Survivorship rules.

I remember the phone calls confirming my diagnosis and the events that would shape the following seven months.

The years in remission are just as hard and complex to explain, ignore or not be affected by.

But today feels like a birthday and a comfortable place to be…a solid 5 years since I was officially diagnosed.

I can safely proclaim I am a 5 year survivor. My whole family is. My wife and kids were obviously directly affected too.

But tomorrow is just another day and every day that follows is another day to get it right, even when life gets messy…I know that it’s entirely possible I might not have been here to complain about it.

So my pledge is to live and be kind and try and make a difference.

The view from 5 years out is dark and sweet. But a real victory nonetheless.

If you are reading this, give somebody a hug in response to this anniversary.

Just do that…for me. Ok?

Thanks.

Scott.

In August 2002 I was laid off and left my middle management job as a Franchise Support Manager at a large hotel franchise company with two months of salary and Severence to follow.

The list from here forward completes the aforementioned misadventures. Pretty much in this order:

Walmart. (6 mos)

UPS. (3 mos)

Shoprite. (16 mos)

Minerals Resort and Spa (6 mos)

Starbucks coffee company. (12 mos)

Embroidery creations. (6 mos)
*cash paying under the table gig while at Starbucks.

GET CANCER!!! (Lose a turn and 9 months to multiple CT scans, Dr consults, surgery, chemo etc) *achieve remission* go back to work…

Route 23 Honda. (3.5 yrs)

Walmart (again, another 6 mos)

And finally back to the hotel job I wedged in before Starbucks. Most of those jobs were taken for the benefits, my wife was running her own consultancy business until Cancer hit home and everything spirialed into the toilet.

This time I decided to get back to what I know well and spent 12 years doing. Taking care of people.

I am getting older and I just want to settle into something I know. I think a solid ten year absence from the only thing I was ever really good at is long enough…

So in keeping with our plans to stay in county for work, my wife and I are adapting to new but familiar schedules that involves nights, weekends and holidays.

I already feel comfortable behind the desk. The whole time spent training these two weeks feels like putting on an old sneaker.

The fact that the resort is three times bigger than it was the last time I worked there and that it has several sources of income other than just room revenue is an adjustment for me.

My old school (before the internet) hotel brain wants to put heads in beds in order to keep the lights on…but this place boasts three hotels each more grand than the last. A sports club, two spas, seven golf courses and at least 13 eateries/restaurant options.

I need to think a little further outside the average hotel revenue model.

And with a flexible schedule I hopefully can find and make time to work on the cartoons my son’s 2nd grade teacher offered to use in class for writing prompts and make some art for me as well.

I’m in the middle of NaNoWriMo and not where I was hoping my word count would be, but aside from that…I hope this is the upswing we’ve been waiting for.

The light at the end of this long dark tunnel we’ve been in since my cancer diagnosis in 2006 if not before that.

Lets hope…

I spent twelve years in the hotel business. Started out as a nervous front desk clerk but moved up to Assistant General Manager in a six short years.

Moved to Ramada Corporate and was laid off about 10 months after the events of 9/11. (Airport properties were seeing catastophic financial losses due to a dramatic drop in business, the franchisor started to cut back.)

I took that kick to the curb as my ticket to brighter horizons. However, it didn’t pan out that way. The lesson here is “STICK with WHAT YOU KNOW.”

So after almost 9 years of career misadventures and a little cancer thrown in, a lot of writing (blogging and whatnot) that has gotten me nowhere I am at long last going to back into the hotel business.

In this case a resort and spa. I don’t play golf, I don’t ski or snow board. I don’t care for water parks or rides…but put me behind the front desk of the hotel there and I’m at home.

The hours suck. Holidays, nights and weekends are no longer yours. People can be impossible to please and nothing goes as planned. But I have spent far too many hours taking care of people’s needs to the best of my ability and based on the limitations of the facility and what it has to offer…its all I truly know.

So, fare thee well Walmart job. I won’t really miss you. You were my rebound job.

Its nothing personal.

Just business.

I have dived in head first.

I just accepted a new job. I am returning to my career origins in the hotel business.

Approxamately 6000 words into my seat of the pants novel I feel like I am turning a corner…professionally and creatively.

My wife came home from work last night and was wondering why I was in such a good mood. I could only attribute it to my NaNoWriMo word count. (Make art, be happy) I was creating for several hours yesterday. I don’t expect it to always be this easy but right now the words are flowing.

I drew a halloween themed cartoon for my kids to find after school on monday, my son asked if he could bring it to school today.

Very happy with that.

I’m drawing, writing and hopefully making a career move that I can stick with.

Right now, life is good.

My rants here in cyberspace are just bitchy, whiney, complaint fueled diatribes that have no value.

Except that every word is mine and comes from my gut.

Even if I have a point I am not collecting my thoughts here very well. I write on this blog “live”…I may edit as I re-read but I am not planning or plotting anything out.

I just tap a vein and pour my bile into this blog. It serves as my electronic therapist. I don’t believe anything I’ve written thus far has enriched anyone’s lives.

All I am doing is spewing forth my discontent. If you can relate to my frustrations then that’s great.

