The pain in my neck was so intense I was nauseous, dizzy, and my jaw kept locking up with the stress.

One afternoon I also received some bad news from my hometown, and although I was not much interested in talking Byron cornered me and wanted to chat. After making my dismal mood clear I tried to quietly excuse myself, but my charming companion embarked on a rant about….. his fear of male pattern hair loss.

For this particular person the concern is purely imaginary – he has as much hair as he ever did in youth, and all sets of grandparents and parents demonstrably kept their hair until death.

Beyond that, this is one of those “normal” problems I have little patience with, given my history. I defy anyone to wake up following cancer treatment at age thirteen with chunks of hair coming out in big handfuls to grow up at all let alone arrive in middle age with all their empathy and tolerance intact.

I did my best to reassure and then joke my way out of the conversation but he just kept getting more and more wound up, even after I pointed out that I was a wee bit too distraught to be a happy little helper.

When he continued I put up a finger and said So, are you persisting because you are trying to distract me, or because you are self-centerered and vain?

He paused then replied Uh, the latter, I guess. 

Yesterday morning I bravely ventured forth to have a massage, hugely disturbed by the thought of strangers touching my neck.

I had forgotten to worry about the fact that I live in a small town, so the odds that it would be a stranger hovered somewhere around zero. In fact, the first thing the therapist said was You’re Karen’s friend, right?

Uh, yeah.

Then we sat down for the obligatory intake questions, including Do you have any health problems?

I opened my eyes very wide and said No.

Why did I do that?

Who knows. Clearly pathological behavior, but hey! I’m allowed the occasional twitch!

Especially since she would figure it out shortly, as she then proceeded to do deep tissue massage of my torso, home to three hundred plus biopsy scars, and neck, sliced halfway round to hack out massive malignant tumors.

This very nice and professional woman hesitated when she caught her first glimpse of the scars, and nearly stopped when her fingers encountered the large supposedly “benign” thing growing in the right side of my neck.

She did not at any point ask me what the heck she was looking at.

British people are so polite! Or…. something.

Other than the strange suspension of narrative integrity, the experience was good. My neck feels much better now.

Though I miss Ana Helena’s wit and brutality, blasting Scopotones or punk music or the Velvet Underground and saying feel the pain or you will never get better as she pounded away, somehow in the madness restoring the function of my right arm, and my sense of smell, lost more than a decade earlier.

Or to state it a different way: I want to go home.

Somewhere on the train journey from London to Cambridge I managed to throw out my neck.

It has been suggested that the pain is psychosomatic and derived from my hatred of this city, but I’m not buying that nonsense.

Unfortunately for me, pain is a purely physiological experience. If it hurts, something is broken.

Hot baths, ice packs, stretching, and tentative prodding have not helped at all so I will almost certainly need to visit some kind of professional to get it fixed.

I loathe, detest, and abhor strangers touching me. Especially my face or neck.

Though the prospect of a medical procedure is certainly better than sitting around contemplating the memories the pain brings up.

Like spending the majority of the fifth and sixth grades in a neck brace and arm sling.

Yes, like Joan Cusack aka Geek Girl # 1 in Sixteen Candles….. my early adolescence was no fun at all.

The river flooded and I forgot to put my gangplank out!

Like I’ve mentioned before (though I suspect nobody believes it) my life functions largely at the mercy of a rickety barter system. This week, that has meant that I’m reading research statements in exchange for some tech work.

To call the task tedious would be the understatement of the decade. Though I do get to issue dire warnings against excessive use of e.g. and similar poor grammar choices!

I’ve continued to ponder where to spend my precious few weeks in the states, while evaluating salacious stories that have been trickling in.

What a conundrum; I really can’t decide who to visit. Several people I would have once thought fun have turned their attention to sabotaging marriages (their own or others). Why, I do not know, though I suppose it might be a developmental plateau of some sort. Like turning five, or thirteen.

These antics baffle me on a fundamental level, though I’ve been rifling through my mental files and cross-referencing with old stories in an effort to understand.

For instance: once, years ago, I was casually chatting with one of my rock star friends at some bar and his girlfriend turned up and was so visibly enraged I thought she was going to leap across the table and attack me.

What was I talking to her partner about? Grotesque abdominal surgeries. Even a backwards person like yours truly can assert that does not count as flirting. No matter how much cleavage I had on display.

Though I just shrugged and wandered off – thinking weird, but whatever. I wouldn’t have even remembered the incident except, within the next twenty-four hours, she tried to seduce my husband.

