Dear readers, tonight we have a truck-driver from 22nd century Australia, who in a freak surfing accident got infected with a sentient alien substance. We caught him talking to Trucker & Jockey magazine, describing life post-infection while trying to avoid a rather persistent ex-girlfriend.
Tardi: You’re from the Trucker & Jockey magazine? Well met! I was a trucker once, with TLC, a family company. My dad and brother ran the workshop, and I drove our old Mack and jockeyed our live-mind freighter. Hope you’re recording all this? I also surfed for Virtual Surfing. Check me out on their website, they still have me in the sensor-suit surfing the actual waves and voice-overing the rides. My pay from them allowed me to rent in Watego’s Wall on Byron Cape, still a hot-shot tourist destination. Yes, formerly Byron Bay.
Me in the past? Oh, my name. My parents intended to register…
The problem this week I have no name for, apart from the fact that it appears to be a technical hitch.
Some of you can see the actual image in my previous post, Avatar Remaindered Part 12.
Some of you could for three seconds see the image doubled.
Since then the image is represented with the website URL, that needs clicking on to see the paragliders.
That’s all the technical part of the problem.
I haven’t discovered a solution yet.
Sourcing images to illustrate my blog posts has become increasingly difficult, and I frequently suffer through a bout of homesickness for the ‘good old days’ … the good old days of the Internet of about ten years ago I’m talking about, when it was easy to find, copy and paste all kinds of images and reference them in the caption.
In the Middle Ages there was such a thing as a Common in most villages, towns and even cities. Common ground that Internet style was called the Public Domain. In those day we either camped right on the grass or had our crofts nearby.
These days, us commoners are being shouldered aside by the moneyed classes. They set up their compounds all over the grass and indeed the trails we used to use to get places, and their gatekeepers require serious ducats to pay for entry. They all want their coin and I don’t have a bottomless purse.
This is the (1) before the previous (1). I thought I wouldn’t need reading in my new life?
The idea that I could slough off my old life and take up a completely new one isn’t happening and was probably doomed from the start. It’s true that while I was in treatment, I put everything normally ‘me’ out of my mind to keep my attention on the main event, to learn the disease, what was required every day, learn the people involved, how the meds affected me, keep my oxygen line straight. [I was on oxygen for ten days]
But after a while it became necessary to take up reading again. In between engaging with staff, which was mostly in the mornings, hung swags of time. Watching TV while in hospital is difficult. Volume is restricted. You can’t turn the TV off, attend the x, y, z person/procedure needing your attention, and turn it back on expect to hit the same place where you left off. The remote is fiddly, usually on the same gadget as the nurse’s call button.
While I was on the Oncology Ward at John Flynn Hospital, out in the corridors practicing my walking, I discovered nooks with bookshelves filled with books. Life-savers, in effect. Not that I read every book. But every walk I took, I’d change a book, like at at a library. I’ve read both fiction and non-fiction voraciously for most of my life.
I’m now officially in remission with a totally clear PET scan. My last chemo session was at the end of January, followed by two Rituximab (monoclonal antibodies) chasers taking me into the beginning of March. A ‘stupendous recovery’ my hematologist calls it, given where I began. My hair started growing again the week of the first chaser. My toenails apparently need more time.
Since I moved into the unit where I’m living now, I’ve been sorting through books … nineteen boxes of them. Some books don’t need a decision. Anything to do with fungi make it onto the shelves beside my work station. Fiction using fungi as plot devices, bad or good, also onto the shelves.
Most other books get the will-I-want-to-read-this-again question. If not, straight into the remaindered pile. If maybe, I open the book anywhere and read a few pages. If boredom sets in after only a few paragraphs, into a remaindered pile it goes. The books that will be sent on their way so far number about eight boxes.
Other things I’m reading at the moment are an article titled Proposal for a subdivision of the family Psathyrellaceae, which I keep for breakfast reading since it is a .pdf and must be read on the laptop. ‘Sideshow’ by Sheri S Tepper. This follows on from ‘Raising the Stones’ which is one of fungi-related novels in my collection. Tin Tin in Adventures on the Moon by Herge for light relief. And I’m thinking of soon reading ‘Meld’ the second part of my trilogy Doomed
Every morning I open the vertical blinds out to the patio and open the glass door then the screen door and go out to check what little things have sprouted. I said fungi would be first thing in my new life, and so it has so far been.