If you are just entertained by reading the disconnected thoughts of an aging wanna-be professional cartoonist then that’s great too.

I just want to make a few bucks at this…then I might feel like the crap I dump here is serving a purpose and is content worth charging for.

If I can keep Pop Tarts on the shelf then I can say my writing is paying off.

NaNoWriMo is just around the.corner. I am charging into it head first, not planning on coming up for air until I have pounded 50,000 words or more into a word document.

Then I can start to rewrite the madness that it is.

Its my cycle of the werewolf. Seasons come and go…I create and then I don’t. I need to forge ahead and never look back. Bleed the truth, get my version onto the page and fix it later.

Someday my kids will uncover all this shit…my sketchbooks, notebooks, word documents and scrap paper filled with all these disconnected thoughts that successfully made it out of my head.

It’s stringing them together that worries me.

I have probably written a few books considering all the words on paper I have collected into piles, jammed into drawers and left exposed between covers of random composition notebooks.

Maybe I should start sifting thru all that madness. I’m sure there are threads of truth to start weaving together.

A writer writes. And I have written, a lot. Just not in any kind of linear order that would make sense to anyone.

Yet.

I have despised the “holidays” for decades now. From the God awful waste of time that is Halloween right on thru to New Years.

I find no enjoyment in any of this crap.

Mostly because of family issues and my late mother’s insistance on tradition on the seemingly holiest of family get togethers…Christmas Eve.

Its not all my mother’s fault, I’m not sure who is completely to blame but consumerism, advertising, wall street, television, malls, anything and anybody who has sucked the life out of why we celebrate anything as human beings is to blame.

The holidays are like enriched white bread. All the good stuff has been removed in favor of the shit put into it to make it good for you.

I get nothing out of decorating. (So I don’t partake, my wife does…and I bitch about the energy she’s wasting and all the extra holiday themed crap littering the house)

Shopping.

Traffic.

People (generally assholes to begin with become bigger assholes during the ‘horror days’)

Parking lots…cars and people and people and their cars.

Shitty weather. WE ARE FARTHER AWAY FROM THE SUN PEOPLE…who jammed these holidays into the end of the freakin’ year. It rains and snows between October and December! (At least in most of this country, especially the north east)

Food. Too much food for too little people. And its always the same shit…TURKEY or HAM in some form or another.

We run around seeing people (mostly the family we moved away from) stuffing our faces and watching football or tearing open presents no one really wants, knows what to do with or has room for.

Not to mention the extra debt accumulated as well.

Unfortunately I don’t have a solution to the horror days. I would skip them all, if I could. Not one if them means what they used to…every single get together we will have in the next 90 days is a manufactured hallmark greeting card commercial engineered to increase profitability for everyone in the BUSINESS of taking your money.

Sorry if that is an overly pessimistic way of looking at it but…lets be honest.

In 2009 we went as a family to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The view from the street was unbelievable. The kids LOVED it. It was so much better than the 3 hour “commercial” you get on TV.

But it’s still sponsored by a retail giant…there is no escaping that. The whole reason the parade exists is to sell you MACY’S. Duh.

I recently had to explain to my kids about advertising. Advertising between their favorite TV shows and within the same shows sometimes.

My daughter was enlightened.

TV was invented to sell us shit. They invented the Soap Opera to keep that 1950′s mom glued to the TV long enough to convince her she needed to buy Tide or some other brand of detergent.

Its all a game.

The holidays used to be about something. Since I’ve been around its been about ‘Stuff’ and that’s why these are horror days not holidays.

Even that definition is wrong.

What is a holiday anyway? Supposed to be a day off or vacation basically. A day you get away from everything and everyone…short of a day off from work (which many of us don’t actually get) we surround ourselves with stress.

And family which is inbred stress.

And bills which keep us at work longer to pay those bills off, also stress.

We stuff too much food down our throats into bodies too inactive to not make us fat.

Stress.

And we let the marketing departments of all these corporations keep us locked into this endless cycle of bullshit.

Its high time to stop the madness.

But we never will.

What’s that? Did I just hear a Christmas song?  It pretty much starts the day after halloween…(used to be called All Saints Day, thus giving us All Hallows Eve. Which has become the confectioner’s wet dream that has become halloween…)

Ok. I have to stop.

Happy Horror Days.

Scott

I ask them what they want and I draw it.

In High school a friend of mine and I used our study hall period to draw cartoons we left for my best friend at the time. (And brother-in-law to be since I eventually married his little sister).

Mike usually wrote the gags while I scribbled them on notebook paper in the 40 minutes we had “studying”

My senior year got me no where. I took everything I needed to graduate by junior year so I could spend my last year in the Art wing and all my electives.

Wanting to be a cartoonist is one thing, but I should have gone to tech.

But I digress…

My self appointed goal set in 8th grade to be a syndicated cartoonist like my heroes Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, Berke Breathed and Gary Larson would soon come and go. Almost as quickly as the newspspers changed.

I no longer want to be syndicated but I would still love to get paid for my cartoons. My sketchbooks mock me.

