Well here we are. I'm actually not sure what I'm doing here in blog-land, but there's this annoying thing in our culture about writing. As in, most immediately, I have cancer, so I guess I should write a book. Or, in other lives, I play baseball, so I should write a book. Or I had sex with someone who's super-famous. Or I did something really great. Or I wanted to do something really great but I just didn't seem to get around to it.
Actually, I had cancer a long time ago - don't get me wrong, I do have it now. I'm not just dredging up the past so that I can dwell among the blogging. Anyway, the point is that I did have cancer a long time ago and I didn't do anything beyond getting cured while raising a couple of kids and holding down a job, and, you see, I thought that was enough. But then, a couple of years later my wife told me about a friend of hers who had also survived cancer. "Cool," I said or thought. End of story. That is until she added, "Yeah. She wrote a book."
Well, shit! No one told me that I was supposed to write a book! So I want to believe that the living and child-rearing, etc. are enough, but there's still that woman in my head who wrote a book and who's making me feel like I'm losing some contest that I know does not exist.
So I guess for today my message is: you do not need to write about your cancer. You only need to live with it. Unless you feel like writing, in which case you should write.
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