Jay Lake: Writer

[cancer] Still with the spoons, plus a bit of unrelated dreaming

The first thing I want to say is that I continue to feel much better these days. My bounceback from this last round of chemotherapy is progressing much more swiftly and smoothly than it did from my 2010 chemo series. My mental energy is very nearly 100%, and at least up to a point, my physical energy is strong. I sleep well, get things done during the day (including basic housework etc. — which was impossible for me for months), am productive in my writing and have the time, energy and focus to parent the_child.

But still with the spoons… Some days I wipe out early and sleep long. As happened yesterday. It’s tied to how much I’ve done that day, and fairly specifically to how much driving I’ve done. For example, yesterday I had lunch with a friend on the southwest end of Portland (far from Nuevo Rancho Lake), then yesterday evening I drove the_child up to northeast part of town (also reasonably far from Nuevo Rancho Lake) for a long, late session with her eighth grade project mentor. By the time I got home around 7:45 I was staggeringly tired, and I was lights out at 8:15.

I’m not sure if the driving is the specific factor that exhausts me, or if it is just a proxy for my overall level of activity. Days when I stay home and lay low, I can stay up til 10:00 or so, sleep six or seven hours, and be fine. This is pretty close to my ordinary behavior when I am at baseline health. Days when I am out and about look a lot more like yesterday, with noticeable fatigue, early bedtimes and hard sleep.

And of course, because I feel fine, I rarely remember to take this fatigue into account. It’s not like while I was on chemo, when every spoon spent was painfully obvious. (For more on spoons, see here: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ].) So I barrel through the days as if I’m healthy, then have a wipe out lottery in the evenings.

Still, a vast improvement. Still, annoying.

And on an unrelated note, last night I dreamt I was at a big potluck picnic with, among other people, daviddlevine. At one point I approached a cold case someone had set up filled with desserts. (It suspiciously resembled the dessert case at the Sellwood location of Papa Haydn’s.) Except that one of the items on display was a sort of box made of head cheese with pickled jalapeno inclusions among the organ meats. Small items of patisserie were in various compartments of the head cheese box. I could not even begin to imagine the point of that presentation, and was fairly grossed out about it.

Ah, my dreaming mind, such a lovely landscape it is.

Tags: Cancer, Child, dreams, Food, health, Personal, Portland

Posted: 6:40 am Wed February 08 2012 | Comments(0) |

[dreams] A world of fonts, a world of tears

Dreamt last night that I was living in an alternate world just like ours with one major exception. The only fonts that existed were Cooper Black and Comic Sans.

Talk about a screaming nightmare…

Tags: dreams, Funny

Posted: 9:13 am Sun February 05 2012 | Comments(2) |

[personal] Dreaming of Japan, and other updates

Sometime in the last few days, in conversation with someone (I cannot recall who now) I made the observation that I am very rarely lost. I don’t always know where I am when walking or driving in a strange-to-me place, but I always know how I got there and how to get back to wherever I started from. I really do have a very good sense of direction.

So naturally last night my subconscious decided to serve me up some humble pie. I dreamt that Mother of the Child and I were in Japan, walking through a Tokyo neighborhood that looked suspiciously like Portland’s West Hills, admiring the classical architecture. We wound up being invited into one of the houses, which was the home of an absent yakuza crime lord. For some reason, I borrowed one of the yak’s cars — a tiny, ancient Subaru — to head back to our hotel to pick something up, leaving Mother of the Child behind. I got to the hotel, a Best Western in a location that looked suspiciously like Nebraska, and realized I had no idea how to get back to the yakuza mansion. Not only had I lost the_child‘s mother, but I had in effect stolen a car from the Japanese mafia. I had a rented Japanese cellphone, but no matter what I did with it, I couldn’t seem to make an outgoing call. Panic ensued.

Anxiety much? I don’t find that dream so hard to interpret.

In other news, the_child‘s basketball team lost last night 43-28. It was only their second loss of the season, and they fought hard, but the other squad were demon shooters, not to mention quite a bit taller.

Also, I’m making a lot of progress on Sunspin. I expect to have Calamity of So Long a Life out to my last few first readers in another week or so, well ahead of schedule. This will give me time to work on Little Dog, I think, given my production scheduling.

This evening, the_child and I are going to the SFWA Northwest Reading Series. David Levine, J.A. Pitts and Ken Scholes are reading:

Tuesday, January 31
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
McMenamins Kennedy School, 5736 N.E. 33rd Ave. Portland, OR 97211

Note they’re also reprising, with a slightly different cast, in Seattle tomorrow night.

Wednesday, February 1
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Wild Rover Restaurant and Pub, 111 Central Way, Kirkland, WA 98033

If you’re in the area, turn out and support live, local literature!

