Not a great weekend. Just one of those things: tired all the time, low-level fever, blood sugar way high (in the 200s). Doc Onc1 said I would have days like this…beyond the 2-3 days after chemo regimen. Something that has always helped didn’t do that much today: a workout at the gym. That has almost always brought blood sugar counts down, but not this time. In addition to that, I was taken off metformin after the last MRI since it’s not good with the chemicals they use in that process.
I see the nurse again tomorrow for regular weekly blood work and I suspect I’ll be back on metformin. I just may have insulin added to my “as needed” cocktail of drugs. This is, as I said earlier, something the OncDocs said would probably happen.
So, I have been watching and catching up with “True Blood” (the blood work reminds me) episodes for the past few days and screamed and shouted as UT squeaked past Brigham Young and will watch the Cowboys tonight as they take on the Jets in the 9/11 game in New York.
I have mostly been listening to memorial coverage on NPR and not watching television. I simply do not need to have things I remember so well, images that are burned into my brain, revisited in HD. My great hope is that we will soon end the juvenile temper tantrum that sent us into Iraq (not even remotely understandable) and Afghanistan (somewhat more understandable ten years ago…but not any more!).
The sheets are rumpled, pillows ragged from the night.
"Tell me there is some end in sight," she says, "something
I cannot see or hear." We have awakened to the news:
jets dropping tons of bombs on Kandahar, two young Baptists,
rescued, confessing that they have maybe spoken a little
about Jesus, have, possibly, broken the word they gave not
to speak of the man who was a truthsayer. No irony, only
a deep-seated desire to spread some other person's truth,
to spread a "gospel" which means truth. Sly grins, such joy.
"Tell me we are bombing people for some great truth, for
more than a matter of simple vengeance." Two testaments,
so many words for truth, for gospel, so many testimonies
they ricochet across the news and through old texts searched
for single lines to support whatever we might choose. "Is He
on our side?" she asks. "Does His blood stream in the firmament
just behind the cover of B-52s? The sky seems so red, crimson."
We watch the stream of refugees, see men who look alike, some
Hunched over, dragging others. They all hold the same old book.
So many dead. Towers fall. I have no words, only images.
The pictures flicker, fade out to a voice over telling us that
we are winning, the evil ones are on the run. We see what
they run from: people wearing turbans, long beards,
flowing brown and gray robes out of those same old books.
The caves are full of scrolls, old words from the beginning
of something that stirred in the deserts and the passes long
before we crossed an ocean. Listen: birds once flew here-
ravens and doves A man lived here who brought a dream.
BMWs, low-financing, safety-tested. New cereal with old grains
blended in secret. Humongous sale, DVDs, laptops. The cows want
me to eat chicken, they appear on billboards and T.V. A woman with
a wondrous navel hawks the latest light beer, her hips move
in ways not often seen. We bomb culture on a land already
rife with culture. We are killing people. In the fields, some
young woman gleans the wheat, selects small kernels to feed
herself, her baby, her aging mother. She makes her way through mine
fields, brushes the dust away. The detritus of another war.
A small boy kicks a ball, another bounces it from foot to foot then
uses the side of his foot to send it whistling to another. They laugh,
run with joy down dusty streets, bang the ball from foot to head.
They are not yet dead. I had supposed they were, that some bomb,
smart or dumb, would land in the streets of Kandahar. Into the streets
of death, children thunder, backward and forward, screams rise to the sky,
drown out for some brief moment, the roar, the shriek, the sound
of bright machinery. The great game sweeps overhead. And I am dumb,
can neither speak nor write. Clouds of dust obscure the sun.
(orig. published in The Texas Observer)
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