predator/hunting.txt

File: hunting.txt
Cont: 13 days post-operative
Date: 10th Dec, 2003
Music: Electric Light Orchestra - Out Of The Blue, Discovery,

Preen really does remove tough stains fast. I tried it on the sticky
squares of gunk left over from where my i.v. lines were taped on, and the
stuff came off easily. 

Woohoo, tomorrow I get to hoe into fatty foods again. I have missed
dietary fat a lot these last two weeks post-op. I am still a bit gaunt,
but since the bathroom scales exhibit neither precision nor accuracy, I
can't tell if I've lost or gained mass while, all week long, doing not a
lot more than sleeping and eating. My cheeks are a bit sunken, and the
little bits of fat on my arse are sort of caved in, as if all the
adipocytes were mysteriously poached in the dead of night by a feral
liposuctionist. Joss is right. There's no way I'm gonna give up cake
either. Or waste perfectly good hash cookies. OoohAhhh.

I am tempted to smear a massively fattening chocolate cake in lard, spray
it with olive oil, dunk it in WD-40 and oh, I dunno, roll around in it for
a few minutes before actually eating it, so I can have the fun of licking
it off my arms. Fat gets a lot of bad press, and I'm not gonna be one to
besmirch it. Where do you get your cell membranes, your tissue padding,
your clotting factors, your steroid hormone precursors, your lipid-soluble
vitamins, and your chance to experience puberty? Dietary laaaard, matey.
But that's tomorrow. My documentation at the moment is gonna be about the
last week, which was pretty much fat-free.

It's been a slow climb out of bed. Finally I can sleep on my belly, but
it's a bit tight, a smidge painful. I found my old navel under a crease in
my eleven inches of scar, which is healing nicely but is a tad uneven. I
don't know if this means I have two navels, but it probably doesn't. The
stitching is designed to dissolve in-situ after a few months, which is
good, I don't have to be exposed to any trauma and infection risk
getting it taken out.

Navel contemplation aside, I can walk the dog and have been doing so
partly to get the hell out of the house for exercise, and partly to
pre-emptively escape the dog's asphyxiatingly putrid farts which I
generally only find out about after it's too late to make an effort to
avoid them. I don't use the leash, tho. She wanders around, self-propelled
and voice activated, distracted only occasionally from her doggie
navigational imperatives to pick a fight with a cat or shove her snout
into any excreted olfactory intrigue abandoned by her kindred on the
manicured lawns of Blakehurst. 

I've lost muscle mass - keeping active is the only way to restore it. Even
though I am eating like a fiend, I feel languid, decidedly
unenergetic. This is partly because my bod is allocating resources to
healing the wounds, and partly 'cos I've not been deriving energy from
dietary fat, so I've been converting proteins into glucose in order to run
my Krebs cycle. This is sort of wasteful and stupid 'cos it just reverses
all the effort my bod put into synthesising these muscles in the first
place, but it keeps me alive. There's another possible reason why my
muscles are disappearing but I'll get to that later.

Getting outside was also good since it let me intercept some short rays
from the big thermo' nuke in the sky. UV gets bad press, too... the
shorter wavelength stuff deserves it, thymidine-dimerising evil that it
is, but the slightly longer segments of that spectrum are an important
part of my calcium metabolism, the not-so-short-wavelength UV photons do
one of the molecular transformations required to produce the precursor for
calciferol.


I feel a bit old - in my present state, the dog outruns me, since I walk
at about the same pace as Dad does, and he's 70 and has a buggered knee.
My gait's changed, I'm a bit bow-legged when I walk because this cushions
the heel-shock of each footstep which otherwise upsets my guts; I'm a bit
bent-forward since the scar is slightly shorter than the length of gut in
which it's embedded, so my weight's thrown a bit forward of where it
usually is, and will be until I can stretch my abdominal muscles back to
their pre-slash length. Given time, these things will return to normal
with exercise.

On the weekend Dad and I went up to his offices to paint out some
graffiti... a half-litre tin of paint presents no serious weight to carry,
so I offered to do it. The building is wedge-shaped. On one side of
the wedge there was this graffiti:

Fuck off u arab cunts

and on the other side there was:

Fuck off u jewish cunts

If the writing on the walls is anything to go by, it appears Australia is
still egalitarian but nowadays it's because we hate everyone equally.
This graf appeared on thursday, on top of the sections of graf I had
painted out a week earlier. 

By the time we got there, the jewish hubby of another person who works in
the building had arranged to paint out the `fuck off u jewish cunts'
section. I don't know if the other bit was left there accidentally or not,
but I suspect the former. I conjectured to myself that I could make it
completely equalitarian by leaving the fuck off and painting out the
remainder, but I painted it all out, not wholly convinced that
painting it over really would make it go away. The middle-east peace
process needs all the help it can get. 

Later we went to get pizza (you find me a fat-free pizza and I'll show you
a foodstuff not worthy of eating) and opposite our local pizza shop were
about fifty uniformed cops waddling around a taped-off carpark, guarding
an equal number of spent 9mm shell cases scattered around the tarmac,
where a couple of dudes had decided to have a go at each other. If they
lived long enough to use fifty rounds they can't have been very good
shots, but then pistols are hard to aim properly in the calm of a firing
range, let alone in the heat of conflict.

This is not the same neighborhood as the one I grew up in.

Sneezes still hurt a lot, so I asked them not to put any pepper on the pizza.


Wednesday 10th: 

I nosebled into my cornflakes this morning. I can't say it influences
their flavour very much.

I went to a restaurant, to attend the christmas party/dinner thingo held
for the handful of staff at the office, because today was the day I could
eat fatty foods again. Oohhh, and didn't I? I think the concerted effort
of ingesting about a cubic foot of penne boccianola knocked me over,
though. I hadda go out and lie down in the carpark before declining a
desert which I couldn't possibly deal with since I was stuffed to the
pylorus with FOOOOOOD, yay! Looking suspiciously like a pissed businessman
in my borrowed tie and shiny black shoes, I lay on the shaded concrete
between a couple of parked cars, gazing happily at the sky, lacking only a
puddle of explanatory vomit. I swear I could feel the oils and triglycerides
pumping around my arteries. Gaaaah. Bliss.

I spent some of last night trawling the electronic online oncology
journals. Blissed out and in the no-care zone on account of the chunky
lode of lipid laden nourishment I was in the process of absorbing, I
mentioned in passing to the oldies some of what I'd found out (you'll get
it in a paragraph below) about how this cancer tends to uh, progress.
I didn't catch their expressions, I was staring at the fluffy upholstery
on the ceiling of the car as we drove back from the restaurant.


