Strip 3. Please send feedback and comments!  Rabraham1@cox.net

So here's strip 2 of my comic strip. Since I have no space limitations here, I have not sized it to comic strip size yet. It's easier to read this way!

Thanks to my new art teacher, Gail Pean, who is helping me learn to make it prettier!

If you like it, please tell me! Suggestions welcome, too. Rabraham1@cox.net  Thanks for reading it!

I apologize for the quality. I'll be working on improving it. I'd love your feedback, by email or comment below. rabraham1@cox.net.

I liked this picture and the thought that accompanied it, so I thought I'd post it here.

"Dreaming about the days when he was just a mere sapling."

There are lots of wild and weird and wonderful things about life, but the weirdest by a long shot is dreams.  I think all of us have woken up many times in our lives and, while still in that nether world between sleep and awake, said, “Wow, that was a strange one”, before reaching over to turn off the alarm.  Then almost always the dream is lost forever – though sometimes we revisit it later to find that we are angry at someone we meet  because of a role they had played in a dream! At which point we realize we’d been scowling at them with no reasonable explanation: “Sorry, I was just pissed off at you because of what you did in my dream last Tuesday.” Better to just slink off, red-faced, and disappear.

I never remember my dreams, except for a few recurring ones that have been with me a long time and have become part of my library. Once long ago I tried doing the things that make it possible to remember them, namely writing down every detail I could recall as soon as I awoke, but it was too much trouble and I felt like I wasn’t sleeping as well because I was thinking about it. These days I don’t seem to dream at all; I take Ativan, a sedative, to help me get to sleep, and it seems to white them out. Last night I felt like I could get to sleep without a pill, and I did have several dreams, though I don’t recall any of them. But it did inspire me to start this essay.

I’m sure medical science has a thorough explanation of the whys and hows and wherefores of dreams: what they are, why we have them, and so forth. With a small amount of effort, I could do a little research and find out the prevailing thinking. But I’m lazy, and frankly, I like my own fabrication of what they are and what they mean. (Similar to my fabrications about politics, economics, and government.)

Basically, I believe dreams are just random stories that are generated by the accidental and arbitrary paths that electrical impulses take as they pinball around our brains. I visualize it like droplets running down a window in the rain, connecting with blots already there and making conduits along the way. I’m sure this has no basis in truth, but I don’t care. It makes more sense to me than the notion that dreams are expressions of our unconscious selves and have great meaning about our true desires. Or maybe I just don’t like what my dreams would say about me if I made the effort to listen. But that’s my truth, and I’m going to hold onto it.

I know that psychiatry takes great stock in dreams, and that interpreting dreams is a standard practice in the field and the specialty of many practitioners. However, it seems to me that it is just a technique they use to have something to talk about. So when the therapist says “This dream means that you are angry at your mother because she liked your sister more than you by several orders of magnitude”, well, who is going to argue with that? It seems to me that any competent therapist has a good idea of what is wrong with her patient within the first session; explaining it via dream interpretation then yields them ten more years of billable hours.

Here are a few of my recurring dreams. Really they are just dream themes; I don’t think it’s possible to remember an entire dream. That would require volumes. But much of it would be monotonous and redundant – doesn’t it seem like dreams backtrack and stay stuck in the same place for long periods of time? Mine do.

One of my recurrent themes has me as the 12^th man on the Chicago Bulls basketball team. I’m sort of a reincarnation of John Paxson: short, slow, and white. Though he is actually about 6”2”, so he’s only relatively short. Anyway, I don’t get to play much, which certainly relates to my actual career, but when I do get in, I generally make a few dunks as well as jump shots. I always loved basketball, even though I can’t jump over a sheet of paper and I can barely palm a grapefruit. So, clearly this is one of my wildest dreams.

(Aside: the story goes that when Nick Saban, the very successful Alabama football coach, was standing on the podium next to his wife after the Crimson Tide won the National Championship, he turned to her and said, “Honey, in your wildest dreams did you ever think we’d be standing here?” To which she replied, “I’ve got news for you dear – you are not in my wildest dreams”.)

