Ned Henry January 7, 2021 · (nedhenry.medium.com)

Many of my friends — John, Sue and others sang in this virtual choir during Covid. I was going to but didn’t get it together in time. I tried another virtual choir but I really didn’t like just singing by myself. Each person sings and records and sends in their own voice individually. Someone technical puts all the voices together and creates something like this. My choir, Collegium Vocale started rehearsals for one of these virtual choirs this past Tuesday for the Spring semester of 2021. I decided with the cancer in my mouth and well the cancer in general and all the appointment and shit and the full time Sprint I’m in that I would sit out the one they are doing in January. They will also do one in February and March so 3 total are planned. It’s not quite the same for the singer since we all all separated but it is a way to keep us singing during Covid. I will sing in the February and March virtual concerts if I can. Here is the website for Collegium Vocale. I am sure they will post these virtual concerts whenever they get finished. We are some 50–60 singers. The piece above is by 17,500 singers from all over the world.Collegium Vocale SquareSpaceDear friends, I hope you are all well and staying safe during these bizarre circumstances. We face the challenge of…cvchorus.org

Vesna texted me an offered me some flannel sheets she isn’t using. unfortuately they are Queen size and I have a King. I’ve got them on order and they will come when they come. Sometimes Amazon surprises you and things just get here much faster than they say. But is was just so sweet to get her text. She’s a love.

Oh I did get my Bellsouth email stuff finally all fixed and am now getting the Bellsouth emails on my phone. It just took me slowing down enough to figure it out. I need this since Emory uses that address.

So I get this email from Loyola High school:

“Dear Gentlemen of the Great Class of ‘68,

I just wanted to take this time to wish you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas.

It’s been a very challenging year to say the least — please know you are always on our mind. We are always grateful for our dear alums and the Loyola community as a whole.

While we are not able to host a Christmas Eve Mass in person this year, we are offering it virtually streamed from our very own Clougherty Chapel tomorrow evening at 5pm.

If you have not already RSVP’ed, we hope you will join us and feel connected to your classmates and to the High on this very special holiday. Let us know here if you’d like to tune in. <https://bbox.blackbaudhosting.com/webforms/linkredirect?srcid=27531045&srctid=1&erid=1802842627&trid=633d0690-dcaf-4b16-961b-1d59aa7f042e&linkid=247005002&isbbox=1&pid=0>

Take good care, and we truly look forward to seeing you in 2021 and brighter days ahead for us all.

Merry Christmas,

Patrick”

I went there for my Junior and senior years of high school. Loyola is on Venice Blvd at Normandie if I remember in LA LA. LA LA is what they called it when you actually live in LA like we did. Not La La like the movie. L.A.L.A. Loyola sends lots of fund raising stuff. Now I give maybe $3K to charities each year and I know the ones I want to support and Loyola is NOT on that list and probably never will be. It is THE Jesuit high school in LA and has been around forever and is an expensive college prep high school. They have money and they have rich alumni and I am not rich. Now I’m sure they also have scholarship programs and things like that as well. But they are not on my list. But I have something on my mind so I send this back to Patrick. I have no idea who this guy is.

“This might be too much to ask but I am trying to locate a photo of a classmate from 1868 named Fred Parker. Fred passed away several years ago and I believe Father Eddie Samaniego — also a classmate from ’68 and close friend might have performed the funeral service for Fred. I have been diagnosed in the last 2 weeks with stage 4 lymphoma and am trying to find connection with my close friends who have passed on from this life and Fred was my best friend in high school at Loyola. I would like very much to have a dialogue with him while I go through my struggle. I know this is a real long shot but I thought you might have the old yearbook from our senior year and could snap a photo of Fred’s picture and send it along. I would be most grateful. And would also be grateful if you added my name to the prayer list at Loyola.

Thank you so much.

Ned

BTW — My name is the class year book is EDMUND HENRY. I also had 2 brothers who went to Loyola — David Henry and Jack (John) Henry.

