Oh, mine was fine.

Well… there was this one part where A F***ING HAWK FLEW INTO THE RESTAURANT WHERE I WAS EATING, AND LANDED ON MY FOOD.

Yeah. really.

I was sitting at a window seat next to the open door, and my food had just been brought out. I looked down to see this guy (or gal - I don’t know hawks) just standing in the doorway, looking back and forth. After surveying the place for a few seconds, it flapped its way in and up onto one of the empty tables.

The guy working the counter came out, and we were both (slowly and carefully) snapping pictures with our phones. The hawk didn’t react to us apart from turning his head to look back and forth between us — even when said employee said:

“Man, you inna wrong place, bird! Dontchu know this a chicken joint?”

But after few more calm seconds, once we were just standing there trying to figure out what the hell to do next, the hawk leapt up and made a beeline through the air directly at yours truly. I executed what could only have been a remarkably awkward yell-and-dodge maneuver, and turned around to see it standing on my two-piece-with-side-and-soda combo, just chilling and looking out the window wistfully, as though a Sarah McLachlan song were playing in its head.

The hawk just sat there for a little while, getting jerk BBQ sauce all over its talons and looking all emo, until it was spooked by the restaurant’s delivery guy walking in, whereupon it shot past all of us into the kitchen.
The counter guy, the delivery guy and I heard a few pots clanging as we debated calling animal control versus just trying to shoo it back out the door, when one of the cooks who was back there caught the hawk with his bare hands, and walked it back outside.

“What restaurant was this?”

I am so glad that you asked.

The place is called, I kid you not… “BIRDIE’S”.


* drops the mic *

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH - Bushwick, Brooklyn

Previously: SPAMtastic: Prejudice, Conspiracy Theory, Has-Been Boxing, and the Tragic Loss of Britney Spears

She said, roughly, “This is a cockroach with only one testicle — I made it for you because roaches are really tough. They’ve been around forever and they can live through anything, and you’re gonna do the same thing.”

It’s rare for me to be speechless, but I really don’t have words to describe how great I feel every time I look at it …

]]> http://www.andiamnotlying.com/2009/live-strong-pink-cockroach/feed/ http://www.andiamnotlying.com/2009/depression-grace-and-killing-carls-army/ http://www.andiamnotlying.com/2009/depression-grace-and-killing-carls-army/#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 01:43:36 +0000 Jeff Simmermon http://www.andiamnotlying.com/2009/big-buck-safari-depression-grace-and-killing-carls-army/

Carl’s evil army dies a little more each week. Fast-moving doctors toppled the heart of Carl’s vicious empire and now the stragglers are huddled in their bunkers reading the tarot to make the simplest decisions and waiting for orders that aren’t likely to come. Perfectionist that I am, I’m not going to be happy until the last lonely soldier scratches out a suicide note with its nerve-chewed nails and gargles a muzzle full of lead.

My doctors are a hard-hitting unit of Inglourious Basterds that are willing to drop in and detonate at the slightest hint of an insurgency which is harsh and excessive, but come on — this isn’t 4-square in the schoolyard here.

For those of you that are rolling your eyes and thinking “Jesus, easy on the hooptedoodle, Simmermon”:

Now that my cancerous non-seminoma is out, the markers it releases in my blood have dropped dramatically, and continue to decline each week. My doctors refuse to take chemo off the table, which is smart both from a scientific and legalistic ass-covering perspective. I’m recovering pretty well from the actual surgical procedure, but it’s a three-steps-forward, one-step back kind of thing.

Some days I can walk fine and hang out a little bit. Other days the incision burns and everyone on earth is a complete barking bozo and everyone needs to just SHUT UP, JESUS CHRIST.

And then there’s this …

I feel a little more like myself, but that’s still taking its time to creep back, too. I daydream every day about getting back into my Muay Thai classes but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. I seriously sit there at my desk and dream about doing pushups. Or I lie there in bed and fantasize about just kicking the heavy bag, working out a new combo, but quickly lifting my legs much higher than the clearance into the shower is just that: a daydream.

I’m still having trouble concentrating on the tiniest stuff. My confidence is kind of wrecked, and every sentence I write gets scrapped, deleted or mocked by an increasingly louder voice in my head. Pulling a story together for the Moth feels fricking impossible most days.

And then I panic on the inside and think that that’s it, when they took one of my nuts they took my creativity and my follow-through and I’m destined to spend my days shlubbing across the earth as the worst kind of dilettante, the guy who could’ve, maybe, but didn’t have what it took, the poor sap. If you’re not living you’re just moving closer to dying, and on my worst days I feel like someone cut my soul out and let my body wander.

I guess what I’m saying here is that sometimes I feel half-neutered, and then I think about it and realize that I actually have been. And that just kills me.

I didn’t say I’d gotten any more rational, people.

Last Friday, a week or so ago, I was sitting in my bed at 11AM, eating chocolate ice cream out of a mug and watching “Cheers” reruns. And man, I was feeling that theme song, just the sheer sounds of the song were soothing my mind and breaking my heart and I could just feel the tears welling up when I heard the guy sing the phrase “everything you got.”

And then it hit me: “Something is wrong here. Seriously wrong. Like, I am one Sex and the City rerun away from some serious pathos and I am not even the right gender to be expressing it this way. ”

I remember thinking

1) Maybe I’ll give “Eat, Pray, Love” another go

2) I might find some new meaning in there

3) If I find meaning in “Eat, Pray, Love” I am going to be suicidal

4) I have a family and friends that love me and I can’t put them through all that.

