File: getting_it.txt Cont: Pred's friendly metastasis. Reality nibbles gently. What the fuck'll I do now? I can't remember what it was which provoked this memory. In 1993 I was doing the practical component of the TAFE explosives course. This was where I held my first old, sweaty (the nitroglycerin had started to sweat its way out of the cartridge), stick of AN60 gelignite, which we were gonna condemn to death by laying it down in the quarry and torching it in puddle of diesel. A long way away from where we would observe it. It's been a long time since I've had that creeping, prickly feeling of fear that accompanied the realisation that the nitroglycerin was migrating across the skin of my fingers and I'd have a fucker of a headache later, since nitro' is a potent vasodilator as well as a vicious explosive. It's the cold grey feeling of discovering you're being infiltrated by something malevolent, but are powerless to prevent it. Dropping old AN60 from any height is a good way to become dead fast. I couldn't let it go in any manner other than was required by the disposal protocol. I could feel the explosive oil on my fingertips. Yes, I did indeed get a fucker of a headache later. I have never handled NG since, preferring the nitrated pentaerythritols and the salami-like sausages, thick as your arm, of 3151 PowerGel. Whatever it was, it came to me while I was headding up to the doctor's office via the elevator. Maybe the hydraulic oil of the elevator and the NG smell the same. The redheaded flautist, who kindly donated me a pair of khaki pants before departing for the apple isle (these were the genuine ADI item, too, not some imitation low-durability crap from a chinese sweatshop), has me under a momentary vow of monogamy. I mentioned to her after saying I'd cop this for about a month at most, that since my time is short and I'm grabbing most things offered to me, that if any carnal offers came up in her absence I'd probably say yes. She's sounding resigned to my stance, saying unconvincedly that I should just do what I have to do, but I said that while we're in the loop, she can negotiate with me about what else we get up to. She told me to just do what I had to do and tell her a story when she came back. Wow. This is the same person who without a moment's thought just walked into the geek room and offered to shag me a few weeks ago. And we still haven't, though we've been pretty close. I think she's right - it's gone beyond simply fucking, we're getting to know each other so it's no longer the straight proteinaceous exchange one can get away with under the blanket of anonymity which comes from barely knowing each other. I figure we've got the pathogens and pregnancy aspects under control, so it comes down to how vulnerable her ego is to the percieved threat of anyone else who shags me, whom she would consider as a superior or competitor, or the assumption that I would, or even could, (I'll phrase this indelicately for maximum effect) fuck her cheaply and forget her, and I'm sure as hell not about to do that. But then, maybe that's why she offered to shag me, from her point of view - I'm disposable. Fair's fair. I dropped her at the airport and rode to the doctor's surgery in Kogarah. I noticed later her blood on the front of the khakis (and they're not AusCam so the blood contrasted darkly against the green drill fabric, but ah, there was nothing else to wear). So did the doctors. I would expect they'd have an eye for blood. I had a chat to Aslan _and_ Cozzi, the dudes who spent a few hours playing about in my guts back in Nov. Cozzi, who resected my cancerous chunk o' lymph nodality out of my retroperitoneal area, had a look at the scar, which has healed well. If I have to complain, it could only be because the scar's fucked up my ol' six pack, even though I never did any work to obtain either of them. I asked 'em about the homicidal maniac incubating itself in my neck. They're gonna pass the job to his mate at Randwick and he will probably opt to chop it out. I am glad I can rely on my previous tactical slash merchants to be of the opinion that we should slash first, ask questions later. Okay okay, de Sousa reckons I'm fucked anyhow and I mostly agree with him, but for reasons mainly related to the need to support the idea that I've got some sort of a chance (and that I want a scar I can wear in public for maximum gratuitous egotistical street cred without freezing my arse off in winter), I'm not going down without a fight. Finally, someone has the clue. So I see the professorial dude in Randwick on the 19th. Arrr... precious days elapse, during which time Bill feeds on my ichor, presumably preparing to launch cytological tentacles into the important adjacent infrastructure which keeps me alive... little things like