“Life is temporary,” the man said.
He had just walked past me with his elderly mother slowly trailing behind with her walker on wheels. She was dismissing the idea of undergoing some kind of procedure for whatever was ailing her. Any possible benefits would be “temporary”, she had asserted.
Her son gave her a simple, sobering reminder of the cost of not doing anything. She was silent. He had made his point. I wonder if she changed her mind.
I was waiting for my father as they gradually made their way to the exit. He was having his fifth IV bottle removed, a bi-weekly routine he’s grown accustomed to for the past two months.
Back in April, after his first colonoscopy, we learned he has cancer, stage 3, the highest of the curable ones. A second procedure and an MRI confirmed it. His surgery was scheduled for June but not long after he arrived that morning he was informed it had to be postponed. Not enough nurses on duty. So they sent him home in a cab.
He finally had it in July. No colostomy bag. A huge relief after everything he’s been through. Four days later, we picked him up and took him home. A couple of months after that, a phone call. A biopsy revealed hidden cancer cells. Radiation was out of the question. Chemotherapy would be the next step on the road to recovery. 12 two-hour sessions every fortnight plus a bottle attached to a picc-line placed in his arm. It takes about 2 days for the bottle to fully empty before it can be safely removed.
That’s why I’m waiting for him here at this local medical facility. I’ll be back here again with him in two weeks. And I’ll keep coming here every fortnight until March.
All of this happening after that septic kidney stone just before the start of 2020, the simultaneous discovery of his Type-2 Diabetes, a horrendous case of the shingles brought out by all the stress of being in the hospital and the belated diagnosis last year of two cataracts that were finally removed a couple of months before his cancer surgery. (His previous optometrist said his eyes were fine. Good thing that clown retired.)
His very nice doctor, who resembles a bearded brown Ralph Macchio, gave it to him straight. If you don’t do this, there’s a 70% chance your cancer will return. But if you do, it’s only 30%. My dad got the message loud and clear, and he’s been a trouper.
Things were going well with the chemo treatments until round six. About 20 minutes into the session, a nurse noticed Dad’s face had turned beet red. Turns out he’s allergic to one of the drugs. Through medication sent through his picc-line the redness eventually disappeared. But from this point forward, he’ll have four-hour chemo sessions.
The hardest part isn’t the excellent medical care he’s been receiving off and on these past three years. It’s the waiting. The waiting for cabs to pick us up which aren’t always on time. (None of us drive.) The waiting in the hospital for Dad’s name to be called so he can be hooked up for treatment. (We’ve waited as long as two hours before the start of a single chemo session.) The waiting for the ride home. The waiting for the call about the blood work on the days we don’t see his doctor who also takes his time before seeing us. The waiting to be informed of the next scheduled trips to the hospital when we don’t receive a printed schedule.
Normally, my Mom would be the one accompanying him to all these appointments. She would be the one asking the questions Dad would forget to ask himself. But she has cancer, too.
It started just before Christmas 2020. She couldn’t keep her supper down one night and ended up laying down for most of the rest of the year. She seemed to be better in January, but as the winter slowly transitioned into the spring she felt worse. Her food intake dwindled considerably. We begged her to call the doctor which she finally did in April. They told her to go get her blood tested. There was something seriously wrong and she knew it the entire time which she kept to herself.
Stage 3. There was an enormous tumour on her bowel, so big that when she had her colonoscopy the camera couldn’t maneuver around it. It had to be removed immediately. She weighed 79 pounds.
In late May, she had her surgery. Her heart stopped at one point but the surgeon and her team were able to get it beating again. None of us were informed of this until months later when she was safely back home. Our family doctor referring to it euphemistically as “a heart incident”. For 11 torturous days Mom was in the hospital unable to keep anything down. Bags of nutrition IV’d through her arm to keep her going. When she returned, she was so frail whenever she needed to go to the bathroom or just simply walk around, someone had to hold her tiny wrists and guide her to her destination.
For 18 straight days, a nurse would come down and administer a needle into her stomach to prevent blood clots while also changing her bandages. Her recovery took months.
She eventually regained all her weight thanks to going off her gluten-free diet. She could eat normal meals again. She could walk on her own again. But traveling outside the house was restricted to short trips that thoroughly exhausted her.
Sometime in January this year, she had a terrible night. Woke up in excruciating pain and vomited. Several days later, the bad news from her oncologist landed like a knife in the throat. The cancer had returned and there was nothing to be done. He couldn’t even look her in the eye.