I called up my best friend and told him how I was pretty depressed. He said “man, you just got one of your balls chopped off. I HOPE you’re depressed. If you’re not, there’s something else wrong with you.”

And as it turns out, my blood work shows some seriously low testosterone. CRAZY low. I’ve never given my girlfriends a hard time for being hormonal, but believe me when I tell you, fellas - it’s serious business.

Last Thursday I got a massive shot of synthetic testosterone right in the butt. They used to harvest the real stuff from bulls down at the stockyard back in the early days. I’m okay with pleather in this regard.

“Guys always love this,” the nurse said. “Give it a few days and see if you don’t feel better.”

Six hours later I was drinking martinis with a buddy and playing Big Buck Safari. And I’ll tell you what — I’ve never had so many perfect sites or gotten the lion, the giraffe, AND the hippo before. I was blasting binary buffalo with the best of ‘em. “I’m all the way back,” I thought. Then I woke up flat again the next day. That’s how this whole thing’s gonna be. Little victories that feel huge followed by a crash and a slow drift upwards that feels completely like a flatline.

I keep waiting for someone to decisively clap their hands, reach out and shake mine and say “that’s it, son. With the powers granted to me by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, I hereby proclaim you well. The life you loved so much was paused for you back in early April, and once you step through this doorway you’ll be able to return to it as though nothing had ever happened.”

And I mean, come on. I’m not sure how much I’m actually getting better and getting myself back as I am just adapting to a new reality. One where I feel about fifteen years older.

But.

I’ve had a glimpse at a few of the side benefits of cancer, too. My relationship with Maggie has completely blossomed into this new thing that I can’t even explain. Things feel deeper somehow, we’re communicating better than ever, and I’m even more clearly aware of how lucky I am to have her in my life.

And when you say you have cancer, the world gives you a little break. You find out how caring and kind the people are that were maybe just on the periphery of your life before, and even strangers work with you a little more. You receive tiny kindnesses, a little patience. You find out what it is to experience real grace.

And once you feel that grace, take it into your heart in a time of real need — you realize that you never want to stop giving that grace back to everyone, all the time, for the rest of your life.

To be completely honest, I can’t say if I do completely want to go back to mid-April, either.

If you are of my generation, there is a very good chance that somewhere — be it in a frame, or shoved in a drawer or shoebox or wallet — there exists a school portrait of you with the infamous laser background that you just HAD to have because it was AWESOME, Mom! Come ON!*
So what we’re gonna do here is, were gonna give you a blank laser background which you’re gonna right-click or control-click and save after you follow that link, and then you’re gonna search Google Images for probably longer than you should ’cause you’re probably at work, and you’re going to use Photoshop or whatever your tool of choice may be to mash that bizness up, creating images that have been astronomically improved through the magic of laser backgroundification.

Then you’ll email them to andiamnotlying(at)gmail(dot)com, we’ll post our favorites, and we will have all wasted similar amounts of time that we will never get back, but we’ll have gotten a laugh out of it. Hopefully.

Deal? Okay. Save that background and get to it!

* P.S. — For your viewing enjoyment, a young lady named Lindsey Weber has been collecting 1990s laser portraits and posting them over at We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!. Check it.

It’s all about the little victories, people.

I told a story about our relationship at The Moth’s GrandSlam a few months back — hope you enjoy it:

A bunch of my best friends came up to visit this weekend — two guys I’ve known since kindergarten, one guy since the seventh grade, and then my friend Mark Koch who’s been on the scene since ninth grade. He’s the new guy.

It was Mark’s bachelor party weekend. Nobody’s going to make a smash comedy hit out of it, as the whole enterprise was more bourbon and burlesque than blow and strippers. We had dinner at Peter Luger, hiked over the Williamsburg Bridge to have a look at the streetcorner that was the cover of “Paul’s Boutique,” walked the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton Beach and saw a hot and hilarious burlesque show at Bar on A.

My roommate and upstairs neighbor kindly gave up their rooms for the cause and let us spread out in the building a little, too.

Not too shabby at all.

I haven’t laughed that hard in a long, long time. And at points I had my hands over my incision, afraid I was literally going to bust a stitch.

Instead I just stretched. Stretched and healed. I haven’t felt this good in a really, really long time.

So here’s the doctor’s news from the other day:

I’m healing up fine, textbook perfection, basically. The CT/PET scans showed one questionable lymph node up in my throat, but he jabbed around in there with his fingers pretty hard and said “whatever, I’m not feeling anything in there, so let’s forget about that one for now.”

There’s these markers in the blood that cancerous tumors give off — they differ by the type of tumor. But for simplicity’s sake here, let’s collectively call them Carl.

Normal levels of Carl in a healthy adult male might be between 0-5. My Carl quotient was burying the needle at 1,250 before surgery. So they drew blood from me a week after surgery, and whatever my Carl levels were, that’s the baseline right there.

Say I’ve got a Carl of 100 a week after surgery. Then a week later, my doctor expects me to have half as much Carl — a level of 50. A week later, Carl’s supposed to be down to 25. Eventually, those levels will bottom out and kinda flatline. And if Carl flatlines at a level that’s higher than normal, we start chemotherapy.

Awesome. Really, that makes sense to me — it’s careful and cautious, and following the results scientifically. What I wanted was for my doctor to clap and dust his hands off, then say, “that’s it, you’re done!”

But that’s not gonna happen for a good while yet. As a wise man named Tom Petty once said, “the waiting is the hardest part.”