oh, you know, my carotid fuckin' artery. I told 'em I'd been reading the scientific literature and that it was my opinion that the more I read about this creeping doom the less I liked it, and frankly the odds sucked. They said there wasn't much they could do about that. Looks like medicine is still DIY to some extent these days. So I'm also off to see Fluhrer on the 13th about some lipopolysaccharides from strep pyrogenes and oh, what was the other one.. serratia marcassens. If we fail to provoke massive immune response to this thing and its invisible buddies by stuffing a few hundred nanograms of immunogenic crap into it, we'll chop it out afterwards. It's been a good week for scavenging, but it usually is in the couple of weeks after Christmasturbation, since all the perfectly good old stuff gets tossed to make way for more perfectly good new stuff. I hauled an _astounding_ bit of stereo hardware out of a dumpster last week, while bicycling breathlessly back from the paint shop adjacent to where I went to school as a little kiddie in the mid-late 1970s. It's a serious weapon from Sony, will drive 160 watts root mean-square into eight ohms, per channel. It has bass enhancement, surround sound and all that related digital signal processing accoutrementage of which the Japanese are so enamoured, and which English electrical engineers such as NAD have correctly held in contempt from the day they built their first amp out of thermionic valves nearly a century ago. I still haven't figured out how to program the graphic equaliser, and have not figured out exactly what much of the rest of it even does. It doesn't have a damned left/right balance control on it, but at least the volume control is a nice, massy knob with no dead spots. It is very spacey to hear in operation. It drives my dumpster-dived (and re-coned) Technics SB1950s with the ... well, noticable effortless transparency which comes from an amp which is not working very hard to do what it does. Liquid sound, man! Excellent, and I don't give a fuck what the snotty audiophile set sez about it. Skinny Puppy's messianic `Warlock' poignantly flares my nostrils and... I can't quite explain it ... makes the glands at the back of my jaw ache (listen to everything after four minutes, ten seconds into the fifth track on the Rabies album, at as much volume as you can tolerate). I almost have to weep when listening to the rolling, oceanic, bass tectonics which underpin the Pet Shop Boys' track Jealousy. The savage dog twitches to it while she sleeps on the carpet. I haven't wired the surround drivers into it yet. Ahh. Thank you, oh bountiful gods of Dumpster. Along with this audio bounty came a toolbox with lots of good tools and hardware in it. The tools came up pretty well with a little work involving some oil and steel wool. Man, I must have found or scavenged just about every tool in the shed by now... everything from fuel pumps to cathode ray oscilloscopes. But it's getting crowded. I've started throwing out stuff that I have accumulated there which had a low probability of my using it in the next two years. I'm glad of the space. I mention the paint shop because adjacent to it is the primary school where I spent the first seven years of forced incarceration in the pedagogic monster which has consumed most of my life. In the corner of the playground where the carpark of the paint shop abutts, is a large gum tree. I planted it in 1977, at the age of six, on a day pouring rain, with the then state environment minister, Paul Landa. He died of cancer (are you bored yet?) a few years later. It was but a fragile sapling when I packed the wet earth around its roots with my clean, small, childish hands. It's a BIG tree, now, twenty five years later. The only honest state politician I have ever met, Paul said it would grow to be so, but I guess he knew he could be sure in his opinion. It makes me smile to see kids eat lunch under it. I am cycling more, and the lungs are obviously awaking from a long slumber. Geez, there's so much more traffic these days, and more noticable when I'm not keeping up with it on the pushie. I got on the scales at the veterinarians and they said I am captain to 64.65kg of mass. But my memory's odd. I went to use my TheftPOS card and I remembered the PIN from three years ago, which it duly rejected. I went down to the bicycle shop where I got components for my first bicycle in the 1980s. It's run now by the son of Ron, who used to run it, who was claimed by mesothelioma some years ago. I'm on the hunt for a suspension seat post now I'm back on the road. I've also started stability testing of my next bit of computing machinery. It's a mongrel with a tale worth telling. I dragged the chassis (where oh where do the side panels always go?) in from the roadside last