I’ll never forget shoveling the snow that early February afternoon hoping finally for some good news about her health. The cab arrived. Mom climbed out. The news wasn’t good at all. Stage 4. No less then three months, no more than a year.
We’ve all since made our peace with it, even cracking jokes from time to time. For most of the year, thanks to a succession of visitors, numerous phone calls, emails, greeting cards and flowers, Mom was able to keep going, her sunken spirits always lifted by the cacophony of laughter and warm memories.
But in recent weeks, her condition has worsened. She’s still eating but the meals are much smaller now. She has next to no energy although she can still walk around and make phone calls when needed. And she’s much sleepier than before. Her pain meds can only do so much.
All this attention on my parents made writing particularly challenging this year. It’s hard to find joy in your work when your loved ones are suffering so badly. And there’s so many more important things to take care of which naturally eats into your spare time.
Before the bad news about my mom, as usual, I was watching movies and writing the occasional review. Really bad movies like A Guy Thing which I actually screened right at the end of 2021. After suffering through two Ernest sequels for the second time, I went through a succession of horror flops like Freaky, Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon and The Puppet Masters.
After coming to terms with mom’s diagnosis, I carried on with more horror disappointments like The Hitcher remake, the sci-fi doozy Meteor, The Condemned with Stone Cold Steve Austin, Halloween Kills, The Descent, From Dusk Till Dawn, the overrated anthology Nightmare Cinema, Deepstar Six, the fifth installment of Scream, Umma, and Spiral: From The Book Of Saw.
I also subjected myself to laughless comedies like Gulliver’s Travels, My Giant, Jackass Forever and the deeply offensive Date Movie. Revisiting Pacific Heights for the first time in over 30 years resulted in less affection for it. The closest I came to recommending anything in this space this year was The Price Of Fame, the sometimes revealing but mostly self-serving Ted DiBiase documentary that already feels dated in light of The Million Dollar Man’s now exposed fraud during the Covid crisis.
In the end, I only liked one movie this year: The T.A.M.I. Show, a highly enjoyable concert film from 1964, that I probably should’ve written about to prove that I didn’t hate everything I watched this year. But I couldn’t figure out how to do it. This year, it was much easier to slam than to praise.
And that was also true of my poetry. What can I say? There was a lot to rage about. From the dumb asshole who overpaid for Twitter (Global Punching Bag) to a certain fascist pundit crying buyer’s remorse about Donald Trump (Stick Figure Nazi) to the utter uselessness of Joe Biden’s Weimercrats (Voting For Democrats) who let the Supreme Court outlaw abortion (You Fucked This Up) to the growing global loathing of capitalism in the age of Covid (Avalanche Of Despair).
In April, an impromptu Google search led to a curious discovery: a video of one of my poems, Kill The Obsession, being recited. I went back and forth about whether I should watch it, dreading any emotional fallout. The fact that it was posted by a supposed critic made it all the more confusing. In the end, I watched it in silence with the captions on, relieved that it was just a straightforward reading. Closet Fan documents my mixed feelings about the whole thing. The video has since been deleted.
As Halloween was approaching, I wanted to write my favourite type of poem: the twisty short story. I had this title, Death Awaits You, which I turned into the tale of a doomed, desperate man outfoxed by one of the women in his life even after he murders her in cold blood. It’s always a challenge to do something different with a well established genre like this but I’m pretty happy with the results. I’ve often said I’m going to write proper fiction in this space. Maybe it’s finally time to go for it.
The ironic thing about expressing your anger is that it doesn’t completely disappear after a single poem. Sure, you may feel a brief sense of relief usually lasting a few weeks or even a couple of months but it will eventually return and it will need to be expunged yet again.
So you write rhyming, often sarcastic diatribes like The Creator Of Misery, Hostile Reception, Burned Beyond Recognition, Permanent Eviction, The Outskirts Of Rage and The End Of Denial. And when the temperature rises once again, you write more like Fuck Off Forever, I Don’t Trust You, Waves Of Silence and The Final Page. Just to be different, you write one that doesn’t rhyme (Good-bye Vortex) before reverting back to form (The King Of Projection, No Salvation).
It’s amazing to me how you can let go of your hurt for many years only to see it resurface unexpectedly out of nowhere. It’s not a welcome development at all. You don’t want to deal with this. It’s disruptive and distracting. The goal, after all, is total avoidance.
So you start writing and you delve deep into this neglected history and you learn things, unpleasant things. And then you come to accept that you were right, that your instincts remain sharp, that nothing will ever change except for your improved ability to cope.
