ISSUE ONE - MARCH 2017
Too much time on my hands? Never!
STAGE FOUR IN SINVILLE
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THE CAMBO CANCER CHRONICLE
MARCH 2017 – ISSUE ONE
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- Is The “Bed Desk” The Future Of Home Working?
- Local Businessman Finally Outed As “Real Person”
- The “Tweaker” Doctrine - Clarification And Expansion
- Current Cancer Status And Ongoing Care
- Fittie Break
- Cool Picture Corner
IS THE “BED DESK” THE FUTURE OF HOME WORKING?
A fancy version of my bed desk that someone else has got
Is this what you’d imagine a “Bed Desk” might look like? I’m using one just like it right now to type this sentence.
It’s not a spot-on “like for like” representation of the one I own, since the version pictured is posher (but only slightly) than the one I've just acquired. At first glance, they are both very similar to the convenient breakfast-in-bed surface you might find when staying at the Ritz, just with a bit more cunning. Like a Swiss Army Tea-tray, something like that.
Scratch the surface and, as you can see, it is much more than simply a stable and convenient method of consuming hot food and beverages in your sleep-space – its clever design allows me to type these words lying flat on my back with the laptop held in place by the laws of gravity, defying the awkward weight/distribution ratio type stuff that one would imagine might scupper inferior designs.
And to top it all off, by swapping your preferred morning meal-choice with your laptop, your workspace has now been turned into a scale model of ED-209 or a Transformer, and who wouldn't be inspired by such a setup? Ergonomic and unorthodox, fantastic!
So assuming there’s no-one who can prove Bed-Desk's direct involvement in any known human fatalities, I call this the leap that finally hurls breakfast tray technology into the 21st century! The quaintly traditional wooden style meeting cutting-edge high-tech ergonomic design standards – damn, that could have been a money spinner if I’d been a bit quicker on the uptake!
“BED DESKS OFFICIALLY THE WAY FORWARD” SAYS DELUDED, RECLUSIVE “INVENTOR”
You get so used to putting up with pain and discomfort when you experience them daily, all the more so when your comfort level erodes gradually over time as the pain increases. I must admit that I’m tired of “putting up” with it but what else can you do?
I thought this through one night and the answer came to me one as I was using deep breathing and Kegeling exercises to ride the pain of my mad stomach cramps. I was lying down on my side with no way of committing my thoughts and wit to either paper or Word format: what if I could find a good working position that would mean minimum discomfort?
When these “attacks” hit, to find the road to relief one must combine painkillers, inertia, time and the blessed “state of horizontality”, which is great for reading but not very productive for writing or making music in Ableton if stuck there for long periods.
I had already had an idea of buying an ipad to use from the bed so I don’t have to keep transporting the laptop between the “Valid” and “Invalid” sections of the room. That was when a mad notion came to me - that we could bring the desk to the bed instead, and fit some form of an adjustable surface to allow comfortable working whilst being in the preferred horizontal position.
Like many people, I could happily be at my desk 24/7 and still never run out of something productive to do, so generally when things have got bad, I’ve just gritted my teeth and ignored the pain. But suffering, when it is regular and especially so unnecessary, is growing increasingly tedious for me – tougher in some ways, just plain tired of it in others.
I described my ideas to my faithful steward and commissioned him to build me my Bed Desk (he's quite a “handy chap” you see) but my claims on future royalties for this creation’s worldwide rollout fizzled as soon as he told me he’d had the same thing requested by his mum in the past - so she either shares my madcap invention style or this is more mainstream than I would have even imagined!
Well it’s hardly a twist in the tale for you to find out that my “original thought” was nothing of the sort, and that these adapted bed-desks are everywhere it seems.
Despite single-handedly furnishing a one-bedroom flat from top to bottom back in London in recent years, independently verified to feature each and every item necessary for it to be declared an “Official Lad Pad” (impressing the judges with the choice of huge corner sofa combined with a 43 inch LCD TV, low profile furniture and king size bed), it seems I was alone in my ignorance of cutting edge furniture trends, the shameful limits of my interior design sophistication all too easily reached and breached.
