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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Few things are sadder than when someone takes something intrinsically whimsical and attempts to surgically remove all of its joy and innocence, subsuming it to a cold and calculating corporate structure.  With a mission statement to “…unite and support businesses that offer value-added balloon designs featuring Qualatex products,”  it sounds like the Qualatex Balloon Network does just that.

Lucky for those of us who still have souls, they have provided us with a whole new type of joy in the form of this bizarre vintage balloono-facist training video:



(Via Everything Is Terrible.)

Popularity: 4% [?]

My dad’s got cancer. I just found out tonight. It’s not as bad as it could be, fairly common in men his age. The doctor figures a 76 percent survival rate 5 years after treatment. That’s decent odds, I suppose, but 34 percent of a whole, whole lot of people is still a whole lot of people. And I would really rather my father not be one of them.

And there’s gonna be some treatment, too. Invasive stuff. There will be surgery and radiation and the planting of radioactive seeds deep in his body. If movies and television have taught me anything, it is that these radioactive seeds may cure this cancer, but they may also turn my father into the Swamp Thing.

We just lost my grandpa last month. My grandmother’s 94, and while she is doing well for her age, nobody in their mid-nineties is doing awesome. My Dad’s mom is out in a home in Indiana, depressed and making the nurses hate her and life will not stop getting realer and realer every week for any of us, ever.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get into my bed and watch Indiana Jones search for the Holy Grail with his dad — and wish like hell I could give my Dad a sip from that cup.

Popularity: 1% [?]