Cure!

Gotcha!

Well... sorta gotcha. It's actually 'cure'. Lower case and quotes... because it is a magazine.

Yup, they seem to have one for everything nowadays. It's a quarterly and as you may have guessed, it's a freebie... if you've got the Big C... or have had the Big C... or know someone who has. Or had. Or whatever. If for some incredible reason you don't qualify for a free subscription -- such as living on the planet Logoff -- then it's twenty bucks a year. So... on the up-side it's another source of information for me to add to an already mind-boggling work-load but the down-side is that it appears to be just another outlet for pharmaceutical PR. Still, I have got to read it.

Some of you won't understand the absolute imperative there so lemme run it by you.

Mention car, firearm, airplane or half a dozen other things and all you'll get out of me is a nod; yep; got all that; let's move on. In those areas I am adept. Not a tinkerer nor a casual user but someone who can build you a car. Or an airplane. Or a mechanical clock that keeps reasonably good time. No sense in our discussing those things nor in my reading about them because the odds of encountering something truly new is vanishingly small. Skim it to the point of identifying a linkage to my existing knowledge in that particular field and if you listen very hard you'll hear the gates of my biological copy of Babbage's falling into place. Next topic please. This ability is probably a sex-linked trait as I've only met a handful of women who have it. Oddly enough, while a lot of men -- probably a majority -- have it to some degree, most are not aware of it. Acquisition of this uniquelly male trait has been through peer-group osmosis rather than a conscious effort. Then too, you would probably have to interrogate them rather closely to have them regurgitate the specifics for making steel. But it's all there, mixed up with the inherent male inability to remember dates deemed important to the feminine mind, or to admit to being lost when we haven't got a clue, and the inability not only to lie gracefully but even wanting the native wit to understand the absolute necessity of lying when harmonious interpersonal relationships with opposite sex is the goal. (What does the color of furniture have to do with anything?)

But when it comes to me and cancer, I'm not even up to novice-grade in the knowledge department. Which means if it has ANYTHING to do with cancer, I HAVE to read it. I've no choice in the matter. I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in June of 2008. At a guess I've probably acquired less than 1% of the available information and even that has to be qualified as meaning information in digital form.

It doesn't matter that the new magazine is a gimme, it's value somewhere between a bathroom wall and a bumper sticker, it is a source of information about cancer so I must at least scan it. But even that takes time.

Maybe I'll send them an article about... some damn thing.

-Bob Hoover