Yeah — and Another Thing!

Such an odd week — well, such an odd week-and-a-half. It’s been eight or ten days since I last wrote. I’m less embarrassed about the irregular publication itself than I am about its potential effect on readers. Apparently many of you, noticing a gap in the dates, wonder whether I have dropped dead or at least fallen into an irreversible state of decline. I suppose I should set up a graphical meter, an altimeter or healthometer for quick checks.

The medical news is pretty good. I have slight but unambiguous evidence of graft-versus-host disease (”GVHD” in the vernacular). This is the complication that has bedeviled transplants of all kinds. If you know it’s happening, you can control it, though this may mean that you control it for the rest of your life. In the case of an organ transplant, it’s just a bad thing. But in my case, there’s a silver lining because it demonstrates that the Donald’s stem cells are getting established and producing new T-cells that are taking over from my old, crappy T-cells.

Despite that silver lining — and by the way it is literally a lacy pattern of pearly-white that lines the inside of my mouth (too much? OK) — I’ve been having an anxious week. Anxiety is not something I understood from my own experience; I’m not normally a worrier. But anxiety is a byproduct of one of my pills and this chemical effect has let me see how I might approach my day if I were.

Each new decision turns back to find its tail and continues in several circles. Then the circle breaks into other, smaller circles, which themselves repeat the process at a smaller scale. Within minutes, they’re too small to understand but their buzz can’t be ignored. It’s impossible to think about them and impossible not to think about them. Nothing of critical importance gets done. Nevertheless, I’m busy. I’ve found something to do that has no consequences (though I can invent some) and I bury myself in it. In fact, I can even enjoy it, making a state of anxiety feel perfectly normal.

Nobody worries about nothing. There has to be at least some trigger worry. In my case it was returning my electronic ID card and office keys. For several weeks now we’ve all known that, if my treatment works, Karen and I will return to Vancouver, and if it doesn’t work, Karen and I will return to Vancouver. So my project role at the Iowa State capitol is nominal. This week, I thought it would only be good manners to return my keys. Funny how that makes you feel.

What’s even stranger is how possessing these bits of metal and plastic offers reassurance.

Thinking too much about graft and host, following the news about summary trials and deportations of illegal workers rounded up in Postville, Iowa, seeing the movie “The Visitor”, and turning in my beeper card, has got me confused about the sanctity of geographic and artificial spaces. I suppose, as bona fide members of the richest place on earth, we will soon carry national identification tags that make things go beep. First we will resent the implicit presumption that we cannot be trusted, then these bits of plastic will reassure us that we are who we think we are and deserve to be here.

Oh heck, how about some pictures? Here’s the beautiful place where I used to work.

Let’s start with Edwin Blashfield’s “Westward” in which “…the Pioneers [are] led by the spirits of Civilization and Enlightenment to the conquest by cultivation of the Great West.” Blashfield was an academic, conservative painter in the sense that he didn’t let any ambiguity get between his symbols and the presumptions of the time — 1905.

My cube wasn’t in the capitol — it was in an only slightly less impressive building across the street. Here’s my hall.

But I was always happy to have a reason to visit the capitol itself. Here’s the standard calendar shot.

I can’t resist a squircle for my friend Tom Magliery.

This dome isn’t quite as much fun as the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore where Cosimo I de’ Medici decided to scare the beejasus out of us with The Last Judgement. Another time, another set of presumptions. So I chose the scarier of my two pictures, which is looking down. For the record, this dome’s interior is decorated with an Iowa blue sky, a Stars’n'Stripes, an eagle and the badge of the Grand Army of the Republic. Did you think it was over? I’m writing this on Memorial Day.

The great thing about working with legislation is the motivational posters. You don’t get any of that “Teamwork” nonsense — you know, the posters with the pictures of rock climbers and sailors on a black field with “Excellence!” in white underneath. No, you get the real thing. We should print it on the coffee cups.

Nice place we got here.