My ignorance was yet again exposed when my man headed out to procure the components needed and he popped into a furniture store for design inspiration, only to find that they were selling ready-made bed-desks identical to our design – yes, someone else has already mass-produced my invention and made it available for sale here, in my little seaside paradise in the heart of the Third World, for a mere $25! – bargainous!
And not to mention, good timing, since I’ve now finally met the mysterious Jake, my remote employer and benefactor since August last year:
LOCAL
WRITER PLEASED TO FINALLY BE OUTED AS A "REAL PERSON"
Finally meeting Jake is quite “A Big Deal”, since before yesterday we’d not even spoken on the phone, instead conducting all of our business by email and text over the several months that I’ve worked for him.
This thoroughly modern way of doing thing but without the benefit of a business web-presence created a sense of intrigue, my imagination conjuring up a “Charlie’s Angels” type figure who literally could be anybody and based anywhere in the world.
Since his own writing is quite solid as you can imagine, he’s able to get his personality across in his communications with me, though it does distort the picture – the clarity of his prose initially gave me a picture of a posh, middle-aged Englishman, someone older than David Cameron but who could easily be his friend perhaps.
This meant I thought I had him sussed, but then he would surprise me by dropping in something completely unexpected - like mentioning that he “used freelance writing to finance travelling around India for three years” and by knowing more about the music I listen to than I would have expected – for instance that it is more commonly known as “psy-trance” rather than the more formal full term, “psychedelic trance”, that I’d used in a previous email.
Turns out I was right on many counts but way off in others – he’s indeed English but is actually 32, originally from the south west but with a public school accent. He runs the business from right here in Sinville with a team based across Asia.
This keeps his costs low, meaning he can pass those savings to the business owners here, for whom western pricing can put some mainstream items out of the reach of comfortable affordability.
On that note, it turns out that the SEO orientated content work I’ve been doing thus far has been not at his whim as I'd suspected, but instead come from his client, a marketing agency that focusses on SEO strategy.
They provide these services themselves of course but will outsource work and pay him a monthly retainer to handle any overflow bits that need done - thank god I don’t have that hankering to see my name published on a Wordpress page as there are now two sets of middlemen between me and my name in lights!
You may be aware that I’d long suspected (in fact it was my mother who originally suggested) that in true “robber-baron” fashion, his game was to fully utilise the benefits of globalisation by maximising his fees from rich-world clients while exploiting workers here in the developing world by paying us the local rate.
So I’m afraid my native-English-language skills, private western education and first world sophistication don’t automatically give me a free pass to the privileged lifestyle my parents enjoyed when they were posted to "the Orient" as expats. No country club membership in the post for me I'm afraid.
Instead, I am a kind of White-Collar Sweatshop worker – but one with the freedom to work when I feel like it and never wearing more than my underwear, so I neither sweat nor wear a white collar these days. I also really don’t even think about the money I’m making, it’s secondary to doing good work and getting it submitted on time.
But, since we're now on the subject, do you want to know how much I'm making? I get paid 1c per word, which should work out to be five dollars an hour.
I can almost hear you scream "Five bucks an hour? Really??".
Don't forget that the living is cheap here and one month’s assignments nets me around 100 bucks – covering my rent for a week and I could easily up my work rate if I needed to.
Unskilled locals in kitchens and stuff will get 2 or 3 bucks an hour maybe and I get to earn twice that sitting in my pants on my own time doing something I enjoy more than I imagined I would (and that landed in my lap). I don’t even need the money really.
After all, you can find bedrooms for five bucks a night here. Christ, in the grimy port-side red-light area (inexplicably known as the Chicken Farm) you have an opportunity to contract the HIV virus for a mere five bucks!
If I wanted to prostitute (no pun intended) myself properly by going fully freelance (which I may still do), that actually seems to be the going rate for non-native English speakers so I could realistically ask for more and get it.
I’ve also discovered that I could do this job freelance in London and earn hundreds a day. Unfortunately that's less realistic as I would need a bit more behind me just to be considered – a degree in English or Journalism and some on-the-job experience for instance.
But let’s not forget the simple truth that nothing on earth could tempt me back to life there so give me the White Collar Sweatshop way of working any day of the week!
