Duff Shot

The Man Who Golfs in Thunderstorms: Duff Shot

If you aren't acquainted with my friend the Golfer you should go back and read The Man Who Golfs in Thunderstorms before continuing this post. If you do recall the Golfer then you might be wondering about the creative soap opera that is his life. Well, aside from his constant state of having no money (even though he earns more than I do), his recent car troubles, and managing to get his license suspended in his effort to 'contest' his speeding ticket (when I say 'contest' you read 'put off paying it') instead of just paying the fine. But aside from that excitement there's been a new bomb in his love life that the Golfer, so inured to shocks of reality that it rarely even breaks through his twisted defense of unrelenting optimism, failed to even notice it.

I believe that when I last left off the story of the Golfer he had two euphemistic 'buns' in two different ovens. This new snafu has to do solely with Ruska but I owe you the wrap-up to the story of Thorn so I'll do that first. Despite having mourned the clump of cells Thorn thought she had miscarried (or maybe aborted or maybe didn't have at all- who knows?) she, after realizing that the Golfer wasn't going to get back together with her in spite of her machinations, told the Golfer that she got a abortion. So the sequence of events for her pregnancy goes: Fails to realize she is pregnant to the point that she has an IUD implanted which causes her to believe she's had a miscarriage and they then name and mourn the dead clump of cells after which she then fails to tell the Golfer that she didn't actually have a miscarriage until after he gets together with Ruska and then only does so in a ploy to get him back and when that doesn't happen she gets an abortion anyway. Though, to be honest, between Thorn's cancer, MS, and medications for the aforementioned she couldn't have carried to term regardless because the medications would have killed a baby and the lack of them would have killed her so the whole situation was absurd to begin with. Weeks after Thorn and the Golfer were finally finished and the apparently-not-miscarried fetus was aborted he still chose to get himself permanently marked with the dead fetus commemorative tattoo that he had been planning. The tattoo is a large circle about four inches in diameter centered over his spine between his shoulders. The design is of a tree with tangled branches and tangled roots and as though it is carved into the tree are the initials of Thorn's dead fetus.

So because Ruska was still pregnant with his child (he had claimed he was going to find out if it was actually his when he first told his brother about it and when asked again said that it was though not how he knew) the Golfer chose to stay together with her even though when they first started hooking up he had said that he was not at all interested in a long term relationship. In early December when Ruska was about five months pregnant I saw her for the first time in ages and she didn't look particularly pregnant. Granted, she was skinny to begin with, and I know that some people don't 'show' much when pregnant (my mother likes to say that one of her sisters, when pregnant, merely looked like she had put on a few pounds until she was close to seven months along and then she suddenly looked like she'd swallowed a basketball) but in retrospect I feel I should have been more scrutinizing and suspicious of this. Another detail I feel in hindsight I should have been more suspicious about than I actually was happened around this time as well (though I honestly do not know or care if it was before or after I saw her). The Golfer told me that Ruska was concerned she might lose the baby. He went on to say that the doctors had told her that the fetus was not getting enough nutrients. I told him that this didn't make a whole lot of sense. If they were concerned about the fetus then they'd have told her to take more supplements, put her on a special diet, maybe put her on bed rest or given her a IV if it was really that threatening. They would have done something and not just given her a 'Oh, by the way, you might lose your kid, so sorry' and gone off to do whatever it was they had next in their schedule.

About a week after I saw Ruska the Golfer failed to come home from swimming one night until mid-morning the following day. He explained that the night before while they were swimming Ruska had gotten kicked in the stomach and had a miscarriage. They'd evidently been up all night because of this. This seemed suspicious to me because while I don't know the statistics regarding miscarriages in women I remembered from biology that trauma resulting in miscarriage is largely a myth- something that neither the Golfer nor Ruska seem to be aware of. But I suppose that after her malnutrition ploy failed (quite possibly because of my pointed questions regarding the situation) she had to go with another plan to 'lose the baby'. After speaking with a coworker of mine who is going to college with the eventual goal of being some kind of obstetrics administrator I was aware of even more evidence. By my calculation Ruska had been at least five months pregnant (based on how long she would have had to have been pregnant for her to have told the Golfer about the pregnancy when she did) and at that stage it is no longer considered a miscarriage but a stillbirth and she would not have 'just bled' as the Golfer said. And she wouldn't have stayed home. She would have had to go to the hospital to have her placenta removed and there would have been remains.

Given this evidence it seems likely that Ruska is a dirty faker. She faked a pregnancy to keep the Golfer from leaving her (probably assuming she could get pregnant before he noticed) and when that didn't happen she had to fake losing the baby but couldn't do so before she was sure the fake pregnancy had done its job in securing him so she waited as long as she figured she could before he got suspicious that she didn't yet look pregnant or anything before pretending to have a 'miscarriage'. And of course she couldn't go to a hospital or her deception would be all-to-obvious. So the Golfer, in his ignorance, was easily duped. Apparently, at least for the Golfer, that's how love is born.