Thu, 11 Dec 2k3
Music: Front Line Assembly - Mindphaser  (four-track EP)

The narrow strip of my inner right thigh which was oddly insensate (fed by
a branch of the ileoinguinal nerve, which along with everything else was
stressed somewhat when my casing was opened up) has returned to normal.
However, I'm still shooting blanks. This is apparently because some (sorry
I don't know the name for them) of the nerves involved in signalling the
emission of liquid rugrat precursor from the seminal vesicles into the
urethra prior to peristaltically forcing it out the end of my end, were a
bit upset when Paul peeled some of the cancerous pieces of lymphatic
system off them. Can't say I blame them.

This is something which, hopefully, will reconfigure itself in the coming
weeks. If it doesn't, well, heh - in a roundabout way, this creepy disease
will have blown any chance it had of inflicting itself on any descendants
I might have otherwise initiated between now and when it eventually carks
me, if it had any genetic propensity to begin with. Which I think it must
have. I can't think of anything I did to encourage this... I don't smoke,
expose myself to cadmium, coal tar, phenacetin, or most of the other
things by which RCCs (Renal Clear Carcinomas) are known to be provoked. In
the absence of some rather pointless DNA testing, there's no way to really
know if it's inherited. Cells are heinously complicated things. Run any
digitally replicating metabolism for long enough and some of it will
eventually turn metastatic under the damage load it accumulates from the
environment.

At this point, the litigious types among the readership would smell an
opportunity to enrich some bastard lawyers suing the medicos for an
negligent accidental sterilisation. If you are one of these people, ask
me over to your place so I can smack you one. I'm an ungrateful bastard
about a lot of stuff, but to sue the dudes who just extended my life by
chopping the renal equivalent of Benito Mussolini outta my flank is really
just beyond tolerable bad manners. 

(I was gonna type saved, where you see the word `extended' above. But I
think, actually, that would be stretching the statistical truth.)



I went along to an oncologist on today. Dad went with me, and fell
asleep (upright - neat trick) in the chair adjacent while the cancer
specialist did the blurb. This is partly because dad's already come to
his own conclusions about what I have based on his own clinical
experiences of cancers which have made it into people's lymphatic system,
and partly because he spent a lot of the night doing surgery on someone
and he needed sleep. He's talked to oncologists before, anyway, and knows
what they tend to say. The only thing he inherited from his oldies was a
propensity for bowel cancer, which many years ago slew his old man, his
uncle and a few others besides. So every so often he gets a camera stuck
up his quoit and fed through his large intestine, to look for polyps and
adenomas and other things which, if left to their own devices, would kill
him. Not exactly Australia's funniest home video, but it's saved him
several times. He eats a breakfast which amounts to a soy milk solution of 
woodchips and sawdust, since this is correlated with reduced bowel cancer,
but also causes reduced iron uptake and unpredictable raucous farts.

I listened intently, but, being a smartarse molecular biologist with an
interest in cancer long before I had any of my own to care about, I didn't
hear a lot I didn't already know. Sometimes, you can lose the primary
tumor and any mets (short for metastases - secondary tumors which
originated in cells flaked off the primary mothership in my now absent
kidney) die - there's some poorly understood protein signalling going on
between the primary and the secondaries, which, when blocked or removed,
tends to result in the mets failing to thrive.

Interferon at this point is about as likely to be useless as not, and even
if it is useful it'll extend my cark-by date by no more than a year, not
actually cure me, and probably make me sick as a dog while I'm on it. If
any mets I have are going to turn up, they'll do it anywhere... muscles,
skin, bone, brain, liver, you name it.

Yeah, blah. I can tell from what he doesn't say, the dude is not a
molecular biologist. In mathematics, the term "math-out" (c.f. white-out,
as in, snowstorm) is used to describe presentations so drenched in formal
notation as to be impossible to understand - which means the explanation
is a failure since nobody actually learns anything from it. The cellular
metabolism, and epidemiology of cancer cells is another subject in which
one could easily inflict a biological chem-out on a hapless layperson, and
I dunno if oncologists are trained to keep it simple just to help their
charges comprehend what it is they face, but I *wanted* the meaty, gritty
technical explanation. 

I asked questions which should have raised the dude's radar about my
pre-existing awareness. E.g. I scanned the titles on the book spines on
the bookshelf... and asked "Hmmm.. Steven Rosenberg... hey, isn't he the
chap who did all that work with recombinant interleukin-2 and LAK and
tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in the eighties?" and even threw in
explanations about why what little he did say was correct, "Yeah, this is
unpredictable 'cos the met cells have accumulated lots of errors, add new
errors each time they do mitotic division 'cos their DNA repair and
copying systems are mostly broken, so it's hard to know what's gonna grow
and what isn't, or when, or how fast, right?" but, aside from getting the
occasional, "Right" and "Yes" it didn't provoke any improvement in his
signal-to-noise ratio. Maybe over the years he's copped negative feedback
from patients about the incomprehensibility of the actual machinery of the
disease when he explained it and now has adopted a strategy of keeping it
simple.

As ruthlessly insensitive an interrogator as I can be when I really want
to know something, I am not in the habit of asking medical people
unreasonable questions, such as, what are my odds, or how long have I got
to live - since there's no way for them to know and I can cull what I need
to know about these things directly from the scientific journals, which is
where they find out in the first place. There are some things we cannot
know. Time will tell me anyway, eventually, but I'd like to have some idea
now about wether to keep living, or to prepare for death.

The 'net is a corporately controlled wasteland these days, the information
superhypeway has tolls at all the interesting offramps. The stuff I really
wanted to look at is hosted by blackwell-synergy.com but it's
subscriber-only. I ended up trawling EMBL and a few other mol bio places
before digging out what I wanted. If I'm going to exercise any
selbstbehauptungswille it will help to know the enemy. 

Actually, knowing the enemy might help you, the reader, get a clue about
why I'm not kidding myself that I'm gonna survive. You might not be
familiar with it. Cancer is the ultimate diesease, dynamically adapting in
real time to every new threat you might present to it - its effectively a
virus which also happens to run its own metabolism, which you gave it in
the first place.

So here's the condensed version, mostly cleansed of mol bio speak and
chromosome-jockey jargon, in approximately increasing order of
shitfulness.

Blokes get RCC (renal clear cell carcinoma) twice as commonly as women do. 

Most people who get RCC get it after they're sixty (I'm waaay ahead of
the curve).

Spontaneous remission happens in about one percent of cases. 

RCCs eat radiation for breakfast. 

The usual cytotoxic chemo drugs (eg, peptide synthesis blockers like
cyclophosphamide, etc) and the immunostimulant chemokines aren't much chop
against it and make ya sick when you're on 'em. Actually, come to think of
it, attacking the tumors with nuclear emissions and chemo usually just
kills the weaker of the cancer cells leaving behind the really tough-arse
tumor cells which were strong enough to surive these attempts at being
nuked and poisoned. What doesn't kill it outright makes it stronger by the
usual Darwinian laws.

