predator/getting_it.txt

File: getting_it.txt
Cont: Pred's friendly metastasis. Reality nibbles gently. What the fuck'll
I do now?


I can't remember what it was which provoked this memory. In 1993 I was
doing the practical component of the TAFE explosives course. This was
where I held my first old, sweaty (the nitroglycerin had started to sweat
its way out of the cartridge), stick of AN60 gelignite, which we were
gonna condemn to death by laying it down in the quarry and torching it in
puddle of diesel. A long way away from where we would observe it.

It's been a long time since I've had that creeping, prickly feeling of
fear that accompanied the realisation that the nitroglycerin was migrating
across the skin of my fingers and I'd have a fucker of a headache later,
since nitro' is a potent vasodilator as well as a vicious explosive. It's
the cold grey feeling of discovering you're being infiltrated by something
malevolent, but are powerless to prevent it. Dropping old AN60 from any
height is a good way to become dead fast. I couldn't let it go in any
manner other than was required by the disposal protocol. I could feel the
explosive oil on my fingertips. Yes, I did indeed get a fucker of a
headache later. I have never handled NG since, preferring the nitrated
pentaerythritols and the salami-like sausages, thick as your arm, of 3151
PowerGel.

Whatever it was, it came to me while I was headding up to the doctor's
office via the elevator. Maybe the hydraulic oil of the elevator and the
NG smell the same.

The redheaded flautist, who kindly donated me a pair of khaki pants before
departing for the apple isle (these were the genuine ADI item, too, not
some imitation low-durability crap from a chinese sweatshop), has me under
a momentary vow of monogamy. I mentioned to her after saying I'd cop this
for about a month at most, that since my time is short and I'm grabbing
most things offered to me, that if any carnal offers came up in her
absence I'd probably say yes. She's sounding resigned to my stance, saying
unconvincedly that I should just do what I have to do, but I said that
while we're in the loop, she can negotiate with me about what else we get
up to. She told me to just do what I had to do and tell her a story when
she came back. Wow. This is the same person who without a moment's thought
just walked into the geek room and offered to shag me a few weeks ago. And
we still haven't, though we've been pretty close. I think she's right -
it's gone beyond simply fucking, we're getting to know each other so it's
no longer the straight proteinaceous exchange one can get away with under
the blanket of anonymity which comes from barely knowing each other.

I figure we've got the pathogens and pregnancy aspects under control, so
it comes down to how vulnerable her ego is to the percieved threat of
anyone else who shags me, whom she would consider as a superior or
competitor, or the assumption that I would, or even could, (I'll phrase
this indelicately for maximum effect) fuck her cheaply and forget her, and
I'm sure as hell not about to do that. But then, maybe that's why she
offered to shag me, from her point of view - I'm disposable. Fair's fair.

I dropped her at the airport and rode to the doctor's surgery in Kogarah.
I noticed later her blood on the front of the khakis (and they're not
AusCam so the blood contrasted darkly against the green drill fabric, but
ah, there was nothing else to wear). So did the doctors. I would expect
they'd have an eye for blood.

I had a chat to Aslan _and_ Cozzi, the dudes who spent a few hours playing
about in my guts back in Nov. Cozzi, who resected my cancerous chunk o'
lymph nodality out of my retroperitoneal area, had a look at the scar,
which has healed well. If I have to complain, it could only be because the
scar's fucked up my ol' six pack, even though I never did any work to
obtain either of them. I asked 'em about the homicidal maniac incubating
itself in my neck. They're gonna pass the job to his mate at Randwick and
he will probably opt to chop it out. I am glad I can rely on my previous
tactical slash merchants to be of the opinion that we should slash first,
ask questions later. Okay okay, de Sousa reckons I'm fucked anyhow and I
mostly agree with him, but for reasons mainly related to the need to
support the idea that I've got some sort of a chance (and that I want a
scar I can wear in public for maximum gratuitous egotistical street cred
without freezing my arse off in winter), I'm not going down without a
fight. Finally, someone has the clue. So I see the professorial dude in
Randwick on the 19th. Arrr... precious days elapse, during which time Bill
feeds on my ichor, presumably preparing to launch cytological tentacles
into the important adjacent infrastructure which keeps me alive... little
things like oh, you know, my carotid fuckin' artery. I told 'em I'd been
reading the scientific literature and that it was my opinion that the more
I read about this creeping doom the less I liked it, and frankly the odds
sucked. They said there wasn't much they could do about that. Looks like
medicine is still DIY to some extent these days.

