Bursting at the Eyeballs with a Creative Impulse

It's been a long time since I updated my blogs. I feel like I have a pretty good excuse. Apparently it takes a long damn time to recover from 9 and a half hours of open craniofacial resection surgery. Who knew?

Everyone says I look great. This is mostly because I have taken great pains over the years to surround myself with people who are kind. I may look pretty good for a guy who had his face peeled off and stitched back on, but that's a relative thing. That's like saying a woman looks good for her age. Everyone may agree, but the woman herself will not be pleased that you have noticed the ravages of time and qualified your assessment of her beauty accordingly. Relativity sucks.

I have an incision that runs across the top of my head from ear to ear. It is thick and pink and hairless and scary. It's also the only conclusive physical evidence that I've had major surgery. When my hair grows long enough to comb over it, no one will know the troubles I've seen unless I tell them. I'm trying not to be that guy...you know...the guy who burdens everyone else with his problems. (Writing about them in my blogs doesn't count. My blogs. My rules.)

I also have a mohawk now. It's not full blown because it starts well back on my head. It's more B movie interpretation of a Mongolian horseman than Mr. T. It's much duller than the one my granddaughter sports on occasion.

A friend of mine said the look combines the best aspects of Genghis Khan and Frankenstein, so I've taken to calling it the Genghis Stein. It's good for some distracted stares when I'm out in public, but I can't help noticing small children circling back to hide behind their mothers' skirts. I can't recommend it, no matter how many people tell me I look great.

How I look is really the least of my problems. More important, at least for the time being, is how I see. Not very well, although it is getting better.

The cancer had eaten away a lot of bone in my forehead and in my right eye socket. It also attached itself to my right eye. The surgeons had to remove significant amounts of bone and some eye tissue to establish what they call clean margins—that is tissue in which the pathology lab couldn't find any more cancer. They replaced some of the bone with bits of skull that they harvested from the top of my head. This still left my eye socket misshapen and my eyeball swollen.

Since then I've had a lot of difficulty getting my right eye to operate in concert with my left. The result is double vision, especially when I try to read or drive or even watch TV. After a few short minutes, the pain and discomfort from trying is more than I care to bear. The upshot is that I'm not getting anything done that I would call productive.

I've got picture frames to build to hold some of my latest large images. Operating power tools without depth perception or clear focus seems ill-advised. I've got blogs to write, a novel to finish, and new photos to take and edit. None of these thing are possible until the healing process has got my vision closer to normal—or the new normal, whatever that turns out to be.

Meanwhile the most productive I can be is to catch up on my reading via audio books. I'm into some science fiction just now. When I'm hard at work, you will see me lounging in an overstuffed chair, staring out the window at the squirrels and painted buntings in the back yard, ear bud wires tangled around my neck while Ben Bova and Poul Anderson transport me to worlds and times where existential crises result from stuff a lot more frightening than mere cancer.

It's okay, but it doesn't feel like creativity. I need to be making something. Not being able to is as bad for my soul as radical surgery is for my eyes.

Curating a Bucket List on the Fly

Today you need to head over to Studio 30 Plus where I am featured writer in the members blog with a post about my ever changing bucket list.

http://studio30plus.com/profiles/blogs/curating-a-bucket-list-on-the-fly

Poke around while you're there. They have a lot of excellent writers and an active community.

When Bob Sings - Excerpt

This is an excerpt from a short story I've been working on for a long, long time. The title is 'When Bob Sings.' Bob is a humpback whale. He does not sing for our entertainment, although he is something of a pop star among his kind. I think, when it's finished, this will be the finest thing I have ever written. I think this because I know how it ends, and, because I know how it ends, I am determined to write the middle bits worthily. It's not been easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is. Comments are practically required.

The day they met, Parker had been wading the flats for bonefish on the west side of the island near the ruins of an abandoned shrimp farm. He’d already caught a couple of respectable fish when he spotted a real bruiser gliding out of the grass in a foot of water. The black tip of its dorsal just broke the surface. He placed the fly six feet in front of the fish, and let it sink to the bottom. He stripped the line to pull out the slack, and waited until the fish was almost on top of the bait. With the rod tip close to the water Parker tugged the line gently, bumping the fly to get the fish’s attention. The fish stopped and turned. Parker pulled on the line again, and saw the fish shudder as it surged forward to take the bait.

Parker knew that he would not feel the strike. He quickly stripped a yard of line to set the hook, and raised the rod tip to absorb the shock. The fish paused. Parker tucked the butt of the rod into his waist and checked the free line floating at his feet for tangles. The fish turned and streaked for deep water. Parker let the line stream through his fingers into the rod guides until all the free line was gone and the reel began to sing.

The first run was nearly a hundred yards. When Parker managed to turn the fish it came peaceably, saving its strength for another dash. Two runs later Parker had the fish in his shadow. He could see that it was spent. Its color was gone, its eyes listless. He removed the hook, and squatted to place the fish back in the water. He curled his free hand under the fish, and tickled its belly until it colored up. As he watched the fish gather itself and flash away he heard a slow clapping of hands on the beach behind him.

“Nice fish,” she said.

“Hmm.”

“I’m glad to see that you catch and release.”

“They’re not very tasty.”

“Oh,” she said.

She was younger than he, slim and angular with short, sun-streaked hair. She wore white shorts, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and flip-flops with spangles on the straps. The strings of a bikini top were tied in a bow on the back of her neck.

“You’re Parker” she said.

“Maybe.”

“I’ve been looking for you.”