Ned

Just Being “Not Racist” is Not Good Enough Anymore”

He writes back:

“Good evening Ned,

I am so so very sorry to learn of your diagnosis. I am praying for you and will absolutely let our Jesuit community know to keep you in their daily prayers.

I won’t be in the office until the middle of next week, but as soon as I am able to be there, I will absolutely find your yearbook and find any pictures of Fred. And I’ll be happy to send those your way.

If there is anything else I can do or if you have any other requests like this, please do let me know.

I hope you are hanging in there as best you can during this extraordinarily difficult time.

God Bless,

Patrick”

I reply: “Thank you so very much Patrick. Fred and Eddie (who is now a Jesuit priest) and I were all in that class and all went to the same grammar school close by — St. Gregory’s. We were thick as thieves in grammar school. In high school Eddie made the sports teams but Fred and I did not so we just hung out together. He came into my mind at this time for some reason and so I am so happy you can look for picture for me so I can connect and remember him.

Have a glorious Christmas and I look forward to the mass today.

Thank you.

Ned

Just Being “Not Racist” is Not Good Enough Anymore”

I attended the virtual Christmas mass this year at Loyola. It was really kind of all over teh place due to Covid. The readings were recorded from a different location at a different time as was the choir but it was a typical boring Catholic mass. Now I am not a church goer as most if not all of you know. I stopped going to mass after I left home after high school. And but for a year or 2 when I lived in Lilburn (I went to St. John Newman there for a year or 2), I only went to mass when I visited my parents and I went with them. Other than that I am your typical “fallen away” Catholic. But if I can on Christmas I like to watch the pope’s mass from St. Peter’s. I love the pagentry and the spectacle and well you know I was Bishop Manning’s favorite altar boy so I got to do cool stuff at the big Christmas midnight masses he did. So I’ve caught the pope’s mass a couple of times over the years and enjoyed it.

So I get nothing back from Patrick and I figure oh well, it fell through the cracks. I am starting to get my shit together a little bit more than I was at Christmas time. I’ll just keep moving forward and not worry about it. Yesterday he writes back.

“Hello Ned,

I hope this note finds you doing as well as can be.

I was not able to make it into our offices until earlier today, and I wanted to make sure to make good on your request. So, I snapped a few photos from the Class of ’68 Yearbook. I found a few of you and also one of Fred. Please see the attached. I hope this is helpful. If you need anything else like this, please do reach out and let me know. I am more than happy to help with anything.

Continued thoughts and prayers for you.

Wishing you all my very best,
Patrick”

And I respond with this: “Patrick,

Thank you so very much. As I go through this I am looking back at my life and trying to make sense of it all. I am writing a blog (and not that I care if you look at it), it is my process which I would say is pretty unique, pretty rough and pretty untraditional and way out there. I’ll add a link here. It is public. It is me processing cancer but really processing my whole life. I have mentioned Loyola a little bit but Loyola was not a very important stop on my journey of life. But these memories of my time there are precious to me. Right now all my memories are precious to me. I am doing very well. I have had brain and spine MRI’s this week and have a very important meeting with the oncologist on Thursday. But this is a Sprint not a marathon. Cancer is sprinting through my body and I now have chemo sprinting with me. And one of us is going to win and I hope it’s me but I am OK no matter what. I’m doing very well. And I am busting my ass 24/7 to learn and grow from this experience.

Here’s the blog. I don’t know you at all. But it’s an open blog and if anyone wants to walk this journey with me they can. Fair warning — there’s lots of bad language if you’re sensitive to that. And I did not walk a Christian path.

My Cancer Journey. Ok I’m new with this blogging stuff — … | by Nedhenry | Dec, 2020 | Medium

But now I can ask Fred to come along if he wants thanks to you.

I am very grateful.