Surgery works well if the cancer is localised to a single spot. Chopping
it out was a good idea since there's now several hundred billion tumor
cells I don't have. I wish them all the very best in their new career as
incinerator fuel.

RCC tends to metastatise (as borne out by my histology report). About a
third of people *already have* cryptic (hidden) mets already when the
primary is removed. Most of the metastases appear within a year of removal
of the primary. 

RCC metastatic behaviour is bizarre and unpredictable. The metastases are
genetically highly variant and as such are an immunologically changing
target - averaging about eight (!) changes per sample compared to the
genetic makeup of the primary tumor. 

So I can go right ahead and vaccinate myself with the tissue taken from
the primary (or derivatives thereof) but this would train my immune system
to act against a target which is longer there, or only a few of the total
available targets. Arrr... I thought I had its number, but apparently I
do not. Well, not enough of it, anyway. 

Not only are the primary tumor and the secondaries are not identical
genetically, the various secondaries (the actual metastases themselves)
are also not even genetically identical to each other, 'cos as they clone
themselves up, they make errors in copying their nuclear material before
passing it on to the next generation of metastatic cells.

<rant: molecular evolution, the comedy of errors>

Cancer is an information systemic process.

The sort of error-correction failures intrinsic to this genetic change
process are fundamentally the same ones which allowed the DNA in one of my
kidney cells to become cancerous (uncontrollably proliferative) in the
first place - breakages in the genes encoding for the proofreading
proteins in the DNA polymerases, failure of p53 to control the
cell growth cycle, failures to express proteins which do the
usual excision-repair and other processes typically used by cells to patch
DNA damage, that sort of thing. 

The failure of these error-correction systems result in the breakages in
promotors / repressors for genes, or the breakages in the genes
themselves, which actually make a cancer cell cancerous: p53 failure,
inappropriate activation of telomere repair, inability to do apoptosis,
inappropriate constitutive proliferation, constitutive angiogenesis, etc
etc. So the errors accumulate, but they sometimes act in favour of the
cells in which they accumulate.

You would expect this. A tumor which didn't mutate (that is, one which
still had functional error-correction genes) certain parts of itself on
the odd occasion would eventually be spotted, and either be enzymatically
clubbed to death, proteinaceously perforated and abandoned to spill its
miserable cytosol into the surroundings, or actually engulfed and digested
alive (what's good for the goose, you might say), by various kinds of 
macrophages which had recognised it as somehow proteinaceously awry. If it
didn't mutate, future generations of itself wouldn't learn any of the cool
tricks which enable it to punch holes in the immune system, sequester my
infrastructure and oh, you know, generally take over the world, which is
the natural ambition of all living things on the planet. The process
selects for its own viciousness.

The cells which do escape surveillance, get to be the surviving metastases
which turn you (well, me, actually) into a failing life support system for
an exponentiating army of nodules great and small.

The same "make errors, mutate to survive" strategy is used by viruses -
they exhibit error-prone copying when they invade cells. Usually viruses
carry a gene encoding their own error-prone polymerase, since the
DNA-copying polymerases in the invaded cell exhibit relatively high
fidelity, which is not in line with the virus' survival strategy of
producing thousands of slightly descrepant copies of itself - some of
which are real winners.

The error-proneness frequently cripples many of the next generation of
viruses (and tumor cells, for that matter - they are pushed over their
error-catastrophe threshold and die one of the many specific kinds of
biochemical process failure related deaths available to complex things
such as cells), but occasionally it generates a prodigy - one that can
reproduce faster, or hide from immunosurveillance, or which is resistant
to various drugs. When the prodigy spawns its own daughter cells, most of
them inherit whatever serendipitous molecular magic stumbled upon by its
forebear. Natural selection is the mother of invention.

Thousands of tumor cells, flawed by a misplaced nucleotide in a critical
spot, screw up and die, but that's the price evolution is prepared to pay
for the development of new cells which discover, by fortuitous accident,
how to survive in the changing immunological environment.

</rant>


As a result of this error-proneness, even generating a vaccine from any of
the lymphatic secondary stuff we chopped out wouldn't help terribly much,
inasmuch as it would represent only one of several possible targets
against which immunosystemic activity could be directed. 

The bit I looked at several times before it really sunk in, and which I
would not believe except I know that tens of thousands of people had to
acquire, and die from, what I have now before the mid-1990's researchers
could get enough statistical confidence to publish this statistic, is
this:


About 80 percent of people with regional lymph node metastases (Stage
III RCC, what I have) are dead within five years of their nephrectomies.


There's a four to one chance I will be amongst the culled by 2008. I do
not know in which group I am. I will probably know with greater, but not
complete, certainty in a couple of years. Or maybe a couple of months.

I'm not a gambling man, since I've always construed gambling as a tax on
people who didn't understand statistics - the way to win was not to place
a wager. But if I had to put money on my chances of long-term future
survival, I'd be betting against it.



---

I popped over to Merro's place in Chippo. She's just had a lump
chopped out of her breast. I'm glad she found it early enough to remove it
before it spread into the rest of her. Lou fed me some yummie pasta, and I
nosebled into it, which is pretty rude. Poor Merro.... but at least she
paid attention to her family history. It's probably saved her life.


---------

Cool things about dying young: avoid all the stupid diseases of
old age... teeth falling out, arthritis, erectile failure, senility, and
the worst one of all, the crushing solitude of being alone when all your
friends are all dead of old age. And what a tax dodge!



The shittiness of the prognosis varies, depending where you look, and a
lot of the same numbers keep showing up everywhere, partly I suspect 'cos
these guys read each other's papers. Want a terrifyingly recent paper? Go
look at Campbell, Flanigan, Clark; Current Treatment Options in Oncology,
2003, 4:363-372

Median survival time, 6-12 months, 2 year survival rate 10-20%.

Oh, shit, I'm gonna die. 5 years I could cop. 2 really sucks 'cos half of
it will be spent getting weaker and feeling shite. 

I chucked in that reference above since, sometimes, I have told people the
odds and they ask me, as if to dispute their belief in my ability to tell
the truth, where did I get that statistic? I could mention the others, but
you can find them as easily as I did. Go look for yourself. Would I lie to
you?

I notice there's not a whole lot I have discovered as concerns what the
survivors did differently to them who died. I guess it's hard to intervew
the dead for comparison purposes.

Two things slightly in my favour: this probability is based on 1) a
population of Americans, who eat poisonous crap in their foods (but I'm an
Aussie, so to a large extent, so do I) and 2) most of the people in these
studies are twice my age.

 

I've read enough for the time being. Time to think.

