ELEVEN MONTHS SINCE BRAIN SURGERY

Yesterday was that milestone. My progress seems to have leveled off. Some days I'm about as close to what I was before the operation, in terms of abilities, than is probably possible. Other days I feel like part of my brain is missing!

It depends to some extent on how tired I am. But it also can be extremely random. I still haven't gotten back the compulsion to make lists constantly, whether in my head during the day or in my writing, including this blog, or before I fall asleep or to help me fall back asleep when I wake up during the night.

I was lying in bed last night thinking of a possible list, but I couldn't get more than two or three listings before I drifted off into other thoughts. That would have never happened pre-operation.

And that strange quirk that has me feeling very attracted to Meryl Streep when I see her in a movie on TV, and now Mitzi Gaynor as well, even though when not actually seeing them on the screen I still know that I don't find them attractive in that way at all (and part of my mind even knows that when I see them on the little screen and tells me that, while the rest of my mind and body reacts in this highly unusual way of feeling attracted to them!).

There are other less easily defined—or that I'm unable to articulate—changes that only I am aware of. Let's just say my mind still feels different and in some ways unfamiliar to me. Something I used to try to make happen back in the '60s & '70s! But not something I was hoping for at this point in my life.

However, I am entirely grateful to be cancer free, to be able to read and write (even though the latter is still more difficult than it was pre-operation, the typing that is, as is playing the piano) a lot, though not quite as much as I used to obsessively do.

And I am still overwhelmed with bewilderment at times—as I was when first coming out of the operation—to see the kind of political discourse, or lack of it, that is taking place in the media and public forums these days. The idiocy that is given attention now that when I was a boy would have been mostly ignored or treated as the extremist unsubstantiated nonsense it mostly is.