So I'm also off to see Fluhrer on the 13th about some lipopolysaccharides
from strep pyrogenes and oh, what was the other one.. serratia marcassens.
If we fail to provoke massive immune response to this thing and its
invisible buddies by stuffing a few hundred nanograms of immunogenic crap
into it, we'll chop it out afterwards.


It's been a good week for scavenging, but it usually is in the couple of
weeks after Christmasturbation, since all the perfectly good old stuff
gets tossed to make way for more perfectly good new stuff.

I hauled an _astounding_ bit of stereo hardware out of a dumpster last
week, while bicycling breathlessly back from the paint shop adjacent to
where I went to school as a little kiddie in the mid-late 1970s. It's a
serious weapon from Sony, will drive 160 watts root mean-square into eight
ohms, per channel. It has bass enhancement, surround sound and all that
related digital signal processing accoutrementage of which the Japanese
are so enamoured, and which English electrical engineers such as NAD have
correctly held in contempt from the day they built their first amp out of
thermionic valves nearly a century ago.  I still haven't figured out how
to program the graphic equaliser, and have not figured out exactly what
much of the rest of it even does.

It doesn't have a damned left/right balance control on it, but at least
the volume control is a nice, massy knob with no dead spots. It is very
spacey to hear in operation. It drives my dumpster-dived (and re-coned)
Technics SB1950s with the ... well, noticable effortless transparency
which comes from an amp which is not working very hard to do what it does.
Liquid sound, man! Excellent, and I don't give a fuck what the snotty
audiophile set sez about it. Skinny Puppy's messianic `Warlock' poignantly
flares my nostrils and... I can't quite explain it ... makes the glands at
the back of my jaw ache (listen to everything after four minutes, ten
seconds into the fifth track on the Rabies album, at as much volume as you
can tolerate). I almost have to weep when listening to the rolling,
oceanic, bass tectonics which underpin the Pet Shop Boys' track Jealousy.
The savage dog twitches to it while she sleeps on the carpet. I haven't
wired the surround drivers into it yet. Ahh. Thank you, oh bountiful gods
of Dumpster.
 
Along with this audio bounty came a toolbox with lots of good tools and
hardware in it. The tools came up pretty well with a little work involving
some oil and steel wool. Man, I must have found or scavenged just about
every tool in the shed by now... everything from fuel pumps to cathode ray
oscilloscopes. But it's getting crowded. I've started throwing out stuff
that I have accumulated there which had a low probability of my using it
in the next two years. I'm glad of the space.

I mention the paint shop because adjacent to it is the primary school
where I spent the first seven years of forced incarceration in the
pedagogic monster which has consumed most of my life. In the corner of the
playground where the carpark of the paint shop abutts, is a large gum
tree. I planted it in 1977, at the age of six, on a day pouring rain, with
the then state environment minister, Paul Landa. He died of cancer (are
you bored yet?) a few years later. It was but a fragile sapling when I
packed the wet earth around its roots with my clean, small, childish
hands. It's a BIG tree, now, twenty five years later. The only honest
state politician I have ever met, Paul said it would grow to be so, but I
guess he knew he could be sure in his opinion. It makes me smile to see
kids eat lunch under it.

I am cycling more, and the lungs are obviously awaking from a long
slumber.  Geez, there's so much more traffic these days, and more
noticable when I'm not keeping up with it on the pushie. I got on the
scales at the veterinarians and they said I am captain to 64.65kg of mass.
But my memory's odd. I went to use my TheftPOS card and I remembered the
PIN from three years ago, which it duly rejected.

I went down to the bicycle shop where I got components for my first
bicycle in the 1980s. It's run now by the son of Ron, who used to run it,
who was claimed by mesothelioma some years ago. I'm on the hunt for a
suspension seat post now I'm back on the road.
 
