The First Post of 2023
The Desert, Love, Dogs, my Cat
This is my first post of the new year. Finally, I can stop saying “I’m almost forty.” Because: I turned 40. On New Year’s Eve. Goodbye, thirties, hello forties. Mostly I feel optimistic about this new decade of life. As I get older, and as my father glides closer and closer to the end (as we all ultimately are), living inside my head and inside my skin seems to feel easier and easier. Or perhaps another (more accurate?) way of saying it is: Less and less fraught. What I mean is: I actually love myself now. Not always, but often enough. And, sometimes, I even like myself. (Haha.)
I recently went on a three-day trip with my girlfriend to the desert. Joshua Tree, to be precise. I wrote about it extensively at my other stack, “Sincere American Writing.” It was a birthday trip. I loved it. We drove on all manner of highways. Saw all manner of flat and mountainous landscapes. Viewed Joshua trees and Yucca trees and thick desert brush. We talked incessantly about life and love and our future together. We read (me Dostoevsky and she Alice Sebold) and listened to Paul Auster’s second-person memoir, “Winter Journal.” We made fire and drank tea and slept in a little cabin and in her car. (A white Prius.) We travel well together, we discovered, and that’s fantastic. A huge chunk of what’s needed to “make it" long term.
(I love this woman like nobody’s business; like no woman ever before. I think about her constantly. I love her with a ferocity unknown by my younger self. I didn’t know you could love someone this much.)
It was the first break I’ve taken from dog walking since I started doing it for money six or seven months or so ago. That felt weird and good. Yet I found myself secretly yearning for the push and pull of my Mastiffs and my Great Dane and my St. Bernard and even my little dogs. They are so comforting. What would it be like to be a dog? Can you imagine the pure ease and bliss? Joseph Campbell said to “follow your bliss.” Yes: Become a dog; that’s the answer to that riddle.
My father was rejected from bigger cancer trials. He’s too high risk with his Myasthenia Gravis. My poor parents drove all the way down to Santa Monica from SB (a two hour trek, and my 72-year-old mother with bad knees which need full replacements again) just to be told that my father would not be accepted into the most common trials. This is a Melanoma specialist. They’d practically “promised” he’d be accepted. (Our oncologist here in SB had said same.) But anyway there are still two experimental trials he could possibly get into. The chances are not great. He has to meet certain physiological criteria. It’s very specific. He’ll get a blood test this week and we’ll go from there. And even if he’s accepted the positive response rate is around 30%. And now we know the cancer is again growing in his lungs, on the prowl, and also getting close to his aorta. If it gets to his heart it’ll be finished.