In fact, I still don’t actually know (or surprisingly even really care to find out) if I’ve even been published or not – as far as I’m concerned, my work is done (and I get paid) when I submit my content, so what happens to it afterwards is of little interest as I’ve done my bit already!
That’s the detached nature of freelancing I suppose, just call me a “white collar hooker” – you can do whatever you want as long as I get paid!
Though even that isn’t really how I view the gig – it was more for the chance to try something new and, as I’ve said before, it’s nice to be given a brief or a theme to write about.
And to top it all off, Jake told me again yesterday that my writing was “exceptional” which is such high praise from someone like him – if he keeps this up, my head might swell just a little bit!
Some of you may recall the earlier “No Tomorrow” doctrine, which removes the need to worry about almost every problem or issue that your average-man concerns himself with – simply because I won’t be there to experience it. No worries about getting you (and your parents) getting old, career, pensions, marriage, kids, sex, politics, war etc etc etc
Normally my conscience wouldn’t have allowed me to fully embrace the expat westerner lifestyle of excess here long-term if I was fully healthy but, since I’m not, I don’t have to worry about the future impact of my self medicating or the detriment I’ve done to my career by opting out of the rat race in this fashion and at this point.
I fully embrace the “lack of tomorrow”, since that loss of my long term future allows me to live more freely than 99% of the human race - and, simply put, it would be rude not to.
There’s a practical side too, which will make sense I hope. My illness means that eating is no longer fun but instead mealtimes are fraught with danger, discomfort and the certainty of later regret. Smoking substances like these reduce the appetite of course, which makes this all the more easy to manage – because the less I consume the less I suffer, it’s as basic as that.
An unexpected effect of my falling into my current pattern with the freedom to creative work suddenly I had priorities and things I wanted to achieve – yet they seemed so far off and I was very aware of this kind of ominous metronome in the back of my mind so was scrambling to achieve everything I could as quickly as I could. This meant that sleep became less of a priority when it meant more time to write, read and do music. Hence the use of certain substances initially: basically I wanted to fit everything in as quick as I can (before I ran out of time!) – thankfully I’ve chilled out a bit now, you’ll be pleased to hear!
I am also now better informed about diet and supplements, not to mention that I don’t have to even try and pretend I eat like a normal person. So having done this before, it’s easier to spot the signs of progression and I know how to manage the symptoms.
Not really – but I did read an article recently that poured scorn on us allowing the collective deception of “reverse anthropomorphism” to affect the way we view the world – in that author’s case, comparing the human brain to an IT or computer system.
I may be paraphrasing, but he basically said it was ludicrous because the brain simply doesn’t work that way so people should stop using it and find a better metaphor. Now while this may be true, until someone comes up with one, I think the IT networking aspect is the simplest and most easily understood way of getting your point about disease across – us sophisticated folk know the difference between real true stories (ones you should believe), bullshit true stories (that you should doubt) and metaphorical, miracles-do-happen stories (the kind that frequently end up in religious texts) but they are ideal for our needs because our aim is to paint a picture that will convey the idea easily.
On that note, the metaphor I prefer the cancer in my guts is to liken it to a Trojan malware worm or virus that’s invaded a computer: an uninvited, unwelcome entity that robs your system of power, is malevolent and additionally comes pre-programmed to proliferate as far and wide as possible until it ultimately destroys the host.
As a result of this intruder several inches in diameter, my body is out of balance as my digestive organs will be blindly going about their job, not knowing there’s an evil cancerous blockage up ahead. By lacking the conscious thought that its current course of action will lead to great discomfort at just the point where the strength and momentum of the gut muscle meet the immovable object of the blockage. Being a stubborn bugger, the gut muscle seems to redouble its efforts, as what had been moving along very nicely comes to an abrupt halt and the resulting gridlock is both bloody painful and visible to the naked eye from outside as you watch it keep trying to force its way through. Sometimes the only way to escape this is unconsciousness – you will invariably wake up fully rested, your guts settled and in no pain, the exact opposite to how you felt when you popped the sedative.
You’d think this would have a daily effect on my appetite but interestingly, for a long time that didn’t do anything to change my base instincts about eating as you imagine it would.