year. The power supply was a cat.org.au item but was broken since someone dropped it so hard its circuit board broke on the mounting lugs - I fixed this, and also soldered in a nice IEC-III noise suppression socket... maybe I'll put in some MOVs later for spike quenching. I found the cdrom drive on the roadside too, a couple of years ago. The RAM is cat.org.au's and I'm testing that too. The Pentium-III CPU came from a mobo felled by errant onboard electrolytic power capacitor explosion (irremediable, sadly, since the resulting short blew some of the adjacent regs) and scavenged from NDARC by Jude Hungerford, who was *sure* it would be useful for something (yep - a CPU is a Good Thing). I had to fling the broken GX-150 mobo; the actual motherboard is one from XML, who said it `had problems', and I figured them out : it was doing segmentation faults mainly 'cos the jumpering and BIOS settings were changing the core/bus ratio to something faster than the processor could handle (and it helped to put a heatsink on the south bridge too) so it'd just seg-fault itself to death a few minutes after boot. So it's in the other room, doing memory tests, running lots of concurrent maps of its own process table entries, running a GUI and factoring huge prime numbers. It's doing about 733MHz, which is a bit sluggard by modern glitzo standards but is twice as quick as my not-very current Celeron/366 Robo-608. If it's gonna shit itself I'll know by morning. If not, I'll be happy. I am glad when I live on a planet where usable recyclable computing hardware, for which free software is also available, adorns the roadsides and junk on the living room tables of friends. The motherboard came my way at Smokering's, the day after I slept in XML's bed (and we didn't shag tho we did listen to a lot of Yello which I hadn't heard for 15 years and I remembered almost all of it, too). Which was before I spent a couple of afternoon hours in the graveyard behind King St, Newtown under the huge spreadding fig trees as the sun descended, holding Wolfie in my mosquitophilic arms and failing to escape the feeling that I was surrounded by a historical example of my next big change in domicile - holes in the ground with slabs on top. --- I spent some of today in the back shed with my shirt off, doing the case metalwork for this Pentium-III machine I'm putting together, which I'm happy to say spent all night testing itself (a knoppix 2.4.20-xfs kernel, several instances of top -d0, memtest, a gui, and about thirty factorisations of large prime numbers - a considerable load average) and didn't skip a beat. I think, ladeez-an-ginnulmen, we have a winner. The PCI bus works too, which i can't say was ever the case for the '608. I love metalwork. I would have elected to do it as a full subject in highschool but I was considered too bright for that, which strikes me as a decision diagnostic of shameful disdain for the great engineering arts of metallurgical cuttin'n'weldin'n'drillin'n'foldin, and I've sure as hell done more useful things with my limited metalwork skills than I have with anything I ever learned in, say, higher school certificate Modern History. It's summer and the back shed (where all the real work happens) is hot and poorly ventilated even with the exhaust fan on and the door open. I did the sheet steel work with aviation cutters and a hacksaw (this was an old ATX tower cover, so pretty easy to retrofit onto a smaller box). The other case plate came from the aluminium chassis of an obsoleted 19-inch rackmount Digital DECserver MX-200 hub from 1992. I hate wasting aluminium sheet so I carved it up with a jigsaw and a Dremel tool, and now it's the side casing of my next machine. Also scored some mains noise-suppressors out of the ol' DEC item. Cool. Cuttin' metal requires manual effort. Sweat poured off me, I stank of burnt cutting lubricant (stuff you put on the blades to make 'em glide through the cut metal edges more easily) and that rusty tang from the reaction between sweat and freshly cut iron filings. The aluminium job was too big for the bench vise so I cradled it in my lap with my left arm and used my right hand to guide the jigsaw, which has a customised blade in it which I tooled down with a grinder a year ago for precisely these sorts of jobs. It was fast work, and hot alloy shavings rained off the smoking, snarlin' blade onto my belly and thighs but aluminium cools fast (low specific heat) and I knew I wouldn't be burned. Fuck this new belly button of mine, though. My previous belly button, protruding slightly as it did, didn't catch metal shavings with anything like the amazing efficiency of this new one, and the shavings are sharp, hard to get, and being aluminium won't be persuaded out with a magnet. I tried to get 'em with the long-nose