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Jim Gilchrist, co-founder of the Minuteman Project, is a a bigger moron than I’d thought if he really believes that a furniture store owner’s decision not to allow Glichrist’s merry band of vigilantes to stage a rally on the store’s private property is somehow a violation of anyone’s “First Amendment rights”.

What a crock. Has anyone else noticed how the assorted right wing nut jobs and fundamentalists in America have begun to employ the very same whiny “oppressed minority” conspiracy theory bullshit they’ve derided for so many years among leftists?

Apparently, the Minutemen believe that their desire for a rallying place to keep anyone they don’t like off American soil trumps an individual property owner’s right to keep people he disagrees with from trespassing on his own private property. A clue: freedom to use other people’s resources however you see fit is not included in the concept of free speech.

Anyone with that many American flags plastered all over his website should know that. Then again, most people with that many American flags plastered all over their websites seem to know precious little about much of anything, liberty or the Constitution included.

I’m celebrating today. The big event? The conclusion of three and a half weeks of daily radiation treatments.

What? You didn’t know I was undergoing radiation therapy? That’s probably because I haven’t really mentioned it to many people, nor have I ever mentioned it here on the site. So here’s the story.

Over Christmas, I began to get a little concerned about this bump which was located right around my collarbone. It seemed a little like a pimple or an ingrown hair, but there didn’t seem to be a head, and it wasn’t going away. It didn’t hurt, but it itched like hell. I decided to have it looked at in mid-January.

My doctor first hypothesized that it was some sort of bug bite and that I should try Bacitracin for ten days. When that didn’t work, we moved into the biopsy stage, never really thinking it was anything terribly serious. Apparently, we were wrong. The biopsy came back on 16 February just in time for the wedding anniversary. The verdict: early-stage non-Hodgkins lymphoma. In other words, cancer. I was, suffice to say, a little taken aback.

The next few weeks were frustrating as hell as I tried to get an oncologist appointment and was faced with a practice which seemed more concerned with my insurance coverage than my cancer and would not return phone calls. After two weeks, I finally succeeded in getting an appointment with a different practice, one that didn’t suck and that actually had working telephones.

This was followed by assorted blood tests (I’ve had plenty of those in the past five years so they don’t bother me), an HIV test (negative, as I knew it would be, but they always make one a bit paranoid), a CT scan (no big deal), a PET scan (a slightly bigger deal), and the most miserable procedure of all: a bone marrow biopsy. Avoid ever having the latter performed on you, if you can. I still cringe thinking about it.

In the midst of all this, we also started buying a house. Interestingly enough, I think this actually reduced rather than increased my stress level, because it gave me a project to take my mind off the cancer. I sometimes think a certain murderinghusband might have planned it that way when he suggested we start looking more intensively. He’s been pretty thoroughly wonderful through the whole thing, by the way, allowing me to talk when I wanted to, but not pushing when I didn’t, and generally keeping me from becoming morbidly obsessed.

Taking the two road trips (Columbus and Atlanta) was a big help too.

On 22 March, I received guardedly optimistic news. On 29 March, I got my “official” diagnosis: Stage 1AE Subcutaneous B-cell Lymphoma. It’s apparently very treatable with radiation alone, and I stand a 75% chance of being cured outright, with no further treatment. All in all, it was the best news I could have gotten, short of “we fucked up and you don’t really have cancer.”

Today, I had the final treatment, number 18. Tomorrow morning, I will stay in bed until I wake up, even though that will probably happen at the same time as usual, if not even earlier.

Is there a guarantee I’ll be 100% cancer-free? No. Will I be a little paranoid for the rest of my life? Of course. But I think I’m in pretty good shape. I choose to believe that the nasty stuff is now gone. And I’m really excited about washing these damned blue marks off my neck and about not having to go into a lab every morning to look up at a huge nuclear weapon pointed at my chest.

I don’t really want to write much more on the subject, either. I will not have this become “David’s Lymphoma Support Site” or anything like that. I try not to dwell on it. This isn’t denial. It’s an acknowledgement that I have other things I’d rather think about. Short of having the required checkups and tests when needed, there’s not a damned thing I can really do about the cancer anyway, so why spend too much time stressing over it?

I never felt the need to join a support group, and with all due respect, I don’t really want to hear people’s cancer stories and anecdotes, happy or sad. As I told my parents, I’d really rather not have this become the only topic of conversation in my universe. I do appreciate your good wishes. And presents are always nice too, although I guess it’s a rather crass suggestion.

I just sort of wanted to let all of you know what’s been going on, since it may have seemed a little obvious that something was.

We have a completed appraisal and final loan approval now. The only hurdle remaining is the home inspection next week. And the big closing check. Anyone got a few thousand bucks to spare?

It’s perfect timing, of course, that I also had a call this morning inviting me to interview me a job I applied for three months ago. A job that’s in a town where I won’t be living soon, alas.

And it’s not surprising that our apartment complex, henceforth known as Nickel and Dime Chickenshit Property Management Company, Inc., has told our mortgage lender that they won’t supply them with a rent verification until I go down to the office and cough up a $25 check. Bloody pricks.

Charlotte is an overlay area code zone; we have two different telephone area codes, 704 and 980, serving the same geographic area. What this means for the average person is that he must dial the area code for all phone calls, even for local ones within his same area code. These overlays are somewhat unpopular, particularly among older less tech-savvy people, and they were actually banned in California before they could really proliferate there. Therefore, in a place like San Francisco, the city itself is in the 415 area code, while the suburbs and surrounding cities are in a variety of other ones.

Charlotte’s overlay has been in place for years, and I’ve always wondered why. The whole thing seems rather unnecessary to me, mainly because I’ve never known a single individual or business to have a 980 number, whether for a land line, fax, cell phone, or anything else. I’ve never seen a sign nor an ad featuring one. Even brand new numbers, like my home number and our eFax number are assigned to 704. If adding a new area code had been so alll-fired important, you’d think that someone would have been given a number within it after all these years.

This morning, while leafing through the telephone directory in the bathroom (yes, I sometimes do this), I finally saw a 980 phone number. A whole slew of them, in fact. It seems the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools may be the only entity ever to have been assigned a phone number within the 980 area code. Apparently, Charlotte moved to 10-digit dialing so its school system could have its own area code. Now that’s bureaucracy…

It’s Confederate History Week in Mecklenburg County.

I understand that the factors leading to the American Civil War went considerably deeper than “to enslave or not to enslave”. I also understand that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany was the result of numerous complex issues, most of which weren’t related to anti-Semitism.

We do not, however, have Nazi Heritage Festivals. We have World War II memorials. Would it have been so fucking difficult for the county commission (I no longer feel compelled to capitalize them) to have adopted the alternative “Civil War Remembrance Month” proposal instead? It’s not “historical revisionism” to suggest that we reflect on the whole fight rather than just on the losing side.

Whether he admits to it or not, anyone promoting “Confederate heritage” or flying a Confederate flag has a very specific social and political agenda in mind.