Ned

Just Being “Not Racist” is Not Good Enough Anymore

So that’s my conversation with Loyola. Well get to Fred and Eddie in a minute. But I did want to mention St. John Newman in Lilburn and talk about why I went back to church there. I decided to check it out when my parents visited I think. Maybe it was for my wedding. They went to mass every Sunday no matter what. Growing up my Dad went to 6:30 mass every day before he went to work and he would get me up at 6 and drag me with him in case the alktar boys didn’t show up. He did NOT want to be tasked with any kind of job at mnass. We had many knock down drag outs over that when I just went back to sleep when he went back upstairs for his shower. I don’t remember how or why I went to St. John Newman for the first time but I liked it. (I also played basketball in the over 30 church slow break league which is where I met Pete.) I liked the music and the singing and I liked the ritual of the mass and I really liked the priest who gave the sermons. They were good sermons — relevant and timely. He was a married Catholic priest – very rare. He had become an Episcopal priest and was married and then later converted to Catholicism. So he got stay married. I think all Catholic priest should be allowed to marry. If that was the reality when I was in the seminary I might have become a priest and my life’s path would be entiely different. I found out later that some 8 or 9 of my classmates at the seminary who became priests were child abusers. I looked it up when the LA diocese published the names. And MOST of the abusers on the list came under Cardinal Manning’s watch (yes our pastor at St. Gregory’s when he was an auxiliary bishop for LA). Now I am dealing with a lot of SEX stuff right now. Maybe I’ll share it maybe I won’t. I will keep working on it. But it is the reality that my attitude about sex has been fucked up almost all of my life.

So here’s Fred Parker and here’s me in high school at Loyola. At St. Gregory’s, the Catholic school a half a block down the street where we all attended church and school, in my class Fred was always the class president, I always won the religion award and Eddie Samaniego (now Father Eddie Samaniego, SJ) always won the athlete awards. But we were all smart and good at sports. And we were all good friends. Eddie’s father was on the draft board when I got drafted after I quit college and he helped me avoid going to jail or prison or something because I was NOT going to Vietnam under ANY circumstances whatsoever. I saw Eddie a few years ago. He and his mom Chatta visited my mom and me at Scripps when my

mom got sick after an operation that turned out to be the cause of her death but I will talk about her someday later. So I saw Eddie about 15 years ago. He looked good. It was a good visit with the 4 of us. Not sure where he is anymore but he was the one of us that turned into a Jesuit priest even though I was the one that won the Religion awards. Funny how things turn out. Fred died about oh maybe 25 years ago. We had lost touch and he had a family and lived in LA and I was in Atlanta doing all the crazy shit you’re reading about and well we never connected again really. Hut he was my best and really ONLY friend at Loyola. You see I came there as a junior so I did not build 4 year high school friendships there. Those were already established. But Fred and I carpooled to school every day with another guy that had a car and we ate lunch together every day for those 2 years and we got to know each other better than ever. He was a modest guy, well liked, friendly. I developed the same kind of closeness I had with Gavin at ATT in much the same way — by sharing lunch every day day after day. Other Loyola kids would play poker at lunchtime or do something else. They were wearing their Letter Sweaters every Friday — like Eddie who played basketball there AND at USC where he went for college. Fred and I were not part of that popular crowd. But he was a good friend and I wanted to write about him since he also is on the other side. And I do hope we reconnect. Patrick also sent a couple of other photos from the yearbook of me in Karate club. I didn’t make the varsity basketball team or baseball team. Loyola was a pretty good sports high school then and probably still is for all I know. But anybody could join the Karate Club run by the chemistry teacher who I liked so Karate was my high school sport. We never did any competitons or anything but we got our little white karate clothes with white belts and practiced. So that was high school. Nobody except me went to Santa Cruz from our Loyola class. And I lost touch with anyone there I ever knew. But I had a really good English teacher senior year and got that great Jesuit education for 2 years at least. Jesuits are generally considered pretty smart. I have no idea if Patrick will read any of this. But my guess would be probably not. But I am very grateful that he took the time to help me remember all of this stuff about my high school experience. That’s what I said yesterday in this blog. I am exploring my memories of the past here and it is all good.