pliers; that didn't work, and I eventually used a hose. Bugger. If I sound to you like the sort of person who will find anything to complain about, it's obviously 'cos you've never had alloy shavings stuck in your natal scar - they're a fuck of a lot more of a nuisance than generic bellybutton fluff. Normal mundanity - the thing I continue to live for - is biting again. I'm gonna go back tomorrow and paint the place I was gonna paint in November but didn't 'cos I got sick. I'm not looking forward to it since my destestable sister has made the kitchen messy and smelly again. Fuck I hate, hate, hate cigarettes and the arseholes who smoke them near me. Even her vacuum cleaner's exhaust stinks of fag ash. ------ Some dudes I meet are telling me about things I consider to be possibly dodgy cures. The present one about which I've been zealously enthused to is laetrile, also known as amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside from almonds, which is supposed to destroy cancers. Some people call this stuff vitamin B17, which is just silly since it sure as hell isn't a vitamin, (tho if you were going to call it a vitamin, it'd be right at home in the motley molecular crew which comprises the B's, nomenclaturally speaking) as far as I can tell, it's not even an enzymatic cofactor anywhere in mammalian biochemistry. Laetrile's not any good as an antineoplastic according to my Dictionary of Plant Toxins (but that's a book about plant poisons, not about oncology), nor is it any good for this according to my Merck Index. These two tomes haven't jerked me around before, but the Merck's description struck me as rather unusually ambivalent in its phrasing - I've never heard of The Merck putting in an entry for a "putative synthesis". Why anyone'd bother anyway eludes me - plants *always* get the chirality right. According to the Merck, the last paper to seriously take the piss out of laetrile was written in 1982 before whoever wrote it could have had a clue about what we know now about enzymes in human metabolism. According to quackwatch there's been a lot of hostile commentry on the material in the last 20 years. Dudes have gone to gaol for selling it. I'm thinking maybe what I am up against here is anecdotal evidence unquantified, and amplified, through the meme-propagating power of the internet, and exposed to people who are desperate for something to believe in since they believe (correctly) they're gonna die without some or other cure... natch, the med industry has its own agendas: if cancers were all easily cured, nobody'd make any bucks out of oncology, chemotherapy or all the other fun things we people in Club Metastasis live to enjoy for a while. "Don'tcha get a fuckin' chokko when you watch one of those docos about those diseases which mean you're born with flippers? You're feeling sorta well and, next thing you know it's the Peter McCallum, for the haircut they give you without clippers." TISM - www.tism.wanker.com - Faulty Pressing, Do Not Manufacture I'm never one to dismiss the observations of thousands of ordinary people. Time to crank up that ancient part of my head into which I hammered organic chemistry into years ago, and make a judgement for myself. "Worf, shields up, activate bullshit filters!" -something Picard never said. Never done chemistry? Here goes. Don't be afraid, most of organic chemistry is just a bunch of exercises in electron-pushing and accounting for it by equivalent amounts of proton theft. They expand this paradigm into a whole degree at university but it more or less boils down to this: electrons are the negative things which get pushed around wires (electron-ics) and are also the material out of which chemical bonds are made between atoms. A proton is a hydrogen atom without an electron, protons are positive. Other atoms have more protons in them and need more electrons to keep 'em electrically balanced (atoms like it when electrons=protons). Protons repel each other and will rip electrons off other things to form chemical bonds to them. Electrons repel each other and like to go where protons are not already shrouded with too many electrons... so you can shove electrons in one place in a molecule (molecule=group of atoms glued together with electrons) and the electrons'll rearrange to accommodate this, which has consequences for the end structure of the molecule, which will either bond to something new, throw something away, or rearrange itself to stash the electron someplace within (frequently this creates a negative ion). You can shove protons in and much the same, but opposite sorts of things will happen. So much for lay terminology, let's chow down. Laetrile is two hexose sugar molecules glyco-bonded to each other, in this case, one of them is bonded via one of its oxygen atoms