Another frequent but less pleasant dream has me driving on a long suspension bridge. The bridge keeps getting steeper and steeper, and I reach a point when I can no longer see more than 50 feet in front of me… then 25… then 10, and then I finally go hurtling off the end of the bridge and flying into the air. At that point I usually wake up in a bit of a panic before I hit the water. This theme doesn’t seem to relate to anything in my real life, but maybe one of my brothers threw me off a balcony when I was two.

My favorite recurring dream has me has floating down the inter-coastal waterway from Va. Beach to Miami on a large raft. Except it’s not really like the inter-coastal waterway, it’s more like a wide river with lots of vegetation and big houses perched on the banks. The houses are all brightly lit, and people are partying and dancing wildly, with a great spirit and joy. Those of us on the boat, and I don’t know who you are, are also in joyous moods as we drift swiftly south with the current, enjoying our tropical drinks next to a bonfire. The trip takes us a single night, so I guess the current is pretty fast in this dream! I also have no idea what the basis for this dream might be, but I always wake from it with a sense of calm and well-being.

A dream I used to have a lot has me in a fistfight with one or both of my brothers. I always beat the hell out of them, of course; but then in most of my dreams I’m the one who wins the violent confrontations. Is that true for all of us? I suppose when we lose the battles, we wake up in terror and find it hard to get back to sleep. At least that’s what happens in all of the cop novels. So maybe its nature’s way of protecting us, letting us win when we need our rest. Anyway, I don’t have that one much anymore; I guess I’ve forgiven them for all their past transgressions.

It seems like one of my most frequent recurring dreams has me going back to repeat business school and getting a second chance to start my career. I’m over twice as old as any of the other students, and the professors regard me with quizzical looks, and ask me to present all of the cases. I feel very out of place and embarrassed, and I wonder if I’ll be able to do this again. The meaning of this dream is no mystery; I do have regrets about my career, and often wonder what I would do if I could do it all over again. Unfortunately the dream doesn’t shed any light on that. If I could do it all over again I’d probably make the same mistakes, they all seemed like the right ideas at the time.

I know I have more recurring dreams, but those are the ones I could recall for this essay. Maybe there will be a part two sometime when I remember a few more. It’s likely that when this nightmare that is currently occupying my wakeful hours is over I’ll probably have some new and very interesting dreams. Or maybe I’ll just dream about food all the time – and then actually be able to eat it. That would be quite a nice ending to this story, and proof that dreams can come true. It can happen to you!

What’s the best thing in life? That’s an easy one, right: it’s the love we share with our family and friends. What’s the second best thing? That’s a little harder. But if I didn’t think so before, I have become convinced over the past few months that the second place winner is clearly… food.

Food has become a problem for me. Because of chemotherapy, my taste buds are whacked and everything tastes metallic and a little nauseating. At first this occurred only right after chemo, but as my treatments have progressed, it lasts almost until the next round. Also, when I do eat, my digestive processes don’t work very well. I’ll spare the details, but whether it is because of the tumor or the chemotherapy, I have several permutations of abdominal discomfort not known to the ordinary man. Finally, I have issues with the eventual consequences of eating; there is no need to elaborate further on that.  To sum it all up, the beginning is unsatisfying, the middle is uncomfortable, and the end is unmentionable.

I also can’t drink. Now I know that alcohol is a sin and a vice and probably an abomination as well, but it is also just plain fun. And if you are drinking good wine, it is wickedly delicious and lots of fun. But I can’t drink any of it anymore; even one drink makes my heart start pounding, my stomach start churning, and my head start spinning (okay, the Percocet may have something to do with that last one). If I try to sleep, I get headaches and sweats, and I wake up at 1:13 am in abject misery. Apparently my compromised organs can no longer process alcohol.