Tags: Books, Calamity, Child, Conventions, dreams, family, friends, Japan, Personal, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:27 am Tue January 31 2012 | Comments(1) |

[dreams] Capers, middle aged white guy style

I’ve been watching too much Mission Impossible. In fact, the_child and I watched MI III [ imdb ] yesterday evening, which quite clearly influenced my dreaming.

In my sleep, I was part of a strike team also composed of joshenglish (a fellow Portland writer) and howardtayler (of Schlock Mercenary fame). Our assignment was to kidnap a teacher (played by a dream person rather than someone from real life) from an American boarding school in Japan and bring him back to the United States. The three of us flew across the Pacific, and executed our assignment, also snatching his girlfriend and their three little kids. We wound up in a hotel near Narita airport waiting for our flight home, where joshenglish bailed on the operation, and howardtayler more or less went on strike.

It finally occurred to me that we hadn’t grabbed our target’s passport when we snatched him, and I began to wonder how we were going to get him through Japanese immigration on the way out, or US customs and immigration on the way in. Then I realized I had no way to get him onto the plane without him speaking up and asking for help from the airline reps. So I went and took a shower with all my clothes on (no, I still don’t know why), until the kids came and pestered me to get out of the bathroom so they could wash up.

Apparently, I’m not even capable of being an international superspy even in my dreams. As for those two rats on my team, gentlemen, I have to say I’m disappointed in your lack of commitment to my imaginary mission.

Tags: Child, dreams, friends, Funny, Japan, Movies

Posted: 8:06 am Sat January 07 2012 | Comments(3) |

[personal|cancer] Another night, another dream

Dreamt last night that I was newly recruited to some spy agency (unspecified in my dream) and was being sent to go undercover for six weeks in a rural Turkish hospital. This despite me not speaking a word of Turkish. Shanna Germain was my spymistress, giving me the assignment and travel details. scarlettina was the doctor responsible for inducing sufficient symptoms of illness in me to get admitted to the hospital in question.

I don’t find this one real hard to pick apart, and if it wasn’t so amusing (to me, at least), it would be rather creepy. Well, I suppose the dream is creepy regardless of whether I find it amusing. It’s not hard to see my anxieties about cancer and my medical experiences in this. And notion of being sent back to the hospital with no way to communicate, for a long period of time. Not unlike being in surgical recovery, for example. Luckily, both Shanna and scarlettina are dear friends in real life, and I don’t have to actually worry about them being medical malefactors or otherwise bedeviling my existence.

In other news, my writing mind seems to be waking up. I hope to be back on fiction next week, writing a requested novelette before diving back into Sunspin. If it doesn’t happen right away, I’m okay with that, but the ice is definitely breaking. This will be me, restored to my identity.

Tags: Books, Cancer, dreams, friends, health, Personal, Sunspin, Writing

Posted: 6:28 am Thu January 05 2012 | Comments(0) |

[personal] Dreaming my way into a New Year

Laid fairly low yesterday during the day, watching Star Trek TOS on Netflix Streaming and browsing through Web comic archives. Brain isn’t quite back to reading books yet. However, I did get crazy and go out last night with the_child and Mother of the Child to a low-key, family-friendly New Years Eve party among the_child‘s school community. Ie, lots of friends and acquaintances of hers running around, lots of parents of current and former students. So I knew almost everybody, at least casually. Likewise, thanks both to my general open-ness on the topic as well as the death from cancer of one of the parents last spring, everybody was pretty aware of my issues.

I actually talked to people. Told jokes and stories. Listened to other people’s jokes and stories. Swilled grapefruit juice and ate terrible food from the potluck table. (“Tasty, but not good for me” terrible, not “Oh my god what is this slop” terrible.) Generally interacted with 12 or 15 adults for about two hours, as if I was an adult myself and not some medical shut-in. By 8:30 I had a headache and could barely keep sitting up straight, so Mother of the Child drove me home while our daughter stayed and partied with friends, to catch a ride later.

I crawled into bed around 9, fortified by Tylenol and Lorazepam, (as well as my lower GI meds, as yesterday the lower GI horrors decided to return to my life). I felt physically lousy, had definitely pushed my envelope being at the party, but was still very glad I went.

My subconscious decided to reward me with a dream about being at an SF/F convention, probably Worldcon or WFC though the dream didn’t specify, where I was being drummed out of the club, so to speak. I got detained by security, then thrown in one of those joke lock-ups except without being allowed to bail myself out, then scalzi (whom I will be seeing shortly IRL at Confusion) came and had a talk with me about how my presence wasn’t required any more, but if I didn’t know the reasons why, he wasn’t going to bother to tell me now that it was already too late to fix things.

