At one point during my adventures living in Boston, I was the greeter/bag check at a guitar store. Daddy's Junky Music. Right smack across Massachusetts Avenue from Berklee College of Music. The manager "let me go" about three months after I started working there. His excuse was that since it was summertime, no one was buying guitars, and they didn't need me. Okay, fine. I didn't really like the job, and the next week I found a much better one as a bartender. I did, however, meet some ridiculous people while I worked there. Berklee not only attracts great musicians, it also attracts a horde of not-so-great musicians who like to bask in the glory of a school they could never get in to. All of these people, at one point or another, wandered through Daddy's and played the $2000 Gibson Les Paul's and such. Daddy's also rented equipment, so we frequently had crazy deejays and musicians getting stuff for a gig. One evening, there were two guys renting speakers and something else, a mixer maybe? While the one guy was filling out the paperwork, the other guy came and talked to me. Hell if I remember what we talked about, but I know at one point he told me that life is all about "whoever's got the groove and the best attitude." That is a direct quote; I know because I wrote it down. Now, I never saw the man again, and I never will. But I do try to live up to what he said.
I fear that right now I am letting down this crazy, dancing, loud and happy man. My attitude, so fantastically good for the past Seven months, is crashing down around me. My final course of chemotherapy has gotten pushed back another week. I have tried so hard not to complain, and especially not to complain on here, but I am seriously upset now. The terrible thing is this is my fault, not my doctor's. It's my platelets that aren't growing, my white blood cells that are keeping me from doing Anything. So I guess this is the bad part of cancer: the end. Your body is so worn down it doesn't regenerate half as well as it used to. It's hard because the end is So Close! It just keeps getting farther away. I need some motivation to get me through this, and going back to school isn't doing it for me anymore, especially since I don't know when I'll be back. I've lost the groove, and I'm losing my attitude. But I'm going to go eat my Cheerios, which will cheer me up temporarily. Okay. Peace.
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2 comments:
First of all, that "your fault" stuff is nonsense. I know this is hard, Caroline, but your platelets are gonna do what your platelets are gonna do and that doesn't really strike me as a mistake or a "fault" kind of a thing. I read somewhere that your language determines your attitude (more than your groove maybe!) because it affects how you are constructing your thoughts and emotional context and yaddah yaddah something something. Bottom line is it's not something that you should be "faulted" for and using that word increases your tendency to feel guilty and man, who needs to feel guilty, I bet if there's an emotion hindering cell regeneration it's totally got to be guilt.
I guess I need a second of all now. Second of all, I'm going to start paying ten cents more to sit in Starbucks late at night and get hit on by doctors having existential crises in your honor/without you until you get back and make me stop. Not much for motivation, but it's all I could muster on short notice, but it's better than school. School is gross. Think about your friends and the giant party we're going to throw you when you get back to Boston/your new apartment/riding your bike on the esplanade/getting away from your house/the coming of autumn and all the pretty leaves/stupid Allston parties/not having to drive to U of C/getting to be at U of C when all the new cute med students are starting in the fall. I think that last one's probably my winner.
All of us here in McGregor Bay are thinking of you, loving you, and begging the universe for your release from this...
I fouind your blog for my Mom, who had been trying to find it. I found it, read it, and now I feel it. I know the "Daddy's" of which you speak, and your dad did trivia night last night, and it's all hitting very close to home, without having seen you, that this is so so real. We can't wait to see you, fight HARD, however long, cuz Little Baldy will be waiting, and we all need to hear you play under the moon again soon. Love,
Erik and the McGB Posse.
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