I wanted to end it there but I just couldn't stop without saying this: The Golfer, to be completely inconsistent in his insanity, does not seem to be preparing to get a second dead fetus commemorative tattoo for this dead fetus.

All Your Cells Are Cancerous

Cancer is treated as bad and horrible and foreign. It steals resources from your body and produces endless cells with no use that press on your organs and wither them. It creates at random making a twisted mass of tissue that appears alien in a way we associate with gristly horror movies. Cancer in one place in your body may never be noticed until you die of other causes and are autopsied. Cancer in another place may steal your memories from you and all your comfort. Cancer in yet another place or a different one or, in fact, any number of places will take your very life from you in service of its sinister creation of more new cells carrying its mutated DNA.

Cancer is not some tiny mite that sneaks into your body and starts propagating. It's not a bacteria or cold that infects you and festers in your body. It is not some tiny alien seed that gets to you through the air and proceeds to grow inside you. It does have many causes. Chemicals can cause cancer. Radiation can cause cancer. Smoking (though that's mostly the chemicals). Asbestos. The sun. Mostly things boil down to chemicals or radiation even though there are many different names for different kinds and different causes. One of the most blatant causes gets less attention than others. Old age. I guess old people die anyway but young people who get cancer caused by chemicals are a tragedy. Even birth control pills can cause cancer (though not for the reasons you think.)

The description is wrong, though. People do not "get" cancer. It is not catching. Everyone has cancer. Every single person in the entire world. And if they don't have cancer they have another kind of problem entirely. Namely, death. So which would you rather have? Cancer, which can kill you or the lack there of which will cause you to be dead much faster? Evolution chose cancer, obviously. If cancer wasn't good for us in some way than we wouldn't evolved so that every single cell in our body was cancerous. All of them. Your entire body festers with cancer from the moment you are born.

Before you become too bothered I will explain. "Cancer" is actually nothing more than the uncontrolled multiplication of cells. You could say that every time a woman becomes pregnant there's a "cancer" in her womb. Except that it's a special kind of parasitic cancer that grows into something adorable that we feel a biological imperative to love and cherish even though it's just a mass of cancer. Your cells divide and multiply as they grow old and need to be replaced or if you're injured. It happens constantly. But the reason that your cells don't divide out of control all the time is a special gene sequence that can be turned on and off to keep cells from dividing. Division is their natural state after all. But because division causes the DNA in your cells to literally unravel you want to avoid too much of it. That's where the special gene sequence comes in to force your cells to stop dividing unless it's necessary.

What causes the cancer in reality is that gene sequence becoming dysfunctional. Once it's broken it divides and, of courses, passes on the broken gene to the daughter cells which divide again. And again and again and again. Until it's stopped. Or it consumes you. Ironically two of the things that cause cancer are also used to destroy it. Chemical therapy and radiation treatments. Another cause of cancer is old age. By necessity your cells must divide in order to keep you alive. But though the division is normally not as rapid it does slowly unravel the DNA in your cells. The more it unravels and the older you get the more likely it is that the natural division of your cells will cause that very same gene to become broken and the already aged cells to begin to divide out of control.

Much like old age is the way in which Birth Control causes cancer. I know that women get prescribed birth control fairly often to "regulate" their cycles or to reduce the severity of the symptoms. But the way in which birth control pills are designed to work with one week of a placebo pill in the round dispenser forces a woman to have a period once in every twenty-eight days. Though you might be under the misconception that this is "normal" the fact is that women were not designed by evolution to have their cycles every twenty-eight days. Modern women go through three hundred or more cycles in their lifetime and it's not sheerly because they live longer. It's perfectly natural for a adult woman to go almost two years without ovulating. So why do we have a pill that forces a woman to have it once a month? Well, mostly because of the church but the real answer is that we shouldn't. Especially as all that extraneous cell-division caused by the egg bursting through the wall of the ovary every month leads to a higher cancer rate. And not just a higher cancer rate in the ovaries but a higher cancer rate in the breasts caused by the progesterone and estrogen in the pill making a woman's body think it's a little bit pregnant. And I won't even get started on the fact that diet causes breast cancer in men.

So it's not so much that there are more things around us that "give" us cancer these days. And it's not so much the fact that we live longer and have time for more cell divisions. It has a lot more to do with the fact that our cells naturally want to be cancerous. Of course there are things we could do to help prevent that from happening (like reducing radiation levels and changing the way birth control works) but those things don't change the truth. Because the truth is that all your cells are cancerous and there's nothing you can consciously do about it. Are you scared yet? You should be.

Seriously though, we've been doing all right with this cancer thing in the last few thousand years before the advent of modern medicine. I wouldn't worry about it too much. After all, if we didn't have cancer we'd all be dead.