File: hunting.txt Cont: 13 days post-operative Date: 10th Dec, 2003 Music: Electric Light Orchestra - Out Of The Blue, Discovery, Preen really does remove tough stains fast. I tried it on the sticky squares of gunk left over from where my i.v. lines were taped on, and the stuff came off easily. Woohoo, tomorrow I get to hoe into fatty foods again. I have missed dietary fat a lot these last two weeks post-op. I am still a bit gaunt, but since the bathroom scales exhibit neither precision nor accuracy, I can't tell if I've lost or gained mass while, all week long, doing not a lot more than sleeping and eating. My cheeks are a bit sunken, and the little bits of fat on my arse are sort of caved in, as if all the adipocytes were mysteriously poached in the dead of night by a feral liposuctionist. Joss is right. There's no way I'm gonna give up cake either. Or waste perfectly good hash cookies. OoohAhhh. I am tempted to smear a massively fattening chocolate cake in lard, spray it with olive oil, dunk it in WD-40 and oh, I dunno, roll around in it for a few minutes before actually eating it, so I can have the fun of licking it off my arms. Fat gets a lot of bad press, and I'm not gonna be one to besmirch it. Where do you get your cell membranes, your tissue padding, your clotting factors, your steroid hormone precursors, your lipid-soluble vitamins, and your chance to experience puberty? Dietary laaaard, matey. But that's tomorrow. My documentation at the moment is gonna be about the last week, which was pretty much fat-free. It's been a slow climb out of bed. Finally I can sleep on my belly, but it's a bit tight, a smidge painful. I found my old navel under a crease in my eleven inches of scar, which is healing nicely but is a tad uneven. I don't know if this means I have two navels, but it probably doesn't. The stitching is designed to dissolve in-situ after a few months, which is good, I don't have to be exposed to any trauma and infection risk getting it taken out. Navel contemplation aside, I can walk the dog and have been doing so partly to get the hell out of the house for exercise, and partly to pre-emptively escape the dog's asphyxiatingly putrid farts which I generally only find out about after it's too late to make an effort to avoid them. I don't use the leash, tho. She wanders around, self-propelled and voice activated, distracted only occasionally from her doggie navigational imperatives to pick a fight with a cat or shove her snout into any excreted olfactory intrigue abandoned by her kindred on the manicured lawns of Blakehurst. I've lost muscle mass - keeping active is the only way to restore it. Even though I am eating like a fiend, I feel languid, decidedly unenergetic. This is partly because my bod is allocating resources to healing the wounds, and partly 'cos I've not been deriving energy from dietary fat, so I've been converting proteins into glucose in order to run my Krebs cycle. This is sort of wasteful and stupid 'cos it just reverses all the effort my bod put into synthesising these muscles in the first place, but it keeps me alive. There's another possible reason why my muscles are disappearing but I'll get to that later. Getting outside was also good since it let me intercept some short rays from the big thermo' nuke in the sky. UV gets bad press, too... the shorter wavelength stuff deserves it, thymidine-dimerising evil that it is, but the slightly longer segments of that spectrum are an important part of my calcium metabolism, the not-so-short-wavelength UV photons do one of the molecular transformations required to produce the precursor for calciferol. I feel a bit old - in my present state, the dog outruns me, since I walk at about the same pace as Dad does, and he's 70 and has a buggered knee. My gait's changed, I'm a bit bow-legged when I walk because this cushions the heel-shock of each footstep which otherwise upsets my guts; I'm a bit bent-forward since the scar is slightly shorter than the length of gut in which it's embedded, so my weight's thrown a bit forward of where it usually is, and will be until I can stretch my abdominal muscles back to their pre-slash length. Given time, these things will return to normal with exercise. On the weekend Dad and I went up to his offices to paint out some graffiti... a half-litre tin of paint presents no serious weight to carry, so I offered to do it. The building is wedge-shaped. On one side of the wedge there was this graffiti: Fuck off u arab cunts and on the other side there was: Fuck off u jewish cunts If the writing on the walls is anything to go by, it appears Australia is still egalitarian but nowadays it's because we hate everyone equally. This graf appeared on thursday, on top of the sections of graf I had painted out a week earlier. By the time we got there, the jewish hubby of another person who works in the building had arranged to paint out the `fuck off u jewish cunts' section. I don't know if the other bit was left there accidentally or not, but I suspect the former. I conjectured to myself that I could make it completely equalitarian by leaving the fuck off and painting out the remainder, but I painted it all out, not wholly convinced that painting it over really would make it go away. The middle-east peace process needs all the help it can get. Later we went to get pizza (you find me a fat-free pizza and I'll show you a foodstuff not worthy of eating) and opposite our local pizza shop were about fifty uniformed cops waddling around a taped-off carpark, guarding an equal number of spent 9mm shell cases scattered around the tarmac, where a couple of dudes had decided to have a go at each other. If they lived long enough to use fifty rounds they can't have been very good shots, but then pistols are hard to aim properly in the calm of a firing range, let alone in the heat of conflict. This is not the same neighborhood as the one I grew up in. Sneezes still hurt a lot, so I asked them not to put any pepper on the pizza. Wednesday 10th: I nosebled into my cornflakes this morning. I can't say it influences their flavour very much. I went to a restaurant, to attend the christmas party/dinner thingo held for the handful of staff at the office, because today was the day I could eat fatty foods again. Oohhh, and didn't I? I think the concerted effort of ingesting about a cubic foot of penne boccianola knocked me over, though. I hadda go out and lie down in the carpark before declining a desert which I couldn't possibly deal with since I was stuffed to the pylorus with FOOOOOOD, yay! Looking suspiciously like a pissed businessman in my borrowed tie and shiny black shoes, I lay on the shaded concrete between a couple of parked cars, gazing happily at the sky, lacking only a puddle of explanatory vomit. I swear I could feel the oils and triglycerides pumping around my arteries. Gaaaah. Bliss. I spent some of last night trawling the electronic online oncology journals. Blissed out and in the no-care zone on account of the chunky lode of lipid laden nourishment I was in the process of absorbing, I mentioned in passing to the oldies some of what I'd found out (you'll get it in a paragraph below) about how this cancer tends to uh, progress. I didn't catch their expressions, I was staring at the fluffy upholstery on the ceiling of the car as we drove back from the restaurant. Thu, 11 Dec 2k3 Music: Front Line Assembly - Mindphaser (four-track EP) The narrow strip of my inner right thigh which was oddly insensate (fed by a branch of the ileoinguinal nerve, which along with everything else was stressed somewhat when my casing was opened up) has returned to normal. However, I'm still shooting blanks. This is apparently because some (sorry I don't know the name for them) of the nerves