Because decline is so gradual, I continued to blindly do as I had for over 30 years at that point, several times a day I would feel hungry so I would eat food, forgetting every time that I would feel like shit very soon after.
My understanding of Darwin-esque thinking is that one of the reasons we got to where we are today as a species is that we learn early to survive whilst avoiding things along the way which cause us pain and harm, but it seems as though our hardwiring was built with eating as it’s number one setting which won’t be overwritten no matter what pain it causes you. May as well try suicide by holding your breath.
It took over a year from the initial onset of symptoms before my conscious brain chimed in ahead of the animal brain that I might reconsider this impending eating idea, since I’ll most likely regret it later – I’d been expecting it a lot sooner but it was never as loud as the animal brain and frequently overruled.
QUICK FITTIE BREAK:
Mmmm tasty
OKAY, HAVE ANOTHER.....
Damn she was fine back then!
Where am I at then? Let’s allow the great man to answer that one, which I hope will make sense, then onto Readers’ Questions:
What is the medical care like over there?
Honestly? Please don’t be shocked but I have no idea, I’ve not seen a doctor for probably 15 months now - but I don’t need to, since the pharmacies here are very liberal and are happy to supply the kind of strong meds that would only be available by prescription back at home.
For that reason, I’m in no rush to see a doc! There is a Western friendly clinic five minutes from me where I could see someone for 20 bucks if I really needed to – but I can’t see that happening.
I did have the idea of looking at chemo here, but this is a non-starter, even if I really wanted to. Firstly because it’s not available locally, and I’m not about to up sticks to the big city or commute 5 hours each way on a bus every two weeks – god that routine would be more punishing than the one I had in London!
What's it going to be like in terms of meds if the cancer is back in action?
Thanks for making it this far, see you next time!
On that note, it turns out that the SEO orientated content work I’ve been doing thus far has been not at his whim as I'd suspected, but instead come from his client, a marketing agency that focusses on SEO strategy.
They provide these services themselves of course but will outsource work and pay him a monthly retainer to handle any overflow bits that need done - thank god I don’t have that hankering to see my name published on a Wordpress page as there are now two sets of middlemen between me and my name in lights!
You may be aware that I’d long suspected (in fact it was my mother who originally suggested) that in true “robber-baron” fashion, his game was to fully utilise the benefits of globalisation by maximising his fees from rich-world clients while exploiting workers here in the developing world by paying us the local rate.
So I’m afraid my native-English-language skills, private western education and first world sophistication don’t automatically give me a free pass to the privileged lifestyle my parents enjoyed when they were posted to "the Orient" as expats. No country club membership in the post for me I'm afraid.
BLATANT EXPLOITATION!
Instead, I am a kind of White-Collar Sweatshop worker – but one with the freedom to work when I feel like it and never wearing more than my underwear, so I neither sweat nor wear a white collar these days. I also really don’t even think about the money I’m making, it’s secondary to doing good work and getting it submitted on time.
But, since we're now on the subject, do you want to know how much I'm making? I get paid 1c per word, which should work out to be five dollars an hour.
I can almost hear you scream "Five bucks an hour? Really??".
Don't forget that the living is cheap here and one month’s assignments nets me around 100 bucks – covering my rent for a week and I could easily up my work rate if I needed to.
Unskilled locals in kitchens and stuff will get 2 or 3 bucks an hour maybe and I get to earn twice that sitting in my pants on my own time doing something I enjoy more than I imagined I would (and that landed in my lap). I don’t even need the money really.
After all, you can find bedrooms for five bucks a night here. Christ, in the grimy port-side red-light area (inexplicably known as the Chicken Farm) you have an opportunity to contract the HIV virus for a mere five bucks!
If I wanted to prostitute (no pun intended) myself properly by going fully freelance (which I may still do), that actually seems to be the going rate for non-native English speakers so I could realistically ask for more and get it.
I’ve also discovered that I could do this job freelance in London and earn hundreds a day. Unfortunately that's less realistic as I would need a bit more behind me just to be considered – a degree in English or Journalism and some on-the-job experience for instance.
But let’s not forget the simple truth that nothing on earth could tempt me back to life there so give me the White Collar Sweatshop way of working any day of the week!