(This actually happened to me in my mid-20s, when a relatively long-standing friendship with a former college roommate ended abruptly with the rather grade-school statement, “If you don’t know what you did, I’m sure as hell not going to tell you.” Our mutual friends refused to say anything, claiming with horror they didn’t want to get in the middle of it. Middle of what, no one would tell me. To this day, two decades later, I have no idea what happened, or what my former friend imagined had happened. Nor do I really care at this point, it just remains a baffling and saddening episode in my past.)

So I woke up thinking, “anxiety much?” Apparently I partied too hard. At least my headache is gone.

If one believes in signs and portents (I do not, except for those signs erected by the Highway Department), this dream would not be encouraging for the New Year. I don’t have any ready-made interpretations for it, but feel free to take a whack at it. And at any rate, I made it out and saw people, like a real grown-up.

Tags: Cancer, Conventions, dreams, health, Personal

Posted: 9:59 am Sun January 01 2012 | Comments(2) |

[personal|cancer] Bottoming out, I hope

I slept about fifteen hours yesterday, counting roughly three hours of napping plus twelve hours overnight. And yesterday was probably the worst day for fatigue that I’ve experienced during this chemo sequence. Or, really, ever. I hope like heck it was peak fatigue, and that I’ll be a little better today. It’s going to make celebrating Christmas tomorrow a bit tough if I can’t keep my eyes open.

Both the nap dreams/daydreams and the overnight dreams were about food. Pizza, largely, though in some unusual forms, such as made on a Prius floormat, or being used to burgle a safe. (No, I can’t explain now how in my dreams pizza is useful as a safecracking tool. And floormat pizza is just gross.) Sometimes I dream about hamburgers, but not yesterday. Food… food… food… The problem of course is the intersection between my rare physical cravings, my food aversions, my food dysfunctions, my chemo-damaged mouth, and the desires romping around in my backbrain for food that tastes like anything but aquarium tubing.

Oh well, we all have our little obsessions.

Today I am laying very low, tomorrow have two small family events, and that’s it. So if fatigue is my lot, I’m all tooled up for it. Whatever you’re doing, however you’re observing (or ignoring) the season, do it well and be happy. And eat something that tastes good, just for me.

Tags: Cancer, dreams, family, Food, health, Personal

Posted: 8:37 am Sat December 24 2011 | Comments(4) |

[personal|cancer] Dreams and mortality

Last night’s dreaming was varied. At one point cmdrsuzdal and I were with jlassen at a WFC apparently taking place on the set of Aeon Flux. Later, I was in post-apocalyptic Belfast as a partner in a law firm, my job largely being to torch surviving Victorian homes after looting them. Sort of Slightly Irritated Max instead of Mad Max.

But I woke up enough to interrupt the flow and lose a few. Mortality’s on my mind again. It occurred to me recently that one way to think about my cancer risks is that we’re all dying, I’m just probably dying a little faster than most of my peers. I want to write about that more than my brainspace is ready to cope with today, so maybe next week. I’ve got most of the week off and can really put some time into my thoughts, hopefully. For now, well, some Day Jobbery, then the holiday weekend.

Have fun, be well, celebrate what pleases you best.

Tags: Cancer, dreams, health, Personal, work

Posted: 6:17 am Fri December 23 2011 | Comments(0) |

[personal] More dreaming, less sleep

Last night was another long, fitful night. I did not sleep well, and the lower GI follies were in full swing, interacting poorly with the sleep needs.

The recurring dream was a retelling of “Jeffty Is Five“, as if written by Neil Simon and starring NPR’s Car Talk producer Doug Berman as Jeffty, but using the sets (as it were) from my Linus Pauling/starship dream.

My subconscious is clearly a swamp. And then some.

Tags: dreams, Funny, Personal

Posted: 6:15 am Thu December 22 2011 | Comments(0) |

[personal] More with the long sleep and weird dreams

I went to bed at 6 pm last night. Slept eleven hours, with weird recurring dreams. It’s always not a solid sleep when I’m like this so much as a hyperextended hypnagogic state. I have some awareness of my surrounds, but my eyes are closed and I am dreaming.

In this case I was giving eldercare to Linus Pauling while rebuilding both a classic railway steam engine and a starship propulsion system, somewhere in Alaska. I needed the train to transport the propulsion system back to the starship’s landing site. Plus I had a detour to visit my old high school and make a presentation on life goals. I took Dr. Pauling on that trip.

Usually I understand the symbolism in my dreams, but this one seems to be a random shot from the wells of my subconscious. I would like to stay up past dinnertime tonight, though.

Tags: dreams, Funny, Personal, weird

Posted: 6:39 am Wed December 21 2011 | Comments(0) |