Day 100, Monday, May 6th, 2013

I have great difficultly attaching realism to the fact that one hundred days have passed since my arrival in Seattle. Most certainly, I have no sense of that much time passing, but I rather imagine that the multitude of procedures that deal by-blows to cognitive impairment, coupled with the handfulls of pills (admittedly, only a few of which meddle with your grey matter), could have tinkered with my ticker's time-tracker to some moderate-to-middlin' extent.

This lovely assortment is my current pill garden. I expect them to sprout soon, and I will transplant them into an orchard I've selected. In a few years, we will all be able to bask in the shade of the Ursodiol and Acyclovir trees. Rest assured, I am nowhere near done with the fevered acquisition of exotic pillforms for my collection. To quote the great Ash Ketchum: "Gotta catch 'em all." 

My sister, Kelly, flew down on Friday, and would like everyone to know that: 

She was so hungry when she got here that she 'cavemanned a chicken with her bare hands.' Then she had a little quarantine (because she might have had child plague from her kindergarten class), but that was okay because that gave her a sighting of the Oscar Mayer Weiner Mobile from the window of her room. Life goal. Bucket List. Then, she saw Pike Place Market, where she saw tulips, fish chucking, non-ginger Pippi Longstockings playing violin and singing off-key in a back alley (made her day), the Made In Washington store (which reminded her of the Leftorium), and then, the gum wall, and then a girl touching the gum wall (so much herpes), and then a businessman sharing a joint with a hobo! And then, on the way back, she saw the Oscar Mayer Weiener Mobile again. This was capped off by getting to ride to the top of the Space Needle and a trip through a glass-museum, "clearly created by a one-eyed pirate." 

She's had a good time.

While she was doing that well-deserved galavanting, I was getting chemo! Aw, it ain't so bad. It was pretty mild stuff, and it's all over now. Today is the last day of conditioning before opening night of the big show. I'm getting irradiated today, in order to increase my shelf life, I guess. In preparation for pasteurization, I had to hook myself up to this guy:

And this adorable little fellow, bleeper of bleeps and apple of my eye, is the portable personal pump that I gave life to through the insertion of the proverbial batteries not included, except that they were, in a different compartment of the shipping container. I have named him Jake, and Jake takes nine-volt batteries. You know, the kind you can test with your tongue to ascertain remaining potency? If you doubt me, obtain a nine-volt battery and touch it gingerly to that most regenerative and prehensile of muscles, your tongue, and you will find an odd tingle is the result; the stronger the tingle correlating to the stronger the charge remaining in the battery. I like nine-volts. Every toy that was battery powered in the eighties took nine-volts, and my older brother was too chicken to test them himself. Don't tell Jake, but being attached to him is a lot like being attached to a really slow dot-matrix printer, because of the periodic nature of his sound output. "Bzszshshzsh-eszhsz." Pause. "Bzshszshzh-ezshzh." Pause. Can this, and repeat every five seconds.

Jake is ensuring that I am well hydrated prior to the day's impending radiation.

He's nice that way.

Two cows are standing in a field, and one turns to the other and says, "Hey Larry, do you ever worry about that 'mad cow disease' stuff we keep hearing about?" And Larry says, "I'M A HELICOPTER WUP-WUP-WUP-WUP!"