The mother of a good friend was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (Wikipedia, National Cancer Institute). They don’t know much about her situation yet (she’s down at the Mayo Clinic undergoing tests), but pancreatic cancer generally has a very poor prognosis, so this is likely to be a tough time for them all.

Our thoughts are with you.

I’m writing the checks to the two organizations as we speak, and we’ve raised (to date) a total of $748, or $374 for each organization (the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) and the Cancer Kids Fund of the Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota).

People can continue to donate in our name to LAF via their Mutant Variety Show web site, and I’m sure that Cancer Kids wouldn’t argue if you sent them a check.

Thanks a zillion to all our wonderful performers and our incredibly generous audience!

Mutant Variety Show poster, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

As mentioned earlier, In a little less than three weeks, Sub-Evil Boy and I will be hosting a strange evening of music and fun, with donations going to cancer-related charities.

And so here we have our advertising poster :-).

The octopus image comes from PeeZed’s blog, the photo of Sub-Evil and I from Ellery Fisher, and the banjo shot is mine. The background is a manipulated detail from a photo of some of WeatherGirl‘s wonderful art.

Hardly high art, but still it has an antique etching of an octopus, and that’s gotta be worth something!

Misty, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Sub-Evil Boy and I went over to Joe Alia’s house Sunday to practice as part of preparations for the big concert Sub-Evil and I will be hosting in 3.5 weeks. I brought my camera along and took a few shots of the two of them playing. I’ll probably post several over the week on flickr as I sort through them, but this is definitely one of my favorites.

Joe has worked up a chart of "Misty" for the two of them (Joe on sax, Sub-Evil on battered cornet), and here they’re working on playing it together for the first time. This is a special song in my family, and especially between my dad and sister. Its popularity in the 60′s led to my parents calling my sister Misty (even though her "official" name is Mary), and the song has become part of the powerful jazz bond between my father and sister. Given that the concert is (for me) largely about family and friends (and to raise a little money for cancer charities) to have Sub-Evil play this song is really wonderful. Joe gets huge props for working with us on this; having Tom play with him is essentially private lessons with an excellent musician, and I’m extremely grateful.

Yup – Thursday, 5 April 2007 at 7pm, in the HFA Recital Hall right here on the UMM campus.

This will be a crazy evening featuring all manner of music and fun, all for the good cause of supporting cancer-related charities. Roughly half the program will be Sub-Evil Boy and me, doing both originals like “Taco Man”, “Fat fly”, and “Crabgrass”, as well as covers goofy and serious (“Looking for my leopard”, “Strange fruit”, “Personal Jesus”, and “I’m so lonesome I could cry”).

Your reward for sitting through the two of us, though, is all the other wonderful performers that have agreed to join us, again doing a mixture of (brilliant!) originals and (great!) classics. Huck Brock on the many problems with Barbie Dolls! Joey Iverson drifting out through the solar system and beyond! John Hanson’s love song, complete with bats! Brittney Stone and Eagan Heath leading us in a round of jigs! And, of course, the mighty Jazz Stylings of Joe Alia!

Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be fun :-).

There will also be some cool spoken word (Athena Kildegaard’s excellent “Dirt: A poem in four voices”), a possible short film, and various improvisational silliness! There might even be a celebrity appearance!

All this is free and open to the public, with donations gladly accepted to benefit cancer-related charities.

So mark your calendars now: 7pm, Thursday, 5 April 2007, in the HFA Recital Hall! And then get out there and pass the word!

Props to PeeZed for the most excellent octopus, and thanks to Ellery Fischer for the photo of our performance of “Taco Man”.

Victory!!!, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Or at least damn good news!

My dad IM’ed me in the office this morning to say that he’d just gotten back from his first major doctor’s visit since radiation treatment ended last month, and he got a clean bill of health. They didn’t see any signs of the cancer in his throat, so now it’s all about regaining his strength after the nasty rigors of the treatment.

They say that if this type of cancer is going to come back, it will almost certainly do so within two years. So now we wait. Today’s report, though, means that however it turns out, going through all that bought him something significant, and that really helps.