I've also started stability testing of my next bit of computing machinery.
It's a mongrel with a tale worth telling. I dragged the chassis (where oh
where do the side panels always go?) in from the roadside last year. The
power supply was a cat.org.au item but was broken since someone dropped it
so hard its circuit board broke on the mounting lugs - I fixed this, and
also soldered in a nice IEC-III noise suppression socket... maybe I'll put
in some MOVs later for spike quenching. I found the cdrom drive on the
roadside too, a couple of years ago. The RAM is cat.org.au's and I'm
testing that too. The Pentium-III CPU came from a mobo felled by errant
onboard electrolytic power capacitor explosion (irremediable, sadly, since
the resulting short blew some of the adjacent regs) and scavenged from
NDARC by Jude Hungerford, who was *sure* it would be useful for something
(yep - a CPU is a Good Thing).

I had to fling the broken GX-150 mobo; the actual motherboard is one from
XML, who said it `had problems', and I figured them out : it was doing
segmentation faults mainly 'cos the jumpering and BIOS settings were
changing the core/bus ratio to something faster than the processor could
handle (and it helped to put a heatsink on the south bridge too) so it'd
just seg-fault itself to death a few minutes after boot. So it's in the
other room, doing memory tests, running lots of concurrent maps of its own
process table entries, running a GUI and factoring huge prime numbers.
It's doing about 733MHz, which is a bit sluggard by modern glitzo
standards but is twice as quick as my not-very current Celeron/366
Robo-608. If it's gonna shit itself I'll know by morning. If not, I'll be
happy. I am glad when I live on a planet where usable recyclable computing
hardware, for which free software is also available, adorns the roadsides
and junk on the living room tables of friends.

The motherboard came my way at Smokering's, the day after I slept in XML's
bed (and we didn't shag tho we did listen to a lot of Yello which I hadn't
heard for 15 years and I remembered almost all of it, too). Which was
before I spent a couple of afternoon hours in the graveyard behind King
St, Newtown under the huge spreadding fig trees as the sun descended,
holding Wolfie in my mosquitophilic arms and failing to escape the feeling
that I was surrounded by a historical example of my next big change in
domicile - holes in the ground with slabs on top.

---

I spent some of today in the back shed with my shirt off, doing the case
metalwork for this Pentium-III machine I'm putting together, which I'm
happy to say spent all night testing itself (a knoppix 2.4.20-xfs kernel,
several instances of top -d0, memtest, a gui, and about thirty
factorisations of large prime numbers - a considerable load average) and
didn't skip a beat. I think, ladeez-an-ginnulmen, we have a winner. The
PCI bus works too, which i can't say was ever the case for the '608.

I love metalwork. I would have elected to do it as a full subject in
highschool but I was considered too bright for that, which strikes me as a
decision diagnostic of shameful disdain for the great engineering arts of
metallurgical cuttin'n'weldin'n'drillin'n'foldin, and I've sure as hell
done more useful things with my limited metalwork skills than I have with
anything I ever learned in, say, higher school certificate Modern History.
It's summer and the back shed (where all the real work happens) is hot and
poorly ventilated even with the exhaust fan on and the door open.

I did the sheet steel work with aviation cutters and a hacksaw (this was
an old ATX tower cover, so pretty easy to retrofit onto a smaller box).
The other case plate came from the aluminium chassis of an obsoleted
19-inch rackmount Digital DECserver MX-200 hub from 1992. I hate wasting
aluminium sheet so I carved it up with a jigsaw and a Dremel tool, and now
it's the side casing of my next machine. Also scored some mains
noise-suppressors out of the ol' DEC item. Cool.

Cuttin' metal requires manual effort. Sweat poured off me, I stank of
burnt cutting lubricant (stuff you put on the blades to make 'em glide
through the cut metal edges more easily) and that rusty tang from the
reaction between sweat and freshly cut iron filings. The aluminium job was
too big for the bench vise so I cradled it in my lap with my left arm and
used my right hand to guide the jigsaw, which has a customised blade in it
which I tooled down with a grinder a year ago for precisely these sorts of
jobs.

It was fast work, and hot alloy shavings rained off the smoking, snarlin'
blade onto my belly and thighs but aluminium cools fast (low specific
heat) and I knew I wouldn't be burned. Fuck this new belly button of mine,
though. My previous belly button, protruding slightly as it did, didn't
catch metal shavings with anything like the amazing efficiency of this new
one, and the shavings are sharp, hard to get, and being aluminium won't be
persuaded out with a magnet. I tried to get 'em with the long-nose pliers;
that didn't work, and I eventually used a hose. Bugger. If I sound to you
like the sort of person who will find anything to complain about, it's
obviously 'cos you've never had alloy shavings stuck in your natal scar -
they're a fuck of a lot more of a nuisance than generic bellybutton fluff.