to a carbon atom; this last carbon atom is also bonded to a benzene ring (the -Ph below), a proton (the H atom) and a nitrile group (which people who haven't done any chem tend to call a cyanide group, but really, it is a nitrile group - cyanide's an ion, the nitrile group ain't - big behavioural difference). glucose | mannose-O C%N <-- nitrile \ / C / \ H Ph <--- benzene ring The chemically astute will, if they ignore the nitrile (CN thing) in the top right for a while, see in the ugly ASCII-art above the residue of a benzaldehyde precursor (Ph-CHO) in the ether bond to the mannose. Benzaldehyde is the stuff they sell as bitter almond essence in supermarkets and you'll see a picture of it in a sec when we pull this stuff apart. Maybe we'd be better off rotating our heads 90 degrees anticlockwise and calling this thing the glucose-mannose ether of phenylacetonitrile, but maybe not. Fuck it. Who cares? IUPAC does but chemical nomenclature's enough of a shit already. One name'll do. The exact nature of the sugar molecules don't matter especially, they're the metabolically profitable `bait' that the cell is attracted to... the cell enzymatically drags larger sugar molecules into itself for processing because they're energetically worth it. Now, if tumors preferentially metabolise sugars like glucose (but there's a LOT of different sugars in biochemistry... mannose, lactose, fructose, maltose, erythrose, threose, trehalose, ribose, rhamnose, just to name a few from memory) 'cos their protein and lipid metabolism is somewhat broken, then it makes sense that this stuff gets processed preferentially by tumor cells, IF laetrile is in fact metabolised by tumor cells at all - the enzymes which cleave sugars tend to be fairly picky about what they choose to cleave. Now we have to think about what happens when a cell tries to eat it. First it'd rip off the glucose and use that for the usual glycolysis pathway into the Krebs cycle, leaving the mannose stuck by an ether bond (R-O-R') to the phenylacetonitrile, probably floatin' around in the cytosol someplace. Now my chem's a bit rusty, but if, enzymatically (which is more or less organic-chemist-speak for magic, which is what biochemists know enzymes do everywhere, all the time), a cell tries to rip off and metabolise that remaining sugar by pushin' an electron into that ether bond (tricky - ethers are pretty inert) I'd expect it'd leave a phenylacetonitrile radical like so: O. | Ph-C-C%N | H the electron (represented by the lone . ) either has to attract something electrophilic to bond to, or the electron has to go someplace locally. The benzo (Ph-) is already stuffed to the gills with these things in its aromatic bond structure and is just gonna electrostatically tell the electron to go away; the single bond to the proton can't accept any more either, and the nitrile's fairly dripping with electrons already. The radical is unstable but it happens that the oxygen wants to keep that lone electron to itself, to get the sort of double bond it needs to fill its outer octet... and oxygen being oxygen (the electronegativity rant can come another day), it's gonna be pretty forceful about getting it. So that electron stays right there on the oxy and forces its probability distribution cloud onto the nearest other thing electrophilic it can bond to, which is the central tetrahedral carbon. The single bond between the central carbon and the singly-bonded oxy atom is joined by another single bond, and (twang!) we get a nice C=O double bond. [A probability distribution cloud is the best way to think of an electron; because of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, you can't really say exactly where an electron is, but you can describe the space of where it is most likely to be in a given slice of time. Some of these clouds have some funny shapes... go look up electron orbitals if you're bored.] This'll push an electron off the central carbon, onto whatever can soak it up (whatever's the most electrophilic now that the carbon's stuffed with one more electron than it can usually take) so the radical will degrade to benzaldehyde and a cyanide radical (a nitrile group with a lone electron on its carbon atom, which happens to make the whole nitrile electrically negative, at which point we can refer to it as a cyanide ion): ---> H | Ph-C -C%N "O benzaldehyde cyanide molecule ion Benzaldehyde tends to get oxidised to benzoic acid fairly quickly in air, and I guess the same'd happen in oxygenated cells, too, though I can't see how it could chew up very much of the cell's available oxygen. It would be bad news for any marginal cell which tried to metabolise this stuff, especially anything not well oxygenated due to poor vasculature (as tumors tend to be), since not only has it had much of its