real life

Mixtape Mondays: Fear Loathing Flesh

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Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. This Mixtape is a week late because, quite honestly, last Monday I forgot entirely that I had one sitting waiting in the pocket to be released. However, it seems like destiny might have shone upon me because this morning is going to be a bit of a mess as I have a very early medical appointment, and don’t really have time to bang out a proper blog post. I am hoping to return to weekly releases after this one again, because I enjoy making these and honestly… I end up listening to them as much as any of you might. Now, to preface my explainer as to why I make these… I have always loved the craft of placing songs in a specific order to create a unique mix that matches a specific mood or theme. Oftentimes, these end up with an anchor song and then attempt to make something that flows together with that single song. Others, like today, are more just that I have been in a specific mood and chose songs to go with that mood. I’ve explained this theory a bunch of times by now, but I don’t necessarily take for granted that someone has read every blog post, or honestly ANY of the previous Mixtape Mondays posts.

27 – Fear Loathing Flesh

If you have consumed any of my posts to date, you might have gleaned that I am dealing with a colorectal cancer diagnosis. It’s really hard waking up every morning and seemingly hearing about another person who has died from this disease, and it feels really prevalent. I am sure this is just selection bias… for example, I had never noticed a Nissan Quest on the road until my sister-in-law got one, and then I saw them constantly. Brains are great at pattern recognition when you are looking for something specific. I’ve been ina pretty dark place over the last few weeks because I am effectively in a holding pattern with no forward momentum yet… and what feels like a ticking time bomb inside of me. As a result, I have been listening to much darker music lately, and this is a mix that more or less fits that mood. This mix honestly caused me to find a song that was completely new to me, because none of the US streaming options seemed to have Melt by Front 242, so instead I substituted a really interesting cover by Helalyn Flowers. Probably my favorite thing is when one of these Mixtapes turns someone on to a new song or musician that they had never heard of before, and I feel like maybe this one has more chance of that given that it is crossing a few different musical worlds.

Track List

  • 01 – Hey Man, Nice Shot – Filter
  • 02 – Super Charger Heaven – White Zombie
  • 03 – Man Should Surrender – Pailhead
  • 04 – Stitches – Orgy
  • 05 – Melt – Helalyn Flowers
  • 06 – Killing Grounds – Front Line Assembly
  • 07 – Kennedy – Kill Hannah
  • 08 – Reptile – Nine Inch Nails
  • 09 – Thieves – Ministry
  • 10 – A Drug Against War – KMFDM
  • 11 – Goodbye – Gravity Kills
  • 12 – Shame – Stabbing Westward
  • 13 – No More Love – God Lives Underwater
  • 14 – Lovesong – Snake River Conspiracy
  • 15 – Cry Little Sister – Ashbury Heights

Listen To It Yourself

The funny thing about this Mix particularly, is that it has what I would consider to be a “phantom anchor”, because this did start off with Down In It by Nine Inch Nails being a sort of thread that I was pulling upon. However, the more songs that fell in place, the less and less that song really felt like it fit anymore. So I removed it and replaced it with Reptile that seemed to fit much more neatly into the emerging theme. I am pretty sure this is not the first time I have attempted to make a mix with that song, but I never actually ended up creating anything that flowed in the way that I wanted it to. Tomorrow is probably going to be an emotional post, because it has been a while since I have done one of my big dumb dumps of feels posts. So be forewarned. I did not sleep super well last night because Gracie has decided that she needs to scream instead of going to sleep, and I know that I did not get proper sleep until after midnight. After wrapping this up, I am going to start getting ready to leave the house and go off to my early morning appointment. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and one way or another, this is going to be a bit of a week of reckoning for me and my “cancer boy” journey.

As always, however, you can find the full list of Mixtapes over on my Archives, and I love it when people listen to them and comment about them. Hopefully, I will have yet another new mix next Monday.