Normal mundanity - the thing I continue to live for - is biting again. I'm
gonna go back tomorrow and paint the place I was gonna paint in November
but didn't 'cos I got sick. I'm not looking forward to it since my
destestable sister has made the kitchen messy and smelly again. Fuck I
hate, hate, hate cigarettes and the arseholes who smoke them near me. Even
her vacuum cleaner's exhaust stinks of fag ash.

------


Some dudes I meet are telling me about things I consider to be possibly
dodgy cures. The present one about which I've been zealously enthused to
is laetrile, also known as amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside from almonds,
which is supposed to destroy cancers. Some people call this stuff vitamin
B17, which is just silly since it sure as hell isn't a vitamin, (tho if
you were going to call it a vitamin, it'd be right at home in the motley
molecular crew which comprises the B's, nomenclaturally speaking) as far
as I can tell, it's not even an enzymatic cofactor anywhere in mammalian
biochemistry.

Laetrile's not any good as an antineoplastic according to my Dictionary of
Plant Toxins (but that's a book about plant poisons, not about oncology),
nor is it any good for this according to my Merck Index. These two tomes
haven't jerked me around before, but the Merck's description struck me as
rather unusually ambivalent in its phrasing - I've never heard of The
Merck putting in an entry for a "putative synthesis". Why anyone'd bother
anyway eludes me - plants *always* get the chirality right.

According to the Merck, the last paper to seriously take the piss out of
laetrile was written in 1982 before whoever wrote it could have had a clue
about what we know now about enzymes in human metabolism. According to
quackwatch there's been a lot of hostile commentry on the material in the
last 20 years. Dudes have gone to gaol for selling it.

I'm thinking maybe what I am up against here is anecdotal evidence
unquantified, and amplified, through the meme-propagating power of the
internet, and exposed to people who are desperate for something to believe
in since they believe (correctly) they're gonna die without some or other
cure... natch, the med industry has its own agendas: if cancers were all
easily cured, nobody'd make any bucks out of oncology, chemotherapy or all
the other fun things we people in Club Metastasis live to enjoy for a
while.



"Don'tcha get a fuckin' chokko when you
 watch one of those docos about
 those diseases which mean you're born with flippers?

 You're feeling sorta well and, next thing you know
 it's the Peter McCallum,
 for the haircut they give you without clippers."

TISM - www.tism.wanker.com - Faulty Pressing, Do Not Manufacture


I'm never one to dismiss the observations of thousands of ordinary people.
Time to crank up that ancient part of my head into which I hammered
organic chemistry into years ago, and make a judgement for myself.


"Worf, shields up, activate bullshit filters!" 
-something Picard never said.

Never done chemistry? Here goes. Don't be afraid, most of organic
chemistry is just a bunch of exercises in electron-pushing and accounting
for it by equivalent amounts of proton theft. They expand this paradigm
into a whole degree at university but it more or less boils down to this:
electrons are the negative things which get pushed around wires
(electron-ics) and are also the material out of which chemical bonds are
made between atoms. A proton is a hydrogen atom without an electron,
protons are positive. Other atoms have more protons in them and need more
electrons to keep 'em electrically balanced (atoms like it when
electrons=protons). Protons repel each other and will rip electrons off
other things to form chemical bonds to them.

Electrons repel each other and like to go where protons are not already
shrouded with too many electrons... so you can shove electrons in one
place in a molecule (molecule=group of atoms glued together with
electrons) and the electrons'll rearrange to accommodate this, which has
consequences for the end structure of the molecule, which will either bond
to something new, throw something away, or rearrange itself to stash the
electron someplace within (frequently this creates a negative ion). You
can shove protons in and much the same, but opposite sorts of things will
happen. So much for lay terminology, let's chow down.