oxygen chewed up by this sudden appearance of something which likes to be oxidised (consequently the cell momentarilty can't run its respiratory reactions by shovin' electrons onto the normally available oxygen, which would in the usual circumstances subsequently steal a couple of protons to form water). But you'd still need to eat a LOT of benzaldehyde or its dietary precursors to have this effect. The real headshot for the cell is that the immediately available cyanide ion has an innate ability to irreversibly bind to components of, and thus shut down, the cellular electron transport chain. A cell trying to metabolise this stuff is gonna have a hard, very short life if it can't accommodate these two problems somehow. Hmmm. I dunno what benzoic acid's gonna do for the cell's pH either.. probably not much, it's a very weak acid. Ok, so chewing laetrile as a plausible generalised cytotoxic agent passes my chemical mechanism sanity check. But. But! It immediately occurs to me that eating this stuff is just gonna protonate the nitrile group in the low pH environment of my gut (contains HCl, so, uh, about pH=3, about 10000 times more acidic, that is, more prone to donate protons to anything nearby, than is water, with pH=7) and give me low-grade cyanide poisoning, which is probably why the almond plant makes the stuff: eat enough of its seeds and you'll die and be no further threat to its species. At this pH disaccharides tend to hydrolyse in the gut anyway, leaving me with phenylacetonitrile derivatives floating around in my gut too, even if the nitrile doesn't come off and form cyanide. Also - why my other cells wouldn't also try and metabolise the stuff, and die trying too, eludes me.... maybe they do but can deal with the damage and tumors lack some of the enzymes which normal cells use to cope with damage to their electron transport chain. I don't really know. Someone mentioned something about mitochondrial rhodanese sulfurtransferase failure in tumor cells so they can't turn the CN into thiocyanide and excrete it, so they die. I've never heard of rhodanese and it's not in my copy of Lehninger, nor my old copy of Stryer, but it's known about at EMBL. "Cancer cells, tax accountancy - the ways we all are failing." -TISM "This Morning I Had Work To Do" - from the Best Off compilation Time to start chewin' bitter almonds, then? Oh, fuck it, I should face it, I've already turned into a pill-poppin' freak. Se, B-vitamins, garlic (well, that's not a pill but it's not something I'm eating because I like eating it, it's for allyl compounds), A, E. I can't say `it cant hurt' to take these things, 'cos cyanogenic glycosides *can* hurt. But then so does Se, and so does retinoic acid, if you eat enough of them, and they're normal parts of your metabolism. So now I've gotta go back to the people who swear the stuff'll cure me, and they're gonna ask me if I've investigated their amazing wonder cure, and I will tell them yes, I have - but not with the same conclusions as they have. It's plausible but I can't say I'm convinced yet. But whaddo I know. It's on the internet so it must be true, right? 8-) Maybe they'll say, oh, ok, go ahead and ignore our advice, see if we care if you die. It's only half as insane as shooting up yer metastasis with dead microbial coats. Which is what I'm investigating day after tomorrow. But I'm doing a lot of things... I'm altering my biochemistry in a lot of ways. I am a statistical sample size of one. If I don't die of this stuff my survival's not going to be attributable to a single thing. Whatever laetrile does, it's not gonna provoke a long term immunological reaction anyway, which is why I'm going for the lipopolysaccharides. Can I think of a way a population of tumor cells could adapt to low dosages of cyanide? Yes. One or more of them will somehow exhibit a tolerance (why *should* a tumor not make rhodanese?) and will then go on to be the progenitor cells which make future tumors. The same way any tumor deals with any chemotherapeutic agent, synthetic or not. Jan 12 I was listening to Regurgitator's Unit album today, on this thumpin' amp I pulled out of the dumpster last week, and it has a great, great track on it. Thank fuck there's musicians somewhere with their heads screwed on properly. All that I am and all I'll ever be is a brain in a body. And all that I know and all I'll ever see is the real things around me. All I've heard, and it's true - there ain't no god, there's just me and you. I don't see a point to this place. But I'm happy to be floating in space. I won't mind if you're holding my hand and life seems sublime when you don't understand that the world turns around and it don't give a damn if we all die away and we never come back again. All that I am and all I'll ever be is a brain in