On Cancer

Cancer: The motherfucking tie that binds, right?

My brother is having the last step in his treatment today, a final surgery to remove a mass that the chemo didn’t fully rid of; and, I expect he’ll be on the mend after this, but I’m not a doctor, I’m just trying to be optimistic.

With his treatment and today’s surgery, I’ve been thinking about this thing – Cancer – how basically every single person on the world gets hit in some way by it, you’ll either experience it firsthand or, without doubt, someone you know, love, work with – SOMEONE you know will be hit by it.

And that’s the thing that binds humanity?

Isn’t that almost a fucking disgrace?

People fucking hate each other these days; I don’t want to write about politics, but even a glance in that direction shows the disharmony between basically half the US population with the other. In a way, I feel like people come together these days over their collective hatred for similar things. The world is so full of hate; but at least we can say that for this one thing, for cancer, our collective hatred has justification – this enemy has been killing our men, women, children, non-binary – it doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe or how you want to live, this fucker has its sights on you and all those you love.

And, perhaps as the only thing we can agree upon, we all hate this fucking thing together.

But, I can’t let this note end on hate; because I think love is infinitely more powerful; and I fucking love that AI (looking at you Bard/chatGPT/llama-2/etc) is going to beat this. Count your blessings, cancer, because now we have our sights trained on you.