Laetrile is two hexose sugar molecules glyco-bonded to each other, in this
case, one of them is bonded via one of its oxygen atoms to a carbon atom;
this last carbon atom is also bonded to a benzene ring (the -Ph below), a
proton (the H atom) and a nitrile group (which people who haven't done any
chem tend to call a cyanide group, but really, it is a nitrile group -
cyanide's an ion, the nitrile group ain't - big behavioural difference).

  glucose
   |                    
  mannose-O     C%N     <-- nitrile
           \   /  
             C 
           /   \ 
          H     Ph       <--- benzene ring

The chemically astute will, if they ignore the nitrile (CN thing) in the
top right for a while, see in the ugly ASCII-art above the residue of a
benzaldehyde precursor (Ph-CHO) in the ether bond to the mannose.
Benzaldehyde is the stuff they sell as bitter almond essence in
supermarkets and you'll see a picture of it in a sec when we pull this
stuff apart. Maybe we'd be better off rotating our heads 90 degrees
anticlockwise and calling this thing the glucose-mannose ether of
phenylacetonitrile, but maybe not. Fuck it. Who cares? IUPAC does but
chemical nomenclature's enough of a shit already. One name'll do.

The exact nature of the sugar molecules don't matter especially, they're
the metabolically profitable `bait' that the cell is attracted to... the
cell enzymatically drags larger sugar molecules into itself for processing
because they're energetically worth it.  Now, if tumors preferentially
metabolise sugars like glucose (but there's a LOT of different sugars in
biochemistry... mannose, lactose, fructose, maltose, erythrose, threose,
trehalose, ribose, rhamnose, just to name a few from memory) 'cos their
protein and lipid metabolism is somewhat broken, then it makes sense that
this stuff gets processed preferentially by tumor cells, IF laetrile is in
fact metabolised by tumor cells at all - the enzymes which cleave sugars
tend to be fairly picky about what they choose to cleave.

Now we have to think about what happens when a cell tries to eat it.

First it'd rip off the glucose and use that for the usual glycolysis
pathway into the Krebs cycle, leaving the mannose stuck by an ether bond
(R-O-R') to the phenylacetonitrile, probably floatin' around in the
cytosol someplace.

Now my chem's a bit rusty, but if, enzymatically (which is more or less
organic-chemist-speak for magic, which is what biochemists know enzymes do
everywhere, all the time), a cell tries to rip off and metabolise that
remaining sugar by pushin' an electron into that ether bond (tricky -
ethers are pretty inert) I'd expect it'd leave a phenylacetonitrile
radical like so:

   O.
   |
Ph-C-C%N
   |
   H

the electron (represented by the lone . ) either has to attract something
electrophilic to bond to, or the electron has to go someplace locally. 

The benzo (Ph-) is already stuffed to the gills with these things in its
aromatic bond structure and is just gonna electrostatically tell the
electron to go away; the single bond to the proton can't accept any more
either, and the nitrile's fairly dripping with electrons already. The
radical is unstable but it happens that the oxygen wants to keep that lone
electron to itself, to get the sort of double bond it needs to fill its
outer octet... and oxygen being oxygen (the electronegativity rant can
come another day), it's gonna be pretty forceful about getting it.

So that electron stays right there on the oxy and forces its probability
distribution cloud onto the nearest other thing electrophilic it can bond
to, which is the central tetrahedral carbon. The single bond between the
central carbon and the singly-bonded oxy atom is joined by another single
bond, and (twang!) we get a nice C=O double bond.

[A probability distribution cloud is the best way to think of an electron;
because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you can't really say
exactly where an electron is, but you can describe the space of where it
is most likely to be in a given slice of time. Some of these clouds have
some funny shapes... go look up electron orbitals if you're bored.]

This'll push an electron off the central carbon, onto whatever can soak it
up (whatever's the most electrophilic now that the carbon's stuffed with
one more electron than it can usually take) so the radical will degrade to
benzaldehyde and a cyanide radical (a nitrile group with a lone electron
on its carbon atom, which happens to make the whole nitrile electrically
negative, at which point we can refer to it as a cyanide ion):


--->



   H
   |
Ph-C            -C%N   
    "O

benzaldehyde   cyanide 
 molecule       ion

Benzaldehyde tends to get oxidised to benzoic acid fairly quickly in air,
and I guess the same'd happen in oxygenated cells, too, though I can't see
how it could chew up very much of the cell's available oxygen. It would be
bad news for any marginal cell which tried to metabolise this stuff,
especially anything not well oxygenated due to poor vasculature (as tumors
tend to be), since not only has it had much of its oxygen chewed up by
this sudden appearance of something which likes to be oxidised
(consequently the cell momentarilty can't run its respiratory reactions by
shovin' electrons onto the normally available oxygen, which would in the
usual circumstances subsequently steal a couple of protons to form water).
But you'd still need to eat a LOT of benzaldehyde or its dietary
precursors to have this effect.