a body I live till I die, then rot away it's a beautiful story. All I've heard, and it's true - there ain't no god, there's just me and you. I don't see a point to this place. I'm happy to be floating in outer space. I won't mind if you're holding my hand and life seems sublime when you don't understand that the world turns around and it don't give a damn if we all die away and we never come back again. Jan13 Manly Beach, South Steyne. I went out and chatted biochem with Joachim Fluhrer, who is unusual for a doctor in that he seems to actually know in some detail the sort of cellular biochemistry which one needs to know about for tumor processes. It's great to crap on with someone who has a clue and isn't afraid to articulate it. Despite all the stuff I just raved on about above (trust me - this dude earned every cent of the $200 he got paid to talk onco-biochem with me for an hour) he's not experientially convinced laetrile's especially useful either, and he's of the opinion that we should chop Bill out rather than inject dead bacterial things into it if someone can remove Bill cleanly (which given the CT scans we probably can). He suggested some doses of retinoic acid which struck me as outright toxic. Also folate, but that makes sense. Bunch of immunomodulatory dietary things. I've bored you with enough of this stuff already. ---------- Jan 16. Not that I want you to think I go feeling myself up all the time but I've noticed Bill The Neck Lump has shrunk. I'm not kidding myself, it's really happened. Now, while this is much better than its previous agenda of expanding to devour my whole head, I'm not getting hopeful about it. For all I know, next week I'll wake up and there'll be lots of other lumpy Bill-equivalents elsewhere. I think maybe what it means is that there's tumor cells there (which means there could be others elsewhere), but now my major scar is mostly healed up (I notice the scar tissue has started to grow its own superfical microvasculature now) and my serum levels of growth hormones such as one secretes when one's flesh is traumatised by the surgeon's blade have returned to normal, they're not growing under their own instructions. Good. I hope they all fuck off and die, even if Bill's a pretty convenient sort of lump... I can feel it and gague the mood of the tumor, to some extent. For easy-access diagnostic purposes it sure beats having one in, say, your prostate gland. Or your brain. I spent the day debugging my new machine (can't boot off the slave drive, so I've swapped it; can't boot knoppix but I think that's the weirdo scsi device jamming the autoconfig, so I swapped that too; can't get red colour pixels in quake which I think is a bug in the card, not the driver, so I took out the Alliance Semiconductor item and slapped in a Tseng ET6000; I couldn't get the other sound card recognised, slapped in my old one and it worked fine; otherwise it's great) installing another bit of a LAN, moving some furniture, and being periodically deafened by the bloody panic alarm to which some of the furniture was attached by screws. Feb's coming around quickly. Back to work. I'm sort of looking forward to it. Graham sent me an email asking if I was up for it and I think I am, given the way I feel at the moment, which aside from some random gut pain is actually pretty good. Jan 17th Dad dragged home the copy of what my oncologist wrote to my kidney chopper-outerer on the 23rd of Dec. Status: -Post nephrectomy, high-risk renal cancer. -?Adjuvant therapy It was his opinion that the lump in my neck was probaby due to lymphadenopathy. Which is rather like saying the lump in my neck was due to lymph-node lumpiness. Off I go to Goldstein on the 16th, which is the day after tomorrow. Ok. So. Now what? I've got cancer and I've had a few weeks to accommodate myself properly to this fact. What am I gonna do now? Is it better to proceed on the assumption that I will survive this? Maybe it is, even if I won't. Among the consequences of that decision would be that I could return to my original mundane life and stop documenting it as if it mattered to anyone else who would care to read about it. I could get on and write about stuff like the things I did last night, which wasn't get laid for a change (monogamy to an absent person really is a drag) - it was scarier and in some ways, better ... 