I know that everyone enjoys eating good food and drinking good wine, and many people make a religion out of it. But I would still suggest that most of us take food for granted. I’m sure in my own case well over half of my meals were of the “just grab something and get on with it” variety. Even then, there was still pleasure to be derived from the most pedestrian of meals: a peanut butter sandwich on potato bread, a bowl of granola with raisins tossed in, or the most underrated delight of all, a hot dog meticulously prepared by throwing it in the microwave. Did I always take the time to relish these delicacies? I’m sure I did not; eating was just a necessary and sometimes inconvenient part of my day.

Now I dream about food; I’m picturing things that might taste good almost every night and every morning. Today when I awoke at 4:30 am, which I unfortunately do all too often, I got up and made the Huevos Rancheros that I had been visualizing for the previous hour of wakeful dreaming. Given that it was the last regular day before chemotherapy, it tasted pretty damn good, too.  Other things I dream about include pasta with red sauce, sushi, French toast, bacon, lobster bisque, sausage, and many others that don’t come to mind immediately. Not that any these are actually going to taste good in my current condition, but my deluded and drugged brain thinks they are going to. And, God, what I would give to be able to enjoy a top-flight bottle of red wine! Pinot Noir is a frequent visitor in my food dreams.

(Aside: another effect of chemotherapy is that it completely wipes out testosterone. So, that gives me lots of additional dream capacity to devote to food and wine that might have been directed elsewhere previously.)

Despite food not tasting very good, I’m still eating as much as I possibly can. Foods with strong taste, like spicy foods and fishy foods and pungent foods, can bypass the metallic taste long enough that I want to eat them, until my stomach is full enough to start ringing the alarms. So somehow I’ve managed to keep my weight loss to about 15 pounds, most of which evaporated during the first round of chemo. I’m committed to being a good eating soldier and hang on to my hard-earned fat. I’m going to need it.

I’ve always loved and been amazed and awed by grocery stores. Consider that for almost the entire history of humans, nearly all of our energies were devoted to growing, killing, or finding enough food. Now we just walk through automatic sliding doors to find the greatest accumulation of victuals we can possibly imagine. And, it comes from all over the world, fresh (sometimes!) and ready for our immediate pleasure. Furthermore, there’s a new generation of stores, the Whole Foods and Wegmans and Fresh Markets, which take things to a new level of gastronomic delight with their cornucopia of prepared foods. Next time you are in a modern superdupermarket, take a minute to stop and think about the abundance all around you – it really is a miracle.

(Another aside: a few years ago we had a five day power outage, and by day two there was nothing left on any shelf of any local supermarket. I shudder to think about how dependent we are on our food distribution system, and how quickly chaos would ensue in a real emergency.)

Another remarkable thing about food is what Americans actually eat. We have been trained by our culture to think that going to a fast food restaurant and getting a 1000 calorie megaburger with a bucket-full of deep fried potatoes and a twelve-scoop-of-sugar soft drink is a normal and appropriate way to eat! And we do this on a daily basis! I don’t know the actual figures, but last I heard the average American goes to McDonald’s seven times a day. (Maybe I should look that up.) And what people buy to eat at home is not much better: boxed foods full of sugar and preservatives and dyes. If you put most of this stuff in front of a 19^th century farmer, she would probably have no earthly idea what she was looking at. How did we ever do this to ourselves? And why hasn't our hyper-informed society woken up to this?

In defense of many of my obese fellow Americans, I will say that I realized recently that eating good food is a lot more expensive than eating bad food. Fruits and vegetables cost many times more than pre-packaged starches and sugary drinks on a per calorie basis. So if you are not fortunate enough to have a good income, you may not have much choice about how to fill your children’s stomachs. This seems to me one of the sadder consequences of the increasing disparity of wealth in America. Although I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, and probably beyond my comprehension and pay grade.

 (Yet another aside: when I lived in New York I would sometimes go play basketball at the playground. All around me were shirtless young men, mostly African-Americans, whose torsos looked like they had been sculpted from hardened steel. Many of them would be munching from bottomless bags of potato chips and chasing them down with a Yoo-Hoo or a Pepsi, suggesting to me that that was their regular diet. I still don’t quite get how they could mold such statues from garbage.)