involved in signalling the emission of liquid rugrat precursor from the seminal vesicles into the urethra prior to peristaltically forcing it out the end of my end, were a bit upset when Paul peeled some of the cancerous pieces of lymphatic system off them. Can't say I blame them. This is something which, hopefully, will reconfigure itself in the coming weeks. If it doesn't, well, heh - in a roundabout way, this creepy disease will have blown any chance it had of inflicting itself on any descendants I might have otherwise initiated between now and when it eventually carks me, if it had any genetic propensity to begin with. Which I think it must have. I can't think of anything I did to encourage this... I don't smoke, expose myself to cadmium, coal tar, phenacetin, or most of the other things by which RCCs (Renal Clear Carcinomas) are known to be provoked. In the absence of some rather pointless DNA testing, there's no way to really know if it's inherited. Cells are heinously complicated things. Run any digitally replicating metabolism for long enough and some of it will eventually turn metastatic under the damage load it accumulates from the environment. At this point, the litigious types among the readership would smell an opportunity to enrich some bastard lawyers suing the medicos for an negligent accidental sterilisation. If you are one of these people, ask me over to your place so I can smack you one. I'm an ungrateful bastard about a lot of stuff, but to sue the dudes who just extended my life by chopping the renal equivalent of Benito Mussolini outta my flank is really just beyond tolerable bad manners. (I was gonna type saved, where you see the word `extended' above. But I think, actually, that would be stretching the statistical truth.) I went along to an oncologist on today. Dad went with me, and fell asleep (upright - neat trick) in the chair adjacent while the cancer specialist did the blurb. This is partly because dad's already come to his own conclusions about what I have based on his own clinical experiences of cancers which have made it into people's lymphatic system, and partly because he spent a lot of the night doing surgery on someone and he needed sleep. He's talked to oncologists before, anyway, and knows what they tend to say. The only thing he inherited from his oldies was a propensity for bowel cancer, which many years ago slew his old man, his uncle and a few others besides. So every so often he gets a camera stuck up his quoit and fed through his large intestine, to look for polyps and adenomas and other things which, if left to their own devices, would kill him. Not exactly Australia's funniest home video, but it's saved him several times. He eats a breakfast which amounts to a soy milk solution of woodchips and sawdust, since this is correlated with reduced bowel cancer, but also causes reduced iron uptake and unpredictable raucous farts. I listened intently, but, being a smartarse molecular biologist with an interest in cancer long before I had any of my own to care about, I didn't hear a lot I didn't already know. Sometimes, you can lose the primary tumor and any mets (short for metastases - secondary tumors which originated in cells flaked off the primary mothership in my now absent kidney) die - there's some poorly understood protein signalling going on between the primary and the secondaries, which, when blocked or removed, tends to result in the mets failing to thrive. Interferon at this point is about as likely to be useless as not, and even if it is useful it'll extend my cark-by date by no more than a year, not actually cure me, and probably make me sick as a dog while I'm on it. If any mets I have are going to turn up, they'll do it anywhere... muscles, skin, bone, brain, liver, you name it. Yeah, blah. I can tell from what he doesn't say, the dude is not a molecular biologist. In mathematics, the term "math-out" (c.f. white-out, as in, snowstorm) is used to describe presentations so drenched in formal notation as to be impossible to understand - which means the explanation is a failure since nobody actually learns anything from it. The cellular metabolism, and epidemiology of cancer cells is another subject in which one could easily inflict a biological chem-out on a hapless layperson, and I dunno if oncologists are trained to keep it simple just to help their charges comprehend what it is they face, but I *wanted* the meaty, gritty technical explanation. I asked questions which should have raised the dude's radar about my pre-existing awareness. E.g. I scanned the titles on the book spines on the bookshelf... and asked "Hmmm.. Steven Rosenberg... hey, isn't he the chap who did all that work with recombinant interleukin-2 and LAK and tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in the eighties?" and even threw in explanations about why what little he did say was correct, "Yeah, this is unpredictable 'cos the met cells have accumulated lots of errors, add new errors each time they do mitotic division 'cos their DNA repair and copying systems are mostly broken, so it's hard to know what's gonna grow and what isn't, or when, or how fast, right?" but, aside from getting the occasional, "Right" and "Yes" it didn't provoke any improvement in his signal-to-noise ratio. Maybe over the years he's copped negative feedback from patients about the incomprehensibility of the actual machinery of the disease when he explained it and now has adopted a strategy of keeping it simple. As ruthlessly insensitive an interrogator as I can be when I really want to know something, I am not in the habit of asking medical people unreasonable questions, such as, what are my odds, or how long have I got to live - since there's no way for them to know and I can cull what I need to know about these things directly from the scientific journals, which is where they find out in the first place. There are some things we cannot know. Time will tell me anyway, eventually, but I'd like to have some idea now about wether to keep living, or to prepare for death. The 'net is a corporately controlled wasteland these days, the information superhypeway has tolls at all the interesting offramps. The stuff I really wanted to look at is hosted by blackwell-synergy.com but it's subscriber-only. I ended up trawling EMBL and a few other mol bio places before digging out what I wanted. If I'm going to exercise any selbstbehauptungswille it will help to know the enemy. Actually, knowing the enemy might help you, the reader, get a clue about why I'm not kidding myself that I'm gonna survive. You might not be familiar with it. Cancer is the ultimate diesease, dynamically adapting in real time to every new threat you might present to it - its effectively a virus which also happens to run its own metabolism, which you gave it in the first place. So here's the condensed version, mostly cleansed of mol bio speak and chromosome-jockey jargon, in approximately increasing order of shitfulness. Blokes get RCC (renal clear cell carcinoma) twice as commonly as women do. Most people who get RCC get it after they're sixty (I'm waaay ahead of the curve). Spontaneous remission happens in about one percent of cases. RCCs eat radiation for breakfast. The usual cytotoxic chemo drugs (eg, peptide synthesis blockers like cyclophosphamide, etc) and the immunostimulant chemokines aren't much chop against it and make ya sick when you're on 'em. Actually, come to think of it, attacking the tumors with nuclear emissions and chemo usually just kills the weaker of the cancer cells leaving behind the really tough-arse tumor cells which were strong enough to surive these attempts at being nuked and poisoned. What doesn't kill it outright makes it stronger by the usual Darwinian laws. Surgery