I was puzzled, and that has remained my dominant reaction to similar situations. Why are some people so possessive, if they also engage in poaching? If you are capable of having one thought (this person is my possession) then how is the other (I will now steal the possession of another person) tenable?

I don’t understand either belief, let alone how people maintain both at once. I have many faults, but I am not a hypocrite.

It would take several more years before I went on the Hunt for Bad Boys and Lumberjacks with Ana Erotica, who announced the explicit operating principle Straight Girls Have No Solidarity.

Oh. Really? I never knew.

While it would be foolish to make generalizations about such a large slice of humanity, this was an illuminating instruction – it had seriously never occurred to me that anyone would think like that.

When I was seventeen I was quite shocked to find my best friend (since kindergarten) making out with my boyfriend in the laundry room. Not because I felt betrayed by him, oh no. What I failed to grasp then or ever was why she made that choice.

I still don’t really understand why she would have picked a few seconds of reckless affection in a dank basement over the entire lifetime of experience we had enjoyed. Even if he was one of maybe two heterosexual males in our scene.

Wandering along behind Ana Erotica as she rampaged across the Hill that week I watched with amazement as she racked up conquests and made enemies. Along the way I took lots of notes and made several enduring friendships with people she rejected as Not Dirty Enough. Heck, I even seem to be stuck forever dealing with the truly heinous boys who caused all the trouble that inspired the campaign – and I dislike them both.

You have to remember that the majority of my early social life was conducted amongst activists and children, two social groups notorious for highly calibrated ethics. Like them, I am a purist, completely loyal to first principles even at my most wicked.

It was clear to me at a very young age that antics like fucking your way through the housemates and/or their loved ones made it very difficult to split up the monthly phone bill. This lesson can be extrapolated to fit almost any other scenario where you might need to choose between having a family, community, job, or …. a quickie.

I know lots of people who competently practice non-monogamy. That is not what I am talking about – there is a big gap between consensual ‘open’ relationships and the active, deliberate destruction of emotional and practical resources some of my friends are engaging in at the moment.

I may be hedonistic, but I understand and respect boundaries. This is, I think, a reasonable way to view the world.

Happy, happy, happy birthday wishes Iain Aitch!

The last time he showed up to visit he handed me a present and I pushed him at a room full of about one hundred strangers brandishing it and shouting Hey everyone! Look! Iain just published a new book! You should definitely buy it!

We’re always laughing too much to actually take a good picture, but I’m absolutely delighted he is my friend:

Yesterday started with a stroppy teenager screaming that I had ruined his life by moving here. I mildly replied It wasn’t my idea but of course, that response was not appreciated.

Then I urgently needed to print a draft but found that I could not do so from Word.

Q: When has Word ever worked for me?

A: Never.

Too bad my career is in, oh, publishing, huh? It is just so frivolous that I need to be able to handle and produce, well, documents…..

I did not repudiate January this year but I am extremely thankful the cursed month is almost over.

Oh, and, btw, guess what I miss most today in the Something I Never Appreciated category?

Free weekly alternative newspapers.

Of whatever varying quality.

I bruise easily – the slightest jolt leaves weltering marks – and I am also quite clumsy. This means that I generally look like I have been mixin’ it up even when I have mostly been sitting around reading books.

One of my local charming companions finds this hilarious and likes to grab whatever piece of flesh that can be reached and take a big bite chomp chomp chomp because it is apparently amusing to watch me trudge through annoying social situations with visible bite marks.

Um, thanks.

However, after a recent encounter, I realized that one of my scars had fallen prey to the attack. Not too surprising, since I have approximately three hundred between my waist and chin. However, the ‘normal’ behavior of scars more than twenty years old is just to, well, hang out. They sit there, flat and flaccid, without reproach or any other message to deliver.

This one turned red, then swelled up, and remained inflamed. For about ten days. Given that it is an area that has been hacked away three times because a malignant tumor persists in returning…. well.

I’m kind of passive aggressive about the whole skin cancer thing, but this reminded me that if it has been four and a half years since the last positive biopsy, it has been exactly that amount of time since my last check-up.

Shhh! Don’t tell! I’m supposed to go in every six months….

I just really, really hate visiting hospitals. And while I heart the NHS most sincerely, they provide an institutional aesthetic that I have trouble enduring since I was a sick kid in the 1970’s.

Wanna see visual evidence? Hallway, cancer ward, leading teaching hospital in the UK, 2008:

The first time I went back to Seattle as an adult I was riding around with Ariel and Inga before a reading at some bookstore or other and I was overwhelmed with sadness to be back in the scene of so many youthful misadventures.