Whew…

So I blog, but erratically and without any real focus. You’d hardly guess that I’m a computer scientist by profession, or that I’m deeply interested in evolution and evolutionary computing. I keep fantasizing that I’ll write all these cool reviews (esp. music, but books as well), but that rarely happens in practice. I post photographs at random intervals, but not with any focus or arc.

Worse, I’m a truly terrible reader of other blogs. And there are dozens, nay hundreds out there that I know I would find useful, interesting, enlightening, fun… But reading is slow and I’m busy and scattered, so it doesn’t happen.

Every now and then I worry about it, but rarely for long. I occassionally fantasize about being some significant figure in the blog universe like my friend down the hall. Then I think about how much of his life he has to put into building and maintaining that status, and I know it will never happen.

And I’m usually OK with that.

Sometimes I think I need (not necessarily want, but need) to write a book or record an album (or seven). How else can I really make a difference? Leave my mark?

But that’s mostly illusory as well. Even books that top the best sellers list are usually forgotten in a few years, and a few decades wipe out nearly every semblence of significance for all but the tiniest fraction of authors, painters, musicians, etc. And lord knows, I’m not Plato or Da Vinci or Godel.

While a rare few get to place some rocks, or even boulders, on the beach of human experience, most of us get a few grains of sand if we’re lucky. And it really has to be that way; if everyone got a rock, then rocks would just become the new grains of sand. (But we can never understimate the power and importance of lots of people pooling their sand; 59 million U.S. voters dropped their sand in George W. Bush’s bucket in 2004, and look where that got us!)

So I muddle through, trying to balance my family, and my teaching, and my music and photography and writing and gardening and whatever, knowing that I need it all to be me, but that I’ll never “Be all that I can be” at any of them because I’m so distracted by the constant buzz of the world. But still trying to put my grains of sand in places that do some good, if in small ways.

Now and then, though, fate drops a penny in my bucket to remind me that sand counts. Sometimes it’s a former student writing back to say how valuable something I did turned out to be for them. (And I promise that every teacher worth sending something like that to treasures every such note they receive.) Sometimes it’s an unexpected thank you for something you didn’t even think was terribly significant at the time, but which meant a lot to that person.

And sometimes you find out you helped a near stranger break an addiction.

I posted the following about two months ago, both here and on Flickr:

This was mostly just part of my response to Dad’s illness, and something I knew would make Mom cry (in a good way). But it was also my small attempt to bring some attention to this issue, and how the decisions we make can have consequences, not just for us but for those around us.

I was very honored by the very supportive responses I received both here and on Flickr, and shared many of those with my family. We were all very grateful for the support and help, both from long-time friends and from people I only sorta-kinda knew from the on-line world.

And I figured that would be the end of it.

Three days ago, however, just as I was scrambling to get course stuff together and drive the 14 hours south to spend a few more days helping my folks out before having to come back for classes, I got a most unexpected comment on this photo on Flickr. csharp_gal has a wonderful eye for gorgeous landscape photography, and was also apparently addicted to nicotine. After describing her addiction first to cigarettes, and then to nicotine gum, she went on to share:

Then, one day I saw this photo and I read about what’s happening with your Dad. I left a comment and started thinking about it. That day, I went off the gum. It’s almost two months and no gum.

…

Just wanted to let you know that this posted picture helped me to end my almost relationship with nicotine in any form. It’s very important to me, former nicotine junky. I will always think about your Dad while being nicotine free.

I just about cried. It was so unexpected, and so positive, and just so cool! Huge thanks to csharp_gal for sharing her story, and best wishes in her fight against that nasty beast.

I know I’ll never be some giant of the blogsphere, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing a book or making an album or whatever. Regardless, I’ll have surprises like this, and my amazing family, to remind me that some of my sand ended up in a good place. And that’s pretty damn cool.

Those wild and crazy people at WalkingTimeBomb.com have a whole host of ads aimed at college students who blithely assume (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that they’ll quit smoking after they graduate. Some of them are pretty strange and don’t make a lot of sense, but some are real winners:

Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is not harmful as long as you only do it socially.

