Or else! Or what?

I get the week off from chemo, and catch a stinking cold! Either that or the pollen count is so high even those of us without hay fever are being effected. Pretty nice week off though. I have to try to get young Mike Fiore to the driving range today, try to rekindle his golfing passion.

The irradiation guy’s nurse called me yesterday, and wanted to know what I would like done. He had a message to call me and set something up. Seemed like an odd way to proceed to me, fraught with potential, the lunatic running the asylum. In spite of all the opportunity, I told him the doctors should probably stick to the prescribed regimen, which it turns out they were planning to do, and their asking of my wishes was so much bunk. First they are going to make me a new hat, to replace the White Hat, filled with holes for the DEATH RAYS. It also has laser guiding nocks on it, so they can laser-align me and ensure the DEATH RAYS hit the holes.

The nurse ensured me that the DEATH RAYS would probably not make me sick in any way, and in fact the dosage I was getting was wussy, George Bush had had nearly twenty times as much and look at him, heh heh, he has no problems with nucular rays. So I felt better about that right away. He suggested that my doctor should prescribe some steroids for the brain swelling, but I told him I was married and had little ego left. We’ll see.

Anyway, before we start with the DEATH RAYS I wanted to write down some of the possible endings for the story of my life, and maybe warm up for the 55 fiction competition in New Times coming up. The 55 stories have to be only 55 words, check it out at http://www.newtimes-slo.com/index.php?p=55fiction

Here we go.

MY LIFE
I lived to be 98 years old, but really struggled with post recovery, always wondering if one the leukemic bastards was hiding out somewhere. Within a year of full recovery I had to leave the house as my tirades were threatening the family. I became a transient and followed the Pan Pipe players from Peru, like a Deadhead only more solitary. I met an Inuit grandmother living in Anchorage that took me in and made me eat blubber as chemotherapy, and my hallucinations about the leukemic bastards ended when I was 72, and I became a scrimshaw broker.

OR

I lived another five years. In the paper it said I had fought a brave battle against leukemia. I went through another five years of chemotherapy but the little leukemic bastards were hiding in my liver, and the lack of alcohol allowed them to thrive. The numbness in my limbs had progressed to my lips and eyelids, so I kept walking into stuff when my eyes closed unexpectedly. When I tried to yell ‘Oh Shit’ it came out ‘Ashes’, and in the end I was cremated.

OR

I started inventing little fun devices that helped people have slightly more fun when they were having fun. Things like the Golf Beverage Caddy, which attached to your golf bag and held your drink so it never spilled. Or the Poker Pot Scooper/Stacker, that scooped and stacked your poker pots, enabling you to win even faster at the casino. In three years I was completely leukemia-free, but court suits from people with spilled drinks and tipped stacks drove me to bankruptcy and divorce. I died at 64 of cirrhosis of the liver.

OR

I became a writer of bad science fiction, but finally made it big at 60 when my book Driven got on Oprah. This was a story about a driving vigilante that starts to outfit his car for small acts of vengeance on stupid drivers, and it escalates on him, until he realizes that he is the psychopath, and yet he is a regular guy. When the LA freeways actually try to institute some of the ideas from the book for traffic control, drivers rebel. They saw me on Oprah, and a small violent group breaks into my house and drags me out to the street, where they drive over my broken body repeatedly.

OR

Having laughed in the face of death, I take up hang-gliding and para-sailing, injure both legs in a bad landing, get gangrene and become a paraplegic, ending the foot numbness problem. I take up wheelchair basketball where it turns out I have a natural talent – I can shove my numb fingers in the other guys’ spokes, bringing them to a dead stop. I went to the Paralympics, representing my country, but I was killed by Chechen terrorists throwing a fake Scud missile at Bush to scare him, but it lands on me.

OR

Having gone through two years of chemo, I become addicted to stool softeners. I die a year later from a really really really irritated bowel.

OR

It turns out that was a secret love note from Angelina Jolie on that picture she sent me, and not her signature as some thought, told you so. She showed up just as I ended chemo treatment and wanted to adopt me, to live with her in her Thailand jungle compound. Dana was not happy about this, having put up with me all this time and just now finally getting her kitchen redone. She smacked Angelina in the mouth, and her lips burst all over me, causing some reaction between collagen and vincristine and making whatever was numb before now necrotic and causing a chemical prefrontal lobotomy. My hands and feet were amputated, Angelina loses interest, and Dana designs a special place in the new kitchen for her big ‘Vegetable’. With no way of taking up bad habits, I ‘live’ another 70 years, draining the family and even the county coffers.

OR

We held this really fun barbecue to say ‘Yippee’, and Mac was there with ho-spice, and Pat was there with twisted references that leapt across three borders you didn’t know were there, and Nick and Dyan and the energy boys came, and all the great Sinsheimer folks with tons more food showed up, and people flew in from Spain and England and RI and ‘Bama, and we had a great time. We drank beer, and some people were smoking, and I thought ‘Oh just one cigarette, no problem.’ Two years later I died of lung cancer, bam.

OR

I lived another thirty years but couldn’t remember much of anything after the cranial irradiation accident. A PG&E truck ran into a transformer just as I was being treated, and the resulting power spike blew through all the protections and super-dosed me. We moved to a 10,000 sq. ft. house with a bitching ocean view, and a kitchen to die for, but I forgot who I was. Dana reprogrammed me to think I was Robert Barrett Browning, and I spent the rest of my life writing sonnets to her.

OR

Who knows?