0) Ate a cheeseburger at the McDollars at Heathcote, while waiting for the rest of the Clan to assemble to do the journey down to Port Kembla. This was possibly the riskiest thing I did all night. I haven't eaten any of their stuff for oh, seven years. It tastes exactly the same as I remember it, which means we've probably both degraded equivalently. I sort of don't give a fuck now. A friend spent ages searching for a power point to charge his phone, found one in the ceiling tiles, and was then accosted by a McDroid for charging his fone off it. 1) motorcycle 100km through extreme fog and light drizzle at 120km/h to the huge industrial precinct at Port Kembla. I didn't know the way there so I was following other Clan vehicles and sped to keep up, but it turns out, you can't miss the Port, yellow-white and blue gouts of flame sear into the night sky, huge clouds of steam well up from the clanking dark shapes dotted with the yellow pinpoints of a thousand sodium lamps, scattered like so many miniature suns. When I arrived and unzipped my weathersuit I noticed the _stench_of_fear_ wafting out of the pockets of warm air held against me for the journey. 2) with about 20 other people, explore the vast, recently mothballed Port Kembla Copper Smelter. The fence is a shit, as is the barbed wire. After that... not a guard anywhere (and there's a million places to hide). Everything's still lit up. Evidently nobody watches the security cameras. The huuuuge vent stack, at least 80m tall, sez something about the nasty outlet of the plant process - whatever it is they want to waft it over to New Zealand. The sulfur-dioxide detectors still work, which is good, since that's the hellish toxic gas which comes off copper sulfide when you smelt it down to metallic copper... near Port Pirie in South Australia this same gas changed the pH of the surrounding soil so much that it killed every tree for miles adjacent to the copper smelter and not a thing grew back for 20 years. At 10 parts per million it'll kill you if you breathe it. They add the gas to water and sell it as corrosive fuming sulfuric acid (hence, lots of stainless steel pipes to guide it around), but there wasn't likely to be any here, the plant's been shut for months. We wore gloves to stop us from touching anything corrosive, but I suspected if we did touch anything corrosive it'd just momentarily pause to eat the gloves before getting into the meat below. It's that sort of place. Everything, and I mean everything, is covered with warning signs. Funniest danger sign of the night: Entry Prohibited Without Permission From The Acid Technician Pass the LSD, maaan. I didn't know what half of it did, it was like being in one HUGE, vastly scaled up pair of interoperating enzymes, each designed to do one reaction at kilotonne scales: CuS + O2 -> Cu + SO2 SO2 + H2O -> H2SO4 Huge crucibles, cranes, hoppers, silos, tanks, motors, analysis and sample control laboratories, radioactive materials handling arms, floor after floor of steel mesh and I-beams, miles and miles of pipes and conveyors and cabling and chain... it just goes on as far as the eye can see. Huge rotating kilns (I could fit my hand crossways in the gap between the drive gear teeth of these) sit frozen in position with dark slaggy copper stalactites hanging off their outlets at 45 degrees to gravity. Below it all is a train engine, and tracks, part of the railway via which presumably came the ore. I don't know where it gets made into sheet and wire and pipe but I guess it'd need to be electrolytically purified first, judging by the stalactites, it looks like shit when it comes out of the kiln. It's untouched by graf artists. It must cost 'em a thousand bucks an hour just to keep the place lit like this. The whole place looks like you could just turn it all on again in a day or two. I pissed off when we spotted a lone forklift driver doing the rounds. Experience has taught me not to hang around to get busted. I rode back slower, and slept very well, to be awoken by the sound of a chainsaw. I was convinced there was nothing left to cut down in this suburb but I am evidently not correct, the people two doors down are taking out the ancient paperbark trees in their back yard. I estimate from being 7.5cm long when it was CT scanned, Bill is not more than an inch (2.5cm) in its longest dimension. Hmmm. Pass the cheeseburgers. 18 Jan I wonder at times why the Flautist has offered me something she is evidently not prepared to give. What good is her provoking a hardon if she won't use it? Arr, I'm not one to impose, but it's frustrating. She's been accepted to go to Brissie, and I am happy for her. Rural Tassie is, according to her report on her time down there, crawling with crazies. Maybe I shouldn't go there. Bill The Lump is smaller again. I have to go to some effort to find the fuckin' thing now. By the time the interleukin pusher gets to biopsy it (will somebody, ANYBODY kindly suck some guts out of this adenopathic lump, please?) it'll probably be in hiding, lurking to pop out again later. Hmmm. It's 1am, Jan 19th. That's today. They'd better move fast. Next load of screen-searing bilge will be at http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/losing_it.txt