Mixtape Mondays Archive

Slightly Less Than Rosy

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Yesterday I met with the surgeon who will ultimately remove the cancer from my butt. The office was pretty great because they were really leaning into the fact that they were butt doctors with the decor. Prime example is this delightful lamp with a golden backside. They were running behind and originally I was being “worked in” at 16:30 but did not leave the office until 18:30. My dad was going with me as moral support and he was running early… so we got to the doctors office around 3pm and largely waited around for our turn. I have to admit I was nervous as hell about yesterday, because from the moment I learned about this foreign invader in my rectum… I wanted it out. It turns out things are maybe not that simple, and I am still processing the news that I received.

Ultimately the next step is that today they will be scheduling an MRI which will allow them to stage the cancer. What stage it is in will determine what the path going forward is. When I met with the doctor after my colonoscopy he seemed to indicate that it looked like we caught it early enough and that it would likely be surgery without the need for chemotherapy or radiation. Yesterday I learned that is probably not going to be the case. There is still a golden path however where that might be the case, and that all banks on how the MRI looks. In that golden path it would be straight to surgery and then several weeks of recovery, and a travel restriction of not leaving the state, because I will be under risk of something rupturing for the first few months. That honestly fucking hurt more than anything else because it means that my planned trip down to see “Erasure” is off the table. I was warned by the doctor that this is probably going to be a year long ordeal at a minimum.

If the golden path is off the table, then I will be rushed in to get a port put in my shoulder and will begin chemotherapy and radiation treatment with a new as yet to be named oncologist. The most modern studies apparently show that the best case of complete remission is to hit it with chemotherapy now, rather than later. Then after a course of chemotherapy and radiation, the surgery would take place. The monkey wrench this time however is that instead of a quick in and out surgery, I would be on a temporary bag for two to three months while things heal. Then there would be another surgery to reconnect everything and remove the bag. It was around this point where I started freaking out nice and proper. They would be removing a large chunk of my rectum and colon and then when reconnecting things up, in either scenario there would be some weird circumstances for me long term, but nothing unmanageable. I will just always need access to a friendly bathroom.

If things were not freak out inducing enough… the doctor starts going into all of the possible complications. Since they are working in an area where a lot of other things are. I could wind up incontinent if they nick anything to do with the kidneys, or could end up various flavors of erectile dysfunction depending on what they damaged. There is also the possibility of a rupture which means that we would be on a clock to catch that fast enough before I went septic and potentially died. Then there is the whole doomsday scenario of if they did not catch this in time, and it spreads to the lungs or liver… at which point it is probably game over for me as a human being. I get that the first doctor that did my colonoscopy was probably just trying to keep me calm and from freaking out on him… but I was really not fully prepared for the results of yesterday.

More than that I was not really prepared to have a speculum up my ass. For the ladies out there, they did in fact insert it ice fucking cold… so that is unfortunately not just a gynecology thing. Yesterday was a lot. Today is also going to be a lot because I was already scheduled for a cardiology appointment where they do an ultrasound. It is also at this point that the dark thoughts that I have struggled with my entire life start to creep in. Am I really worth saving? Should I just give up and accept my fate and try and eek out as much joy as I can in the meantime? Really out of everything that has happened the thing that I worry about the most is the damage it will end up doing to the fledgling relationship that I am trying to build with “Erasure”. We were friends before, and we will always be at least that… but I wanted more.

Basically I am very scared and not really sure how to deal with those emotions because I am not always great at that. Everything would be so much easier were I not alone. I have people that I can lean on, but I hate asking them for anything… and I also hate tolerating other human beings in my space. Its a catch 22… I need people but I also have to psyche myself up… to be able to accept them. I am lucky in that I have plenty of folks who are willing to help, I just have to start availing myself of them. For the moment I am focusing entirely on getting through the MRI which will hopefully be either at the tail end of this week or beginning of the next week. Nothing can be known until that is done, and from there I figure out how to cope with whatever path we end up going down.

Wind-chimes and Heat

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Good Morning Folks. I had grand plans for all of the things I would do this weekend, but largely spent the weekend being super lazy. One of the things my wife bought me at the beginning of the summer was a set of wind chimes, and it was one of those things that I never quite got around to taking care of. I bought a bracket for them and everything, but it just never seemed terribly important. While she can no longer enjoy them, I am hoping I do especially as things begin to cool down a bit. I had these grand ideas about all of the things I would do over the weekend, and accomplished very few of them because it was too freaking hot to be outside. There are a bunch of things that need to be done, and I struggled to bring myself to do any of them.

