In a year where developments find me making ready analogies among how people behave, music's patterns and what I find sound and unsound, I've said little of those in the blogroll with reason to make physical and mental health the very focus of their work on the Net.
But they're there, like Cass Brown, who last week laid claim to 'Fame at Last' -- though to my eyes he had it years ago -- for a news item about Cancergiggles, a terrific blog where Cass has long written about living with cancer.
The subject sounds gloomy and painful, but Cass is almost invariably neither, though he writes about the downs as well as he handles the ups of life and love with such a disease, so I still follow his blog, catching up in depth every now and then.
Cass is more down to earth than people who irritate me occasionally by saying I push musical analogies to such a degree it seems I've found them a "cure-all" for everything, as if an awareness of our inner harmonies and those of others were enough to drive sickness away.
I don't believe that for an instant.
Nor do I often write about physical pain because usually I'm lucky, don't get very much of it; except for one kind that scares me badly whenever it happens, all the worse for being unpredictable. It did at the end of the week, an appalling bout so bad there just was no Saturday; it's been one of the worst yet.
During my last fortnight at work, I've also been busy on several pieces, either on specific musicians or further long essays more of the deep background kind. These latter are not always log entries, they'll one day be parts of the book that's definitely going to grow out of this site once I get down to writing it in a few years.
On Friday night, I went to bed having made lots of progress on two such pieces, but I soon woke up feeling far less cheerful, indeed terrible. Those hours between about 1:00 am Saturday and late Sunday morning I don't want back any time soon, preferably never again, but that's asking a lot.
I was very violently sick, there were cold sweats and hot ones, and for almost a day and a half the hellish migraine and nausea wouldn't stop. The poor cat didn't get fed because trying to move made it worse, I must have overdosed insanely on painkillers and nightmares when knives and metal bands in my skull seemed to take on colours and physical shape.
It seems silly to log about Cass and people like him mostly when this happens to me, since such people are always a part of my life. Still, as I very shakily, slowly emerge from bouts like the one I've just had, I find myself especially wondering how on earth people manage it, those who have to endure constant physical pain.
In our society, we're fortunate: we've got money, usually, and medicine and doctors, but it's not so for lots of people in Africa with no such relief.
My doctor has never been able to tell me exactly what triggers these ghastly experiences, but while they're happening, it's like they'll never end, yet they do, just leaving me gasping and thankful and weak as I am now, wondering if just maybe I've understood a reason for them.
They would make sense if I'd been smoking more than usual or had an unhealthy day without enough food and exercise; but it begins to strike me a possible common factor is they invariably land me on my back on my bed just as I'm starting to unwind.
Well, I think I'm very bad at unwinding and really doing nothing, denying a body that says "I'm tired" and a instinct that says "Take a rest".
There's a much better reason than my last dose of getting that wrong for talking about Cass again, all the same. He's already done what, for one day, I have in mind and turned a well-written and focussed blog into a book, with a note typical of his approach:
"With about 3 years experience of living with cancer and having come close to being a very dead person, I thought that I may be able to pass on a few thoughts which may help or comfort people who found themselves in a similar hilarious situation."
I don't know about a hilarious situation, just that his blog often is wise and funny because he sees much humour in facing up to something too many people find nigh on taboo or very uncomfortable, which it doesn't have to be when you're honest.
The book's called 'Cancergiggles (Mountains are Easy)' (Lulu, Inc. is one place to get it) and I liked one reader's comment and 'Bravo' that said: "Here you are, embracing life and all it has to offer in the face of this bastard cancer. You are far braver than I, and I'm only fighting a mental illness."
One entry I've been working is about what could be called "bastard cancers" deep in our society and how some singer-songwriters confront them, finding music and words to help the rest of us do so. Without going more deeply into this right now, here are a couple more quotes that particularly spoke to me recently:
"I know we are always essentially alone, in the dark hours of the soul, and to think that a spouse will make that go away is mere fantasy. I know that a spouse is not a panacea for all that ails the lonely beast, and if one has those expectations, one is going to be desperately disappointed."
Those lines on such misplaced expectations are part of a passage on partnership by one Mary, which the eclectic Kathryn Petro found 'Achingly, Beautifully Said' in A Mindful Life, another blog I look to sometimes for focus.
Mary writes toughly at Fly in the Honey about what it is to have someone "willing to bind himself or herself to your sorry ass" and her entry moved me.
