The Kids
Smiling is healthy; take that to the bank any day. The day I was first diagnosed Michael and I went golfing, not skydiving. There was a removal from the everyday attitude, into something nearly unexplainable: the illness experience.
Shortly after diagnosis, a group of us took a boat out to camp on an island along the river. It was one of the best nights of my life; I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time. The next morning the boat stopped working, and we had to get upstream. So with that, being the Macgyver’s that we were, we decided to strap Michael to the boat to swim upstream, against the current—he is good at swimming, right?
Some may be offended by what I write here. So I’d like to share a passage from Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller to provide some explanation for the relevance of some of this nonsense:
Chemotherapy fits with disturbing ease into Elaine Scarry’s definition of torture as “unmaking the world”…I was unmade as my mind sought to hold on to the idea that this treatment was curing me, while my body deteriorated: my intactneess, my integrity as a
body-self, disintegrated…“I never thought of myself as ill with cancer”, says Marcia in her story. “I was never sick before or after the the mastectomy….Not true of chemo; chemo was hell. Chemo was not therapeutic; it produced illness. I hated it I cried every time I had it and did not trust it at all. I felt so vulnerable.”….Yet people in chemotherapy believe they are being cared for. Or they believe they ought to believe this, or they have given up believing but still confront others who insist that their treatment is care. The self is unmade in the opposition of the mind’s message of care and the body’s message of pain.
So within the cancer illness experience, there really is something twisted at hand to begin with, so maybe a lot of it is a laugh or cry about it kind of thing.
As it were, I had so many incredible people in my life to keep my spirits up. Here is an example with a text from Nick, one of the several fellas pictured above who created my community at Thiel College. There is this type of “black humor” within that community:
Hello, my name is merv, when i was 13 years of age i had a labodomy and a sever cleft chin…by thee age of 19 i put together my first 50 piece puzzle, also in that year i caught myself continuously being able to look into mirrors and see another world of fairy’s kings, queens, and jesters, my mom and dad once told me that i will be special in this world.
So you see, this is the kind of shit that can get someone through times like those. I was surrounded by this all the time. It was so hard to have a day without a laugh. In case you don’t know; that’s a huge deal. One of cancer’s biggest defenders is humor. When the human body is in a state of laughter, nourishing hormones and frequencies circulate the body, thus enhancing the healing processes.
I shared my time at Thiel College with some extraordinarily funny human beings. This influenced many pleasant memories while a little turned up—if you will—and just bouncing self-expressions off each other. When you get characters like these together, hilarity is bound to ensue. Quite a bit of this book derives from a black notebook I wrote in during my illness and through my explosion back into life. I’m very thankful I kept those notes. It’s great fun to look back on them and reminisce on the experiences that sourced them.
Still, I’m conscientious about rambling about how cool my friends are to a certain extent, but I feel like it’s these people with whom my days were shared. So any understanding the contexts of my story necessarily include them. A person’s friends reveals a bunch about that person, as they often share similar interests, goals, morality, etc.
Nick, a.k.a. Miles Jenkins, a.k.a. Wren is a character I must introduce. Nick and I met freshman year at Thiel and has been my arch nemesis since. I went to Nick with a lot of my concerns, and the thing about Nick, he usually has a helpful perspective on the issue. Nick has diversified social experience. I am very close with his people. He did a lot to keep things light for me whenever I got down. Here is a text conversation we had on the topic of him not visiting me in the hospital,
R: “Raindrop trickles down Ryan’s cheek, as he quickly wipes it away before nick notices.”
N: “are you crying boy?? (as Nick notices his wheeping friend, momentarily a sudden boom comes about the wind…a thunderstorm is bruing up, little do they know, it was an army of pharohs sent from the mideval times, there courage & dignity will be tested…it will…be…TE STED!)”
Man, we’ve had some great times together; too many awesome memories to recount all of them on these pages. Really, I’ve met a lot of amazing people through him; another thing to be grateful for.