When I’m at the bar I like to smack myself in the face a few times with a good claw hammer. So what? Who am I hurting? Or the other day I was walking along with Joe and he pulled out a shiny ball-peen model. Man, we just went to town with that baby. But what of it? I don’t plan on being one of those life-long hammerers. I’ll just quit after I graduate by tapering off with some of those small rubber mallets.

Generally I’m a pretty libertarian kind of guy, and I rarely give students grief about their smoking even though they bloody well ought to know better. Going through this cancer fight with Dad, though, makes it tough not to run around shouting at students that I see smoking.

The problem is that the claim that smoking (or not wearing a seatbelt or a bicycle helmet or whatever) only hurts the fool is based on a sad and ultimately unacceptable assumption that there is and will be no love in that person’s world when the odds come for their due. To watch my mother hold Dad while he’s vomiting again in the middle of the night, to hear her voice break on the phone after spending another all-nighter with him at the hospital, all this shatters any arguments that the impact of these choices is limited.

We are people, and that has implications.

When my father started smoking in the early 40′s, there was no broad understanding of the horrible risks involved, and as that data became clearer the tobacco industry spent millions to confuse and obfuscate the issues. At some point when I was a kid (late 60′s, early 70′s) Dad became convinced and stopped cold, an action I have always admired.

Today’s students can’t claim ignorance, and I sure as hell hope they don’t plan on lonely, loveless lives. I know that I have higher aspirations for them…

Some of it is just not very pleasant. Chemo makes him throw up (as it does many people). I’ve watched a fair bit of that while we’ve been here, although nothing close to what Mom’s helped him through, and these moments definitely fall in the “I wish I could pretend I hadn’t seen that” category. There are probably powerful images that could be made of this distress, and one could argue that going through this is a key part of the fight against the cancer and therefore worthy of documentation. But some other photographer will have to do that. It’s my dad, and I need to be giving him a hug and helping him wipe his face, not taking his picture.

Some of it is the sounds that still photography just doesn’t capture. Extreme discomfort can be a very noisesome beast, and there’s been plenty of that, with more to come. Harry Smith would probably tape the whole thing, but I’m passing on that as well.

Some of it I would love to capture, but just haven’t, and probably won’t, because it’s not easy and I’m only willing to go so far to record the moment. Mom stroking his forehead in the near dark, helping him calm down after a bad spell and encouraging him to go back to sleep. Her hand on his back; his hand in mine. Little glances; fleeting expressions; moments. In the end, the little signs of why we’re fighting this thing.

Sometimes you have to live, wading through the experience instead of recording it from the shore. I keep reminding myself that now is a good time to live.

“My father is fighting cancer.” Nope. Sounds too much like a back alley brawl, and this is a much bigger deal than that.

“My father is battling cancer.” Closer. Given the great chunks of medical machinery being brought to bear on his illness, “battle” seems more descriptive than “fight”. But battles are (usually) parts of wars, and I’m inclined to be more explicit about that. So…

“My father has become a foot soldier in humanity’s on-going war with cancer.”

This seems pretty apt. We (mostly my Mom) are the support staff, providing love and support and matériel, eagerly and nervously awaiting news from the front. But he’s the one in the trenches, dealing with the foot rot and the deafening machines of war and the crap rations.

The key diagnoses were last week, and luckily my wonderful sister was able to fly down from New York and be with them for several days of intense and difficult information gathering. A huge thanks to her for being there for all of us!

Dad’s got cancer of the throat. The doctors place the odds at 50/50, but the system is pretty complex and there are a whole host of things that could slip or crack. He’s got several weeks of radiation and chemo ahead, so it’s going to be a long slog (and probably a rough Christmas), but Dad and Mom and the doctors are all prepared for the fight. Saturday morning was the first skirmish; happily he came through that in excellent shape.

Everyone here in Morris has been really supportive and wonderful, for which we are extremely grateful. We’re going to take off the week of Thanksgiving and will drive down to be with my parents for that week. Until then, it’s fingers crossed and a lot of time on the phone.