Ch-Ch-Chemo Ch-ch-changes

An’ now people just get uglier
An’ I have no sense of time*

It’s a fine line between life and death. One moment you are alive, and the next moment you are dead.  At least that is how we imagine this transition.  In that second between life and death, there could be eternities for all I know.  Eternities of listening to Paul Williams sing I won’t last a day without you. There are  people who claim to have died and come back.  But can we trust their accounts? What if the transition itself is a form of hallucination?

Yesterday I was driving down the hill on Fraser Street, just up the hill from where I live, and I saw a young raccoon in the middle of the road. It had obviously been hit by a car.

Raccoons are supposed to be nocturnal animals, but that doesn’t mean they only come out at night, like Edgar Winter and Frankenstein.

Sometimes raccoons are out in the daytime, along with other city wildlife-nocturnal animals like coyotes, skunks and bass players.

So it wasn’t that strange to see a dead raccoon in the middle of the road but still it was shocking. Death is shocking. It’s not something you see every day. Can I swerve to avoid driving over it? What should I do here? Should I call someone? Who would that be? Is there a dead raccoon hotline?

Ah, yeah 933 here, we got another dead raccoon in the middle of the road. Please send crew.

Cleanup on aisle seven.

One minute that raccoon was looking across the street and the next minute he was part of the street.

I had seen that raccoon about a week before, when I was out walking. As I looked up the hill, I could see the raccoon staring across the street. I went around the corner so that it couldn’t see me and then I snuck back to see if it had moved. It wasn’t peek-a-boo, as the raccoon was intent on whatever mystery was across the road. The raccoon wasn’t paying me any attention, basically it was frozen in time staring at something across the street.

Now we haven’t determined the correct raccoon pronouns, so it is impossible to know exactly if it was a he or a her, or being a city raccoon, something in between. And when my dog and I came upon it under the tree, we did not pause to check its undercarriage.

What if it was a Mother? What if we could see inside that dead raccoon? Would it reveal a litter of unborn babies? Or worse. Jimmy Hoffa?

Or was it an incel teenager, angry at the world, ready to shoot holes in the fire on Main Street?

How about a lonely lifelong bachelor who had mistaken his Liberace Cooks cookbook with A Guide to Urban Mall Dumpsters by Dr. Rocky Racoon?

All we know for sure was that this raccoon had been staring at whatever mystery was across the street, and in a split second of bad judgement, and acting on impulse, he/she/they made a mad dash to oblivion. Where there was once a sense of curiosity and dread, now was just dead raccoon. Clearly, this raccoon was no longer curious.

There’s a fine line between life and death.  One day you’re curious and the next day someone’s picking you up off the road and laying you beneath a tree.

Today I go for my second chemo session, which will bring on further changes in my body. ( How you like that segue?) The chemo’s function in the systemic therapy is to reinforce the radiation, acting as an additional sports mom, cheering on the killing of the cancer from the sidelines. Chemo is not intended to be the Agro Hockey Dad getting into fights in the parking lot. Chemo is the Dad joke with a mullet, who after all his concussions, has accepted that predictable behaviour is no longer on the menu.

I keep coming back to that line from Lou Reed, from his Magic and Loss record, “radiation kills both bad and good, it cannot differentiate, so to cure you, they must kill you”.++

It’s all about getting the radiation right, and chemo correct. As with any drug, it is a series of trial and error.  It’s all about the dosage, and knowing just how far to push things.  This was not a question that we entertained as young drug experimenters. Various drugs were selected in our randomized trials for what possible effects might prove “interesting “.

Remember Black Beauties? Pink Hearts? There was one restaurant I worked at in my 20’s, we would ask ourselves at the start of our shifts, are we going up or are we going down?

Going “up” entailed taking speed or variants on the fast drugs- coke, coffee, amphetamines. More, more more.

Going down was Valium, Midol, alcohol or a combo. We had this Cointreau concentrate which was clear overproof booze, concentrated flavour but with less sugar bites. A splash of that in your coffee was both up and down, stopping mid-floor if you were lucky.

Like in the hallucinatory film Being John Malkovich, there was a portal revealed to be between the 7th and the 8th floor. From there it was a hop, skip and a jumpcut to the mind of John Malkovich.

Another direction we could try was sideways. Sideways would be sourced through the portal of Hash, hash with tobacco, dope. The last portal was Everything Everywhere All At Once, or what we call the magic mushroom family. BC is home to many naturally growing magic mushrooms, and we tried most of them. The length of time and intensity depended on dosage. Gooned on mushrooms.

Peyote was another trip. It was important to pick out the white hairs, as they were arsenic. Kind of like being over 60. Pluck out the white hairs. Unless that is how you are rocking it, beautiful. Peyote traditionally would make you sick to your stomach before you got ripped and tripped. Out of respect, peyote made you bow down to the peyote Gods. I took that once, puking in an alley, then found myself on a bus, walking into a movie theatre. It was a triple bill.

I remember Invasions of the Body Snatchers was one of the films that was playing. The version with Donald Sutherland with a perm.

Whatever movie that playing was halfway through when I walked in. Someone was getting an axe right through their forehead. SLUNCH!!

Without rewatching the movie, I can’t remember for certain if the “axe in head” scene was in Invasion of The Body Snatchers or not. Whichever it was, my mind was snatched.

Around the same time a good friend started growing blue Psilocybe cubensis in her basement. My mushroom memory was that these were the best, but I don’t remember anything that confirms that conclusion. That is the way it is with hallucinations; you rarely remember them.

As noted, last week I suffered hiccups for 3 1/2 days uninterrupted. In all the warnings I had been informed about, hiccups were never brought up as a common side effect of chemo, especially for men. Now every time I mention it, 4 out of 5 health professionals say, without fail, oh yeah, that’s a common side effect.

It was then that I had a vision. A revelation. Not a vision of a dog/man, but this:

Les Goodman’s Chemo Club For Men. God is going to get me for laughing along with his cancer.

I am reminded of the song by Vic Chesnutt called Kick My Ass.

In the last verse he says,

I’m so sorry you had to pull my hair,

I had to take care of business
A lot of business giving there.” **

I revised those lines into:

“I’m so sorry you had to pull my hair.

Hey, nobody touches my hair.

You got no business going there.”

Please note that I am advised that this particular type of chemo does not cause hair loss. For someone who is as vain as I am, hair perfection is well, perfection. While I’ve often had a bad cough, I’ve rarely a bad coif. I even had a Facebook page called Put Dennis Mills’s Hair in the Punk Rock Hall of Fame. My hair. Not me. My hair.

Sure bring on the hiccups, bring on the nausea, the vomiting, the talking backwards to the Porcelain Love God. Clearly I’m not fussy, any alleyway will do in a pinch. Bring on the Dancing Horses if you must, but please, don’t fucking touch my hair.

*Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again- Bob Dylan

++ Sword of Damocles -Lou Reed

** Kick my Ass-Vic Chesnutt

Playlist:

CH CH CHEMO CH CH CHANGES