The Day the Music Lived

Every time I stood up, I saw flashing lights and felt as if I was going to pass out. Though my most recent chemo infusion was two weeks ago, I continued to suffer its side effects. As I lay on the sofa where I tried in vain to muster the energy to get up and do something productive, when a Beatles song, “Penny Lane,” cued up on the radio. I cannot listen to the Beatles without recalling the days in 1964 in which I was introduced to the British rock group.

 

Military service isolates its members to varying degrees from popular culture in the civilian world. Every weekday the occupants of barracks on the US Naval Training Station in Bainbridge, Maryland assembled on the roadway in front of the World War One- vintage wooden structures and marched in military formation to the Communications Technician School, then called Radio “A” School. The barracks were not air conditioned, resulting in open windows to catch whatever breeze presented itself. One memorable day, we were taking our usual shortcut to barracks when I heard music coming from an open window as we passed.

Wow, I thought. Who is that?

I had given up on ever hearing another revolution in music like Bill Haley and the Comets, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis and that of Elvis's magic in his recording of "Heartbreak Hotel"during the first incarnation of rock music. The music I heard that day haunted me. I decided that it must have been a throw-away tune that some barracks dweller would appreciate but would disappear into his record collection to be heard only by his friends.

The “A” school had a policy in which, at the halfway point of the six-month long course, attendees in the top 10 percent of the class would be awarded with a day off. I was too broke to go off base, so I resolved to spend my free day at the base library, then attend a movie at the base theater with the last few coins in my possession before payday (“the day the eagle shits.” In Navy parlance).

An open rack in the library featured a teen magazine with the image of four young men on the cover.

Holy crap,” I thought. Look at all that hair!

The magazine cover featured the Beatles, of course, and "all that hair" would be considered neatly trimmed by the standards that followed. The song I heard as I marched under a barracks open window was “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Soon after that day, my long-hoped-for revolution in Rock music arrived. Now, sixty-four years later, I remain a faithful Beatles fan, and I long for the third revolution in rock music, when I might again be thrilled by a new sound- a sound not before heard by human ears; a "third wave" in rock music.

I am an old man now, so please hurry.

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Does Cancer Have a "Skip" Button?

 

Surviving Amateurish Advertising

On making the decision to do a series of blogs about the personal experience of dealing with a cancer diagnosis, I had not counted on the ravages of chemo treatments side effects, especially the deep and demotivating fatigue. During those times I had no willingness to do anything other than lie on the sofa with YouTube to keep me company.

In time, I became steeped in video streaming lore and culture. I watched hours of content, advertising, and content about content. I watched streaming videos to make of me something of an expert in its advertising: enough to warrant a letter to the king of video streaming services.

 Dear YouTube.

I have enjoyed many of your streaming channels ranging in interest to cabbage recipes to Kantian ethics, and from writing with ink to zebra camouflage, and I have nothing but praise for your contributors. However, most of your advertising has the “look and feel” of promotional videos produced by a cinematography classroom of eight-year-olds.

Wait. I take that back. Our theoretical classroom could produce more professional quality ads than a hefty percentage of ads I see on your service.

Let me offer some advice to your advertisers. First and most important, any ad that runs longer than thirty seconds must be interesting if I, for one, am going to give it my attention. Ads that tip the clock at forty-five seconds must be interesting and informative. If an ad lasts longer than forty-five seconds, it must be interesting, informative, and entertaining. Advertising that does not meet these criteria gets skipped. Most people simply go for another beer or coffee during those ninety-second ads that feature screeching or ultra-authoritative voices that reek of desperation.

C’mon, YouTube, you damn near own a monopoly in the service you provide, and yet your advertising comes across like amateur hour. You are a visual media. Act like it. Get imaginative companies to sponsor your product.

With our mutual interests at heart, I am,

 Sincerely,

Ken Shelton

 

I had subscribed to YouTubes competitor, Nebula, but soon ran into a problem there: That streaming service does not like controversial topics, and so one of my favorite channels left Nebula rather than compromise their message. Kudos to them, but woe to me. I’m back to YouTube for cutting edge video content  peppered with amateurish, boring, ads that left nothing to do to break the monotony and misery that follows chemo treatments.

͢Those treatments are completed now, and the fatigue and nausea side effects have all but disappeared. Now, perhaps, I can get back to my original intent here—that of offering friendly, upbeat advice for the cancer novice.

Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot of advice I can offer other than, if you’re going into chemo, be prepared for a lot of television. But if you intend to spend your time on video streaming services, make sure spare batteries are at hand, super-easy-to-prepare meals are stocked in, and your remote “skip ad” button is functioning.