Inga offered sexual favors to cheer me up, but I just closed my eyes and said I don’t think that would help.

Ten years later, I can’t imagine that anything else would have, but hey – I know both more and less now, compared to when I was twenty-eight.

Eventually of course I moved to Seattle, because I wanted to win the tormented game I have always played with my past. For the most part, it worked – though I would sometimes find myself on particular roads and have to pull over because it was hard to drive while sobbing.

Various Seattle friends are privy to the information that I’ll be in the states this spring and keep asking if I will visit, and the answer is: I don’t know.

During my brief residence in that city I was responsible for two houses, two cars, and three young children. I was entrenched in an intricate and vast community stretching between Portland, Olympia, and Seattle, and the complications of an extended family six miles away across the Sound. There was too much work to deal with, too many invitations, too much noise. I had a whole lot to accomplish and only a little bit of time available.

Now I live on the other side of the world. I have a boat, a bicycle, and half-share in one adolescent boy. I have no discernible ambitions, aspirations, goals, plans for the future, or even interest in any of the concepts implied. I haven’t been on a stage in years.

One of my more maniacal friends, hearing these stories, just shrugs and says At least you got a book out of it. True, but possibly more significant than he might think.

I’ve changed. I’m not the sick kid dying in the cold public hospital, or the reckless teenager stripping and dancing around in the fountains at the Science Center. I’m not the resolute youngster who refused to go back, or the adult who felt she had conquered the world by purchasing a house on top of Beacon Hill.

Since leaving I have spent about a month of each year in the city. Stupid, shitty things have happened alongside the wondrous and weird; that is the nature of the place.

I feel that I should go back this spring, and that I want to, but that does not mean that I can. It might be healthier to go somewhere new, or at least, somewhere I am less likely to meet ghosts.

Yesterday I received a letter notifying me that my kid has been selected to participate in an advanced reading group operating outside of school hours.

I was so furious I nearly tossed the letter on the fire. Then I remembered that I am a good mother and dutifully passed it on, asking what he wanted to do.

He read it with an expression close to my own, for roughly the same reasons.

Children are perfectly capable of understanding the dangers of elitism in a classroom, and the practice of breaking out achievement groups is just plain nasty.

Maybe people judged to be right in the middle have a fine time, but dwelling on either end of the spectrum is not fun. Even in a posh English school, there is social stigma associated with both under and over achieving.

Beyond that, the trend in education (here at least, can’t comment on elsewhere as my kids never attended proper stateside schools) is to use faddish popular literature rather than the canon.

Amongst various other texts, this means my son has been assigned The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I have no opinion at all about the quality of the book, since my grown-up child told me that I was too sensitive to read tit. She was shocked that her (then eleven year old) sibling was given the book, because he, like me, is… sensitive.

The fact that a child has the cognitive ability to read at a high level does not mean that they can or should consume everything on offer.

I’m not proposing that books should be rejected because of controversial content – I am instead suggesting that quality should be the main criteria in selecting textbooks.

In principle teachers choose recent books to spark an interest. In practice, these works are often inferior to the favorites of earlier generations.

My kid is independently working his way through Alcott, Montgomery, Twain, Dickens, and Dumas. When he needs a little light entertainment he switches to Wilde or Wodehouse. Every single one of those authors offers challenging ideas. The opportunities to discuss the mechanics of literature, and debate social and cultural context, is tremendous.

Or how about going right back to basics, and teaching Shakespeare? Particularly in this town, there are abundant opportunities to attend performances and even hang out in the exact courtyard where the man staged his plays.

I could go on. Wanna visit the mill Chaucer was talking about? It is just past the Orchard in Grantchester. You know, that place where the Bloomsbury kids hung out. We’d have to cross the field where Augustus John pretended to live like a gypsy. On the way we would pass Byron’s Pool, so called because, you know, Lord Byron used to swim there.

Though all of that would involve walking twenty minutes or so through idyllic countryside. Without leaving town, we could see rooms once occupied by E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Laurence Stern, Samuel Coleridge, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, heck, even C.S. Lewis. Not to mention Douglas Adams. If you’re not careful you might literally get run over by Stephen Hawking.

This town offers, if nothing else, an abundance of history.

Yet the school entrusted with the intellectual development of my child is picking books off the Amazon bestseller lists. The predictable consequence? He has developed a sincere hatred of his English class.

So, no, he will not be attending the ‘special’ reading group. He has elected to go to science club instead.