Last May, I used this blog to announce to the world that I had developed a very sudden and statistically rare case of testicular cancer. I had surgery, had the thing removed. Which remains, to me, a totally unacceptable way to lose a testicle. Maybe at the tip of a pirate’s saber, or while wrangling a giant octopus deep under the ocean, those’d be okay. But a regular old organized cellular rebellion — fuck that.

I wrote a series of posts that talked about my condition, what I was facing, and how I was holding up. It seemed only natural to me at the time, the best way to keep friends and family posted while I was dealing with something I really didn’t want to talk about on the telephone any more than necessary. Folks commended me for my bravery, for my sense of black humor and optimism, and told me how well I seemed to be healing up.

And yeah, in a way I was healing up. But in this other way, I really, really, wasn’t.

As my body was healing up, my mind was slowly donning a space suit made out of 400 pounds of wet laundry that never dried up and never, ever came off. Food all tasted the same, and I’d find myself flying into sudden rages when individual air molecules struck my skin.

Every night I’d lie awake and just look at the dark air above my bed, watching the little glowing fireflies that live in my retinas while an enormous black bird whispered very, very destructive and completely logical things into my ear.

Actually, I have a story about that part, which you can see here — the audio’s a little problematic, but you should get the gist:

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My grandmother’s real name is Helen, but everyone in my family calls her Daro. It’s one of the first words I ever said, apparently — I just pointed at her and yelled it out and it stuck, simple as that.

Daro is 95 years old. She lied about her age her whole life until she turned 90, and then she started telling EVERYBODY. She’s a relentless self-promoter, a tireless artist, creator, and outsider poet. And man, she’s full of wisdom that she does not mind sharing at all.

Here’s some classic wisdom she shared with me when I visited her over Labor Day weekend:

We were sitting at the dinner table eating a home-cooked meal. Sort of. She proudly announced to me “I never use the oven anymore, Jeffrey. I just do everything up here in the microwave now, and it’s great!” We had some microwaved vegetable soup with a salad of romaine leaves covered with canned pears, and canned peaches. “Try some of the dressing I invented just tonight, Jeffrey,” she told me, all excited. “I came up with it myself. It’s mayonnaise with pineapple juice mixed in!”
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Carl’s evil army dies a little more each week. Fast-moving doctors toppled the heart of Carl’s vicious empire and now the stragglers are huddled in their bunkers reading the tarot to make the simplest decisions and waiting for orders that aren’t likely to come. Perfectionist that I am, I’m not going to be happy until the last lonely soldier scratches out a suicide note with its nerve-chewed nails and gargles a muzzle full of lead.

My doctors are a hard-hitting unit of Inglourious Basterds that are willing to drop in and detonate at the slightest hint of an insurgency which is harsh and excessive, but come on — this isn’t 4-square in the schoolyard here.

For those of you that are rolling your eyes and thinking “Jesus, easy on the hooptedoodle, Simmermon”:

Now that my cancerous non-seminoma is out, the markers it releases in my blood have dropped dramatically, and continue to decline each week. My doctors refuse to take chemo off the table, which is smart both from a scientific and legalistic ass-covering perspective. I’m recovering pretty well from the actual surgical procedure, but it’s a three-steps-forward, one-step back kind of thing.

Some days I can walk fine and hang out a little bit. Other days the incision burns and everyone on earth is a complete barking bozo and everyone needs to just SHUT UP, JESUS CHRIST.

And then there’s this …
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I lay in bed in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, staring up at the ceiling and watching the sunlight fade from the room. I couldn’t nap, couldn’t rest. A creature had taken up residence in my throat and chest. I imagined it to be black and very hairy, with large leathery wings. It wasn’t quite a bird and wasn’t quite a mammal, just this hairy winged thing, like a shaggy, greasy bat.

It moved around, pacing between my uvula and heart, shuffling and trying to stretch its wings. I imagined what it would feel like when the shaggy bat burst past my lips and lifted off, cutting ragged figure-8s around the paper lamps hanging from my ceiling.

Smithfield Ham is a meat like no other. A close cousin to Italian prosciutto, Smithfield ham is the meat of peanut-fed hogs, salt-cured and hickory smoked for a minimum of six months in the corporate limits of Smithfield, Virginia — home to my grandparents, aunt and uncle. Smithfield ham is drier and more thickly cut than supple, subtle prosciutto. Compared to Smithfield ham, prosciutto is the damp rag used to wipe a hog farmer’s work boots.

In a purely physical sense, Smithfield ham is terrible for you. The only way it could harm your heart more from a medical perspective would be if a surgeon were to slice your chest open and manually pack your arteries with wads of the stuff. From an emotional perspective, it is Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, love and forgiveness and bedtime stories all in one salty, fat-filled bite. Draped over a handmade biscuit with butter, it is also Prozac, Lithium and THC.