Uncle Mike and Tweet (JNanz) are two twerps I will bunch together, because that was often how it was, one with the other. These are some of the craziest s.o.b.'s you’ll ever meet. If you don’t think they’ve done it, you’re probably wrong, but if you’re right, serve it up, because they were probably down. I gradually got to know Mike as a friend of Tweet’s until he transferred to Thiel my sophomore year. Three-tred Mike is one of the funniest humans I’ve ever met. Jarod would not like me to try and short-change the JNanz experience with words. He’s one of those people you really just have to encounter for yourself.
Next, I’d like to introduce you to my friend who I will refer to, for all extensive purposes as Dutch. I shared a townhouse with this fella for a semester Junior year, and I learned quite a bit from him about the nuances of the good life. Dutch is the kind of man who values class and style and loves a rusty whiskey on the rocks. Just like Mike and JNanz, whenever Dutch is around, you won’t not laugh.
So about some atrocities that make me laugh, a lot. My sense of humor is not at par with most. It seems much of the everyday comedy flicks don’t especially do it for me, but these idiots, Dutch, Nick, Lain, all of 'em--they get it. I have so many amazing people out there wishing good for me and sending all good vibes. This is everything in the light of the law of attraction--good things sit on the shoulders of other elements of positivity, and all that love blends together into a blessed surrounding. My boredom over ordinary humor leaves me with only intellectually twisting enjoyment from a particular fashion of wit to persuade myself to a personal mode which accompanies laughter. This jovial lightness does so many beneficial things physically to a multitude of systems.
There are plenty more dimwits whom I love and have sourced outrageous stories, but I will only mention a few. My sense of humor is one that would take some time and context to get acquainted. A lot of what I like entails either catchy word play or just thinking different, like when an unknown source says, “Scented toilet paper. Think about it…” Or Tweet before going out on a Friday night dancing/threatening me, “Primetime for crimetime Hart!”
But one day we were kickin’ it in Nick’s room and we aggravated JNanz. I don’t remember what the deal was, but I’m guessing we mentioned his stature. So Mike says—referring to an angry Tweet while narrating the scene to come:
“He kills us all.”
“Not me,” I said. (Because I am a ninja)
3-Wood Mike shakes his head disapprovingly: “Not twice Hart; can’t cheat death once twice.”
This inevitably brings me to the thing that makes so many squirm: cancer jokes. It seems these twisted quips only come from a limited few who are very special to me. While I’ve encountered a person who’s been effected by cancer who takes offense to this sort of humor, as I understand many probably do, few things make me laugh harder. A lot of my close friends have said some pretty sick but funny shit to me. Lainey always loved to tell me how nice my hair looks while I was bald. Dutch was probably the most practical, as he'd find ways to let me know I was playing exempt without saying it. Nick often liked to imply that my cancer was contagious, that I caught it from talking too much shit, or that I was faking it for attention.
Another individual who will remain unnamed here tops them all in this department. One day we were sitting around a group of awkward teenagers while I was in the middle of chemo, and he proposed a footrace amidst our bantering. His friends chuckled, given the implicit notion that I was obviously in no shape for sprinting. Well, he took those assumptions and attacked with the most stern and sincere “Why are you laughing! What’s funny!? Do you not think he can run!?” Those poor kids, you could cut the tension with a spoon. I could not control my laughter. Not only have his jokes been the most creative in content or whatever, but he really could invoke some hysterical situations with the people he allows/intends to hear what he says. It’s terrible. It’s actually wonderful, I just say terrible because of all the discomfort it caused people. I think the root of such discomfort is the feeling among some people that I deserved to be immune of jokes at my expense, along with other things.
But the ill person is not the only one within this arena whose experience is gruesome.
Arthur Frank goes on to mention discussions he had with Intensive care physicians-in-training (residents) where they described the brutal nature of their work in a “medical black humor style” and a metaphorical story plot to match:
The point of the “joke” is to make its telling as grotesque as possible; without those flourishes, the basic plot describes two or more explorers captured by savages. The first explorer is offered a choice of death or cheechee. Not knowing what the latter means, he chooses it and is horribly tortured to death. The second explorer is given the same choice and chooses death. The chief is puzzled at his decision. “All right,” he says, “but first, a little cheechee.