I take their photos: caps, stems, undersides, the way the gills attach to the stem, the pattern of their gills, is there or is there not detritus from a partial veil on their caps, what color is the cap, what color is the center? I note a few more things for future reference.
These may be in the Coprinopsis genus
These may be of the Parasola genus
All of them are tiny and really to make good photos I’ll need some equipment superior to what I have. An older model mobile phone with a 50% success rate where the photo is sharp enough to enlarge for extra detail. Just like the older model operator whose eyesight is not as sharp as it was, but whose eye for detail still works very well.
After breakfast and a couple of chores I may sit down at my laptop and do online fungi IDing on the various FB fungi groups I’m a member of, or I may submit a few more fungi observations to https://inaturalist.ala.org.au
Some days … when my state of being doesn’t allow me any running around … that’s all I do. Like today. Have to keep reminding myself, need to crawl before I can walk.
A recurring part of my new life will be fungi. Even though I can’t get out into the field as yet … am stuck photographing whatever comes up in plant pots … I’m spending the majority of every day traversing the four FB fungi groups I belong to, and now also adding old data to my account at iNaturalist.org
The tile which, after suffering an unfortunate accident, nevertheless became a work of art
Today someone asked me if I could see my life lining up after chemo. It stopped me in my tracks.
I’ve been living in the moment of having cancer and having it treated for so long that plans about what to do afterwards are not on my horizon.
Should they be? I’ve gotten out of the habit of making plans. After all, it wasn’t just cancer that hit me. There’s COVID too that hit the whole world. Does anybody now think they know what is around the corner?
— — — —
But let me tell you what happened with that tile.
I was learning to paint with ceramics at the time. My next big project was going to be a 30 cm square tile using all the techniques of applying texture available to me. I’d gotten as far as recessing the sky areas by patient scraping and sanding with the scrubber part of the dish-washing sponge. The applying the three coats of sky blue. In the foreground I’d started the stylized bamboo, and the carving-in of various landforms.
Un-kilned tiles (referred to as green ware) are extremely fragile. I decided to leave it at the workshop for my next class the following week for that reason. Nobody knows how it happened, just that sometime during the week the tile broke.
The pebble insert above was my first idea for saving it. The rest of the class, Carmel, Carole, Sue and several others all made suggestions. If I was to have a band of pebbles, I’d first need to saw off part of the existing bits, top and bottom, then stick the middle two bits on another tile, kiln the whole assembly, and finally glue the pebbles in.
I didn’t like it. No elegance in it. There had to be a better solution, I thought. I took the tile home for the four-week interim around Christmas and New Year and studied it often.
Finally, I realized that the only way to camouflage a break so definitive would be to have more breaks. More pieces.
Did that. Very satisfying. Ended up with about eleven pieces. Was able to highlight a different technique on each of them. I use it as a puzzle. Lend it to people and they call me in the night to ask which piece goes where.
— — — —
I think that this puzzling-together of the pieces I am left with after my life broke is probably going to be the way into a new way of being. There will be no lining up of the pieces. How can there be?
I’ve got old bits that need upgrading … my writing and my painting … friends from then, and family, to convince that my new way of being is how I’ll need to be.
New bits … the amount of attention I now need to give to my health … new friends to make and maintain … my grandchildren now within reach to nurture … a new way of gardening to learn …
More new things than old things possibly, and all of them having to fit into a narrower borrowed time.
While the beast illustrated here was once what a newspaper printer looked like, being in the Magnetic Resonance Imager today felt just like this looks like. The whole event was as near to a first hand nuts and bolts steampunk experience that I will want to experience.
fineartamerica.com
Imagine lying on a stretcher bed inside a machine like this in essence, being told to take deep breath and hold it. Dozens of times. Each episode you’ll hear a clickety-clacking, high pitched whistling, rumbles, moans and groans, cracking and creaking; each soundscape in sets of six to nine instances.
At the same time you’ll feel waves of heat traveling down the presumably steel stretcher you’re lying on that’s sliding slowly in and out of the MRI donut. The ghostly voice in your ears and the SOS squeeze bulb in your right hand are your only contacts with reality.
At the end, one of the staff said quite matter of factly that they don’t have many fans. First thing I would do is modernize the monster and cut back the high decibel sound effects. I doubt that my hearing improved.
Rita de Heer 