The bat flapped tireless, frustrated laps up and down my throat all last night, all this morning, in the cab to La Guardia, on the plane and all the way through the airport. It wouldn’t come out, and it was getting hairier by the hour, so hairy it got heavy when it settled on my chest to tongue its wet wings clean.

I keep waiting for the real grief to happen, but I just feel numb. I feel like I’m made out of balsa wood or something — soft and flexible, but easily shattered. All I want to do is read. I am an Easy Reader of epic proportions on a normal day, but now I am positively EATING words. I finished “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the plane and started right in on Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.” I was able to take a break from reading and joke around with my dad and sister while we shopped for funeral suits this afternoon, but after reading Pop-Pop’s obituary in the local paper, I couldn’t stop. It was all I could do not to wad the newspaper up and stuff it in my mouth — knocked out the front page, local section, comics and started in on the classifieds by the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house.

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Everything’s unwrapped, the champagne’s gone flat, and even the hangovers are over. While my holidays were full of warmth and good cheer and that uniquely Simmermon brand of stressed-out love, I’m glad to be entering that great grey yawn of real winter. Running around outside SUCKS until mid-April and when I have my daily panic that my life is slipping past, I can look out the window and feel fine about having a laptop strapped to my face. In the factory-blended oatmeal that is an East Coast winter, every numbing day that ends like all the rest is at least one day closer to spring.

My New Years’ was spent having cocktails and a home-cooked meal with my girlfriend, best friend, his wife, and their new baby. My New Years’ celebrations in years past have also involved copious amounts of booze, screaming and vomiting, but this years’ was different.

While the first decade or so of David Allen Browne’s life is going to be happy and full of love, he’s going to have no choice but to become grim, selfish and willfully ignorant in order to rebel against his hilarious, brilliant and loving parents once he hits puberty. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it before it’s time to take the SATs.

Christmas was different, too. I brought my girlfriend home, for one thing. It’s a big deal for me to bring somebody home for a number of reasons:

• My sister and I have pretty well inoculated our parents against cultural/racial hangups, accidental profanity, body art and punk-influenced fashion choices … all known causes of heart failure to conservative parents. My mom can even say “fuck” without making a face now. But my family can smell a bullshit heart from a running mile, and the false politeness that ensues is deeply embarrassing. Nobody makes it across the threshold of the Simmermon unless they’re top shelf for real.
• Also, my grandmother kind of hates anyone that me and my uncle have ever dated. She comes around eventually, but I can take no responsibility for any eye-rolling, interrupting, or ignoring until she does. Folks that can’t handle it don’t make the cut.
• The relationship must be about much more than the physical. As I mentioned before, my family can sniff out a bullshit heart. In a small house with two parents, a sister, two lively and curious dogs and a “no ring, no shared bedroom” policy, that physical side is going to have to take a little holiday of its own.

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Like any decent American, I am ashamed and embarrassed by my country.I spent decades thinking we were the good guys until Bush and crew came and ruined us, turned us into a bunch of heavy-handed fratboys with no consciences or consequences.

Except maybe not. I wasn’t around for Vietnam, but Kurt Vonngut, Jr. sure was, and his words on American torture in Vietnam are as true and heartbreaking today as they were when he wrote them 36 years ago. I first read the following piece in “Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons,” a marvelous collection of Vonnegut’s essays and speeches.

Originally published in the New York Times in 1971, “Torture and Blubber” mirrors my disgust with our country and a sadness for the entire human race — a disappointment I thought was new and mildly fashionable.

The piece is short and well worth your time — in its entirety after the jump …

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Behind that adorable black face, behind those sweet mournful eyes lies the soul of an unapologetic shit-eater.

For real.

That is not a metaphor. She’s gone from stealing fruitcake and puking it under the tree last Christmas to full-blown coprophagia, gobbling it right up from between dead leaves on the ground at night. Cold and hard or piping hot and still steaming, she doesn’t care and she does it quick, too, too quick to catch sometimes. She just can’t help herself.

Layla’s my sister Jess’s dog, half-beagle and half lab with incurable separation anxiety. She was taken from her mother too young, and consequently has massive incurable anxiety. Jess has tried training camps, reading dog books, everything. Nothing works. Every time Jess is gone for a little while, Layla overindulges in something she shouldn’t: fruitcake, shoes, a purse, now fecal matter.

All training methods exhausted, my sister now just spoils the dog completely rotten, talking to her in a high, squealing voice, carrying her in her arms like a large infant and allowing the dog to “kiss” her directly on the lips.