works well if the cancer is localised to a single spot. Chopping it out was a good idea since there's now several hundred billion tumor cells I don't have. I wish them all the very best in their new career as incinerator fuel. RCC tends to metastatise (as borne out by my histology report). About a third of people *already have* cryptic (hidden) mets already when the primary is removed. Most of the metastases appear within a year of removal of the primary. RCC metastatic behaviour is bizarre and unpredictable. The metastases are genetically highly variant and as such are an immunologically changing target - averaging about eight (!) changes per sample compared to the genetic makeup of the primary tumor. So I can go right ahead and vaccinate myself with the tissue taken from the primary (or derivatives thereof) but this would train my immune system to act against a target which is longer there, or only a few of the total available targets. Arrr... I thought I had its number, but apparently I do not. Well, not enough of it, anyway. Not only are the primary tumor and the secondaries are not identical genetically, the various secondaries (the actual metastases themselves) are also not even genetically identical to each other, 'cos as they clone themselves up, they make errors in copying their nuclear material before passing it on to the next generation of metastatic cells. Cancer is an information systemic process. The sort of error-correction failures intrinsic to this genetic change process are fundamentally the same ones which allowed the DNA in one of my kidney cells to become cancerous (uncontrollably proliferative) in the first place - breakages in the genes encoding for the proofreading proteins in the DNA polymerases, failure of p53 to control the cell growth cycle, failures to express proteins which do the usual excision-repair and other processes typically used by cells to patch DNA damage, that sort of thing. The failure of these error-correction systems result in the breakages in promotors / repressors for genes, or the breakages in the genes themselves, which actually make a cancer cell cancerous: p53 failure, inappropriate activation of telomere repair, inability to do apoptosis, inappropriate constitutive proliferation, constitutive angiogenesis, etc etc. So the errors accumulate, but they sometimes act in favour of the cells in which they accumulate. You would expect this. A tumor which didn't mutate (that is, one which still had functional error-correction genes) certain parts of itself on the odd occasion would eventually be spotted, and either be enzymatically clubbed to death, proteinaceously perforated and abandoned to spill its miserable cytosol into the surroundings, or actually engulfed and digested alive (what's good for the goose, you might say), by various kinds of macrophages which had recognised it as somehow proteinaceously awry. If it didn't mutate, future generations of itself wouldn't learn any of the cool tricks which enable it to punch holes in the immune system, sequester my infrastructure and oh, you know, generally take over the world, which is the natural ambition of all living things on the planet. The process selects for its own viciousness. The cells which do escape surveillance, get to be the surviving metastases which turn you (well, me, actually) into a failing life support system for an exponentiating army of nodules great and small. The same "make errors, mutate to survive" strategy is used by viruses - they exhibit error-prone copying when they invade cells. Usually viruses carry a gene encoding their own error-prone polymerase, since the DNA-copying polymerases in the invaded cell exhibit relatively high fidelity, which is not in line with the virus' survival strategy of producing thousands of slightly descrepant copies of itself - some of which are real winners. The error-proneness frequently cripples many of the next generation of viruses (and tumor cells, for that matter - they are pushed over their error-catastrophe threshold and die one of the many specific kinds of biochemical process failure related deaths available to complex things such as cells), but occasionally it generates a prodigy - one that can reproduce faster, or hide from immunosurveillance, or which is resistant to various drugs. When the prodigy spawns its own daughter cells, most of them inherit whatever serendipitous molecular magic stumbled upon by its forebear. Natural selection is the mother of invention. Thousands of tumor cells, flawed by a misplaced nucleotide in a critical spot, screw up and die, but that's the price evolution is prepared to pay for the development of new cells which discover, by fortuitous accident, how to survive in the changing immunological environment. As a result of this error-proneness, even generating a vaccine from any of the lymphatic secondary stuff we chopped out wouldn't help terribly much, inasmuch as it would represent only one of several possible targets against which immunosystemic activity could be directed. The bit I looked at several times before it really sunk in, and which I would not believe except I know that tens of thousands of people had to acquire, and die from, what I have now before the mid-1990's researchers could get enough statistical confidence to publish this statistic, is this: About 80 percent of people with regional lymph node metastases (Stage III RCC, what I have) are dead within five years of their nephrectomies. There's a four to one chance I will be amongst the culled by 2008. I do not know in which group I am. I will probably know with greater, but not complete, certainty in a couple of years. Or maybe a couple of months. I'm not a gambling man, since I've always construed gambling as a tax on people who didn't understand statistics - the way to win was not to place a wager. But if I had to put money on my chances of long-term future survival, I'd be betting against it. --- I popped over to Merro's place in Chippo. She's just had a lump chopped out of her breast. I'm glad she found it early enough to remove it before it spread into the rest of her. Lou fed me some yummie pasta, and I nosebled into it, which is pretty rude. Poor Merro.... but at least she paid attention to her family history. It's probably saved her life. --------- Cool things about dying young: avoid all the stupid diseases of old age... teeth falling out, arthritis, erectile failure, senility, and the worst one of all, the crushing solitude of being alone when all your friends are all dead of old age. And what a tax dodge! The shittiness of the prognosis varies, depending where you look, and a lot of the same numbers keep showing up everywhere, partly I suspect 'cos these guys read each other's papers. Want a terrifyingly recent paper? Go look at Campbell, Flanigan, Clark; Current Treatment Options in Oncology, 2003, 4:363-372 Median survival time, 6-12 months, 2 year survival rate 10-20%. Oh, shit, I'm gonna die. 5 years I could cop. 2 really sucks 'cos half of it will be spent getting weaker and feeling shite. I chucked in that reference above since, sometimes, I have told people the odds and they ask me, as if to dispute their belief in my ability to tell the truth, where did I get that statistic? I could mention the others, but you can find them as easily as I did. Go look for yourself. Would I lie to you? I notice there's not a whole lot I have discovered as concerns what the survivors did differently to them who died. I guess it's hard to intervew the dead for comparison purposes. Two things slightly in my favour: this probability is based on 1) a population of Americans, who eat poisonous crap in their foods (but I'm an Aussie, so to a large extent, so do I) and 2) most of the people in these