----


"Sell out, sell out wherever you are, sell out and be like me, 
with a quarter-acre suburban lot and a nice colour teevee.
I threw away my skateboard, and got a Commodore, my jingo!
I'm sittin' in it, right about now, with exhaust pipe in th'window."

-This Is Serious Mum -  De Rigeurmortis


Um, no. Unleadded smells disgusting.

On Saturday I was typing in some responses to emails and I nosebled
unexpectedly, but it didn't show on my black shirt and camo pants. What
the hell's annoying my schnozz like this? I motorcycled to Newtown with a
fellow admirer of flab-o-genic foods and ate, amongst other things,
chocolate impregnated lard masquerading as cake in a quantity probably
sufficient to kill a starving elephant. Oooh it was good. I'm glad to be
motorcyclin' again, even though the lumps and bumps in the road provoke
stabbing pain in my internals. So I'm riding the machine in a manner more
like that of a horseman, standing slightly in the seat, taking load on the
footpegs instead of my arse, since the suspension is still configured for
my previous incarnation - a rider with tougher internals. I wanted to get
out on Friday but it was pissing cold rain all day, and saturday was a
blazing sunny day, so I whizzed out to visit the old granny matriarch who
used to send me shortbread biscuits when I was imprisoned in boarding
school back in the 1980's.

I go out and see her every so often when I'm near Randwick, 'cos it
probably sucks to be 91 and blind and arthritic and sciatic and more or
less abandoned by one's family. She's outlasted two world wars, a husband,
and bowel cancer. She loves it when I come over 'cos getting old and dying
in a building full of the unmistakable smell of disintegrating old people
weeping volatile nitrogenous compounds into their surrounds as their
metabolisms gradually collapse is a lonely excuse for a life. I am glad
not to be among them.

There is a certain cred she apparently derives amongst her aging inmates
for being visited by a scruffy leather jacketted motorcyclist, but more
importantly I bring news from the outside world, which she can trade with
the few people who see her. Word gets back to me, via the family 'fone
grapevine, that she loves my visits. Juicy goss is the currency of the
imprisoned. Imprisoned she is, and goss don't get much juicier than this.

I rode out there to tell her in person 'cos yesterday mum was doing her
suffering martyr routine. Mary rang her up enquiring as to my absence, and
mum didn't break the news. Good - I told her not to, in advance, last
week. Mum was now expressing to me that she would _just have to_ Break The
Bad News to ol' Mary about it and went through several permutations of
specious reasoning about this to me, all of which I flatly rejected, and
about which I eventually got cranky. She can only possibly be doing this
for the gratification of being the bearer of someone else's bad news. It
shits me that she asks me to show my angry red belly scar to various
friends of hers whom I have never really met. She got pretty cranky when I
told her the only reason I could think of that she was pulling this
`dutiful bearer of sorrowful news' routine (when she refused to tell me
when I asked her) was that she was gettin' mileage outta my illness. She
usually gets this cranky when I'm right, and I know it, and there's no way
she can wriggle out of it. When this happens, she lies to dad about it,
who generally chews me out later. Which he attempted to do, and failed, on
the grounds that it happens I'm right. She *is*. The question is why.

Maybe mum's doing this because she herself is in need of some support now
that it's finally sinking into her head that I am a condemned individual,
and have damned good reasons to not be walking around cheerfully. But she
won't tell me that. WHY wouldn't she just be straight up about it with
me? I'm being straight up with her about what I'm in for. Maybe she just
can't accept what's happening, even if she does understand it.

Mary took it pretty well, considering. Maybe it's because she's one of the
few people I will probably outlast. 


Dec 14th, 2k3
------
Dad is a master of understatement. He comes in on sunday morning while I'm
still asleep under the doona, and says "Sorry to be a nuisance, but could
you swap the cars over? Mum's gonna take me to hospital, I've been
shitting blood since midnight."

For fuck's sake. This is precisely why I got a license to drive cars three
weeks ago but I'm useless anyway. I swapped 'em with some difficulty,
cranking my head around to reverse out the curvy driveway is another
recipe for laparotomy pain. Collect the set.

Normally I don't reveal the state of my old man's guts to the public,
since they're really not mine to talk about. But it sort of ties into the
generally shitful state of affairs around here.

Dad had a colonoscopy last week. A polyp (pre-cancerous lump o' bowel
wall) was successfully chopped out but he has now started bleeding out his
arse. It really sank in properly when I went for a leak (normally I piss
on the lawn, there's a drought on, and water restrictions have been
imposed) and saw a spray of his circulation coagulated to the gleaming
enamel of the toilet bowl. I brushed it off, and watched its reddish
tendrils sluice into the diluted pink pool below it.

They slapped him under anaesthetic, fed a catheter into his femoral
artery, and using x-rays navigated it up his aorta and down into one of
his mesenteric arteries, then eventually down into the spot where he'd
evidently blown a small vessel near the place from which the polyp was
excised. Once there they placed a small metal spring there to block off
the torn bit of arterial wall, pulled out the catheter, and closed him up. 

Wow.

I checked him out in the ward later that day. He looked OK. First thing I
asked him was, "Are you bored shitless?" and he said "Yep." He woke up and
said he couldn't believe all this hospitalisation which has happened to us
in the last couple of weeks. He got out a couple of days later, but was
feeling pretty knocked about. 



+++Pred's low cost retirement planning scheme+++

0) Give away porn, firearms. Why these two? Well, they're the
instrumentation of sex and death, defining boundaries of the human
experience, the great taboos, aren't they?

Firearms 'cos they're too scarce and important to bury. And, Evelyn
Waugh in Brideshead Revisited wrote a little vignette about teaching men
in the army how to top 'emselves, and rolled out a great one-liner:

"You'd be amazed how many chaps botch this apparently simple procedure."
 
and he's right, they're generally not reliable enough for suicide... if
Lorenzo Milam is to be believed, this is because the human animal is quite
hard to kill and when some people try to blast their processor out of
their skulls, they don't die, but just end up trapped in a shattered
carcass far more greivously fucked up than the one they were trying to
leave. I can't see how that would apply to such a monstrous projectile
instument a twelve-gauge, but fuck it, I'm gonna use ANFO anyway - seven
times the VOD, I'm legally permitted to use explosives, and it's
environmentally friendly, too ... no lead.

Porn 'cos, oh, I'd assume it'd be stressful for my oldies, ratting through
my stuff after I died, to posthumously discover things that imply I have a
sex life... probably about as shocking to them as it is to you when you
discover they had one, and though one is usually living proof of that
fact, it generally doesn't occur to one, and the bestial imagery is
probably a bit hard to take with one's parental faces on it.

1) Tell thesis supervisors that there's no point starting the phd next
year, since there is a significant chance I'll die, or off myself, in the
middle of it.