In fact, I still don’t actually know (or surprisingly even really care to find out) if I’ve even been published or not – as far as I’m concerned, my work is done (and I get paid) when I submit my content, so what happens to it afterwards is of little interest as I’ve done my bit already!
That’s the detached nature of freelancing I suppose, just call me a “white collar hooker” – you can do whatever you want as long as I get paid!
Though even that isn’t really how I view the gig – it was more for the chance to try something new and, as I’ve said before, it’s nice to be given a brief or a theme to write about.
And to top it all off, Jake told me again yesterday that my writing was “exceptional” which is such high praise from someone like him – if he keeps this up, my head might swell just a little bit!
NO TOMORROW MEANS GUILT FREE FUN TODAY
Some of you may recall the earlier “No Tomorrow” doctrine, which removes the need to worry about almost every problem or issue that your average-man concerns himself with – simply because I won’t be there to experience it. No worries about getting you (and your parents) getting old, career, pensions, marriage, kids, sex, politics, war etc etc etc
Normally my conscience wouldn’t have allowed me to fully embrace the expat westerner lifestyle of excess here long-term if I was fully healthy but, since I’m not, I don’t have to worry about the future impact of my self medicating or the detriment I’ve done to my career by opting out of the rat race in this fashion and at this point.
I fully embrace the “lack of tomorrow”, since that loss of my long term future allows me to live more freely than 99% of the human race - and, simply put, it would be rude not to.
There’s a practical side too, which will make sense I hope. My illness means that eating is no longer fun but instead mealtimes are fraught with danger, discomfort and the certainty of later regret. Smoking substances like these reduce the appetite of course, which makes this all the more easy to manage – because the less I consume the less I suffer, it’s as basic as that.
An unexpected effect of my falling into my current pattern with the freedom to creative work suddenly I had priorities and things I wanted to achieve – yet they seemed so far off and I was very aware of this kind of ominous metronome in the back of my mind so was scrambling to achieve everything I could as quickly as I could. This meant that sleep became less of a priority when it meant more time to write, read and do music. Hence the use of certain substances initially: basically I wanted to fit everything in as quick as I can (before I ran out of time!) – thankfully I’ve chilled out a bit now, you’ll be pleased to hear!
I am also now better informed about diet and supplements, not to mention that I don’t have to even try and pretend I eat like a normal person. So having done this before, it’s easier to spot the signs of progression and I know how to manage the symptoms.
CANCER IS A VIRUS AFTER ALL
I may be paraphrasing, but he basically said it was ludicrous because the brain simply doesn’t work that way so people should stop using it and find a better metaphor. Now while this may be true, until someone comes up with one, I think the IT networking aspect is the simplest and most easily understood way of getting your point about disease across – us sophisticated folk know the difference between real true stories (ones you should believe), bullshit true stories (that you should doubt) and metaphorical, miracles-do-happen stories (the kind that frequently end up in religious texts) but they are ideal for our needs because our aim is to paint a picture that will convey the idea easily.
On that note, the metaphor I prefer the cancer in my guts is to liken it to a Trojan malware worm or virus that’s invaded a computer: an uninvited, unwelcome entity that robs your system of power, is malevolent and additionally comes pre-programmed to proliferate as far and wide as possible until it ultimately destroys the host.
As a result of this intruder several inches in diameter, my body is out of balance as my digestive organs will be blindly going about their job, not knowing there’s an evil cancerous blockage up ahead. By lacking the conscious thought that its current course of action will lead to great discomfort at just the point where the strength and momentum of the gut muscle meet the immovable object of the blockage. Being a stubborn bugger, the gut muscle seems to redouble its efforts, as what had been moving along very nicely comes to an abrupt halt and the resulting gridlock is both bloody painful and visible to the naked eye from outside as you watch it keep trying to force its way through. Sometimes the only way to escape this is unconsciousness – you will invariably wake up fully rested, your guts settled and in no pain, the exact opposite to how you felt when you popped the sedative.
You’d think this would have a daily effect on my appetite but interestingly, for a long time that didn’t do anything to change my base instincts about eating as you imagine it would.
Because decline is so gradual, I continued to blindly do as I had for over 30 years at that point, several times a day I would feel hungry so I would eat food, forgetting every time that I would feel like shit very soon after.