studies are twice my age. I've read enough for the time being. Time to think. ---- "Sell out, sell out wherever you are, sell out and be like me, with a quarter-acre suburban lot and a nice colour teevee. I threw away my skateboard, and got a Commodore, my jingo! I'm sittin' in it, right about now, with exhaust pipe in th'window." -This Is Serious Mum - De Rigeurmortis Um, no. Unleadded smells disgusting. On Saturday I was typing in some responses to emails and I nosebled unexpectedly, but it didn't show on my black shirt and camo pants. What the hell's annoying my schnozz like this? I motorcycled to Newtown with a fellow admirer of flab-o-genic foods and ate, amongst other things, chocolate impregnated lard masquerading as cake in a quantity probably sufficient to kill a starving elephant. Oooh it was good. I'm glad to be motorcyclin' again, even though the lumps and bumps in the road provoke stabbing pain in my internals. So I'm riding the machine in a manner more like that of a horseman, standing slightly in the seat, taking load on the footpegs instead of my arse, since the suspension is still configured for my previous incarnation - a rider with tougher internals. I wanted to get out on Friday but it was pissing cold rain all day, and saturday was a blazing sunny day, so I whizzed out to visit the old granny matriarch who used to send me shortbread biscuits when I was imprisoned in boarding school back in the 1980's. I go out and see her every so often when I'm near Randwick, 'cos it probably sucks to be 91 and blind and arthritic and sciatic and more or less abandoned by one's family. She's outlasted two world wars, a husband, and bowel cancer. She loves it when I come over 'cos getting old and dying in a building full of the unmistakable smell of disintegrating old people weeping volatile nitrogenous compounds into their surrounds as their metabolisms gradually collapse is a lonely excuse for a life. I am glad not to be among them. There is a certain cred she apparently derives amongst her aging inmates for being visited by a scruffy leather jacketted motorcyclist, but more importantly I bring news from the outside world, which she can trade with the few people who see her. Word gets back to me, via the family 'fone grapevine, that she loves my visits. Juicy goss is the currency of the imprisoned. Imprisoned she is, and goss don't get much juicier than this. I rode out there to tell her in person 'cos yesterday mum was doing her suffering martyr routine. Mary rang her up enquiring as to my absence, and mum didn't break the news. Good - I told her not to, in advance, last week. Mum was now expressing to me that she would _just have to_ Break The Bad News to ol' Mary about it and went through several permutations of specious reasoning about this to me, all of which I flatly rejected, and about which I eventually got cranky. She can only possibly be doing this for the gratification of being the bearer of someone else's bad news. It shits me that she asks me to show my angry red belly scar to various friends of hers whom I have never really met. She got pretty cranky when I told her the only reason I could think of that she was pulling this `dutiful bearer of sorrowful news' routine (when she refused to tell me when I asked her) was that she was gettin' mileage outta my illness. She usually gets this cranky when I'm right, and I know it, and there's no way she can wriggle out of it. When this happens, she lies to dad about it, who generally chews me out later. Which he attempted to do, and failed, on the grounds that it happens I'm right. She *is*. The question is why. Maybe mum's doing this because she herself is in need of some support now that it's finally sinking into her head that I am a condemned individual, and have damned good reasons to not be walking around cheerfully. But she won't tell me that. WHY wouldn't she just be straight up about it with me? I'm being straight up with her about what I'm in for. Maybe she just can't accept what's happening, even if she does understand it. Mary took it pretty well, considering. Maybe it's because she's one of the few people I will probably outlast. Dec 14th, 2k3 ------ Dad is a master of understatement. He comes in on sunday morning while I'm still asleep under the doona, and says "Sorry to be a nuisance, but could you swap the cars over? Mum's gonna take me to hospital, I've been shitting blood since midnight." For fuck's sake. This is precisely why I got a license to drive cars three weeks ago but I'm useless anyway. I swapped 'em with some difficulty, cranking my head around to reverse out the curvy driveway is another recipe for laparotomy pain. Collect the set. Normally I don't reveal the state of my old man's guts to the public, since they're really not mine to talk about. But it sort of ties into the generally shitful state of affairs around here. Dad had a colonoscopy last week. A polyp (pre-cancerous lump o' bowel wall) was successfully chopped out but he has now started bleeding out his arse. It really sank in properly when I went for a leak (normally I piss on the lawn, there's a drought on, and water restrictions have been imposed) and saw a spray of his circulation coagulated to the gleaming enamel of the toilet bowl. I brushed it off, and watched its reddish tendrils sluice into the diluted pink pool below it. They slapped him under anaesthetic, fed a catheter into his femoral artery, and using x-rays navigated it up his aorta and down into one of his mesenteric arteries, then eventually down into the spot where he'd evidently blown a small vessel near the place from which the polyp was excised. Once there they placed a small metal spring there to block off the torn bit of arterial wall, pulled out the catheter, and closed him up. Wow. I checked him out in the ward later that day. He looked OK. First thing I asked him was, "Are you bored shitless?" and he said "Yep." He woke up and said he couldn't believe all this hospitalisation which has happened to us in the last couple of weeks. He got out a couple of days later, but was feeling pretty knocked about. +++Pred's low cost retirement planning scheme+++ 0) Give away porn, firearms. Why these two? Well, they're the instrumentation of sex and death, defining boundaries of the human experience, the great taboos, aren't they? Firearms 'cos they're too scarce and important to bury. And, Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited wrote a little vignette about teaching men in the army how to top 'emselves, and rolled out a great one-liner: "You'd be amazed how many chaps botch this apparently simple procedure." and he's right, they're generally not reliable enough for suicide... if Lorenzo Milam is to be believed, this is because the human animal is quite hard to kill and when some people try to blast their processor out of their skulls, they don't die, but just end up trapped in a shattered carcass far more greivously fucked up than the one they were trying to leave. I can't see how that would apply to such a monstrous projectile instument a twelve-gauge, but fuck it, I'm gonna use ANFO anyway - seven times the VOD, I'm legally permitted to use explosives, and it's environmentally friendly, too ... no lead. Porn 'cos, oh, I'd assume it'd be stressful for my oldies, ratting through my stuff after I died, to posthumously discover things that imply I have a sex life... probably about as shocking to them as it is to you when you discover they had one, and though one is usually living proof of that fact, it generally doesn't occur to one, and the bestial imagery is probably a bit hard to take with one's parental faces on it. 1) Tell thesis supervisors that there's no point starting the phd next year, since there is a significant chance I'll die, or off myself, in the middle of it. 2) Walk into superannuation company, and ask for my (teeny amount of) money. Which the govt will tax at 30% on the way out. Assholes. 