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Doing Cancer with Buddha

 

Photo by Ravi Palwe on Unsplash

 The study of philosophy has been an interest since discovering Alan Watts* in the early 1970s, when I stumbled upon The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. In the half-century since then I have read or read about all the most famous thinkers, but it was Alan Watts who had the greatest influence on my thinking. Not Nietzsche, not Hegel, not Hume: Watts.

I’ve often wondered why he is not listed in philosophy tomes as one of their own. I understands that he was something of a populist, and his thinking centered on religion—especially Asian religions—but other philosophers have centered their thoughts on religion. Ah, but there it is: We focus on western philosophers and the principle western religion, Christianity. Those who write about the eastern religions are shut out of the west.

Mr. Watts’ 1966 classic has something to teach us in the western world about death. As any adult cancer patient knows, death is always around the next corner, the next day, the next month. Death stalks the cancer patient like a specter from the future.

After the cancer diagnosis I picked up The Watts book again and experienced the flashes of insight again that changed my life in 1973, but this time with a death sentence interpreting the words. I saw death as a black wall. I saw the death of my ego, my sense of self, and an uncaring universe that would continue without me. But I also saw, in Reading The Book, a universe that lives through the senses of those who live, have lived, and will live. I saw every new life as a realization of a universe that can know itself only through its people, its animals, its rocks, and oceans. It is a universe in which every new life is us, a blank slate through which the universe us as we experience the universe.

 

[*] Yes, I know. I’ve heard it before: Alan Watts is not a Real philosopher. He merely reports on what other philosophers.have said? I’m not so sure. Much of his interpretations of Asian religions and philosophies looks original to me.

Jesus in a Medical Cart

 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Christus_Ravenna_Mosaic.jpg

US work that is in the public domain in the US for an unspecified reason, but presumably because it was published in the US before 1929.

 

Upon entering the previously unknown world of cancer diagnosis and prognosis, I saw a religious plea brochure on a countertop in the oncologist’s waiting room. Oh, no, I thought, I’m going to be deluged with sappy Christian propaganda. The descent into illness and death is not just fertile ground for Christian evangelists and other proselytizers: It is justification for their existence. Remember “No atheists in foxholes” mantra? It was a favorite for years, until enough people came forward with the invention of the internet, people who had faced death and did not convert to their religion and its and any one of its associated ideologies.

To my surprise, Christians did not spring en masse from woodwork and sewers to inform me of the suffering that awaits me if I do not convert to their particular brand of their particular religion, or of the rewards that await if I just pay them lip service. That’s all. Just lip service. Pretend Christianity. Instead of swarming around cancer patients I saw only the brochure and an infusion cart with a sticker that proclaimed the cart’s technician’s something something Jesus something something. My chemo and iron infusions were performed by a kindly lady who worked out of the cart and arranged it so the Jesus sticker faced me. She was such a sweetheart that I forgave her for her superstitious delusion. Her gentle and friendly manner were far from the violent, threatening posturing of my previous experience with Christians. I can only hope she is setting a trend.

If that is her goal, it is not working, or so I thought. I relied on the news of a decline in religiosity among Americans, but a tour of social media and news reports of a surge in Christian fundamentalism reveals that the religion of misogyny and xenophobia is not done with us yet. Americans working to produce a bright future are locked in a battle against forces that seek to return them to a medieval theocracy. The state of the future is the battleground.

Unless you’re dying of cancer; then you have only the present world that dreams of freedom from the kind of religion and of the kind of government Christianity (and Islam) seek to force on us.

 

More information:

https://bigthink.com/the-present/a-surprising-explanation-for-the-global-decline-of-religion/

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Cancer and Fatigue

 

Photo: Tomáš Vendiš, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The intent to document ongoing cancer treatments for those diagnosed with the disease, but who have not yet been initiated into the daily grind of scans, chemo and radiation treatments, and the effect the disease has on pre-existing conditions and their prognoses. It was a good plan, but I didn’t foresee the crippling fatigue that chemo treatments have on the body. I spend far too much time lying on the sofa, soaking up YouTube and Great Courses + videos when I want to be writing, reading, or house cleaning. * Fatigue restricts cleaning up after oneself. When all the energy you can call on is expended to heat a can of soup, there is nothing left to clean the dishes.