I concentrated on writing well before cancer struck, because I realized how much writing actually went into a cartoon or a daily comic strip.

I have bounced back and forth looking for a balance between the two…because in the back of my mind that 14 year old kid who decided to set this goal to begin with gave me until my 30th birthday to accomplish it, continues to haunt me with the fact that I in fact did not achieve this goal (but researched the crap out of it into my late 20′s) AND that 14 year old kid still thinks a cartoonist is a gag writer at heart.

Trouble is I might be able to write…I just don’t have a lot of confidence in my gag writing.

And since I’m not trying to sell cartoons to the New Yorker…my days of being a gag cartoonist are behind me.

All the greats started out as magazine gag cartoonists. Kind of like a comedian’s rite of passage coming up in vaudeville. I think that’s why I keep coming back to it.

I have no ambition to start a web cartoon. I still enjoy a good single panel gag cartoon when I can find them.

And there is always Richard Thompson’s “Cul de Sac”…as good as Calvin and Hobbes ever was.

I doodle a lot and I experiment with watercolors and abstract art. I am looking for a happy medium somewhere in between.

I don’t think I will ever find it. But I need to get back to searching for it. Art is the only thing that keeps me sane.

When I make my kids laugh with a cartoon their idea sparked its worth all the money in the world.

Maybe I should collect those and just publish them.

Later, Scotty

This is usually a quick and painless transaction, but if I cant get thru today at all I have to wait until Wednesday to call again. This prolongs the delivery of funds into my account and again stresses me out as too many things need to be paid…yesterday.

I find that I am not dealing with stress very well at all anymore. It has me thinking about job choices I need to make because I used to be accustomed to high volume, tight dead-lined type of work.

But I think that has changed. I think I need a low intensity, low stress, non-decision making position somewhere.

The days of thinking something medical or emergency related are thinning out.

I had considered joining the local first aid squad with the intent of EMT schooling paid for by the state, which could lead to all sorts of medical related possibilities.

The slightest thing raises my blood pressure now. Dealing with intrusive parents with my cub scout den gets on my nerves now.

So much so that lately I catch my breathing patterns changing and I start to pace…like a caged animal. (See previous posts)

I am not happy with where I am in life right now (To say the least) and it bugs the living shit out of me.

Maybe its just too expensive in Jersey. Maybe its the business climate. Maybe its just the economy. Maybe its…me.

It’s no surprise that Jersey costs too much and it is high time to get out of dodge. Go south, south west. And also because the cold is wreaking havok with my body…

Last winter was brutal. It gets worse every year.

How am I supposed to successfully rob liquor stores when my joints hurt so much I couldn’t make a clean getaway?

“It was a cranky old guy in glasses and a baseball cap. Oh and he had limp and complained his fingers and shoulders hurt” 

How’s a guy supposed to make a living suffering with cold weather related arthritis-like body and joint pain?

I worry too much. My days as an over-churched youth reminds me to not worry and to cast my cares onto God. But it isn’t that easy when the electric bill still reads in bold print: “Pending Shut Off scheduled for…” after I gave the bill to the Almighty.

“How are you gonna pay it God? Do I tell them you’re sending a check or money order?”

Did I mention how much I hate where I am in life right now?

I could list all things we are doing without, but it wouldn’t change anything. It would just depress me further.

Stress can kill you. I have blogged before that I didn’t beat two cancers to die from stress, but then again…it appears I probably will.

Life is all about irony. Ha Ha that’s the joke. Right God?

Well. I fail to see the humor.

…

Know this, the journey is over. The adventure has to end here.

We’d be crazy to believe to that fate isn’t working against us now. The odds are stacked in favor of the house.

And the house ain’t us.

Together we sailed uncharted seas, drank deeply in forbidden love and bathed in the warmth of another sun.

We discovered amazing treasures along the way, but sadly we can only keep the bittersweet memories. I will always hold them dear.

The temptation is too great to ignore, I admit… but I cannot risk losing you forever.

I have to go against nature and deny my heart this time. I fear it will be our undoing and will cost us more than this pain we feel now.

If we go back, it will cost us, everything.

I will never forget.

I will never, ever forget.

********************

“HOME” Nichole Nordeman

“Bright are the stars that shine in somebody else’s sky, green is the grass that grows, some place different.

More possibilities, more than you offered me. More than I cared to see, from a distance.

I was certain that the truth would be in a place that kept eluding me, but every stone turned and unturned again would only serve to prove that I never had to move to find you.

And you will always be the only love I’ll ever know, home. And you have made for me the only place I’ll ever go, home.

God, for the shameless pride, the times when I rolled my eyes to laugh at simplicity, show me mercy knowing what I know now, its hard to imagine how I could feel anything but unworthy.

And the mystery of your love for me is not as hidden as it seemed to be, should have known then when you said to me “seek and you will find”… it was right here all the time.

I believe in the quest and the journey, I believe that the answers come in time and where we begin is where we arrive.”

words by Nichole Nordeman ©2000

********************

And you will always be the only love I’ll ever know…you have made for me the only place I’ll ever go…home.

The seas were deep and unforgiving. The journey was always the destination.

You went with me. Thank you.

…fin