months **ago.** I know I should, because I know the benefits of early detection and the detriments of late detection, as I've lived through both of them. Both required surgery and chemotherapy. But being in Stage Cancer one and catching it early meant that chemo was only **fucking miserable and something I'd not wish on my worst enemy** as opposed to many stages past that. I vividly remember what it was like in 1976 when they found cancer late stage, and my treatments were of longer duration and intensity when I remember thinking that this couldn't continue and that if this is what it took to live, then maybe I wasn't supposed to live. I know I was too young to be conceptualizing things as I do now. Still, I do remember asking "if this is what it takes to live why do people want to do it?" which apparently broke my mother's heart and when she started just **telling** me that I was going to live, as opposed to telling me I needed to fight. But none of this is an excuse not to get my screening. The excuse I've been telling myself is COVID- hospitals are risk zones and no need to lock doctors up with "non-essential" medical care. But the reason is way worse, I think.
I'm afraid, and the way life has been going, that I'll go in and find out I have cancer. And I honestly don't think I have it in me to do surgery, radiation, and chemo again. To live in **this** world? To be treated like a second-class citizen if they're nice and like a moving target at a shooting range on their worst days? To live through cancer, you have to have the will to live and the desire to survive, and although they seem like they may be the same thing, they're not. My desire to survive is simple-there are people I love, and dont want to hurt. I love who I know would be hurt if I was gone- I always want to prevent my family and friends' pain. The other half of that is the will to live, and that's internal. Nobody gets to control that will know except you, and it's the one thing that keeps us driving through the hard times, understanding on the other side, it'll be better.
Cancer makes you fundamentally question that.
Many people assume that the fight against cancer is just surgery, radiation, and chemo vs. cancer. Your body is only the Antietam/Western Front/Japanese Theatre/Da Nang that battle is fought on if it were that easy more people might live. The location of the battle has agency, and it **does** play a role. If you've ever had the misfortune of watching cancer take someone, then you may have seen the point when their will to fight, the will to live, is exhausted- it's when the person doesn't have any more fight in them. I feel the need to preface this as not "losing" the battle to cancer; it's merely running out of the gasoline to continue. I've gone through chemo twice in my life. I know how much harder cancer attacked me when I was having doubts about whether this was just how I was supposed to go. In my 20's, a leukemia survivor already and just exhausted- mentally and emotionally, but not more than physically, which was being poisoned from within, and my body reacted to poison as you would expect, which personified itself in my treatments as what it might feel like to be burned alive, except just internally which only meant nobody could see how you were**really** handling it. However, I'm sure screaming in the office and crying at home was pretty accurate. What got me through those times was being able to call Ma Dukes and talk. She'd remind me.
Ma: "Remember what I made you memorize and say every night after your prayers- can you say it now?"t
Me: "Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him. His complexion is perfect gallows." I get it now.
For those who don't remember or recite Shakespeare's The Tempest (read: people who aren't **huge dorks**) it's just a saying that ''he who is born to be hanged will not be drowned," telling me that, **cancer** wasn't the way I was going to go out. It had gotten me through much darker times when my likelihood of survival percentage was determined in the teens, but I survived. So I believed that again, and I survived again. Despite no grounding in anything scientific or empirical, I believed that, almost religiously.
But 2020 has me here losing my religion.
