The Universe Repeats Itself

So have you ever had this experience? 

You go out to buy, say, a car and you look around and you find this neat new thing you've never noticed before. The Toyota Rollerskate or the Honda Hamster. So you test drive the Rollerskate and decide it's the car for you -- plus it's got the added benefit of being unique -- and so you buy it. 

And then on the drive home you notice that every third car on the highway is also a Rollerskate. The car's not unique at all; you've just never noticed it before.

Giving up on treatment is kinda the same. Yeah, I got a few texts and emails of the "Are you sure this what you want to do?" variety -- and, for the record, no, not entirely, but of the available options this seems the best course right now -- but I actually started noticing a lot of reaffirming messages. For example...

This was a chemo weekend, and this cycle hit me pretty hard. As a result, I spent most of the weekend (at least the part where I wasn't in the bathroom) moving from bed to couch and back again. At one point I turned on the TV and caught most of a documentary about Tower Records. If you were a teenager in the '70s, '80s or '90s and were raised on one of the two coasts, you've probably been in a Tower Records. And if you were like a lot of us, you spent a lot of time in Tower Records.

It was a really interesting film. I learned that Tower started in Sacramento as part of the Tower Drug Store, and was first spun off as the Tower Record Mart. It became Tower Records as it started to expand, with kids essentially lining up to get in every time they opened a new store. Eventually they spread internationally and at one point sales exceeded a billion dollars a year; just a few years after that, they were bankrupt and gone.*

What killed 'em? In some ways this is the best part of the documentary, in that you get both the talking heads that, years later, are still upset and angry about what happened, but you also get the talking heads who seem a bit sheepish, sort of mumbling about how they did it to themselves. In one case, it's the founder that's mumbling, and then they show an interview he did where he was talking about how streaming (though that's not the term he used) might be possible, it was still many years away and Tower would have lots of time to react. The film then states that the interview was conducted like the year before Napster. And, of course, there's the finance guy who acknowledges that eliminating the single, swapping vinyl for CDs, and then setting the retail price for CDs at twice the cost of vinyl (despite the fact that CDs were actually cheaper to produce) might not have been the most prudent of strategic choices. 

A really interesting tale about the death of a really significant company and cultural icon. The name of the film turned out to be All Things Must Pass. 

And then there was my weekend reading. I've mentioned before that I'm fond of Terry Pratchett's work, and over the weekend I finally got my hands on his last, posthumously published novel. The book was part of the discworld series. Although the series started as if J.R.R. Tolkien was trying, above all else, to be funny, as the universe expanded and the target audience bounced from adults to kids and back again, the series sort of evolved into this filter through which Pratchett would funnel current events. You'd read the novels, with their collection of wizards and elves and werewolves and Igors, and start to think, oh, I read the news story about this. 

Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007 (give or take) and, at least per the afterword, clearly knew he was close to dying. Not surprisingly, then, even though Death makes only the briefest of appearances, the book is really all about death -- or rather, how the world responds to death. One of the series' significant characters dies, and then the rest of the book is largely about the ways the universe around them responds to the hole they've left behind. I don't think I'm giving away too much to say the characters eventually come to grips with the character's passing, and move on with their lives, comforted by their memories. 

Not a bad book to be reading the weekend you opt out of chemo. 

Last, but not least, I finally told my health care team at the SCCA that I was giving up on chemo for awhile. The nurse wrote back wanting to better understand why, but also said that my oncologist was okay with my choice and would see me after my scan the first week of May. 

So, yay. I feel okay about the choice and am looking forward to not feeling like crap, just as soon as the effects of the last infusion finally wear off. 

But as the small print says, I reserve the right to change my mind at any point in the future for any reason, or even no reason, at all. 


* Mostly. As they started to sink, the Japanese stores were spun off as a separate company, At least at the time the documentary was made, Tower Records (Japan) was still going strong.