I had this idea that I was going to go out on a photo shoot somewhere, but again with the heat I just could not bring myself to go out and do it. I did however get everything all set with my camera and the new USB C charging battery works beautifully. I went out into the backyard and took a few photos which you will see throughout the rest of this post because I wanted to test both the battery and a sd card adapter that I had never used with it. My camera is over a decade old at this point but still seems to do a pretty admirable job capturing shots. It isn’t a full frame digital slr, but does a pretty good job and the only real annoyance I have with it is that I like using this hand grip, and I have to take it off in order to get to the battery compartment. I’ve got my backpack packed with everything I need to go out on adventures and I think I am going to start throwing it in my vehicle when I go anywhere just so it is available if the inspiration hits me.

I need to figure out what I am going to do with the library of books in my wife’s office. I really would like them to go to some measure of use, but I am not even certain where to start with that. I have toyed around with the idea of just getting a storage building so that I can put all of that stuff in it until I have a better idea of what I want to do with it all. Storage units are much cheaper than I realized they were, but that also seems like a hassle to move them somewhere else. I need to get out into the garage and organize and clean some stuff out there as well, but again… the heat is the problem. I am hoping once we get into September that things calm down a bit on that front. I know there is a bunch of stuff in the garage that I just need to have hauled off. There is a local group we have used before that if I can make a big pile, they will take it all at once. I have a bunch of boxes for larger electronics that I need to break down, but then there is the problem of what the heck to do with the Styrofoam inside of them. I could in theory save it for building wargaming terrain or something… but that also seems like a massive pain in the butt to find a place to store it.

What I really need to do is move everything from one side of the garage over to the other side of the garage so that I can put up shelving units properly. There is this giant cat toy thing that my father-in-law made which was lovely… but like 300% larger than it needed to be so that it took up MOST of our livingroom. It is just sitting there and has been sitting there for over two decades, and I think it is a candidate for the “haul pile”. We have a couple of rugs out there as well that I have no clue why we saved… other than it was just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with them at the moment we swapped. Basically I need to spend some time building a pile so that they can come haul it away and clear up more swap space for me to organize things. There are some cheap shelving units that you can get at Sams that seem pretty sturdy and my goal is to put those in pretty much every place where I can in the Garage just to get more stuff up off the ground and usable.

We have this giant workbench thing out in the garage that blocks access to the breaker box… which generally sucks because I have to climb up on the thing if I need to deal with them. However it would make a really great base for setting up both a FDM Printer and Resin Printer out in the garage. Even in the winter months, our garage stays fairly warm because our insulation between the laundry room and the garage is kind of shit, so everything directly up against the house rarely gets low enough to matter. After reading and watching so much stuff on the toxic chemicals that they give off… I am legitimately concerned about the cats when it comes to fume off-gassing for either process. This is especially true with resin, but seems to be also mostly true with FDM as well. There is plenty of room to set everything up out there pending I give it a good cleaning and de-clutter. I have a good concrete slab on the north side of our house that I could start piling up things for the eventual dump run.

Another thing that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later is the little tree/bush/whatever that is growing on the deck off our pool. I have not really spent a ton of time in the backyard this summer due to the extreme heat, and I am sure this is something that my wife was going to take care of eventually as she spent countless hours reading in the backyard. However it has grown up enough now that it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with I think. The vine that we have been fighting for two decades… is back with a vengeance this summer and I just do not care enough to deal with it right now. It seems to be grown all in throughout the boxwood that has long since outgrown the bounds of what a boxwood should be. Everything is just so much more difficult when there is only one person. All of the things that I need to do… are things that the two of us would have tag teamed until we got them finished. I miss my wife for all of the normal reasons but especially because I miss being part of a team.

Anyways…. I have rambled enough for a blog post, but I did share random photos with you for your time.

Maelstrom Captain

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Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.

This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.

In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.

Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.

I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.

One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.

Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.

Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.