2) Walk into superannuation company, and ask for my (teeny amount
of) money. Which the govt will tax at 30% on the way out. Assholes.

3) Detonators are seriously restricted, so construct and test a few of
them with which to subsequently initiate the half-kilo of ANFO with which
I will check myself out.


I got a call from a Melburnian acquaintance who ran an interesting thought
process past me over a horrendously costly wankerphone connection - she
was saying to herself, it occurred to her, now that many of us are in our
thirties - who's gonna cop it first... we're getting into that age group
where we start to get heart attacks and diabetes and so forth.

Well, I dunno, obviously someone has to cop it first. I've outlasted
several of my high school classmates, who have died from, amongst other
things, accidental incineration, vehicle crashes and suicide.

I pointed out, the people who cop it first, are the ones who die of the
stupid childhood diseases which most of us usually survive. We only think
we're the ones to cop it first since being killed hasn't happened to us
yet, so it's the first time it happens _to us_. I exclude the deaths of
foetuses due to accidents and disease, and also infants before they can
speak, since I don't consider them people so much as mere precursors to
them. One values a human for the personality which, years after their
birth, appears within them, not for the cheaply manufactured meatware
chassis in which it lives or the chunk o' neural net on which it is
executed. "Sleep, scream, puke and crap" doesn't constitute much of a
personality as far as I can tell. 

The ones who really cop it first from cancer are never given names, much
less shown to their mothers, much less even spoken about except in the
scientific journals. These are the teratocarcinomas, hideously
unconfigured, partly differentiated lumps of immortal tissue which due to
various developmental accidents never got its act together to become a
foetus, but became a tumor instead before it was even born. None of us who
live long enough to learn to talk can really claim our life sucks when we
get clued up about this sort of stuff. 





Someone else, a dear acquaintance, emailed to me:

>> I don't want you to die.

And I replied:

> I don't particularly want me to die either. But look at it this way. At
> least now, to some extent, I have a clue how I'm probably gonna. In a few
> weeks, I'll have deduced my odds from the literature, and know how long I
> have. Most of us never get to find that out, it's a sort of luxury to
> know. Compare this to my expected mundane exit mode as a motorcyclist in
> Sydney, I'd be lucky to get two seconds of impending fatality awareness,
> and that'd be long enough to think, "OH SHIT I'M DEAD!" which would
> really shit me - two seconds is not long enough to say all the important
> things one thinks one has to say when one's on the way out. 

At least it wouldn't shit me for very long, and would spare my immediate
audience some things they didn't really want to hear, like the somewhat
sardonic rants I've thrown at my keyboard this last few weeks.

She slipped me the address of a woman whom, it so happens, is a medico who
happens to be a competent biochemist with a clue about cancer and
nutrition.... it's her mum! But I'm chewing over wether or not to make a
move there. The emotional tangles are tricky. I'm gonna have to think 'em
over. For about a nanosecond. My miserable arse is on the line here.


A consequence of the way cancer sorta-exponentially progresses is that
most of the statistically condemned, if I assume myself to be amongst them
for a moment, will be dead not in the first or second of their remaining
five years, most will cop it in the forth or fifth year, or maybe a little
later (you have to dig up the 10-year survivability stats to know that,
but given the smaller number of remaining people in the sample, the stats
aren't as certain). But it depends on wether or not I have mets
already. If I do, they're probably not gonna be in my chest or guts, we'd
have spotted 'em on the MRI and CT scans. Which leaves arms, legs, neck
and head.





"I couldda stayed at home pal, and lived a joyless life,
 but where the fuck's the fun in that? Superannuation, wife,
 the whole fucking package - for me it never suited. 
 A softcock life, and limp death? Go and get fucking rooted."

TISM - "Attn Shock Records: Faulty Pressing - Do Not Manufacture"
  

I'm a bit paranoid now, about the appearance of mets. I get lots of stupid
little skin bumps every year anyway, and now I view them through more
apprehensive eyes (when I can see them). They bespeak the existance of
ones I cannot see and cannot find, 'cos there's a few billion places to
hide a couple of nanolitres of new metastatic growth in a body like yours
or mine, which occupies about the same volume as a couple of kegs of beer.
One generally finds out about 'em when they do something stupid like cut
off a nerve or a critical artery.

Which brings me back to chat about ... immunology. If my immune system's
any good for anything, it is recognising molecular patterns. What *is*
there, specific to the cells of my personal home-grown suicide bioweapon,
that I can train my lymphocytes to lock onto, to rid me of these fuckin'
tumor cells? What crucial thing do they have which normal cells do not?

There may not be anything for them to get a lock onto. Nevertheless, I'll
find it amusing to entertain the conjecture for a little while.

Tumors appear, and change, *because* of errors in their DNA copying and
repair processes. This happens because there's damage to the genes which
encode for these enzymes, or because they aren't supplied with the
co-factors they need to do their complicated subatomic, information
systemic exercises in molecular recognition, atom abstraction and electron
pushing (do read Tom Schneider's J. Theor. Biology 148, pp83-123 for a
good information theoretical description of enzymes... yes, the laws which
run computers are also responsible for running life). The solution to the
latter problem is to eat foods containing these co-factors (things like
transition metals... copper, zinc, that sort of thing, well, duh). The
solution to the former problem is trickier - tucked away in the nucleus,
DNA with broken genes on it is never seen by the immune system - only the
broken proteins for which it encodes. DNA repair, by the way, is not very
good... a repaired strand with broken code sequences on it is not
detectably broken, as is a physically broken strand. DNA repair enzymes
are not that intelligent.

Exploiting cell mediated immunity is probably the go.

If the tumor cells didn't cook up MHC-I or MHC-II presentation proteins
due to some brokenness in their system, they were probably smashed long
ago by CD54+ cells, which pay close attention to the presence of these
proteins on all cells (and which, I might add, is the reason that
herpesviruses fake these proteins in the cells they have invaded - so the
NK's don't smash 'em. Tricky bastards.).

If it's possible to get a lock on the precise sequence of fragments of
broken varieties of DNA polymerases, and/or DNA correcting enzymes, then
we're a lot closer to home. I could vaccinate myself against cells with
broken DNA repair / DNA replication proteins, *if* these proteins are
chewed up by the cytosolic proteasome complexes and fed out to the cell
membranes for recognition.

But enzymes are complex things. One would have to be very specific about
which fragments to vaccinate against, and where they are chopped
(decisions made at the amino acid sequence level). Nor is one allowed to
toss around pCpGp DNA sequences on one's vaccine with gay abandon, either,
since one's vaccine tends to be chopped up faster (though it also exhibits
greater adjuvancy).

If the tumors are expressing no broken error-correction protein fragments
then this approach won't work. What else would they possibly be serving up
for recognition?