The real headshot for the cell is that the immediately available cyanide
ion has an innate ability to irreversibly bind to components of, and thus
shut down, the cellular electron transport chain. A cell trying to
metabolise this stuff is gonna have a hard, very short life if it can't
accommodate these two problems somehow. Hmmm. I dunno what benzoic acid's
gonna do for the cell's pH either.. probably not much, it's a very weak
acid.

Ok, so chewing laetrile as a plausible generalised cytotoxic agent passes
my chemical mechanism sanity check. But. But! It immediately occurs to me
that eating this stuff is just gonna protonate the nitrile group in the
low pH environment of my gut (contains HCl, so, uh, about pH=3, about
10000 times more acidic, that is, more prone to donate protons to anything
nearby, than is water, with pH=7) and give me low-grade cyanide poisoning,
which is probably why the almond plant makes the stuff: eat enough of its
seeds and you'll die and be no further threat to its species. At this pH
disaccharides tend to hydrolyse in the gut anyway, leaving me with
phenylacetonitrile derivatives floating around in my gut too, even if the
nitrile doesn't come off and form cyanide.

Also - why my other cells wouldn't also try and metabolise the stuff, and
die trying too, eludes me.... maybe they do but can deal with the damage
and tumors lack some of the enzymes which normal cells use to cope with
damage to their electron transport chain. I don't really know. Someone
mentioned something about mitochondrial rhodanese sulfurtransferase
failure in tumor cells so they can't turn the CN into thiocyanide and
excrete it, so they die. I've never heard of rhodanese and it's not in my
copy of Lehninger, nor my old copy of Stryer, but it's known about at
EMBL.


"Cancer cells, tax accountancy - the ways we all are failing."
 
-TISM "This Morning I Had Work To Do" - from the Best Off compilation


Time to start chewin' bitter almonds, then? Oh, fuck it, I should face it,
I've already turned into a pill-poppin' freak. Se, B-vitamins, garlic
(well, that's not a pill but it's not something I'm eating because I like
eating it, it's for allyl compounds), A, E. I can't say `it cant hurt' to
take these things, 'cos cyanogenic glycosides *can* hurt. But then so does
Se, and so does retinoic acid, if you eat enough of them, and they're
normal parts of your metabolism.

So now I've gotta go back to the people who swear the stuff'll cure me,
and they're gonna ask me if I've investigated their amazing wonder cure,
and I will tell them yes, I have - but not with the same conclusions as
they have. It's plausible but I can't say I'm convinced yet. But whaddo I
know. It's on the internet so it must be true, right? 8-)

Maybe they'll say, oh, ok, go ahead and ignore our advice, see if we care
if you die. It's only half as insane as shooting up yer metastasis with
dead microbial coats. Which is what I'm investigating day after tomorrow.
But I'm doing a lot of things... I'm altering my biochemistry in a lot of
ways. I am a statistical sample size of one. If I don't die of this stuff
my survival's not going to be attributable to a single thing.

Whatever laetrile does, it's not gonna provoke a long term immunological
reaction anyway, which is why I'm going for the lipopolysaccharides. Can I
think of a way a population of tumor cells could adapt to low dosages of
cyanide? Yes. One or more of them will somehow exhibit a tolerance (why
*should* a tumor not make rhodanese?) and will then go on to be the
progenitor cells which make future tumors. The same way any tumor deals
with any chemotherapeutic agent, synthetic or not.




Jan 12

I was listening to Regurgitator's Unit album today, on this thumpin' amp I
pulled out of the dumpster last week, and it has a great, great track on
it. Thank fuck there's musicians somewhere with their heads screwed on
properly.


 All that I am and all I'll ever be
 is a brain in a body.
 And all that I know and all I'll ever see
 is the real things around me.

 All I've heard, and it's true - 
 there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
 I don't see a point to this place.
 But I'm happy to be floating in space.

 I won't mind if you're holding my hand 
 and life seems sublime when you don't understand 
 that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
 if we all die away and we never come back again.

 All that I am and all I'll ever be
 is a brain in a body 
 I live till I die, then rot away
 it's a beautiful story.

