The cancer crept out of a cough. It was nothing more than a knock-knock game played in a lowly lobe of a lung, it was an excuse to awake in the dead night and pop a pill by the light of a flickering flashlight and an alarm clock with a glow in the dark radium dial . A cough will draw attention. On an afternoon walk with the beautiful sun so bright and with life all around abounding, a serious of chesty coughs directed at the canyons of the rows of suburban houses will draw attention. People will drop their soup spoons and religious pamphlets to look through reverberating windows to see the dying "lunger" suffering in the street. This was the best part of the cancer. This was a chance for treacherous theatre played out with no fear of consequence or discovery. This is another way to see the beginning; the beginning of everything.
There is another "cancer" in this story, but it is a different and little known strain known clinically as "kanser". It is illness in metaphor, and is a mutation of the imagination that happens inside of the heads of human beings who live only to suck. It is similar to a hybrid of a sad kid believing he is an empathic vampire but is actually a bed-wetter with esteem issues, and a broken down psychotic alcoholic street drifter thinking he is actually a misunderstood mountain man in the city, and although the city is full of all of the people who have done wrong by him, he comes there to be victimized some more, and to live off of their pity and calculated monetary(symbolic beaver skin and firewater) distributions. This is the story of Kevin Manson, my father, and the son of my grandmother.
After Granny had danced with the cancer for awhile, Kevin Manson decided that the cancer was the rage, and he had his own mind diagnose him with cancer of the throat, and some other places which are too delicate to mention. This grim and coincidental diagnosis was seconded by a delusional trip that Kevin Manson took to the local country veterinarian to confirm what the expertise of his psychosis had already deduced: Kevin Manson had "kanser", and the only hope he had to cure it, and to continue his sad and self-made man-child life, was going to be money, and he would need lots of money. After all, it could be a very expensive type of "kanser" to treat, there was no way a fantasy country veterinarian could know anything about that, not unless his parents put him through Bel-Rea with dividends from pharmaceutical companies. It was a good thing that Granny had cancer, and a will, and he would see that it was changed so that he could get his "kanser" money. Who cares if he never made a single child support payment to any of his three kids? Who cares if they had to use attorneys and pay attorneys all of the time to get any child support from Granny? They can go to Hell, because this man wants to fight for his right to cry, lie, and abuse people for as long as he can. It is the only way he can be "self-empowered".
Kevin Manson broke the news to his family in a touching way. It was tear inducing to see the care with which he took to close the door, and to begin acting like a crazy person with a completely unjustified sense of righteous indignation, invoking the name of God, the power of God, and the fact that he clearly believed that he had every right to his kanser-tribute-fund on a celestial scale, regardless of what the person making out the will believed. He would make sure to address each person on an individual basis, like a community college, and he would stand with his eyes six inches from your own, peering with the unblinking gaze of a person about to start capping people, and he would shake all over with micro-tremors of rage while he clenched his fists and clenched his teeth. Monkey rage or the precious love of a daddy? That depends on whether you are talking to Granny, a lawyer, a counselor, a crystal ball, or one of the myriad misinformed and hateful busybodies lining the street in the square beehives.
Some people may wonder if Kevin Manson is always this good to his family? The answer to that is "yes", he is always this good to his family when he has anything to do with them. He has instilled family values that encourage the avant-garde, with an emphasis on horror and macabre atmosphere as thick as the night. In his mind are stories of violence that never happened, real stories of violence that he perpetrated against his own family that he does not care ever happened, and there is something moving inside of a package which looks like a high quality candy bar, but there are disturbing sounds coming from within the wrapping, and inside there is a squirming monster that Kevin Manson has built and fed with little dangling scraps of all the shining moments when in the depths of his baseless and base self-pity, he was able to draw a moment of insane and violent power into a long series of moments like a string of red pearls strung out before you, and he would threaten with the unveiling of each shining bauble to snap the strand, and to send all of the beautiful sparklies into a cascading fall, before finally resting in a pattern to be considered art with consequences, or to be analyzed as spatter patterns by crime teams.
Kevin Manson was always good to his family. But now it was a matter of his own personal life or death struggle with "kanser", and if the dirty receipts in his shirt pockets were not replaced with all of the assets of Granny, he knew we all knew what he had done before. Now he gets to show the goodness of experience and perspective and treasured grey hair, now he gets to really shine, that is, if he gets all of the money.
That is all for now, for my heart beats erratically, and I listen intently for the sudden sound outside my door.
Friday, September 4, 2009
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