1. I cried in the Corner Bakery today because “Let My Love Open the Door” started playing as I was spooning honey into my tea.
2. Clark’s old friend Robert has an art show in Richmond, and, as Leigh said in his email to me, C’s overseeing the proceedings:
3. My little brother gave a speech in class yesterday about melanoma and how the public is misinformed about it. He said girls in his class cried. Then his professor said he’d never seen anyone look so intense while giving a speech.
Yesterday was a 75/25 day, mostly good, a little bit bad.
The day Clark died was rainy and (as I remember) a bit chilly for June. I was wearing a sweatshirt, at least. All day the sky was grey. A few minutes after he passed, I went outside to call my mom, and the sky had suddenly turned pink – a cloudy, smoky pink, but pink nonetheless. Like it was covered in muted insulation foam.
Maybe it’s silly, but whenever the sky turns pink like that, I feel like he’s trying to tell me something – that it’s OK, that I’m OK. The sky was threatening rain all day, but when I got back to my house at night, after the not-so-good part of the day, it was unmistakably that same color.
I’m usually too lazy to wholeheartedly participate in Halloween. Either that, or I’m broke. In college I recycled my Monica Lewinsky costume, which was conceived in 9th grade to wear in marching band for the Halloween parade. In retrospect, it was entirely inappropriate. I was 14 with a cigar in my pocket and a “stain” on my skirt. I also like dressing in drag, which is easy and has worked with my occasional short haircuts throughout the years (this year included).
Clark and I celebrated Halloween together in 2007. His costume idea came to him after I made him watch “Pretty in Pink” one night. He was obsessed with James Spader’s character Stef, and couldn’t believe that I would actually choose Andrew McCarthy over him.
We were late putting it all together — and this is when we were subletting Nikhil’s place above the Galaxy Hut. Halloween night we scrambled to the nearest thrift store and CVS to get our supplies. We blew $20 on some ridiculous sunglasses and picked up hairspray and a ton of polyester. He flipped his head over as I brushed the AquaNet through it to make his grey hair stiff, but fluffy. The shirt was silk, the pants were ivory.
We focused so much on his costume that in the end, I just wrote “All that …” on a T-shirt and carried around a bag of chips. At least people thought I was cute.
We went to the Red Derby and the Black Cat and Clark didn’t leave character once. He’d push people aside and say things like, “I could buy you,” or “My dad owns a dealership.” He tried to go behind the bar. I laughed consistently throughout the entire night, and I don’t think our friends or our bartenders knew quite how to take it.
At the end of the night, we burned Clark’s shirt in a bonfire at Jason Hutto’s house, and it created a toxic waste pit. Synthetic materials plus fire does not a good smell make.
We went to the best gay bar I’ve ever been to this past weekend. They played: The Pixies “Here Comes Your Man,” The Spice Girls “Stop,” The Cranberries “Zombie,” Lady Gaga “Paparazzi,” and lots of Smiths. It was the greatest.
The best part is that the bar promotes its Twitter page on this TV screen that also displays the specials. This is what the Twitter page looks like, right now:
A profile of a 35-year-old woman with melanoma whose battle mirrors Clark’s. Everything about the way she describes the treatments and the emotion – it’s the same.
“They are patients like 35-year-old Mindy Lanoux of San Antonio, who has melanoma that has spread to her liver and lungs, her odds of surviving in the single digits. She has been to the hospital 16 times in nine months, spending a week there each time for treatments so debilitating she wanted to give up. But she keeps returning, smearing peppermint oil under her nose when she walks in the medical center’s door to hide the odor.
‘The smell gets to me,’ Ms. Lanoux said. ‘It smells like cleaning products and the sickness and the medicines. It takes your brave edge off.’
Then she and her father go to her room and start putting her things away. ‘We don’t talk,’ Ms. Lanoux said. ‘There is no polite conversation. It is like an army setting up to do battle.’”
Clark said that to me once. I am going to try and think of it and repeat it, my own little mantra, when I find myself getting wrapped up in life’s daily bullshit. I think all of us who were close to him are so beyond that. And when I let myself get upset about something small, or worked up about something that in the grand scheme of things really doesn’t matter, I’m not honoring him or that day at Georgetown Hospital when he, knowing he was going to die, looked me in the face and said those words.
The Netflix queue is another thing. I restarted it the other day and rediscovered all of the horrible sci-fi he’d put in there.
The New York Times did a little home update/profile on Augusten Burroughs, who I think totally rules. I feel like people tend to dismiss him sometimes, but I’ve found joy in almost all of his books, and most surprisingly in “Magical Thinking,” a collection of short stories that made me PEE MY PANTS.
Sometimes the Mac will randomly decide to open Mail when I start it up, and Clark’s e-mail will load, full of Facebook invitations and Google Calendar reminders to pay his cell phone and car bills. I needed to make myself a list last night so I opened Stickies, and there were his little notes to himself about Statehood songs and Stitches and Staples ideas, including one called “Reba older” that he never told me about.
I have a bunch of old journals, too, that we somehow ended up sharing because he’d write whatever ideas came to him on whatever paper he could find. One page my handwriting, the next page his. Our resumes are still in a folder on the desktop that he titled “Clark and Reba’s Resume’s.” Soon the clothes I have will lose the scent of our old apartment. One blue shirt went unwashed since the last time he wore it — if I breathe it in too many times, will the smell go away? Am I allotted a certain number of whiffs before it’s gone? It’s like a scene from a movie when I hold it to my face and inhale, it seems so cliched, but that’s really the way it is.