Telomerase. Vaccinating against this might also make me immune to my own
gametes. Dumb idea... I don't need my 'nads to fall off just now, thanks.

A broken version of p53? Nah. Real Tumors surf around sayin' "I don'
have to show you any steenkin' p53" because they don't *care* about
controlled cell growth. 

I threw this together to comprehend an immuno approach to attaking cells
with broken DNA copying enzymes.

Allele of 
DNA error               consequence of therapeutic targetting
correction
protein


No allele    <--- no DNA polymerases, so tumor can't proliferate. Ha ha!
                   
A few errors <--- lymphocytes target friendly cells as well as tumor. Bad.
                                       
Many errors <---- lymphocytes target cells with shit DNA copying fidelity,
                  that is, tumors. Good. Contradiction: need to target the
                  vaccine against conserved sequence in such a gene. As if
                  you're gonna find one in such an error-prone
                  environment - though one might find such a sequence
                  fragment it is unlikely to be common to all the mets.

Lots of errors <--- tumor cell falls off its error catastrophe cliffside,
                    doesn't need to be immunologically dealt with, ha ha,
                    eat shit and die.


Maybe they're getting by without error correction anywhere, poised on the
lip of their error catastrophe threshold.

The background to all of this is that it isn't gonna FIX EXISTING ERRORS,
only increase the likelyhood that cells exhibiting them are going to be
immunologically destroyed. Anyway, I might just be fixing a symptom here,
not fixing the actual cause of the disease. Besides which, the whole
technique is patented up to the moon... I don't have much time to do it
either - I'd have to drag together a PCR thermal cycler, an
electrophoresis rig, some bacterial cloning and mammalian expression
vectors, a pile of restriction enzymes, blah blah blah.




It dawns on me that my entire cogitating on these molecular processes and
therapeutic approaches is, in fact, a refusal to face the inevitable. 

"You hear that sound? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound
of your death, Mr Anderson." - Agent Smith, The Matrix



When I wrote earlier that tumors select for their own viciousness, I
didn't mention that some of the fuckers actively hide themselves in
proteins like fibrin to prevent immunosurveillance (this is the
cytological equivalent of the Klingon Cloaking Device - if lymphocytes
can't "see" the tumor, they can't kill it). Some emit proteins which
suppress immune activity (IL-10 and TGF, etc) and they also mess with the
chemokine signalling pathways of the lymphocytes (mainly pumping out "Kill
yourself" signal proteins into their vicinity) in such a way as causes the
immune cells to enzymatically blow their own brains out (well, their own
nucleus, actually), before they have a chance to attack the tumor cells.


Not only that, cancer literally eats you alive. It *hollows you out* at
the molecular level. Tumors like to run their energy metabolism on glucose
(not ketones, not fats). They usually do this anaerobically, too, so they
piss lactate into their surroundings, the processing of which is a further
waste of my energy reserves (the Cori cycle is energetically wasteful).  
But the really evil thing is, they dump signalling proteins into their
immediate circulation, which then spread throughout my body, telling my
every cell to turn on gluconeogenesis, which is the biochemical synthesis
of new glucose from existing proteins in my body. Cancer _tells_ the rest
of my body to turn itself into food to supply the tumor. It remotely
reprograms the behaviour of the very meat of which I am fabricated,
telling that meat to deconfigure itself into nutrients for additional
tumor growth.

Bastard.


Millions of people die every day of preventable diseases, ones easily
knocked over by nutrition, clean water, drugs which work really well. But
this ain't one of those. If there was ever an enemy worthy of its
victories, this would have to be it. Cancer is a probe into the
configuration space of possible diseases. One is compelled to fight a war
of attrition against a hoarde of different armies, all armed and armoured
differently, all of them carrying around the same molecular software
library wherein is encoded every trick my body might use to fight it off.
It is a hundred different versions of the same disease, which is why the
silver fuckin' bullet - falsely advertised every so often in newsprint -
does not exist, why terminal cancer patients undergoing surgery are often
carved open and the surgeons take one look inside, and immediately sew 'em
up again 'cos there's no point, and they starve to death, eaten alive by
their own reprogrammed flesh.

What good a sword against the fog?

My reading list is getting huge, I'm wearing out my retina in the process
of uploading the contents of chunky immunology texts into my brain, they'd
bore the shit out of you, unless your life depended on 'em. It helps that
I know the biochem lingo in advance. But this reading is eating into my
email and conversation time. I guess most diseases exhibit that propensity
where they forcibly focus your entire attention on them.

As happens, right now, ow, there's a strange, faintly painful lump at the
bottom of my neck, nestled just above the medial aspect of my left
clavicle. If I jam a thumb in the hollow behind my left
sternocleidomastoid and use my index and middle fingers above the
collarbone I can gauge its dimensions. It is approximately golf-ball sized
and has no business being there. Natch, it's just above where we CT and
NMR scanned last month. Sly bastard. I'd invite mum to feel it but given
the state of her sharp, manicured nails I don't know if I'd die of first -
blood loss or bacterial infection.

If this is a met, I'm gonna have to move fast to biopsy it, or chop it
out, or um, get the fuckin' ANFO before it does something stupid like, oh,
invades my carotid artery and strokes the left side of my brain out. It's
the festive season and all the cancer choppers have gone home. There may
be less time than I had reckoned. 

I look around at the stack 'o biochem and immuno' texts around me. It
occurs to me that I am not gonna live long enough to read my way out of
this.

There sure as hell isn't anything symmetrically matching me on the other
side of my neck. So I'm stage IV after all - which sucks a lot. I have
less time than I thought. Shit.

"It's only a lump - you've gotta love that,
 when the tests are done, the results are back.
 Unleadded's got cheaper. A seat on the wing.
 When at last you're sure - she keeps looking."

-TISM `You've gotta love that.' 
      "Attn Shock Records: Faulty Pressing - Do Not Manufacture"

--------

Starship Predator, Captain's Blog:
18122003 
3 weeks postop. 

I haven't been keeping a log very well so the following will be just a few
anecdotes. I'm obviously not Alexander fucking Solenhytzin.

----

I went around to Fee and Jase's cafe (Glow, on the arse end of King St,
StPeters), where I used to hang out and eat when I could afford it (their
food's a bit more dear than the old Three Feet was). They asked me where
I'd been for the last couple of weeks and I gave 'em the compressed
version, which come to think of it is getting pretty compressed since I'm
sort of mentioning a lot, and it saves time - something of which i am
acutely aware is running out. They're pretty hard core christians, living
a righteous life in fear of the big bad judgement at the end, and after I
clued them into my impending death and godless atheism I wondered if they
thought I was gonna go to hell for my sins.

Jase (brow furrowed)  > So what do you do now?
Pred (laughing)       > Hang around and die.

