Well, I have an unruly mind and it's hard to do the Tweet thing and the Facebook thing and the blog thing because of my long and sort of masochistic, sequestered, power-hungry, control-freakish hierarchical old-school fear-based relationship with writing which is miraculously being cured daily by my work with others in the Amherst Writers and Artists method, through which I have become remarkably relaxed and affable and can now kind of laugh at my pretensions as a writer and see how the quasi-monastic models of writer-as-monk have not only hemmed me in but have made it difficult to adapt to social media (finally getting it sort of that "writing" in the traditional sense is not it; this is more like "hanging out" which I really miss anyway; I miss hanging out; I spend all this time alone in the house chiseling away word by word -- ok, I know it doesn't always look like it, all haphazard prose, as this is: I mean, this is really haphazard prose because the poor kid is trying to break out, see? the kid is trying to loosen up) ... where was I?

Oh, yeah. I was trying to check in and say I'm pretty darned healthy.

Folks have written and suggested I post about my health. So the basic facts are that this sacral chordoma tumor was removed in December 2009 and I spent a pretty rough but very successful few months of recovery -- no post-op infection, no complications, just steady recovery and the typical hell of getting physically dependent on painkillers and then weaning off them, which involved a good deal of very wiggy mental and emotional ups and downs, sleeplessness, totally weird psychic environment for a soul to live in, but got through that, am of course a recovered addict so that was heavy but not a slip, just a medical challenge, though I was of course concerned that my old addictive predilections would hijack my course of recovery and I would start hiding pills and lying about how many I was taking (so I kept a daily pill diary and wrote down every one I took, and was able to see my slow progress weaning my body off them, until one day no more Neurontin, no more Oxycodone) ...

So I'm here to tell you that getting carved up is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, and my wife Norma has been an absolute saint about it all, caring for me in ways most wives are going to have to wait for their husbands' senescence to experience (thanks, babe) ... and coming home on Christmas day with tubes coming out of you is pretty weird and ghoulish, and so that first few months was rough, and then fighting with the insurance companies was upsetting and difficult but thanks to our medical advocate Jennifer Brokaw and her team and our surgeon Dr. Christopher Ames and his team and our Dr. Loredo at Loma Linda Medical Center and her team and all my comrades down there and all the other remarkable professionals who were on our side and all you amazing readers who spoke up on our behalf we got the go-ahead to do two months proton beam followup treatment at Loma Linda Medical Center which was amazing, from which I returned to SF on July 29, and have been writing the column full-time for a few weeks now, swimming daily, working out on the elliptical trainer and getting back much of the nerve function that was affected by the surgery, and

Oh, look: the Attitudinal Changes!

Foremost among them (surprise surprise) a heightened sense of the fragility and urgency of life and its projects, to wit making writing and communicating with elan and spirit paramount, to the detriment of carefully etched and worked-over prose (there just isn't time, man! there isn't enough time!) so back to the spirit of if not automatic writing at least very rapid writing following the contours of a mind that rushes from thing to thing breathlessly (breathlessly?) if not brilliantly ...

and trying to put in all the relevant medical details, which are that the chordoma tumor, which is a slow-growing but persistent kind of cancer, that does not tend to metastasize but does tend to recur in the same spot -- main reason for the two months of proton beam radiation, as well as the main reason for the "wide margins" observed during surgery -- is not likely to come back and I can more or less go about life as if this is a done deal, a gone thing, an episode not to be repeated,

but nothing is certain! So I go for quarterly followups. And I change my diet and lifestyle to one dedicated to stuff that fights cancer. Because maybe I'm full of cancer cells that are either going to grow or die ... so here's to apoptosis, merry apoptosis!

And I'm not even going to edit this because if I do there goes the day, and I've got to get on to writing the column and I really would like to write a new song to bookend the song with which I began this odyssey last fall ... the "My cancer sounds like a 1970s two-door chrysler convertible" song ("Chordoma" -- it does have a ring to it, don't it?)

So basically, this is, again, just to say that it looks like I'm OK and just have to get stronger, plus I lost, wow, looks like a good 25 pounds from going vegetarian (well, I'm a vegetarian who eats meat when he feels like it, and I can live with the contradiction, thank you very much!) and just stopping some of the dumb stuff I was doing ...

So. One more time: I'm alive and I'm pretty darned healthy and thanks for asking!