{"id":64,"date":"2008-04-10T11:19:47","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T16:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=64"},"modified":"2018-10-31T15:23:37","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T19:23:37","slug":"kidney-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"Kidney Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent the last 24 hours trying to decide if this pain in my lower back is just normal old back pain, because I\u2019ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting lately (you know, corpses), or if my kidneys have been devoured by some fast-acting space cancer.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Depending on my mood, I can go either way.\u00a0 <\/span>This morning, when I woke to a somewhat warmish foggy day, it was back pain.\u00a0 <\/span>But then I went to make coffee and all the beans were gone and, well, kidney cancer.\u00a0 <\/span>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.<\/p>\n

Well, not my<\/em> book.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019m just the publisher.\u00a0 <\/span>My<\/em> book currently lives under my bed.\u00a0 <\/span>Sometimes, I look under there and see the big ass manuscript and I wonder if I should pull it out and look at it.\u00a0 <\/span>But I think there are mice nesting in it, so I\u2019m afraid to look.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 <\/span>The others have beginnings, middles, and ends, as well, but not always in that order.<\/p>\n

The one under my bed is about three guys steeped deeply in pop culture who survive an apocalypse peopled by super-human plague monsters.\u00a0 <\/span>The \u201cmonsters\u201d are roughly like Anthony Zerbe\u2019s \u201cfamily\u201d in Omega Man<\/em>, which was I Am Legend<\/em> before I Am Legend<\/em> was cool.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I recently told an ex girlfriend that I Am Legend<\/em> was a sequel to We Are Marshall<\/em> and she got all gung-ho about that.\u00a0 <\/span>I\u2019d say that I hope she deeply embarrasses herself in some way, but all her friends know that she\u2019s stupid.\u00a0 <\/span>I call her once a month, regardless, and fill her with similar lies.<\/p>\n

Zerbe, in Omega Man<\/em>, led his little rag-tag 70\u2019s-happy plague mutant family in their quest to get at Charlton Heston.\u00a0 <\/span>Every once in a while, they\u2019d try to kill him.\u00a0 <\/span>But, mostly, they threw rocks at his window and taunted him.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t know which is worse \u2013 crazy demon things, or Anthony Zerbe showing up at my house in robes every night.\u00a0 <\/span>Something he also did in Matrix Reloaded<\/em>, incidentally.\u00a0 <\/span>Just wandering around in a bathrobe and tormenting insomniacs.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

See why it\u2019s under my bed?<\/p>\n

The seed for the three guys\u2026 Oh, that sounds bad.\u00a0 <\/span>I mean the seed for the idea.\u00a0 <\/span>That was back in 97 or so when a friend and I wrote a screenplay parody of The Shining<\/em>. Our three heroes got the job to watch the hotel that was isolated during the worst of the winter, blah blah.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>So we have a bunch of ghost characters to mess around with.\u00a0 <\/span>One guy doesn\u2019t believe in ghosts, so he never sees them \u2013 to great comic effect.\u00a0 <\/span>Another plays the Nicholson role and is slowly going insane trying to solve the murder in the dreaded hotel room.\u00a0 <\/span>Another guy reacts violently to the ghosts and decides to shoot them all to hell.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

That screenplay didn\u2019t even make it under my bed.\u00a0 <\/span>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.\u00a0 <\/span>So I sprayed them with Raid.\u00a0 <\/span>I spray everything with Raid.\u00a0 <\/span>Sometimes I spray ex girlfriends with Raid.<\/p>\n

So after I mailed off not-my<\/em>-book, I walked to my day job and the back pain morphed into kidney cancer again.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s stayed like that ever since.\u00a0 <\/span>Though, at lunch, we\u2019re going out for drinks, and it\u2019s supposed to be sunny and in the 70\u2019s today, so I can feel the cancer turning into ordinary back pain again.\u00a0 <\/span>Though I know it\u2019ll be cancer again when the bill comes and I have to go back to work.<\/p>\n

I went out drinking yesterday, as well.\u00a0 <\/span>I went to the Irish Times and sat out on the sidewalk tables and drank Guinness.\u00a0 <\/span>The waiter was disturbed that I wasn\u2019t eating and kept pestering me to order something \u2013 a salad, an appetizer, anything.\u00a0 <\/span>I told him to bring out a glass of Guinness every 10 minutes.\u00a0 <\/span>Then I told him I was timing him and pointed at my left wrist.\u00a0 <\/span>I don\u2019t wear a watch, so I tapped my wrist meaningfully and refused to speak to him further.<\/p>\n

There were three hillbilly types drinking Bud Light at the table next to me, talking about life in the city.\u00a0 <\/span>Meanwhile, spring \u2013 as I noted earlier this week \u2013 has sprung.\u00a0 <\/span>The girls were out.\u00a0 <\/span>Boots and legs and tits and skirts and so on.\u00a0 <\/span>Shoulders, hair.\u00a0 <\/span>You know.\u00a0 <\/span>Pretty things.\u00a0 <\/span>So I sat all alone in my Target-chic casual clothes (unwashed for a week), slamming watery Guinness.\u00a0 <\/span>No doubt I stood out as the better candidate, though, because I think those three hillbillies had never seen women before.\u00a0 <\/span>Or, perhaps, they had never seen women under 300 pounds before.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

During these nice months, I usually go out drinking every day at lunch.\u00a0 <\/span>Some might call it a problem but, really, I\u2019m trying to soak up as much beauty as I can, because my bus-ride home is not worthwhile.\u00a0 <\/span>All beauty has been stripped from the evening Z8.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, by the time I transfer to the bus, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent the last 24 hours trying to decide if this pain in my lower back is just normal old back pain, because I\u2019ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting lately (you know, corpses), or if my kidneys have …<\/p>\n

Kidney Cancer<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[175],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-illness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}