Hi. I just got off the phone with Ruth -- Henrich, who like me is a longtime Salon.com employee. She called to see how I was. Nice of her to do that. She's a nice person. So we talked. I've been out of touch. I'm resting up. I have this couch here where I lie down a lot. I can't sit. Doctor's orders. So I lie or stand and walk, or kneel. I figured out a few postures but mostly it's lie down or stand. So many ordinary things are hard to do. It would be enlightening in some abstract world but in this world it is simply a struggle.

But Ruth and I were talking and I said how I'm out of touch and I can't go back to work officially because I am on disability but I can communicate unofficially through Open Salon so I will do that because I do not like being out of touch. On many days since Dec. 17, 2009, I have been foggy on Percocet or Oxycodone. In the hospital I had a dilaudid drip; there was a button hanging on a cord that I pushed with my thumb whenever I felt the pain of the surgical incisions or the other sources of post-surgical pain that still bedevil me from time to time.

It would be commendable to narrate the entire sequence of events that led to this moment lying on the couch supported on elbows typing awkwardly into the Macbook. But the power and concentration needed for such a straightforward narrative -- truth be told, the emotional stance too, and the intellectual energy -- these things are not liberally available in the way they were prior to surgery.

Yet a brief outline: I was diagnosed in November 2009 with a rare cancerous tumor located in the area of my lower back, on the front side of the sacrum; it measured about 9 cm by 8 cm by 6 cm and is called a sacral chordoma. The procedure with the highest probability of cure is a surgical removal of the tumor and enough surrounding tissue to ensure that no cancerous cells have remained. After numerous visits and consultations surgery was scheduled for Dec. 17. The operation is a long and complex one involving a neurosurgeon, a colorectal surgeon and a plastic surgeon as well as the anesthesiologist. It was estimated that the surgery would take from 12 to 16 hours but it did not take that long. I think it was about 8 or 10 hours.

Preparation for the Thursday morning surgery began Tuesday at midnight with a fast, followed by a colon-cleansing routine Wednesday involving this liquid that you drink that cleans you out completely. Then you wake at 4:30 Thursday morning to arrive at the hospital at 6; we took our places in a crowded and dark waiting room; we were among many other people also waiting for surgery. They were all types. It was nice to feel that we all had something in common. We were mostly a quiet bunch.

 Anyway, as I said, a straightforward narrative is beyond the powers of your narrator; please allow it to suffice for now to say that I have been through an ordeal of some magnitude and have sensed throughout that some wisdom must be found somewhere in the experience but that for the time being the experience itself is far too large to be digested or contained or turned into fable or metaphor, and that I am too busy having the experience to contemplate it. At the same time I do feel the need to reach out and talk.

Some friends bought me  a Kindle. That was a high point. One of them, the effervescent Mary B., brought me the Kindle while I was in the hospital all hooked up to tubes and wires and patched up with gauze and monitored constantly. The Kindle has been a revelation. Much will be said about that, I suspect.

There is also much to be said about pain, and about drugs and recovery and the particular strained indolence of staying home slowly getting better.

But for now that is mostly it. Everything takes longer now. That, too, is probably a revelation.

But all revelations lie in shadow now, while we are busy with the business of simply getting by, simply getting better.