 All I've heard, and it's true - 
 there ain't no god, there's just me and you.
 I don't see a point to this place.
 I'm happy to be floating in outer space.

 I won't mind if you're holding my hand 
 and life seems sublime when you don't understand 
 that the world turns around and it don't give a damn
 if we all die away and we never come back again.



Jan13

Manly Beach, South Steyne. I went out and chatted biochem with Joachim
Fluhrer, who is unusual for a doctor in that he seems to actually know in
some detail the sort of cellular biochemistry which one needs to know
about for tumor processes. It's great to crap on with someone who has a
clue and isn't afraid to articulate it.

Despite all the stuff I just raved on about above (trust me - this dude
earned every cent of the $200 he got paid to talk onco-biochem with me for
an hour) he's not experientially convinced laetrile's especially useful
either, and he's of the opinion that we should chop Bill out rather than
inject dead bacterial things into it if someone can remove Bill cleanly
(which given the CT scans we probably can). He suggested some doses of
retinoic acid which struck me as outright toxic. Also folate, but that
makes sense. Bunch of immunomodulatory dietary things. I've bored you with
enough of this stuff already.

----------


Jan 16.

Not that I want you to think I go feeling myself up all the time but I've
noticed Bill The Neck Lump has shrunk. I'm not kidding myself, it's really
happened. Now, while this is much better than its previous agenda of
expanding to devour my whole head, I'm not getting hopeful about it. For
all I know, next week I'll wake up and there'll be lots of other lumpy
Bill-equivalents elsewhere. I think maybe what it means is that there's
tumor cells there (which means there could be others elsewhere), but now
my major scar is mostly healed up (I notice the scar tissue has started to
grow its own superfical microvasculature now) and my serum levels of
growth hormones such as one secretes when one's flesh is traumatised by
the surgeon's blade have returned to normal, they're not growing under
their own instructions. Good. I hope they all fuck off and die, even if
Bill's a pretty convenient sort of lump... I can feel it and gague the
mood of the tumor, to some extent. For easy-access diagnostic purposes it
sure beats having one in, say, your prostate gland. Or your brain.

I spent the day debugging my new machine (can't boot off the slave drive,
so I've swapped it; can't boot knoppix but I think that's the weirdo scsi
device jamming the autoconfig, so I swapped that too; can't get red colour
pixels in quake which I think is a bug in the card, not the driver, so I
took out the Alliance Semiconductor item and slapped in a Tseng ET6000; I
couldn't get the other sound card recognised, slapped in my old one and it
worked fine; otherwise it's great) installing another bit of a LAN, moving
some furniture, and being periodically deafened by the bloody panic alarm
to which some of the furniture was attached by screws.

Feb's coming around quickly. Back to work. I'm sort of looking forward to
it. Graham sent me an email asking if I was up for it and I think I am,
given the way I feel at the moment, which aside from some random gut pain
is actually pretty good.


Jan 17th

Dad dragged home the copy of what my oncologist wrote to my kidney
chopper-outerer on the 23rd of Dec.

Status:
-Post nephrectomy, high-risk renal cancer.
-?Adjuvant therapy

It was his opinion that the lump in my neck was probaby due to
lymphadenopathy. Which is rather like saying the lump in my neck was due
to lymph-node lumpiness. Off I go to Goldstein on the 16th, which is the
day after tomorrow.

Ok. So. Now what? I've got cancer and I've had a few weeks to accommodate
myself properly to this fact. What am I gonna do now?

Is it better to proceed on the assumption that I will survive this? Maybe
it is, even if I won't. Among the consequences of that decision would be
that I could return to my original mundane life and stop documenting it as
if it mattered to anyone else who would care to read about it. I could get
on and write about stuff like the things I did last night, which wasn't
get laid for a change (monogamy to an absent person really is a drag) - it
was scarier and in some ways, better ...

0) Ate a cheeseburger at the McDollars at Heathcote, while waiting for the
rest of the Clan to assemble to do the journey down to Port Kembla. This
was possibly the riskiest thing I did all night. I haven't eaten any of
their stuff for oh, seven years. It tastes exactly the same as I remember
it, which means we've probably both degraded equivalently. I sort of don't
give a fuck now. A friend spent ages searching for a power point to charge
his phone, found one in the ceiling tiles, and was then accosted by a
McDroid for charging his fone off it.