We had a spliff, I no longer give a millionth of a shit what it does to
the tennis-court's worth of delicate alveolar surface through which I have
been doing surfactant-mediated gas exchange for the past three decades.
Cannabis makes me giggly, and when I walked out, my face hurt from
excessive grinning. No wonder it's illegal. Too much cheap fun.

-----
 
Hope is a dangerous thing. It's what keeps you alive when you really
should know better. 

I suspect most people staring down this circumstance do their damndest to
convince themselves they're gonna make it out alive, but there's a
niggling suspicion in the back of their heads, which says they are gonna
die. In some ways I am taking the reverse attitude - I'm pretty sure I am
gonna die, but there's this corrosive, strange hope, that I might escape.
It's not that I cling to it, but rather that it clings to me, like that
fuckin' glue I had to get off my arms and neck with Preen last week.  I'd
rather the luxury of cleanly resigning myself to this business of death
than wandering aimlessly in the indecision which comes with misplaced
hope... only to have death sneak up on and spank me like primary
school teachers used to when I hadn't done my homework.

This is not helped at all by many of the people I talk to, when I tell 'em
what I have, and the dolorous odds which I have culled from the
literature, are almost uniformly self-delusional, or put a happy spin on
it, even when they have obviously no fuckin' idea what I'm up against, and
even after I precisely describe what I am up against. They just can't seem
to believe it. 

This falls into one of two camps: One is, the `you'll be in the 20% that
survive' crew (this, of course, is a permutation on the same sentence
mentioned to all thousands of people who have already died of it). The
other is, telling me about some rello of a friend who had some bastard of
a cancer chopped outta them and was sent home to die, and then underwent
remission. I imagine they're not gonna tell me about the friends and
rellos who, felled as expected, are now in the ground. 

Others tell me to visualise a nice place I want to be in five years, which
I think is meant to give me something to aim for, to motivate me to hang
around. However, I can't, in the light of western civilisation's
inevitable impending collapse from energy starvation due to the
energy unprofitability of the remaining hydrocarbon reserves upon which it
is absolutely dependant, which would have occurred within my normal
lifetime anyway. I kind of think I'm lucky to have a ticket out. I have
leaked this news to a couple of people and they can't wrap their heads
around the un-negotiable, inescapable thermodynamic inevitability of this
situation either. For reasons totally unrelated to my carcinogenation, the
future still sucks. 

I'm starting to realise that they're telling me this "you'll survive" and
"be happy" stuff so as to convince themselves, in my presence, that I'm
not gonna die, or that they can convince me to go to the effort of trying
to be rid of this disease, maybe for their sake as well as mine.


The one exception to this is happy-face approach is Diode, with whom I
started the Sydney Cave Clan more than ten years ago. Cancer smote his dad
Milo in the mid 1990's. I went on one of Milo's final bushwalks. Diode
came around a couple of weeks ago with a load of books (Hacking the X-box,
in particular, was a great read, but there were also some great books in
the crate, including one about the history of taxation) and I'm glad at
least he knows there's no point telling me `good luck' and has the guts to
say so. I agree. But he's sending me these emails now which make me
cranky, suggestin' I should not just glue myself to the search engines, I
should get outside and be happy. Which goes against my geeky, somewhat
curmudgeonly nature. I am grateful, at least, that he's got his head
around what I'm in for. I guess he got the clues when his dad died.


The receptionist at the dentist asked me why I cancelled my future
appointments, and I told her that although I thought their service was
excellent, my teeth are, at this stage, almost certain to outlast me
without any additional care whatsoever. At least I'm going out with a nice
set o' choppers.


----

Explosives are a fast, reliable, but violent, messy way to go. They don't
leave anything pretty to look at. They're dependable. Back when was
getting my explosives licence, the forensic ballistics crew came and
showed us what explosives do to a human. I saw the photos of what happened
in the 1980's when the family law court judge's wife opened the front door
to a load of gelignite, it flung her down the corridor and through the
brick wall at the end, into the next room. Tore her limbs off.

She wouldn't have known what hit her, and at 3500 metres a second nor
would I with the relatively slower blast front intrinsic to detonating
ANFO, but I mean, what a fuckin' mess for the rellos to look at. Come to
think of it, a waste of good dentistry, too. Maybe I should seek a more
appearance-preservative approach for everyone else's sake.



---------------

XML invited me over for another round of watermelon consumption (this is
not a codeword, it just means we eat watermelon) and frantic, damaging sex
- she bites and it's all I can do to stop her anchoring her teeth into my
neck, shoulder or whatever other chunk of musculature onto which she can
lock her jaws. Normally I wouldn't care but I'm a bit fragile just now. We
shagged ourselves into near crippledom prior to my hospitalisation I was
faintly apprehensive. The watermelon was deeelightful. I asked her why it
didn't have any seeds and she said `it's sterile'. I empathised with the
watermelon, both from that perspective and from our shared ill fortunes to
be being eaten alive. My rigging was still sort of broken from a
neurological perspective and I was not entirely sure that the laparotomy
scar had enough integrity to withstand the rigors of the act. It
hurt from the mere touch of a tee shirt, and probably wasn't gonna be
entirely amused with someone else's bod pressed against it.

This turned out to be correct, so there was a certain amount of gymnastics
involved to push the pain:fun ratio into mutually enjoyable values. We
discovered some uh, very mutually enjoyable values, actually. My
reproductive plumbing appears to be working again (Murphy's Law would hold
of course, so I was cloaked in latex as usual) which is a relief, and we
both got off, shaking, flushed, reeking of fucking, nerves burning,
crushed against each other. Yeah, the scar hurt a lot but I didn't much
care. It felt totally weird when she ran her fingers along it - delicate
tingling bliss interfingered with momentary stabs of agony. Ahhh... great
shaggery is one of the things most worth living for, and one of the best
gifts one can give to another human, but it has that irritating aspect of
giving me more reason to live, which is what I don't want - I can go out
cleanly. I don't wanna feel like I'll miss anything when I go.

-----------------

The Ice Cream Factory crew, who exist under the same sheet of tin as does
the bulk of cat.org.au's infrastructure, threw a party on Friday night. 
It's a weird thing to be at a party where everyone has heard on the
grapevine that yer dying. It sort of kills the mood.


"Often, private schools, what they do with the drugs, they you know, uh,
they bring in a criminal, right, a guy in gaol, you know, he's out of gaol
now, he's lookin' really bad, and uh, they put him in front of the class,
and you know, they talk about how they used to get onto heroin and
that, and then they had to break into houses which led 'em into the
criminal scene which meant they got into bank robbery and they were still
hooked on heroin, then they went to gaol. And he said they interviewed the
kids after, and the kids are, he said, what the kids are thinking is, this
guy's had a fucking great life, he's fuckin' far better than my dad, my
dad's a boring fuckin' prick, and look at this guy, you know, if I - if I 
had to pick between him and my dad, I'd want his life, and look at him
now. They all say the same thing - look at him now, he's alive and he's
getting paid to go around and say how bad drug use is."