I had thought going into this that I would find cancer treatments and facts about the disease enthralling and of interest to the blog-reading public. Not so. The facts are more expertly provided on many websites and receiving treatments is an exercise in boredom. It involves waiting for chemicals to spread through the body; waiting for treatment to start; waiting for a PET, CT, or MRI to complete its operation; waiting for the slow drip of chemicals; waiting for appointments and bloodwork. Take a book with you.

I have never appreciated friends as I do now. They have helped me with household chores, getting to appointments, acquiring and preparing food, and moral support. Keep your friends close and be mentally prepared to repay the favors in the event any of them fall victim to disabling disease.

Should that happen to you or a friend, you have my deepest hope for a full recovery and a long life.

* I don’t want to be housecleaning, but I need to be housecleaning.

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C-Notes

 

Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash

I won’t dwell here on the scatological details that sent me in an ambulance to the Presbyterian Hospital except to say that the drive was preceded by a loss of blood, a lot of blood, and a couple of episodes of abject misery in which I didn’t only think I was dying, I wanted to.

While hospitalized, a CT scan found a benign growth in my colon and a malignant one in my lung.

“It’s in the upper part of your right lung,” the doctor said. “Because of its location and your COPD, the mass is inoperable.”

That meant chemo and radiation treatments.

I surprised myself with the lack of anxiety I felt on hearing the news. I had thought that getting a cancer diagnosis was a death warrant. Though a blood transfusion or two and some hospital-strength drugs had reduced the misery to a shadow of itself, I remained yet alert to the meaning of the doctor’s words. Instead of foreseeing the gloom of financial issues, side effects, the commitment of large blocks of time, I saw myself writing about the experience. For some time, my blog had seen an occasional post about whatever interested me at the moment, but it carried no consistency and no theme. Every post was a writing experiment, and every post followed a long period of staring at the blank page. I occasionally submitted work to online content mills and literary magazines, but the blog remained a place for sporadic and too-often unrelated material.

Now, I thought, it has a purpose. Finally.

Now I can write here with a theme, a plan, and a service to those 1,700,000 who might follow me to the radiation and chemo labs over the next twelve months.

A visit to an oncologist laid out the early stages of a plan. First, an intravenous dose of iron to beat back the anemia that resulted from blood loss and from cancer, then, a class to educate me on the procedures I will undergo, and finally, the radiologist. There will be more, so much more, but that is the plan at this moment.

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Ernie the Magic Elf

 

Photo by Brigitta Schneiter on Unsplash

The rise in the number of religious “Nones” and its opposite—the decline in the number of people professing Christianity as their religion—has resulted in an angry backlash from a vocal minority: the Christo fascists. That angry minority includes celebrities, influencers, and power brokers like Clarence Thomas, Jordan Peterson, and huckster cum Bible salesman Donald Trump.

The Christo fascist intends to force his version of a god on the skeptic, the unbeliever, and the secular humanist. It is of paramount importance to the theist that an entire population appear to follow the dictates of his ideology and that they be forbidden from the appearance of straying from the faith. Witness the Muslim world, where any deviation from the norm can result in deadly consequences. That world is a template for the society dreamed of by the Christian evangelical right. My God is the one true God, they tell us. And you must accept my God or have him crammed up your… er, down your throat.

There is an obvious problem with that assertion, or any claim of supernatural entities, be they gods, unicorns, elves, vampires, etc., etc.: The problem: we can safely stake the claim that gods and other mythological and supernatural beings do not exist.

There is no God. One can say that with the same confidence that I might say there is no Ernie the Magic Elf. Both claims express absolutes and the absolute, like Ernie, does not exist. Of course, we might at any time, we might find a Magic Elf hiding in someone’s garden, just as, at any time, one of the thousands of gods posited by humans might step forward to cut out the middleman and make himself/herself/itself known to the world. God might decide that he/she/it can no longer depend on imperfect humans to deliver a perfect message (assuming he/she/it has a message to share), and who could dispute the need for his/her/its change in his/her/its method of dealing with people. After all, the roughly six-millennia method of his/her/its reliance on fallible and often malevolent humans to deliver his/her/its message has left us with wars, crusades, hucksters, priests, religious doctrine, and Kent Hovind.

To believe, or even opine, that a magic being exists to watch my every act and thought with the intention of punishment or reward fills me with a sense of incredulity. The idea is ludicrous. But, that is an argument from incredulity and the argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy, no different than arguing from emotion. Arguing a point based on one’s emotional attachment and emotional repulsion to it is to concede the point.

When Ernie the Magic Elf is revealed, my a-elfism will undergo a significant reappraisal. When a god reveals himself/herself/itself to the world, my atheism will have received its death blow.  At that time, I will believe.