Is he more physically gone than he already is if I delete or hide these things? But what do I get out of keeping them besides the intensifying of this horrible ache?
It’s amazing to me how many good things, and how much love, have come out of the worst thing that will ever happen to me. This guy Erik who knew Clark from around town asked Jennifer at the memorial service how he could best honor Clark. J told him to get his moles checked, because no one really thinks they’re going to get skin cancer — melanoma’s not so well-publicized. No one realizes that melanoma’s a different kind of cancer, one that can’t really ever be cured with traditional chemo and radiation treatments. One of my favorite doctors from Georgetown, Dr. Taylor, described it as “a bear.” It mauled Clark, and took over his entire body in less than two years.
I’ll post what Erik’s shared via Facebook, a story for which I am very grateful:
7:50 AM, I am staring at the computer screen that sits on my desk at work. An ugly cubicle surrounds two sides of me. Behind me a dreary fall day presses it’s foot against my neck. I think nothing of it; it just hangs around like a wet sweatshirt from my shoulders. It is damp and depressing. The phone rings. It’s not a number I recognized. Not one that I have stored in this idiot device. But it’s a local number. I pick it up.
“Erik, this is Dr. Murrow.”
“Good morning,”
“I wanted to call you about that mole I biopsyed last month,” he starts.
“Okay,” I interrupt. The nerves hit immediately. Last go around I got a call from the desk clerk.
“The mole was pre-cancerous. I’d like you to see…” he continues, but it all trails off in my head. Somehow I successfully write down the name of the doctor he wants me to see for a follow up. I call that office and make an appointment.
None of this would have happened if it weren’t for, well for a lot of things. I had the mole on my left leg for my entire life. As a child I looked at the odd, brown colored anomaly with curiosity. A certain amount of vain animosity existed in regards to the blemish that broke up the otherwise perfect skin. I never thought much of it at all in my life. Ever. Then Clark Sabine died.
At his memorial service, I was in tears. I hadn’t cried with this amount of grief in my life. Even my own Grandfather’s funeral didn’t affect me like this. Through a stream of tears I spoke with Clark’s sister about him, and how he touched me. In our awkward, unfortunate conversation she requested, that in Clark’s memory I go see a dermatologist for a routine check up. Clark had died of skin cancer. It’s not a very sexy cancer. It doesn’t have a PR campaign or a ribbon or a walkathon. No one on TV dies of skin cancer. You just don’t think about that shit.
Had it not been for that conversation, through wine and tears, had it not been from the urging from my friend to make sure the doctor looked at the mole on my leg, had it not been for seeing Bald Rapunzel in a garage, where I met Bonnie, who later played in Motorcycle Wars with Clark, who I had a few great conversations with over beers here and there, would I have even thought about that mole or the possibility of skin cancer.
I got lucky. Very very very lucky. I am not the most observant person. I don’t know at what point, if any I would have even recognized that the mole I’ve had my whole life was getting bigger. Chances are it would have been too late. This scares me more then anything. It’s not a cancerous mole yet and my leg will be cut up a little bit and I will go from there, most likely with nothing more then a scar and an annual check up. I’m not worried about what will happen. I’m just really frightened about what could have happened. It’s not the normal kind of anxiety I am used to. Dodging the bullet can be just as intense as getting hit by it.
Since Clark passed in June, it’s been a different kind of life for me. It doesn’t quite seem that way on the surface sometimes, but I assure you that it is. I made more then one promise that day in the ballroom, where his closest friends, his dearest family and a whole lot of people who he knew and touched gathered in memory. I made a promise to do something as mundane and ordinary as go to a Doctor. But I also made a promise to really love the shit out of this life, to do the things I wanted to do, to always plant the seed, tend to the garden, pull out the weeds as they expose themselves and if the crop doesn’t yield anything, plow that land and plant the seed again.
I’m not normally the sentimental type. I don’t really believe in fate. I feel, in the face of all this realization, that this is all just coincidence. I am by no means trying to belittle Clark’s existence on this planet by any means in saying that. It obviously had a bigger impact on me then I would have ever expected. But these are just the kind of things that happen to people all the time. I’m not special, just completely fucking lucky. We are in the midst of a crucial time in American history in terms of health and health care. I am so skeptical of so much of modern medicine, modern diet, modern health care, but please do what you can to take care of yourselves. Listen to your loved ones. Go to the doctor, get the diagnosis at least. There are many ways things can be treated and your body can be healed, but if you don’t know what you’re dealing with, you can’t begin to fight it.
My favorite thing to do in addition to (instead of) working is to watch old episodes of “Later with Jools Holland” on YouTube. Basically anyone who was even amazing for just 10 minutes of their band’s history has made an appearance on this show. Even real shitty bands, like Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, have played. Jools really has something for everybody.
There are so many amazing Radiohead performances, for instance:
And there is an absolute TREASURE TROVE of Oasis videos, which obviously pleases me to no end.
And Sigur Ros! Which definitely makes me cry a little bit.
Relatedly, Jessie and I were discussing that moment in which we realized that the lyrics to Sigur Ros songs aren’t actual words. But we initially definitely thought we knew the words to, for instance, the first track from “( ).” “You sigh along the fire … you saw the light, you saw …”