3) Detonators are seriously restricted, so construct and test a few of them with which to subsequently initiate the half-kilo of ANFO with which I will check myself out. I got a call from a Melburnian acquaintance who ran an interesting thought process past me over a horrendously costly wankerphone connection - she was saying to herself, it occurred to her, now that many of us are in our thirties - who's gonna cop it first... we're getting into that age group where we start to get heart attacks and diabetes and so forth. Well, I dunno, obviously someone has to cop it first. I've outlasted several of my high school classmates, who have died from, amongst other things, accidental incineration, vehicle crashes and suicide. I pointed out, the people who cop it first, are the ones who die of the stupid childhood diseases which most of us usually survive. We only think we're the ones to cop it first since being killed hasn't happened to us yet, so it's the first time it happens _to us_. I exclude the deaths of foetuses due to accidents and disease, and also infants before they can speak, since I don't consider them people so much as mere precursors to them. One values a human for the personality which, years after their birth, appears within them, not for the cheaply manufactured meatware chassis in which it lives or the chunk o' neural net on which it is executed. "Sleep, scream, puke and crap" doesn't constitute much of a personality as far as I can tell. The ones who really cop it first from cancer are never given names, much less shown to their mothers, much less even spoken about except in the scientific journals. These are the teratocarcinomas, hideously unconfigured, partly differentiated lumps of immortal tissue which due to various developmental accidents never got its act together to become a foetus, but became a tumor instead before it was even born. None of us who live long enough to learn to talk can really claim our life sucks when we get clued up about this sort of stuff. Someone else, a dear acquaintance, emailed to me: >> I don't want you to die. And I replied: > I don't particularly want me to die either. But look at it this way. At > least now, to some extent, I have a clue how I'm probably gonna. In a few > weeks, I'll have deduced my odds from the literature, and know how long I > have. Most of us never get to find that out, it's a sort of luxury to > know. Compare this to my expected mundane exit mode as a motorcyclist in > Sydney, I'd be lucky to get two seconds of impending fatality awareness, > and that'd be long enough to think, "OH SHIT I'M DEAD!" which would > really shit me - two seconds is not long enough to say all the important > things one thinks one has to say when one's on the way out. At least it wouldn't shit me for very long, and would spare my immediate audience some things they didn't really want to hear, like the somewhat sardonic rants I've thrown at my keyboard this last few weeks. She slipped me the address of a woman whom, it so happens, is a medico who happens to be a competent biochemist with a clue about cancer and nutrition.... it's her mum! But I'm chewing over wether or not to make a move there. The emotional tangles are tricky. I'm gonna have to think 'em over. For about a nanosecond. My miserable arse is on the line here. A consequence of the way cancer sorta-exponentially progresses is that most of the statistically condemned, if I assume myself to be amongst them for a moment, will be dead not in the first or second of their remaining five years, most will cop it in the forth or fifth year, or maybe a little later (you have to dig up the 10-year survivability stats to know that, but given the smaller number of remaining people in the sample, the stats aren't as certain). But it depends on wether or not I have mets already. If I do, they're probably not gonna be in my chest or guts, we'd have spotted 'em on the MRI and CT scans. Which leaves arms, legs, neck and head. "I couldda stayed at home pal, and lived a joyless life, but where the fuck's the fun in that? Superannuation, wife, the whole fucking package - for me it never suited. A softcock life, and limp death? Go and get fucking rooted." TISM - "Attn Shock Records: Faulty Pressing - Do Not Manufacture" I'm a bit paranoid now, about the appearance of mets. I get lots of stupid little skin bumps every year anyway, and now I view them through more apprehensive eyes (when I can see them). They bespeak the existance of ones I cannot see and cannot find, 'cos there's a few billion places to hide a couple of nanolitres of new metastatic growth in a body like yours or mine, which occupies about the same volume as a couple of kegs of beer. One generally finds out about 'em when they do something stupid like cut off a nerve or a critical artery. Which brings me back to chat about ... immunology. If my immune system's any good for anything, it is recognising molecular patterns. What *is* there, specific to the cells of my personal home-grown suicide bioweapon, that I can train my lymphocytes to lock onto, to rid me of these fuckin' tumor cells? What crucial thing do they have which normal cells do not? There may not be anything for them to get a lock onto. Nevertheless, I'll find it amusing to entertain the conjecture for a little while. Tumors appear, and change, *because* of errors in their DNA copying and repair processes. This happens because there's damage to the genes which encode for these enzymes, or because they aren't supplied with the co-factors they need to do their complicated subatomic, information systemic exercises in molecular recognition, atom abstraction and electron pushing (do read Tom Schneider's J. Theor. Biology 148, pp83-123 for a good information theoretical description of enzymes... yes, the laws which run computers are also responsible for running life). The solution to the latter problem is to eat foods containing these co-factors (things like transition metals... copper, zinc, that sort of thing, well, duh). The solution to the former problem is trickier - tucked away in the nucleus, DNA with broken genes on it is never seen by the immune system - only the broken proteins for which it encodes. DNA repair, by the way, is not very good... a repaired strand with broken code sequences on it is not detectably broken, as is a physically broken strand. DNA repair enzymes are not that intelligent. Exploiting cell mediated immunity is probably the go. If the tumor cells didn't cook up MHC-I or MHC-II presentation proteins due to some brokenness in their system, they were probably smashed long ago by CD54+ cells, which pay close attention to the presence of these proteins on all cells (and which, I might add, is the reason that herpesviruses fake these proteins in the cells they have invaded - so the NK's don't smash 'em. Tricky bastards.). If it's possible to get a lock on the precise sequence of fragments of broken varieties of DNA polymerases, and/or DNA correcting enzymes, then we're a lot closer to home. I could vaccinate myself against cells with broken DNA repair / DNA replication proteins, *if* these proteins are chewed up by the cytosolic proteasome complexes and fed out to the cell membranes for recognition. But enzymes are complex things. One would have to be very specific about which fragments to vaccinate against, and where they are chopped (decisions made at the amino acid sequence level). Nor is one allowed to toss around pCpGp DNA sequences on one's vaccine with gay abandon, either, since one's vaccine tends to be chopped up faster (though it also