Sometimes if you study a problem long enough you have to finally acknowledge that the best solution is to just ignore the problem. After a session with my shrink wherein I ranted and raved about the threat of dying of cancer and how my life seemed to have come to a stop, I was sort of ashamed of myself for being such a wuss. My shrink has a thing about how God can solve all the problems if you just trust in Him. The cynic in me asks the question then, if God is in control of everything, then how come I gotta ask him to remove the threat he placed on my life? Makes no sense to me.

I had been thinking about how I have been relatively immobilized by the threat posed by my cancer. Why go through the motions of living if it was all going to end soon anyway? Yeah, maybe I'll survive, but for how long is the question. Like Swayze, maybe I have a few months at most, or maybe a year. Then again I could outlast my shrink who so ardently believes in God. Don't get me wrong, I believe in God, I just don't believe in this stuff about the pearly gates and asking am I worthy to pass through them. My God has infinite patience and a cruel sense of humor. He doesn't play silly games with righteous morality that can be turned on a religious bit of piety and a set of judgments on what I did or did not do and if so why not? No, my God has a strict sense of straight to it methods of delivery. He gives you a bunch of crap in life because that is what life is, a long series of challenges, for no particular reason really and usually in no particular order. But the randomness of the awful events raises the stakes a bit more than a life full of milk and honey mixed with indolence and pleasure. And this life can be a real bitch. Witness pancreatic cancer. So, how best to deal with it?

I will apply the only logic that can be applied. Break the situation down to usable parts and solve them individually. In this case, the pancreatic cancer is simple enough to describe. It is an affliction that may take my life, and while it hasn't yet it can make my life pretty miserable. I can get chemo for it and I can do what my doctor says to do and hope it works. Past that, there isn't diddly I can do. I could pray, but again, who would I be talking to except the God who gave me this disease. Like asking the IRS to excuse me for not paying taxes for no particular reason except I don't feel like paying them. So, I will have to go about solving this whole impasse by simply ignoring the cancer as best I can when I can.

That means picking up my books and studying web programming until I can claim some sort of knowledge then getting a few gigs and proceeding like I have a future. Because sure as hell unless I anticipate having a future and acting like I have one, I probably won't. I mean except for a life of dread and fear of the life I might have before the cancer takes me. It ain't got me yet, and the timing of the end is uncertain. I ain't laughing at God in feeling like this. I'm just not pissing my pants in fear in the mean time.