THE ENTRY I DON'T WANT TO WRITE --- ANOTHER SURGERY SCHEDULED... RADIO SHOW PUT OFF FOR A COUPLE MONTHS....

I guess I saw this coming, the surgery, though I thought I was going to turn it down.  I read some bad shit about it on the internet, and was afraid I would get another fucked up surgery that in the end made me worse.  My back problems started when I was five.  Spent a year getting chemotherapy.  You could say my angelic wings were removed in that year.  I lost my ability to walk.   I remember fighting every shot.

The long story goes through another year in bed at 17 in horrible, untreatable pain after a botched surgery the doctor tried to hide by giving me enough drugs to make me forever terrified of narcotics (which has come in handy of course in the whole avoiding becoming a junkie aspect of life);  another surgery followed to correct this one.  Major, in a body caste, re-learning to walk surgery that shifted my hip bone up to my spine to reinforce the  crumbling vertebrae left weakened in childhood.  Chunks occasionally fall off this fusion, float all around my back touching the nerves.  Imagine having glass poured into your lower back, and legs...  takes your breath away pain.   Of course I have been in a pain clinic since the inception of the chronic, 24/7 pain, thank God, and was able to get disabled.   I go to Stroger, the county hospital, where the doctors have no reason to push drugs or surgery on you.  They make no more or less as a result.  Let's them be honest as hell.

Anyways, through out it all they have kept me going... first, back when I was working and going to school... and now, that the crumbling spine has gotten to the point that I cannot drive... there is a lot I cannot do.  Making the pain worse is as easy lifting a pan wrong when I am doing the dishes, mopping... the pills keep the weasels at bay, though they wear off in the night, make the last few hours of sleeping a battle of waking up and trying to get back to sleep despite the pain, until finally I am driven to get up and limp in to get my first dose of pills of the day.  Two tramadal, one neurotin, a baclofen, and a ranidine.   At night there is valium and cymbalta (an anti-depressent I get in a very low dose that is supposed to fight pain, and has had a bit of a difference).

NOw, they want to insert an electrical device into my lower spine, a wire attached to a battery belt that is inserted into my ass (they would do my stomach if I was fat).  Now, they have already taken bone out of my ass to rebuild my spine -- my hips, so I have no ass to speak of really.   This surgery sucks, of course, very painful, takes a month plus to go away -- and I cannot lay on my back, will have to sit a certain way after the few weeks when I will not be able to sit up at all.   Some of the people I read on the net said it hurt them the entire time it was in and they could not wait to get it out.   Now, at the hospital I go to, you wait for surgeries, which worries me... but I do have insurance, so if forced to I will find a doctor  take it right out if it bothers me... otherwise, like one woman I read about, had the thing in for six miserable months.  

It is possible, even probable, that I am in a lot more pain than these people to start out with.  You look at my x-ray and see chunks of bone all over the place, pushing directly on my psychotic nerve, etc...  and the nerves leading down into my legs;  surgeries to take them out, would leave scar tissue that would do much the same thing...

The scar tissue from this new surgery will nowhere near my nerves.   They also have to go in and, get this, change the fucking battery every couple years.  They gave a video cassette of the damn thing, like I have had one of those for the last five years....The doctor, though, he insists that the last person he did the procedure on had an 85% reduction inn pain.  This means, also, an 85% loss in the feelings below the spine.  The electric shocks are supposed to scramble the pain messages to the brain.   Wonder what else they scramble? Will my sex life be effecte -- I mean, beyond having a bulge on my but which looks, for all the world, like I have a walkman installed in my ass.  This thing is bigger than you would expect.   Anything inserted in my ass should be very small.  That does not sound right.  I don't like anything in my ass at all.... I am forever trying to get shit out of it.  Ah, the obvious..

Anyways, so i am going to let them give me the trial.  They will insert a wire into my spine, and I will have the control device outside of my body.   I will try this for a week, and see how much it helps.... then, we will decide at that point whether or not I let them cut me again...  I have honestly forgotten how many surgeries I have had, as well as how many years I went to school...  keep changing the numbers I write ---  I assure you I am not lying, just repressing on the one hand, and unsure about the years with studying.

Anyways....  this means that I cannot start the radio show until I know how this is going to turn out.  I am not going to go to the expense of starting the show, then going off the air for a month.  The kind of radical shit I am going to be doing, they will think what they did at Peace and Pipedreams when I disappeared for a couple weeks.... killed for his views.  Well, trust me....  no one is going to kill me for my views.  I can assure you of that all the more after discovering what is going on in the facebook realm, and I suppose even more so the radical realms which fuel the posts,    I am so moderate that it is not funny.   I am not weird enough for people, or too weird, as I wrote before.

So....  Chris, my buddy from LA, a writer of great talent, who has the business aspect of this writer thing down to a science, tells me I have too much going on with my writing to do a radio show.  He thinks the radio will be another distraction from the main thrust of my career, the books.   I mean, books were always the goal but we had not seen the internet yet in our dreams of a literary life.

The millions who have read me here humble me, ennoble me, and honor me.   People say that, but I was not an instant success, and despite my influence I am still pretty small time.  I sought a certain audience of powerful people, readers who could then go on and effect others...  I sought to start echoes in the canyons....

The Radio Show:   the longer I put it off, the more time I have to record a bunch of stuff.   I can spend my time recording all the different characters I play, so that i can then have, practically, live conversations with them.   I will play their voices recorded so they can talk over me, get interrupted, shouted down, beat up, shot, fucked, whatever is called for.  Plus, it would be nice to have a few songs laid down to introduce the different segments.  I have a few to write, and plenty of friends who will play them for me once i am done.... and hopefully, spice them up.   I also want a lot of the kind of poetry we did at Peace and Pipedreams.  Jimmy Peace was brilliant at working with me musically.   I really wish he hadn't moved to the suburbs, but in a way it is better.  I like to learn everything there is about the process, and I relied on him, because he has been around recording equipment and radio stations his entire life.   Anyways....  my set up, thank god, is much simpler than Fearless Radio.

I make this decision with a heavy heart, though.....  Not just because I am getting cut open, and am hearing the first month is pretty painful, and the entire thing might not work -- it is one of those, on some it does, on some it doesn't  -- unlike the morphine pump that keeps Jerry Lewis jumping for those kids.   I am not rich enough to afford a painless life, unfortunately, since such surgeries are considered elective, or something... maybe I am wrong?

Anyways, so to those of you who are happily involving yourself in this endeavor, it gives us all the more time. You will be getting one little blast of my DJ'ing before that, in a simplistic way.   I am going to the Mayday March and will be filming it, and recording a narrative on my ipod that i will make available to folk.  Hopefully, being in the middle of a huge protest will interest my readers....   May First.  Come To Chicago And Show Your Support.

I may not make the entire walk, in my shape, but I will be there at the beginning and the end.  Got a sign idea I like, just the face of Ceaser Chavez... that was what came to me at first, though now I am kind of itching to get out the acrylic paints and do something really cool, a painting on cardboard that I can frame afterwards.... I am also going to shamelessly advertise my website and upcoming radio show, as well as wear my Marines jacket -- and my Honolulu Sherriff's Department shirt.  I do not want any police officers to mistake me for the enemy if any shit heads show up and start trouble.   I mean, the anarchists might hate me, but they will not be caring guns, stun guns, or riding horses -- and let me warn you again, anyone does anything to the cops or their horses -- especially their horses, is going to feel my steel toes boots going about two feet up your cowardly ass.

Real Revolutionaries March With The Police.