TISM - "Attn Shock Records: Faulty Pressing - Do Not Manufacture"



The kind person who manufactured those cookies I didn't get to use last
month, didn't warn me how kick-arse they were. And, I use the magic weed
on average about once every year so I'm not desensitised to it. I had one,
about two inches square, an eighth-inch thick, on am empty stomach. Two
hours later I was absolutely stoned off my brainstem, to the point
that anything remotely amusing made me laugh so hard I thought I'd tear my
stitching out, which wasn't helped my the repetitious mental playback of
an ancient Sesame Street song, sung by the Cookie Monster... C is for
Cookie, that's good enough for meeee. Nor was my sudden tendancy to laugh
at how funny it was to be this stoned helping me either. I had to crash in
a bed somewhere. An unspecifable time later, mysterious Cookie
Manufacturer found me sprawled there, face hurting from smiling too much,
almost too stoned to get my clothes off. We then proceeded to shag each
other's brainstems out. The pain-muting effects of the cookie might have
helped, but I have gotta go easier on this scar. My smile muscles ached
for most of the next morning. Stuff the cookie monster. P is for pussy,
that's good enough for me. Too.


This would appear to be a tale of drugs, sex, death and anarchy, but you
shouldn't get the idea I'm normally some sort of drug-munchin' studly root
rat - though I could learn to adapt to the life. I sure as shit don't feel
especially energetic or athletic and I look like something released from
the morgue for unexpectedly waking up when stabbed mid post-mortem. The
last woman I mentioned my impending exit to immediately told me she 1) was
frigid and 2) she'd love to shag me. Who am I to refuse such an offer...
but I can't figure it out. Are dying men supposed to try harder in the
sack, or appreciate it more? Or to be closer to their emotional sides? Do
some women like the guarantee of a short-term relationship which I imply?
Is there some special insight or into life, or some unusually candid
conversation that one expects to extract from a self-proclaimed impending
stiff-to-be? I thought necrophiles were at least supposed to wait until
their love interests got around to carking it. But, in the face of all
this sudden carnal generosity, I'll feel like a lying bastard if I *don't*
die.
  
---------------

I'm thinking more than infrequently about Joss, over there on the other
side of the planet, probably angsting about me, though I hope she isn't. I
had the strange thought that I should chop off my hair and mail it to her.
It's symbolic of me in some ways - thin, frayed, knotted, unorganised, and
already dead, after all. But I lack an address. And anyway it'd be risky
from various perspectives, both emotional ones, and, knowing my hair, from
a quarantine point of view. The Brits would be well within their rights
incinerating it as soon as it crossed the channel.

----------

Dad wandered home with some interesting scars on his bonce, since he's
just had some squamous cell carcinomas frozen off his ears and forehead.
Fuckin' cancer. Mum's the only person around here who hasn't got it and
she's been smoking tobacco for since the middle of the second world war.
I've conjectured to her that this is because there isn't a tumor on earth
that could survive living in the toxins which have accumulated in her
body. Maybe I should start on cigars.

-----------

Sunday 21 Dec 2003

Diode and I went down a drain we visited a decade ago. I've not been down
in the dark, earthy-smelling bowels of the sururbs for some time. It was
stinking hot, so drain exploration was just the thing to do - a fine day
under Revesby. It has grown a new section. We pestered frantic Christmas
shoppers in the carpark by making announcements into their vicinity in our
best security guard voices, from the safety of secluded gutter grilles.

"Trolley Control, attention Trolley Control we have a Code Six shopping
trolley violation, send backup to sector four, suspect is a white male
beergut, trolley is adjacent to a black Nissan Eczema, registration
SUX823, repeat, subject is armed with beergut, assume dangerous."

Some of our exits were blocked by locks on various grilles, or bolts
screwed down more tightly than our fingers could open, or because cars
were parked on top of them.

I found some tools in the debris at the bottom of the pipes - a beautiful
pair of pliers, barely corroded, and a philips-head screwdriver, etched by
years in the anoxic sludge, but salvagable. We ended up climbing out a
grille in the back yard of a house while the Maori occupants were playing
footy in the back yard. Their pit bull gave us more hassle than they did,
since they were standing around gaping at the two grotty freaks drenched
in old spiderwebs who appeared in their yard as if straight out of the
air. We climbed over their front fence to get out, 'cos they'd lost the
keys to the side gate. Arrr. Recreational trespass, just like the old
days.


-----------

Malibu Stacy suggested we name the tumor. We named it after Microsoft's
founder, Bill Gates III. 

Tumorsoft - which hospital do you want to go to today?

I'm eating for two again. I'm avoiding carbohydrates. I love carbs...
they're in pasta, bread, just about everything I (used to) eat. So my diet
sort of sucks again, mostly protein - fish, chook, various fruit'n'veg -
but at least I can eat fats (which are effectively hydrocarbons with
various moieties chemically appended, so are processed in different
biochemical pathways to the sugars). The reason for this is I suspect
Bill, the secondary tumor taking over my neck is running with a broken
electron transport chain, as many cancers do since their mitochondria are
kind of broken, so can't oxidatively metabolise lipids or protein for
fuel. So I'm trying to drive my metabolism into ketogenesis, which means I
will be running on fat and proteins, exhibit hypoglycemia, feeling like
shit, stinking of acetone and hopefully starve the bastard to death. Yeah,
as if I'm gonna think about that in a few days when I fight my way up the
road system to my cuz's place for the family din-dins on the 25th. Put a
load of carbs in front of me and I'll a-guts it. Some days I just don't
give a fuck if what I eat helps to shorten my life. I'd rather just enjoy
the food, but sometimes I just feel as if by the mere act of eating at
all, I'm helping myself along towards the cemetary. Anyway I'm gonna try
and get Bill chopped out this week. 

It's sunday night, I have to have a shower and wash the cobwebs outta my
hair and the Drain Stench off my feet. I want to get away from the
terminal .. um, keyboard. I might write more in a few days. 

If you've made it this far, you've suffered nearly eleven thousand words.
Congratulations. It probably wasn't good fun to read. Some of you will be
offended because I employed the word fuck at least sixteen times, and
quoted other people using it in addition. However, I like the word, its
occurence here is not really that excessive and seeing it once more won't
kill you. I've also used words you had no idea existed, so don't accuse me
of leaning on it due to a depauperate vocabulary. Have a merry fuckin'
christmas and a happy new fuckin' year. What's that? I'm innumerate? 

Fair call.



<predator>

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