1) motorcycle 100km through extreme fog and light drizzle at 120km/h to
the huge industrial precinct at Port Kembla. I didn't know the way there
so I was following other Clan vehicles and sped to keep up, but it turns
out, you can't miss the Port, yellow-white and blue gouts of flame sear
into the night sky, huge clouds of steam well up from the clanking dark
shapes dotted with the yellow pinpoints of a thousand sodium lamps,
scattered like so many miniature suns. When I arrived and unzipped my
weathersuit I noticed the _stench_of_fear_ wafting out of the pockets of
warm air held against me for the journey.

2) with about 20 other people, explore the vast, recently mothballed Port
Kembla Copper Smelter. The fence is a shit, as is the barbed wire. After
that... not a guard anywhere (and there's a million places to hide).
Everything's still lit up. Evidently nobody watches the security cameras.
The huuuuge vent stack, at least 80m tall, sez something about the nasty
outlet of the plant process - whatever it is they want to waft it over to
New Zealand. The sulfur-dioxide detectors still work, which is good, since
that's the hellish toxic gas which comes off copper sulfide when you smelt
it down to metallic copper...  near Port Pirie in South Australia this
same gas changed the pH of the surrounding soil so much that it killed
every tree for miles adjacent to the copper smelter and not a thing grew
back for 20 years. At 10 parts per million it'll kill you if you breathe
it. They add the gas to water and sell it as corrosive fuming sulfuric
acid (hence, lots of stainless steel pipes to guide it around), but there
wasn't likely to be any here, the plant's been shut for months. We wore
gloves to stop us from touching anything corrosive, but I suspected if we
did touch anything corrosive it'd just momentarily pause to eat the gloves
before getting into the meat below. It's that sort of place. Everything,
and I mean everything, is covered with warning signs. Funniest danger sign
of the night:

Entry Prohibited Without Permission From The Acid Technician

Pass the LSD, maaan.

I didn't know what half of it did, it was like being in one HUGE, vastly
scaled up pair of interoperating enzymes, each designed to do one reaction
at kilotonne scales:

CuS + O2 -> Cu + SO2
SO2 + H2O -> H2SO4

Huge crucibles, cranes, hoppers, silos, tanks, motors, analysis and sample
control laboratories, radioactive materials handling arms, floor after
floor of steel mesh and I-beams, miles and miles of pipes and conveyors
and cabling and chain... it just goes on as far as the eye can see. Huge
rotating kilns (I could fit my hand crossways in the gap between the drive
gear teeth of these) sit frozen in position with dark slaggy copper
stalactites hanging off their outlets at 45 degrees to gravity. Below it
all is a train engine, and tracks, part of the railway via which
presumably came the ore. I don't know where it gets made into sheet and
wire and pipe but I guess it'd need to be electrolytically purified first,
judging by the stalactites, it looks like shit when it comes out of the
kiln.

It's untouched by graf artists. It must cost 'em a thousand bucks an hour
just to keep the place lit like this. The whole place looks like you could
just turn it all on again in a day or two. I pissed off when we spotted a
lone forklift driver doing the rounds. Experience has taught me not to
hang around to get busted.

I rode back slower, and slept very well, to be awoken by the sound of a
chainsaw. I was convinced there was nothing left to cut down in this
suburb but I am evidently not correct, the people two doors down are
taking out the ancient paperbark trees in their back yard.

I estimate from being 7.5cm long when it was CT scanned, Bill is not more
than an inch (2.5cm) in its longest dimension. Hmmm. Pass the
cheeseburgers.

18 Jan


I wonder at times why the Flautist has offered me something she is
evidently not prepared to give. What good is her provoking a hardon if she
won't use it? Arr, I'm not one to impose, but it's frustrating. She's been
accepted to go to Brissie, and I am happy for her. Rural Tassie is,
according to her report on her time down there, crawling with crazies.
Maybe I shouldn't go there.
 
Bill The Lump is smaller again. I have to go to some effort to find the
fuckin' thing now. By the time the interleukin pusher gets to biopsy it
(will somebody, ANYBODY kindly suck some guts out of this adenopathic
lump, please?) it'll probably be in hiding, lurking to pop out again
later. Hmmm. It's 1am, Jan 19th. That's today. They'd better move fast.


Next load of screen-searing bilge will be at

http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/losing_it.txt 



<predator>