exhibits greater adjuvancy). If the tumors are expressing no broken error-correction protein fragments then this approach won't work. What else would they possibly be serving up for recognition? Telomerase. Vaccinating against this might also make me immune to my own gametes. Dumb idea... I don't need my 'nads to fall off just now, thanks. A broken version of p53? Nah. Real Tumors surf around sayin' "I don' have to show you any steenkin' p53" because they don't *care* about controlled cell growth. I threw this together to comprehend an immuno approach to attaking cells with broken DNA copying enzymes. Allele of DNA error consequence of therapeutic targetting correction protein No allele <--- no DNA polymerases, so tumor can't proliferate. Ha ha! A few errors <--- lymphocytes target friendly cells as well as tumor. Bad. Many errors <---- lymphocytes target cells with shit DNA copying fidelity, that is, tumors. Good. Contradiction: need to target the vaccine against conserved sequence in such a gene. As if you're gonna find one in such an error-prone environment - though one might find such a sequence fragment it is unlikely to be common to all the mets. Lots of errors <--- tumor cell falls off its error catastrophe cliffside, doesn't need to be immunologically dealt with, ha ha, eat shit and die. Maybe they're getting by without error correction anywhere, poised on the lip of their error catastrophe threshold. The background to all of this is that it isn't gonna FIX EXISTING ERRORS, only increase the likelyhood that cells exhibiting them are going to be immunologically destroyed. Anyway, I might just be fixing a symptom here, not fixing the actual cause of the disease. Besides which, the whole technique is patented up to the moon... I don't have much time to do it either - I'd have to drag together a PCR thermal cycler, an electrophoresis rig, some bacterial cloning and mammalian expression vectors, a pile of restriction enzymes, blah blah blah. It dawns on me that my entire cogitating on these molecular processes and therapeutic approaches is, in fact, a refusal to face the inevitable. "You hear that sound? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death, Mr Anderson." - Agent Smith, The Matrix When I wrote earlier that tumors select for their own viciousness, I didn't mention that some of the fuckers actively hide themselves in proteins like fibrin to prevent immunosurveillance (this is the cytological equivalent of the Klingon Cloaking Device - if lymphocytes can't "see" the tumor, they can't kill it). Some emit proteins which suppress immune activity (IL-10 and TGF, etc) and they also mess with the chemokine signalling pathways of the lymphocytes (mainly pumping out "Kill yourself" signal proteins into their vicinity) in such a way as causes the immune cells to enzymatically blow their own brains out (well, their own nucleus, actually), before they have a chance to attack the tumor cells. Not only that, cancer literally eats you alive. It *hollows you out* at the molecular level. Tumors like to run their energy metabolism on glucose (not ketones, not fats). They usually do this anaerobically, too, so they piss lactate into their surroundings, the processing of which is a further waste of my energy reserves (the Cori cycle is energetically wasteful). But the really evil thing is, they dump signalling proteins into their immediate circulation, which then spread throughout my body, telling my every cell to turn on gluconeogenesis, which is the biochemical synthesis of new glucose from existing proteins in my body. Cancer _tells_ the rest of my body to turn itself into food to supply the tumor. It remotely reprograms the behaviour of the very meat of which I am fabricated, telling that meat to deconfigure itself into nutrients for additional tumor growth. Bastard. Millions of people die every day of preventable diseases, ones easily knocked over by nutrition, clean water, drugs which work really well. But this ain't one of those. If there was ever an enemy worthy of its victories, this would have to be it. Cancer is a probe into the configuration space of possible diseases. One is compelled to fight a war of attrition against a hoarde of different armies, all armed and armoured differently, all of them carrying around the same molecular software library wherein is encoded every trick my body might use to fight it off. It is a hundred different versions of the same disease, which is why the silver fuckin' bullet - falsely advertised every so often in newsprint - does not exist, why terminal cancer patients undergoing surgery are often carved open and the surgeons take one look inside, and immediately sew 'em up again 'cos there's no point, and they starve to death, eaten alive by their own reprogrammed flesh. What good a sword against the fog? My reading list is getting huge, I'm wearing out my retina in the process of uploading the contents of chunky immunology texts into my brain, they'd bore the shit out of you, unless your life depended on 'em. It helps that I know the biochem lingo in advance. But this reading is eating into my email and conversation time. I guess most diseases exhibit that propensity where they forcibly focus your entire attention on them. As happens, right now, ow, there's a strange, faintly painful lump at the bottom of my neck, nestled just above the medial aspect of my left clavicle. If I jam a thumb in the hollow behind my left sternocleidomastoid and use my index and middle fingers above the collarbone I can gauge its dimensions. It is approximately golf-ball sized and has no business being there. Natch, it's just above where we CT and NMR scanned last month. Sly bastard. I'd invite mum to feel it but given the state of her sharp, manicured nails I don't know if I'd die of first - blood loss or bacterial infection. If this is a met, I'm gonna have to move fast to biopsy it, or chop it out, or um, get the fuckin' ANFO before it does something stupid like, oh, invades my carotid artery and strokes the left side of my brain out. It's the festive season and all the cancer choppers have gone home. There may be less time than I had reckoned. I look around at the stack 'o biochem and immuno' texts around me. It occurs to me that I am not gonna live long enough to read my way out of this. There sure as hell isn't anything symmetrically matching me on the other side of my neck. So I'm stage IV after all - which sucks a lot. I have less time than I thought. Shit. "It's only a lump - you've gotta love that, when the tests are done, the results are back. Unleadded's got cheaper. A seat on the wing. When at last you're sure - she keeps looking." -TISM `You've gotta love that.' "Attn Shock Records: Faulty Pressing - Do Not Manufacture" -------- Starship Predator, Captain's Blog: 18122003 3 weeks postop. I haven't been keeping a log very well so the following will be just a few anecdotes. I'm obviously not Alexander fucking Solenhytzin. ---- I went around to Fee and Jase's cafe (Glow, on the arse end of King St, StPeters), where I used to hang out and eat when I could afford it (their food's a bit more dear than the old Three Feet was). They asked me where I'd been for the last couple of weeks and I gave 'em the compressed version, which come to think of it is getting pretty compressed since I'm sort of mentioning a lot, and it saves time - something of which i am acutely aware is running out. They're pretty hard core christians, living a righteous life in fear of the big bad judgement at the end, and after I clued them into my impending death and godless atheism I wondered if they thought I was gonna go to hell for my sins. Jase (brow furrowed) > So what do you do now? Pred (laughing) > Hang around and die. We had a spliff, I no