A few weeks ago, Layla vomited a five-inch turd onto my parents’ living room carpet. My mom called Jess up immediately to report the news, saying only

“Your dog has vomited a massive turd onto the carpet. Yes, a turd. Go ahead and let her lick your lips again. As a concerned mother, I hope you’ve got good health insurance,”

and hung up.

Such was the climate of the household this Thanksgiving. Everyone was exhausted and frustrated with this new habit, this repugnant fetish for a newly repulsive creature that’s far too cute to kick.

Jess and I spent Thanksgiving day over at my aunt and uncle’s taking care of my grandparents. They moved in sometime last summer for a few weeks while my grandpa recuperated from an operation, and it’s become clear that they’re in no shape to live independently. My grandpa’s 88 years old with congestive heart failure, kidney failure and diabetes. He needs a walker to get around now and can’t lift his legs by himself.

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My friend Richard sent me these photos tonight, saying

“I don’t know where these came from but they’re going around the
net. If you haven’t seen them already, I know you will enjoy them. Don’t ask questions, just marvel.”

And marvel I did. My God. Have a look – ingredients and buildup here, the shocking conclusion after the jump.

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So it goes.
Originally uploaded by egg..

Kurt Vonnegut is dead and now I am unstuck in time.

It is 1989, my thirteenth summer. I am visiting my Aunt Kay and Uncle Dave on their honey farm in South Bend, Indiana. It’s a form of indentured servitude to eccentric, loving masters. Life out on the honey farm is probably really boring, but I wouldn’t know. I’m busy reading.

“The library’s pretty good out here in the sticks,” Aunt Kay says. “Nobody else out here reads, so we get the good stuff pretty much to ourselves.” On one of many trips to the library in town, I discover Slaughterhouse Five. “Oh, Vonnegut,” Aunt Kay says, a little surprised. “I think he’s a good fit for you.” I start the book in the parking lot on the way home and do not speak for the next 24 hours.

I sneak in a few pages in the truck on the way out to the beehives with my Uncle Dave. I _eat_ the pages while he gets out our netted hats (they are simultaneously ridiculous and ominous) , readies the bee smoker, gets my gloves out of the box in the back. He doesn’t make me get out until it’s time to hit the hives. “I know how it is,” I remember him saying. “If you read real fast, you get to find out what happens next. But if you take your time, it lasts longer.”

I do both, my eyes running laps over and over each page. I know what the Tralfamadorian ship sounds like as it hovers over Billy Pilgrim’s back yard: it sounds like hives full of sleepy, smoke-addled bees.

I read more while walking slowly to the car that night on the way to the only pizza restaurant in town, read it at the table and in the car on the way home in ambient light from slowly strobing streetlights. Once we get outside town, it’s too dim to read. I sit back and imagine saucers, war, time travel.

A beehive is little more than a series of stacked boxes (called supers) containing frames for bees to build honeycomb on. When the hives are full the frames are bloated, pregnant with honey and larvae. Hardcore vegans think that eating honey is cruel because it is an animal byproduct. Hardcore vegans are a uniformly joyless bunch, and I would imagine that they have never had someone else masterfully clean their apartments in an afternoon. I am providing that service to these bees, and in their tiny little hearts they are grateful.

To clean these cramped, boxy little apartments, I stack the supers in a tiny room containing a large, heated bowl with a hole in the bottom, an electrically heated knife, a centrifuge and a DustBuster. After supper I enter the room and shut the door, prying the frames out of the super with a crowbar. A few addled bees inevitably escape. They’re no real threat until they come to their senses. Their stupor allows me to take the electric knife and shave both sides of a frame bloated with honeycomb into the heated bowl. There, the beeswax melts and rises to the top, allowing heat-thinned honey to trickle through a hose and into tanks on the floor below me. Then I load the frames into a centrifuge, spinning the remaining honey out and into the same tanks below.

I sit on a wooden box while the honey twirls, reading Slaughterhouse Five in one hand and sucking bees into the Dustbuster with the other. Wisely, Uncle Dave pays me per pound of extracted honey rather than by the hour.

Late at night, when all the honey is twirled, I go into the yard release the bees. I stop reading long enough to stare up into the Indiana sky. A storm system is moving in, erasing the stars one by one.

The next morning, over honey-slathered slices of thick Amish toast from Uncle Dave’s personal toaster (he keeps one by his feet at the breakfast table), I am asked to mow a path to the hives. The grass is too wet from last night’s storm, so I sit on the porch and wait for it to dry. And while I wait, I finish Slaughterhouse Five and start it over again.

Now it’s April 12, 2007. Kurt Vonnegut is dead, and so are most of the bees. So it goes …

Hear Vonnegut reading an excerpt from Slaughterhouse Five.

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