Thinking back to the time I was forced into an uncomfortable situation as a young child inspired a more positive series of rhymes. The Memories Of Pleasure starts there and then focuses on how a significant, albeit short-term relationship allowed me to move on and more importantly became the impetus to start this website.
My favourite poem of the year, however, is an unbelievably true story. In February 2019, Valentine’s Day to be exact, a young girl went missing. For many years now, whenever a terrible thing like this happens, an Amber Alert is sent out with the fervent hope of a safe recovery. On this particular occasion, it was sent late at night when most people are asleep.
Most people were ok with this but there were about 100 or so who were not. One such grumbler decided to vent their frustration with being woken up unexpectedly by rage tweeting. The blowback was immediate and fierce. The grumbler got into pointless arguments with aggravated users who were deeply offended. And then the mocking began.
Someone made fun of the grumbler’s looks while others continually pointed out how unbelievably callous and heartless it was to be more outraged about losing a night’s rest over the fate of a missing child. This went on for a week.
The sad news is the girl was murdered. The even sadder news? The killer was her own father (not a stranger like I erroneously and lazily asserted which I’ve now corrected) and he never went to prison because he ultimately committed suicide. (After shooting himself, he was arrested and died while in hospital.) The grumbler complained that the system failed her, that she wasn’t found alive. Thanks to an eagle-eyed citizen who received the alert, her body was recovered in an hour. Considering the tragic set of circumstances at play here, the kid had absolutely no chance of survival. It’s likely that by the time the notification was even sent out, she was probably already dead. The only good thing is that her family were able to find out immediately what happened and were able to properly grieve their loss. The Amber Alert is the only reason they could do that.
None of this mattered to the grumbler. In the end, it all became too much to take. After being relentlessly owned, they completely disappeared from Twitter. It’s not clear if they were suspended or just deactivated their account. Either way, they’re gone for good.
Beauty Sleep joins in the mockery nearly three years later. Fun fact: the grumbler once posted a tweet with a racial slur by accident but instead of instantly deleting it they doubled down with a follow-up blaming their phone for the error. Amber Alert cranks like this are not missed at all. As this MacLean’s magazine columnist aptly put it, “You are horrible people.”
There were two new entries in The History Of The Mystery Track series this year. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of his death, I wrote about the tragic end of Layne Staley, the great but deeply troubled frontman for Alice In Chains.
The night after his deteriorating body was discovered by his own mother, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder quickly worked up a musical tribute. An outtake from the Riot Act sessions, 04/20/02 would end up unlisted on the rarities collection Lost Dogs.
While Eddie Vedder Angrily Mourns Layne Staley was completed over several weeks, R.E.M. Covers The Clique sat in my draft folder for more than a year before I was finally able to ready it for posting. The plan was to write about it along with two other popular mystery tracks in a single piece, but thankfully it proved too meaty to get shoveled into a compendium.
I tried reaching out to retired journalist Chuck Fieldman on Twitter when I was initially uncertain about how to portray his role in the story but I never heard back. It turns out I had plenty to go on from research that sat unused for roughly 25 years. I’ve been working on other installments but my parents’ health is a priority right now so who knows when I’ll have the time to finish any more stories.
Everything is so uncertain right now. My life feels like it’s on hold for the foreseeable future, a pattern I’ve grown accustomed to. I will do my best to post in this space whenever imagination and inspiration resume their ongoing partnership. But joy isn’t on the horizon. Dark times lie ahead for my family. Significant change is coming. Am I prepared for it? I don’t know.
What I do know is I don’t want to give up my writing. This website has done a lot for me. It rekindled lost friendships. It allowed me to make peace with the past. It got me a two-year gig with The Huffington Post. I’ve had the freedom to rant, to lust, to laugh, to treasure, to reflect, to mourn. I won’t take this platform for granted.
Unlike Twitter which can suspend you under questionable circumstances, WordPress is thankfully hands off. I can say anything here. I can’t say that about any social media site.
This past year, more than any in recent memory, I’ve seen too much vulnerability. The ravages of disease, the consequences of war, the punishing of the innocent, the lack of punishment for the guilty, the breaking down of the institutional west, the rise of fascism. It has been a nightmare for all of us. When will it end?
“Life is temporary,” the man said. It’s important to be reminded of that. It keeps things in perspective.
A big thank you to the readers who took the time to like some of my writing (including the hundreds of you who shared links on Facebook and Twitter (almost 700 times which is more than double last year’s total bringing the overall number to just over 2400)). And to those who either leave comments here or send email or need some burning questions answered. It’s always appreciated.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Sunday, January 1, 2023
12:19 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 