longer give a millionth of a shit what it does to the tennis-court's worth of delicate alveolar surface through which I have been doing surfactant-mediated gas exchange for the past three decades. Cannabis makes me giggly, and when I walked out, my face hurt from excessive grinning. No wonder it's illegal. Too much cheap fun. ----- Hope is a dangerous thing. It's what keeps you alive when you really should know better. I suspect most people staring down this circumstance do their damndest to convince themselves they're gonna make it out alive, but there's a niggling suspicion in the back of their heads, which says they are gonna die. In some ways I am taking the reverse attitude - I'm pretty sure I am gonna die, but there's this corrosive, strange hope, that I might escape. It's not that I cling to it, but rather that it clings to me, like that fuckin' glue I had to get off my arms and neck with Preen last week. I'd rather the luxury of cleanly resigning myself to this business of death than wandering aimlessly in the indecision which comes with misplaced hope... only to have death sneak up on and spank me like primary school teachers used to when I hadn't done my homework. This is not helped at all by many of the people I talk to, when I tell 'em what I have, and the dolorous odds which I have culled from the literature, are almost uniformly self-delusional, or put a happy spin on it, even when they have obviously no fuckin' idea what I'm up against, and even after I precisely describe what I am up against. They just can't seem to believe it. This falls into one of two camps: One is, the `you'll be in the 20% that survive' crew (this, of course, is a permutation on the same sentence mentioned to all thousands of people who have already died of it). The other is, telling me about some rello of a friend who had some bastard of a cancer chopped outta them and was sent home to die, and then underwent remission. I imagine they're not gonna tell me about the friends and rellos who, felled as expected, are now in the ground. Others tell me to visualise a nice place I want to be in five years, which I think is meant to give me something to aim for, to motivate me to hang around. However, I can't, in the light of western civilisation's inevitable impending collapse from energy starvation due to the energy unprofitability of the remaining hydrocarbon reserves upon which it is absolutely dependant, which would have occurred within my normal lifetime anyway. I kind of think I'm lucky to have a ticket out. I have leaked this news to a couple of people and they can't wrap their heads around the un-negotiable, inescapable thermodynamic inevitability of this situation either. For reasons totally unrelated to my carcinogenation, the future still sucks. I'm starting to realise that they're telling me this "you'll survive" and "be happy" stuff so as to convince themselves, in my presence, that I'm not gonna die, or that they can convince me to go to the effort of trying to be rid of this disease, maybe for their sake as well as mine. The one exception to this is happy-face approach is Diode, with whom I started the Sydney Cave Clan more than ten years ago. Cancer smote his dad Milo in the mid 1990's. I went on one of Milo's final bushwalks. Diode came around a couple of weeks ago with a load of books (Hacking the X-box, in particular, was a great read, but there were also some great books in the crate, including one about the history of taxation) and I'm glad at least he knows there's no point telling me `good luck' and has the guts to say so. I agree. But he's sending me these emails now which make me cranky, suggestin' I should not just glue myself to the search engines, I should get outside and be happy. Which goes against my geeky, somewhat curmudgeonly nature. I am grateful, at least, that he's got his head around what I'm in for. I guess he got the clues when his dad died. The receptionist at the dentist asked me why I cancelled my future appointments, and I told her that although I thought their service was excellent, my teeth are, at this stage, almost certain to outlast me without any additional care whatsoever. At least I'm going out with a nice set o' choppers. ---- Explosives are a fast, reliable, but violent, messy way to go. They don't leave anything pretty to look at. They're dependable. Back when was getting my explosives licence, the forensic ballistics crew came and showed us what explosives do to a human. I saw the photos of what happened in the 1980's when the family law court judge's wife opened the front door to a load of gelignite, it flung her down the corridor and through the brick wall at the end, into the next room. Tore her limbs off. She wouldn't have known what hit her, and at 3500 metres a second nor would I with the relatively slower blast front intrinsic to detonating ANFO, but I mean, what a fuckin' mess for the rellos to look at. Come to think of it, a waste of good dentistry, too. Maybe I should seek a more appearance-preservative approach for everyone else's sake. --------------- XML invited me over for another round of watermelon consumption (this is not a codeword, it just means we eat watermelon) and frantic, damaging sex - she bites and it's all I can do to stop her anchoring her teeth into my neck, shoulder or whatever other chunk of musculature onto which she can lock her jaws. Normally I wouldn't care but I'm a bit fragile just now. We shagged ourselves into near crippledom prior to my hospitalisation I was faintly apprehensive. The watermelon was deeelightful. I asked her why it didn't have any seeds and she said `it's sterile'. I empathised with the watermelon, both from that perspective and from our shared ill fortunes to be being eaten alive. My rigging was still sort of broken from a neurological perspective and I was not entirely sure that the laparotomy scar had enough integrity to withstand the rigors of the act. It hurt from the mere touch of a tee shirt, and probably wasn't gonna be entirely amused with someone else's bod pressed against it. This turned out to be correct, so there was a certain amount of gymnastics involved to push the pain:fun ratio into mutually enjoyable values. We discovered some uh, very mutually enjoyable values, actually. My reproductive plumbing appears to be working again (Murphy's Law would hold of course, so I was cloaked in latex as usual) which is a relief, and we both got off, shaking, flushed, reeking of fucking, nerves burning, crushed against each other. Yeah, the scar hurt a lot but I didn't much care. It felt totally weird when she ran her fingers along it - delicate tingling bliss interfingered with momentary stabs of agony. Ahhh... great shaggery is one of the things most worth living for, and one of the best gifts one can give to another human, but it has that irritating aspect of giving me more reason to live, which is what I don't want - I can go out cleanly. I don't wanna feel like I'll miss anything when I go. ----------------- The Ice Cream Factory crew, who exist under the same sheet of tin as does the bulk of cat.org.au's infrastructure, threw a party on Friday night. It's a weird thing to be at a party where everyone has heard on the grapevine that yer dying. It sort of kills the mood. "Often, private schools, what they do with the drugs, they you know, uh, they bring in a criminal, right, a guy in gaol, you know, he's out of gaol now, he's lookin' really bad, and uh, they put him in front of the class, and you know, they talk about how they used to get onto heroin and that, and then they had to break into houses which led 'em into the criminal scene which meant they got into bank robbery and they were still hooked on heroin, then they went to gaol. And he said they