But so did these words by the Seraphim, who entitled them 'Totally impossibilities':
"Change is the most beautiful thing when you allow it to pass freely. The reminder that all things end does not have to be unsettling. It can be a comfort to rest in, like a good spot of grass. Life is fleeting and must be mindfully attended to. Like an intoxicating agent, simplicity can entirely deteriorate the illusion of our own self importance, and reinforce the finality of our existence, and what we are as a whole, thus we feel joined. Then, all loneliness can do to us is vanish, for there is no place for it anymore, when you realize that being alone is a total impossibility.'
That was Sarah Fimm's journal entry on October 18.
What I've been seeking myself to explore, not always for anyone but me so far, has drawn mainly on intuitions and the new kinds of "knowing" that come to me sometimes since last July's 'Night of Unknowing', which is the sole term I'll ever have for it.
The everlasting process of assimilating it helps me juxtapose passages like the above, full as they may seem of contradictions, feeling there are none the instant you stop worrying about "logic" and start realising "truths" can be contained in their opposites.
Some weeks after overdoing a fuss -- without understanding why -- in an "elastic birthday" entry on turning 50 that obstinately insisted on writing itself, then finding a place on its own here, I've realised there was more to it than I thought at the time.
In my weeks back at work, after that stubborn piece and the naked non-musicians who illustrated it defied everybody's common sense about a day everybody told me was no different from any other, some of my morning meditations have left me feeling it was a bit different.
But what I was also trying to say, beyond the parallels I drew between creating music and making love, wasn't yet ready to be expressed, not in any words I could find. Anyway, but that entry was quite long enough as it was as well as maddening somehow to give some kind of shape.
The many pages I've written since have been inspired by my listening, more research and reading where I'm often struck by fine observations on other people's blogs. Perhaps I've done too much, so by Friday night it was deep exhaustion that had set in.
That's particularly absurd.
A bad kind of "bastard cancer" we tend to tolerate for no good reason is self-inflicted: a sense of urgency where there is none. Cass knows and says "I don't have a lot of time" but he doesn't rush life on that account; one reason so many people like his blog is it's the work of a man who makes best use of the time he does have.
Well, I've still not found the words for further insights that came together somehow around October 2, making it a date to put a few more things permanently behind me, then stress some of what's left as songlines for my future, finding they express a quest for health rather than dwelling on with sickness.
In short, I gave myself a deadline, but one was quite enough for a month except at work. Foolishly, I've been setting more deadlines since -- in contradiction to what motivated me to turn again to Ursula K. Le Guin and read 'Always Coming Home' for the fourth or fifth time. I've done the same with virtually every book by the woman who is my personal Nobel Literature laureate.
On this volume, I've written essays elsewhere to describe how it's a collection of tales, poems, music and even the anthropology Ursula sometimes practices with genius each time she invents a Utopia. Her Utopias are immensely varied; some of them comprise several books, often taken up after gaps of many years when she feels like going back to one of them.
As ever, this book manifests her best-selling ability -- far too popular worldwide for her to win a real Nobel from a snooty committee -- to give readers a vision that's always credible, with characters developed in great depth sharing qualities and flaws like anyone, while never preaching.
I think I chose this particular Utopia as a book to read almost all year long because Ursula's story-telling focus is a culture that's outside linear time and whose people live by natural cycles. Thus in the extensive collection of essays and notes forming 'The Back of the Book', the narrator observes at one point:
"It is hard for us to conceive, to approve of, a serious adult person not in a hurry. Not being in a hurry is for infants, people over eighty, bums, and the Third World. Hurry is the essence of city, the very soul. There is no civilisation without hurry, without keeping ahead."
What Ursula does is to imagine a world that stands ours on its head, one way or another, so effectively that many readers return to her again and again for a more sensible perspective. I just don't know why I'm still setting myself deadlines and rushing at life or log entries when I've never before had as much time for people who aren't in a hurry.
Next time I start one of these breaks from a world full of deadlines, I think it might be a good idea to remember the Saturday that just disappeared. I can't be sure, but maybe the silliest thing I could have done on Friday was to quit work for a week then plunge straight into music writing.
My body and guts said "Don't do it", I didn't listen, and here I am writing about it while the idea of listening to music until I've had a proper night's sleep gives me the shivers ... for now the big question is dare I yet eat anything again. Can you get much more stupid than that?
8:46:06 PM 
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