School of Life Monday: Why Old Friends Matter

We all have people in our lives that we’d never start a friendship with today if we met them for the first time – but that nevertheless matter immensely to us. An essay on the importance of old friends.

The Diagnosis of Xeni Jardin

Xeni has become a friend in recent years and someone who's work I always appreciate, and use on this blog here often. Friday on the infamous blog Boing Boing, that she helped to start many years ago before most of us had ever even heard of the internet, she told her current story of her own diagnosis. Read the story below and a comment from another mutual friend, and another bad ass blogger, Richard Metzger (DangerousMinds) after.

I have breast cancer. A week ago, I had breast cancer, and the week before that, and the week before that. Maybe five, eight, even ten years ago, the first bad cell split inside me, secretly. But I didn't know. This is how I arrived at knowing.

Two friends of mine were recently diagnosed. When news of the first came, I felt sadness. When news of the second came a few weeks ago, I felt a different kind of shock. I'd never had a mammogram. Even though I was ten years younger than the time they say you need to start, it felt like time to start, and when her news came I thought: I need to do this right now. For my friends, for me. Solidarity. Something small I can do, some little action against the big unknowable that swoops down without warning and strikes the ones we love.

Around the same time, I'd became aware of a funny stiffness in a spot on my own body. But anomalies in women's bodies come and go all the time, and it was a fluid whatever-thing, something that would pass, definitely not a lump, nothing that my waking, speaking mind would grasp as danger. This anomaly must be misplaced anxiety, my logic-brain tried to explain to my lizard-brain; maybe it's me wanting to make my friend's bad news all about me.

I called my insurance company for a clinic referral, then dialed a few places on a list the guy in their Indian call center emailed. Over the phone, the clinics all sounded like places you'd take a pork chop to be examined, not a human breast, not a person, and not me. I googled around and found a place with a lot of stars on Yelp and other online ratings services from women who'd gone and felt they'd been treated well. Pink Lotus Breast Center. The women who answered the phone there sounded cool. I made an appointment.


I live online as much as I live offline. Often, I move around in the world staring into a device as I walk, sharing bits of one realm with the other. The morning I went in for my first mammogram, I felt nervous. I would tweet this new thing, like I do with lots of new things, and make the unknown and new feel less so. Maybe by doing so, I thought while I was driving, other women like me who'd never done this would also feel like it was less weird, less scary, more normal and worth doing without hesitation. I'd crack some 140-character jokes. I'd make fun of myself and others. I would Instagram my mammogram.

The women at the front desk were kind and welcoming. Both were from Virginia, like me. One of them is from the back-country part where there's still no internet. Her dad and uncle work the fields. We talked about growing corn and hogs, how they still make cane molasses with a horse-drawn grinder, and about poor white Appalachian babies nursed on Mountain Dew.

The mammogram technologist saw on my chart that I'd lost a loved one to ALS. She had too. I hugged her, and she hugged back. She folded my body into the machine, pressed some buttons, folded me another way, and the machine clicked and whirred and clicked and whirred. Then it was over. She told me to wait.

I tweeted the waiting. Inviting the internet in is something I do every day anyway, but this time it was like a shield. Nothing bad can happen in a new place if you're cracking jokes and 50,000 people are watching. You're safe out here, in here, out here.

The waiting-moment stretched out, and out, and out, and finally she returned.

Where was that thing you felt that isn't anything, she asked?

Here, I showed her.

Put your arms in the air, she said. She felt, and squinted, and her brow furrowed, and she stepped aside again. Then she returned. Come back in a few hours when the doctor is free, she said, and we'll look a little more closely with ultrasound, just to be thorough. She smiled. Maybe just go have some lunch, she said, and we'll wrap this up when you return.

The hours stretched out and out and out. I felt nervous, but it was still all normal. I was too nervous to eat, but not too nervous yet to tweet. A finger pulling down the iPhone touchscreen still yielded replies from familiar names, and this was all going to end well. I drove back to the clinic.

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor's name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we'd hoped to find.

"The first thing you're going to learn about working with me is that I'm a straight shooter," Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

"That's how you know you can trust me. I'm going to tell you everything, and I'm going to tell it to you like it is."

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.

I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. We're going to do a biopsy right away to confirm and learn more.


Another woman came in, and held my hand. Dr. Funk shot the biopsy gun in the air first so I wouldn't be afraid of the sound. That's when the shaking started and my heart started pounding.

I cried, but someone else was doing the crying, someone else was doing the shaking, someone else was lying there, and now the gun was diving in to someone else's flesh to bring back rock samples from outer space for the lab to analyze.

The shaking didn't stop. I tried to dial the people I loved on my iPhone with one hand while the assistant held down my other arm, pushing cotton into the place where the probe dove in for samples, where blood was now coming forth.

My fingers were cold and shaking, and I couldn't hit the numbers on the screen. When I finally got through, someone else's voice was coming out of my mouth, and it was taking forever for the stuttery radio transmissions to beam through space, from the cold planet I was lost on, way out here, far from home.

Treatable, curable, survival odds, margins, chemotherapy, surgery, radiation. Someone else's problems, someone else's words. The biopsy came back the next day. Those words became my own.

I do not know all of what's ahead. I know a little. I know that there is a new kind of life on the other side of this thing. A changed mind and body. A new appreciation of time, and breath, and health, and life, and loved ones.

The gravity in this place is different. I've spoken to others who've traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can't understand.

The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal.

You must be at peace with not knowing, they tell me. That is how you get through outer space, and find your way back home.

The thing about this thing, or, at least, this first week of this thing, is how it takes you out there to the cold planet again and again and again, when you aren't expecting it. Long, undulating waves of fear pull you out to where you are alone and unreachable, even by words sent from the strongest satellite.

