Bonus Mode

In Houston, I worked for an awesome nonprofit called Writers In The Schools. WITS employed poets, playwrights, and fiction writers to do writing workshops with kids. It was an amazing organization and an amazing job. The founder, Victoria Jones, hired me as her first employee, telling me she had enough money to pay me for six months. After that, it was up to me. I left a little over five years later after getting my MSW, and WITS had about ten staff, stable funding, and we were in a Menil House.

There’s an incredible museum in Houston called the Menil, and its patron purchased a bunch of houses around the museum and rented them to artists and arts organizations. We had one directly across from the front entrance, and had a program specifically dedicated to bringing in elementary school kids for tours and writing lessons. The museum itself ranges from African art to modern, with sculpture, impressionist, and just about everything. My favorite was the surrealist art, especially Rene Magritte.

So, in his honor, I am calling the latest mode the Magritte mode. I am not quite seeing a bunch of bowler hatted men dotting the night sky, but it’s not far from that. The visual, let’s call them distortions, are truly challenging reality. Things are moving. A lot. And they are creating contrail lines, as if there are echoes of everything. Arms and legs seem a bit misshapen, and I have now completely been flummoxed by how to put on a shirt twice. And socks once. And today I had a existential crisis when looking at our spoons, as they seem to not be designed correctly. Can’t really explain how they were wrong, just a little too MC Escher to be useful as a utensil. I am checking my reality with others, just to make sure. Fortunately, when I asked Jill yesterday “do you see the topless dude on the neighbor’s roof eating Cheerios?” She did in fact see him. I don’t need to know the why, just happy the what was independently confirmed.

I had a bonus MRI yesterday, just to make sure things hadn’t gone ziggy-zaggy (shout out to kids book “Russell the Sheep”). The moderately good news is that the tumor has not increased, and kinda looks smaller, which is the long term point. They redoubled the steroids, meaning I am likely headed toward sumbitch by next week. People keep comparing my new look to Walter White in Breaking Bad, so that might fit. I’m a few days from the end of treatment, bald, looking like a meth dealer, inside a surrealist painting, and by the way, brave Dr. Valliant quit me yesterday. And I have been so compliant. More on that some other time. But the finish line looks close. Too bad it’s also in motion.