My understanding of Darwin-esque thinking is that one of the reasons we got to where we are today as a species is that we learn early to survive whilst avoiding things along the way which cause us pain and harm, but it seems as though our hardwiring was built with eating as it’s number one setting which won’t be overwritten no matter what pain it causes you. May as well try suicide by holding your breath.
It took over a year from the initial onset of symptoms before my conscious brain chimed in ahead of the animal brain that I might reconsider this impending eating idea, since I’ll most likely regret it later – I’d been expecting it a lot sooner but it was never as loud as the animal brain and frequently overruled.
QUICK FITTIE BREAK:
Mmmm tastyOKAY, HAVE ANOTHER.....
Damn she was fine back then!
CURRENT CANCER STATUS AND ONGOING CARE
What is the medical care like over there?
Honestly? Please don’t be shocked but I have no idea, I’ve not seen a doctor for probably 15 months now - but I don’t need to, since the pharmacies here are very liberal and are happy to supply the kind of strong meds that would only be available by prescription back at home.
For that reason, I’m in no rush to see a doc! There is a Western friendly clinic five minutes from me where I could see someone for 20 bucks if I really needed to – but I can’t see that happening.
I did have the idea of looking at chemo here, but this is a non-starter, even if I really wanted to. Firstly because it’s not available locally, and I’m not about to up sticks to the big city or commute 5 hours each way on a bus every two weeks – god that routine would be more punishing than the one I had in London!
What's it going to be like in terms of meds if the cancer is back in action?
Unfortunately the cancer has never been out of the action, I’ve never had any periods of remission since my diagnosis – this was the kicker for me to cease treatment, when my first scan after six months of chemo (which should have cleared the decks completely as you might imagine) showed that the defiant little bastards had simply shrugged off the toxic chemical bombardment by terminator-esque killing machines whose entire purpose is to destroy every fast growing cell it comes across, with no care for “collateral damage” or “civilian casualties”.
Yet, come June 2015, we could see a tiny little spec on the scan that had appeared on the outside of my lower intestine, which meant that the chemo was losing its power and the last six months had been for nothing – or at best, treading water.
It was at this point that my status changed to “palliative” from “curative” and they introduced the phrase “terminally ill” to my personal cancer cliché adjective list. In fact I was the one that used it first, because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and felt so well in myself at the time – when the nurse gave me leaflets about “getting my affairs in order” my reply was that she was “making me sound like I was terminally ill” to which she replied, “you are terminally ill”.
My kneejerk reaction was that enough was enough and I asked what my prognosis was if I ceased treatment, which is when I got the “months not years” reply - a second, harder whatsit kick since at that stage I thought I had at least five years in me, the idea that it might only be months was so inconceivable because I felt so well!
In fact, when I would discuss the news with people I would always be incredulous saying, “look at me, do I look like I’ll be dead within months?”
Right, that’s enough cancer chat for now – more to come in issue number two, which will be coming together shortly. And so, to close....
Yet, come June 2015, we could see a tiny little spec on the scan that had appeared on the outside of my lower intestine, which meant that the chemo was losing its power and the last six months had been for nothing – or at best, treading water.
It was at this point that my status changed to “palliative” from “curative” and they introduced the phrase “terminally ill” to my personal cancer cliché adjective list. In fact I was the one that used it first, because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and felt so well in myself at the time – when the nurse gave me leaflets about “getting my affairs in order” my reply was that she was “making me sound like I was terminally ill” to which she replied, “you are terminally ill”.
HOW’S THAT FOR A KICK IN THE WHATSITS?
My kneejerk reaction was that enough was enough and I asked what my prognosis was if I ceased treatment, which is when I got the “months not years” reply - a second, harder whatsit kick since at that stage I thought I had at least five years in me, the idea that it might only be months was so inconceivable because I felt so well!
In fact, when I would discuss the news with people I would always be incredulous saying, “look at me, do I look like I’ll be dead within months?”
Right, that’s enough cancer chat for now – more to come in issue number two, which will be coming together shortly. And so, to close....
COOL PICTURE CORNER
Thanks for making it this far, see you next time!
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