The thing that brings you back is love.

Note from Richard Metzger's DangerousMinds blog:

As many of DM’s readers probably know, Xeni Jardin is one of my and Tara’s closest friends and favorite people in the world. As a mutual friend once said of her, “Xeni is like a being from an advanced planet or the future who has come to Earth to help us all evolve faster.” If there’s anyone who can beat this, it is, for sure, our Xenorita, and she is in really good hands, which is a real comfort to all of us who care about her. Send some good vibes—and love—her way in the Boing Boing comments, won’t you?

Taken By Storm - A documentary

A re-aqainted friend, whom i had not seen in close to 30 years, I met at a Jem Cohen screening last fall. It was a friend who I was in 9th and 10th grade classes with, most notably art, where we collaborated on a painting of one of my Tony Alva photos that was published in SkateBoarder magazine probably in 77 or so, (the painting by the way is now owned by Cynthia Conolly).

Well now Roddy and I both have very young sons that ride scooters together in the park, 3000 miles away from where we were in school together, and recently he told me about his biggest most ambitios project to date. Currently he's teaching film, and working on a documentary of the life of Storm Thorgerson and his design crew HIPGNOSIS.

He signed up to Kickstarter a few weeks ago because the film needs some financial help, I kicked down a bit and i thought i'd ask to see if any of you may be interested in helping as well. Seems like a pretty cool project. After the current "trailer" below, here's part of the blurb:

FRONT LAYOUT
Storm Thorgerson is an artist who believes in the craft of his imagemaking, no matter at times whether these images were bombastic, surreal, impossible, hypnotic, or sublime. As HIPGNOSIS, along with partner Aubrey (Po) Powell, Thorgerson designed some of the most recognized album graphics in popular culture - Pink Floyd’s DARK SIDE OF THE MOON and HOUSES OF THE HOLY for Led Zeppelin - while relentlessly pushing the boundaries between art and commerce. Not only examining the prolific work of Thorgerson, TAKEN BY STORM will also examine his idiosyncratic techniques and visual achievements shunning computer fabrication for more ‘materialistic’ means such as constructing the various objects, scenarios, or performances in real time and space and simply photographing them. As a designer continually working with his creative philosophies and principals guiding his art in his quest to "do it for real" while the very nature of imagemaking has dissolved into the digital realm, Thorgerson has created a massive body of work that intersects movements in art, culture, and perception and TAKEN BY STORM will be a film resonating with the moment in which we live where beauty and poetic discovery are things which can still send us back in time and memory.

BACK COVER
At the moment, the film is @95% shot (yes, that is 16mm film) and I am trying each and every avenue to raise the funds as soon as possible to get a cut of the project (which means, yes, even though I have a mac, etc. etc., I want to hire a good editor). I’ve filmed numerous interviews of Storm many at the sites where he created some of his most iconic images and gotten amazing interviews with musicians such as David Gilmour and Nick Mason from Pink Floyd, Robert Plant, Peter Gabriel, Graham Gouldman from 10cc, Alan Parsons as well as Dominic Howard from Muse, Rob Dickinson from Catherine Wheel, Noel Hogan and Fergal Lawler from The Cranberries, Cedric Bixler Zavala from The Mars Volta, and Simon Neil and James Johnston from Biffy Clyro. I’ve also interviewed artists such as Sir Peter Blake (who designed Sgt. Pepper) and Damien Hirst as well as rock photographer Jill Furmanovsky. I know it sounds a little crazy that I haven’t been able to raise the money to finish the film, but I’ve had loads and loads of interest from distributors, producers, sales agents, and the like, but no hard cash!

And so my urgent and humble plea, dear Kickstarter fan…

INNER SLEEVE
My Kickstarter request, if successful, could not come at a more opportune time. I have raised some private money towards the edit but need to raise the total amount of my project request to insure a cut of the film to be completed in the next several months. The money raised will be used to keep the editor on the project until a full cut is done that can be screened to potential distributors and sales agents. As things go, I hope to submit the film to next year’s festival circuit.

Storm has generously gifted me with several original artworks to help in my Kickstarter campaign as well as Atavistic Records supporting me with discounted copies of the soundtrack to my last film, I WAS BORN, BUT…, scored by indie rock musician Chris Brokaw. Chris is a co-producer on the film and recording original music again for the soundtrack and I am also getting original music from Antony Genn and Martin Slattery of The Hours who if you know their history (Pulp, Elastica, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Black Grape), you know they ooze Britpop.

TAKEN BY STORM will really be a film for the ‘punters’ as Storm puts it and if all goes well will be the first film of mine to get a wide release. And so for TAKEN BY STORM to be featured on Kickstarter makes sense in so many ways…that the ‘punters’ (fans to us yanks) can be part of its completion and also help in getting the word out. Any and all contributions, any and all recommendations, any and all communication, I thank you profusely in advance.

PLEASE CHECK MY UPDATES FOR IMAGES OF REWARDS FOR DONORS AND VIDEO SAMPLES.

links for project:
www.takenbystormfilm.info
www.roddybogawa.com
www.chrisbrokaw.com
www.stormthorgerson.com

This project will only be funded if at least $20,000 is pledged by Tuesday Jul 6, 12:00pm EDT.

Pictures from the Idealist Propaganda opening

L>R Shepard Fairey, Russell Simmons, Tony Alva, Zack De La Rocha, GEF, Brett Ratner (in front)

L>R "King James" Cassimus, GEF, Steve Olson, Craig Stecyk, Jim "Red Dog" Muir (I've known these guys since the mid 70's!)

with my family.

Sean Bonner texting and Russell with the Shepard hook-ups, amongst the crowd in the entry.