interviewed the kids after, and the kids are, he said, what the kids are thinking is, this guy's had a fucking great life, he's fuckin' far better than my dad, my dad's a boring fuckin' prick, and look at this guy, you know, if I - if I had to pick between him and my dad, I'd want his life, and look at him now. They all say the same thing - look at him now, he's alive and he's getting paid to go around and say how bad drug use is." TISM - "Attn Shock Records: Faulty Pressing - Do Not Manufacture" The kind person who manufactured those cookies I didn't get to use last month, didn't warn me how kick-arse they were. And, I use the magic weed on average about once every year so I'm not desensitised to it. I had one, about two inches square, an eighth-inch thick, on am empty stomach. Two hours later I was absolutely stoned off my brainstem, to the point that anything remotely amusing made me laugh so hard I thought I'd tear my stitching out, which wasn't helped my the repetitious mental playback of an ancient Sesame Street song, sung by the Cookie Monster... C is for Cookie, that's good enough for meeee. Nor was my sudden tendancy to laugh at how funny it was to be this stoned helping me either. I had to crash in a bed somewhere. An unspecifable time later, mysterious Cookie Manufacturer found me sprawled there, face hurting from smiling too much, almost too stoned to get my clothes off. We then proceeded to shag each other's brainstems out. The pain-muting effects of the cookie might have helped, but I have gotta go easier on this scar. My smile muscles ached for most of the next morning. Stuff the cookie monster. P is for pussy, that's good enough for me. Too. This would appear to be a tale of drugs, sex, death and anarchy, but you shouldn't get the idea I'm normally some sort of drug-munchin' studly root rat - though I could learn to adapt to the life. I sure as shit don't feel especially energetic or athletic and I look like something released from the morgue for unexpectedly waking up when stabbed mid post-mortem. The last woman I mentioned my impending exit to immediately told me she 1) was frigid and 2) she'd love to shag me. Who am I to refuse such an offer... but I can't figure it out. Are dying men supposed to try harder in the sack, or appreciate it more? Or to be closer to their emotional sides? Do some women like the guarantee of a short-term relationship which I imply? Is there some special insight or into life, or some unusually candid conversation that one expects to extract from a self-proclaimed impending stiff-to-be? I thought necrophiles were at least supposed to wait until their love interests got around to carking it. But, in the face of all this sudden carnal generosity, I'll feel like a lying bastard if I *don't* die. --------------- I'm thinking more than infrequently about Joss, over there on the other side of the planet, probably angsting about me, though I hope she isn't. I had the strange thought that I should chop off my hair and mail it to her. It's symbolic of me in some ways - thin, frayed, knotted, unorganised, and already dead, after all. But I lack an address. And anyway it'd be risky from various perspectives, both emotional ones, and, knowing my hair, from a quarantine point of view. The Brits would be well within their rights incinerating it as soon as it crossed the channel. ---------- Dad wandered home with some interesting scars on his bonce, since he's just had some squamous cell carcinomas frozen off his ears and forehead. Fuckin' cancer. Mum's the only person around here who hasn't got it and she's been smoking tobacco for since the middle of the second world war. I've conjectured to her that this is because there isn't a tumor on earth that could survive living in the toxins which have accumulated in her body. Maybe I should start on cigars. ----------- Sunday 21 Dec 2003 Diode and I went down a drain we visited a decade ago. I've not been down in the dark, earthy-smelling bowels of the sururbs for some time. It was stinking hot, so drain exploration was just the thing to do - a fine day under Revesby. It has grown a new section. We pestered frantic Christmas shoppers in the carpark by making announcements into their vicinity in our best security guard voices, from the safety of secluded gutter grilles. "Trolley Control, attention Trolley Control we have a Code Six shopping trolley violation, send backup to sector four, suspect is a white male beergut, trolley is adjacent to a black Nissan Eczema, registration SUX823, repeat, subject is armed with beergut, assume dangerous." Some of our exits were blocked by locks on various grilles, or bolts screwed down more tightly than our fingers could open, or because cars were parked on top of them. I found some tools in the debris at the bottom of the pipes - a beautiful pair of pliers, barely corroded, and a philips-head screwdriver, etched by years in the anoxic sludge, but salvagable. We ended up climbing out a grille in the back yard of a house while the Maori occupants were playing footy in the back yard. Their pit bull gave us more hassle than they did, since they were standing around gaping at the two grotty freaks drenched in old spiderwebs who appeared in their yard as if straight out of the air. We climbed over their front fence to get out, 'cos they'd lost the keys to the side gate. Arrr. Recreational trespass, just like the old days. ----------- Malibu Stacy suggested we name the tumor. We named it after Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates III. Tumorsoft - which hospital do you want to go to today? I'm eating for two again. I'm avoiding carbohydrates. I love carbs... they're in pasta, bread, just about everything I (used to) eat. So my diet sort of sucks again, mostly protein - fish, chook, various fruit'n'veg - but at least I can eat fats (which are effectively hydrocarbons with various moieties chemically appended, so are processed in different biochemical pathways to the sugars). The reason for this is I suspect Bill, the secondary tumor taking over my neck is running with a broken electron transport chain, as many cancers do since their mitochondria are kind of broken, so can't oxidatively metabolise lipids or protein for fuel. So I'm trying to drive my metabolism into ketogenesis, which means I will be running on fat and proteins, exhibit hypoglycemia, feeling like shit, stinking of acetone and hopefully starve the bastard to death. Yeah, as if I'm gonna think about that in a few days when I fight my way up the road system to my cuz's place for the family din-dins on the 25th. Put a load of carbs in front of me and I'll a-guts it. Some days I just don't give a fuck if what I eat helps to shorten my life. I'd rather just enjoy the food, but sometimes I just feel as if by the mere act of eating at all, I'm helping myself along towards the cemetary. Anyway I'm gonna try and get Bill chopped out this week. It's sunday night, I have to have a shower and wash the cobwebs outta my hair and the Drain Stench off my feet. I want to get away from the terminal .. um, keyboard. I might write more in a few days. If you've made it this far, you've suffered nearly eleven thousand words. Congratulations. It probably wasn't good fun to read. Some of you will be offended because I employed the word fuck at least sixteen times, and quoted other people using it in addition. However, I like the word, its occurence here is not really that excessive and seeing it once more won't kill you. I've also used words you had no idea existed, so don't accuse me of leaning on it due to a depauperate vocabulary. Have a merry fuckin' christmas and a happy new fuckin' year. What's that? I'm innumerate? Fair call. The next file will be at conway.cat.org.au/~predator/bill_me.txt