Kidney Cancer – Great Society

I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to decide if this pain in my lower back is just normal old back pain, because I’ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting lately (you know, corpses), or if my kidneys have been devoured by some fast-acting space cancer.

Depending on my mood, I can go either way. This morning, when I woke to a somewhat warmish foggy day, it was back pain. But then I went to make coffee and all the beans were gone and, well, kidney cancer. The cancer feelings persisted through much of my commute, where I wondered how best to give other people my cancer, and then turned into ordinary back pain again at the post office when I stopped to mail off a few dozen review copies of my latest book.

Well, not my book. I’m just the publisher. My book currently lives under my bed. Sometimes, I look under there and see the big ass manuscript and I wonder if I should pull it out and look at it. But I think there are mice nesting in it, so I’m afraid to look.

I actually have several books, but the only one with a beginning, middle, and, you know, end, or something, is the one under my bed. The others have beginnings, middles, and ends, as well, but not always in that order.

The one under my bed is about three guys steeped deeply in pop culture who survive an apocalypse peopled by super-human plague monsters. The “monsters” are roughly like Anthony Zerbe’s “family” in Omega Man, which was I Am Legend before I Am Legend was cool.

I recently told an ex girlfriend that I Am Legend was a sequel to We Are Marshall and she got all gung-ho about that. I’d say that I hope she deeply embarrasses herself in some way, but all her friends know that she’s stupid. I call her once a month, regardless, and fill her with similar lies.

Zerbe, in Omega Man, led his little rag-tag 70’s-happy plague mutant family in their quest to get at Charlton Heston. Every once in a while, they’d try to kill him. But, mostly, they threw rocks at his window and taunted him. I don’t know which is worse – crazy demon things, or Anthony Zerbe showing up at my house in robes every night. Something he also did in Matrix Reloaded, incidentally. Just wandering around in a bathrobe and tormenting insomniacs.

So these three guys survive the apocalypse, and have to fight cunning yet predictably inept baddies, and eventually get all tangled up in a time-travel plot that whips them back to 9/11 where they have the option to change the timeline (and avert the eventual apocalypse), or preserve the timeline.

See why it’s under my bed?

The seed for the three guys… Oh, that sounds bad. I mean the seed for the idea. That was back in 97 or so when a friend and I wrote a screenplay parody of The Shining. Our three heroes got the job to watch the hotel that was isolated during the worst of the winter, blah blah. Now, the hotel is haunted just as malevolently as the Ridgetop, but instead of getting into the head of one of the guys, the ghosts manifest themselves. So we have a bunch of ghost characters to mess around with. One guy doesn’t believe in ghosts, so he never sees them – to great comic effect. Another plays the Nicholson role and is slowly going insane trying to solve the murder in the dreaded hotel room. Another guy reacts violently to the ghosts and decides to shoot them all to hell.

That screenplay didn’t even make it under my bed. Though I did find it in the very far corner of one of my storage units and, in that case, mice really were nesting in it. So I sprayed them with Raid. I spray everything with Raid. Sometimes I spray ex girlfriends with Raid.

So after I mailed off not-my-book, I walked to my day job and the back pain morphed into kidney cancer again. It’s stayed like that ever since. Though, at lunch, we’re going out for drinks, and it’s supposed to be sunny and in the 70’s today, so I can feel the cancer turning into ordinary back pain again. Though I know it’ll be cancer again when the bill comes and I have to go back to work.

I went out drinking yesterday, as well. I went to the Irish Times and sat out on the sidewalk tables and drank Guinness. The waiter was disturbed that I wasn’t eating and kept pestering me to order something – a salad, an appetizer, anything. I told him to bring out a glass of Guinness every 10 minutes. Then I told him I was timing him and pointed at my left wrist. I don’t wear a watch, so I tapped my wrist meaningfully and refused to speak to him further.

There were three hillbilly types drinking Bud Light at the table next to me, talking about life in the city. Meanwhile, spring – as I noted earlier this week – has sprung. The girls were out. Boots and legs and tits and skirts and so on. Shoulders, hair. You know. Pretty things. So I sat all alone in my Target-chic casual clothes (unwashed for a week), slamming watery Guinness. No doubt I stood out as the better candidate, though, because I think those three hillbillies had never seen women before. Or, perhaps, they had never seen women under 300 pounds before.

During these nice months, I usually go out drinking every day at lunch. Some might call it a problem but, really, I’m trying to soak up as much beauty as I can, because my bus-ride home is not worthwhile. All beauty has been stripped from the evening Z8.

Of course, by the time I transfer to the bus, I’m usually wound up anyway because the Metro takes 15 minutes to move 4 miles and always appears to be driven by a spastic (yet strangely hesitant) Golden Retriever.