Finally, I wonder how much my own diet was a factor in my current predicament. Over the past thirty years or so, I’ve generally maintained a pretty healthy diet: mostly fresh foods, probably too much meat and starch, not enough veggies and fruit, maybe too many sweets. But generally pretty good stuff. Before I got married it was worse, especially too much alcohol. So, I’m sure my illness is a result of many factors, upon which medical science has no grasp, but I have always believed that diet is probably the most significant of these. I don’t know any of this, of course, but it gives me one more thing to think about during the many hours when flattened by chemotherapy.

So it goes with me and food. There’s lots here upon which I could elaborate, but I only seem to write in frenzied bursts of occasional inspiration, and I’m getting tired. I like getting feedback; you can comment below or send me an email. Thanks, and bless you all!

When I was young my body was me. I would look in the mirror with wonder as I grew taller and muscles filled in and hair began to grow and other miracles occurred. And much of life was about indulging and reveling in my body: playing sports, eating, thrill-seeking, getting to know girls. Of course there was a lot going on in my mind as well, but it wasn't as much fun as the stuff with my body.

Now my body isn't me anymore, it's just the vessel that is carrying me. It's just the shell that is housing my heart, my soul, my consciousness, the stuff that matters. And it's not working very well anymore, in fact it's verging on epic fail. (I like that expression, "epic fail", though I generally hate pop language. But epic fail works).

We come into this world with such beautiful, pristine bodies - in most cases, anyway. And then in the process of living, we wreak havoc upon them. I've always wanted to do this, to write down the damage I've inflicted on this body. So here goes, bottom up:

Torn ankle ligaments
Repeated sprained ankles, mostly due to the torn ligaments
Cracked tibia
Nerve damage in calf and foot (see back injury, below)
(no knee injuries ever!)
Hamstring pull or tear, not sure which, but it was a bad one
Compressed disks in lower back, and subsequent nerve damage
Pinched nerve in neck
Broken growth plate in elbow
Broken nose
Stitches in 6 places on my face and head, all from separate incidents
Two concussions (I think)

I've carried these as a badge of honor, a testament to toughness and the spirit to live hard. It would probably be more accurate to chalk most of them up to recklessness and stupidity. But fortunately, the only one that really has been an on-going problem is the lower back injury, and it's always been manageable.

Obviously I'm in a different era now. I'm watching my body deteriorate, and it's disheartening, to use about the mildest phrase I can . I've lost about 15 pounds so far, and my waist is down to 31 inches, about where it was in 7th grade. I made the mistake of trimming my hair too short, and because of the chemo, it's not growing back. My beard hardly grows at all; I shave about once per week. I feel like I've gone from looking 45 to looking 75 in two months. I look more like my dad every day; in fact I look more like him than he does. This is not a bad thing, he's pleasing to look at at age 87.

I once had fairly well developed butt and leg muscles, and they have departed for greener pastures. My gluteus maximus has become gluteus minimus. I have discovered once-hidden cheekbones and hollow cheeks, and I have a little more skin than necessary to cover everything. I do a double-take when I see the old guy in the mirror.

I have a port implanted in my chest for the chemo infusions. It feels just like you might expect, to have a plastic disk stuck just under my skin. It's no big deal, but I hate to look at it or touch it.

(Aside: I have never understood tattoos and piercings. Why, why, why would one choose to mar perfection? I'll never get used to them, even when everyone has them.)

But finally, none of this really matters. I realized very early, I think hour one of my diagnosis, that how my body comes out of this ordeal is of no consequence at all. I am concerned that I will lose too much weight and become frightening to my family and myself (but I'm not going to write any more down that track). This disease is going to do it's damage to my body, and it's not likely to ever be the same. But all that really does matter is that I come out on the other side and am here to be with my family and friends. In the end, my body, your body, all of our bodies are just rental cars that move us from origination to destination. It's alarming to watch what's happening to mine, but I just need it to get me home. And I still have miles to go before I sleep.