So I got an email from Louisa. Louisa runs the refugee ministry at All Saints Episcable church. A BIG chuch in midtown. Sue goes there and Sue is very active in this ministry as well. I used to teach English classes to refugees at IRC but Covid and a misunderstanding about boundaries put an end to that so I haven’t been teaching at all this year. Anyway, Louisa put me together with a 14 year old sophmore in high school student to tutor him in Math. Sue told her I was available. Yunus is a refugee from Myanmar and has had a rough life. I don’t know it all. Most of it is confidential and he hasn’t opened up about it. He is absolutely LOST in Algebra. Well I’m no great shakes either these days. I loved alegebra in high school — took 2 years of it but it’s all gone except for cross multiplication. But since Yunus couldn’t keep up with his “virtual” classes anyway, we tried other subject and we’d have these sessions once a week on Zoom where I’d help him with whatever. Biology, Geography whatever he wanted. He’s a good kid but he really is a 14 year old kid. Kind of doesn’t really care all that much. He doesn’t show up online for his classes and he is starting the whole muslim praying thing now where he prays several times a day. He’s active in his mosque. And so the time we have scheduled is getting shortened because he “has to go pray.” I fully support him no matter what he wants to do — even if he wants to bail on the whole deal. But I try to tell him that it’s important. He says he wants to work in a restaurant and I tell him well how are you going to add up the check if you can’t do math. I want him to see that math is practical and that he needs to learn it. btw — His English is excellent. He’s been in the US for 4 years or something. Well I started this cancer journey at Thansgiving and he was on break. We had a couple of shortened sessions in early December and they have been off for the holidays for the last 3 weeks. I have told Louisa that I have cancer and that I really don’t know what my schedule is going to be but that I wanted to keep working with Yunus but only if Yunus wanted to do it. I think it is good for me and will help my healing as well. So she asked me if it was OK to tell Yunus I was sick but that I would continue but might miss some sessions for chemo or medical stuff. So I told her for sure and to tell Yunus I had cancer and to work on his math. I haven’t heard back yet but I hope we get to continue. Sue helped us go back to find a spot in the IXL curriculum for math when he got lost. She put an aptitude test together and I asked him to solve the problems in one of our sessions and he’s at about 5th grade level. Decimals and fractions. So we bailed on algebra since neither us really had a clue and went back to fractions and decimals where I am more comfortable too. That’s where our session have been for the last couple of months. Of course all these excuses from him about showing up at all (he forgot) and needing to go pray are still there but if he really wants to continue with me, Louisa wants me to continue and she will spell me from time to time if I need that. She also expressed an interest in the blog. I do tell people it helping me heal but it is pretty far out there. So I wrote her back and told her how I was doing, shared the blog with her — she doesn’t really know me but she is a lovely human being and committed to helping refugees full time. So we’ll see what happens. School is back in session next week and I am going to FINALLY have a week off I think from all the tests and labs and appointments. Yunus is at Clarkston High and they are all online classes. But tutoring would on Zoom whether he ends up going back to live classes as Covid winds down or not. He’s a good kid. But at a 14 year old maturity level after a hard life.

I think you’ve head this one before but I feel like listening to it.

You know I don’t subscribe to You Tube so I get the commercials but after 3 seconds I can skip them Are you getting the commercials? Lots of them for the IRC. One organization that I do actively support. The one I volunteered at teaching English classes.

I guess the government is melting down. I’m getting news alerts and text flows all damn day about the capital. I haven’t turned the TV on. I can’t DO anything about it so why let the noise intrude on my work. I’ll find out soon enough what happened. I did turn on the morning news this morning after I saw an alert that Warnock had won and saw an interview with him. Was really glad about that. Ossoff was ahead too but hadn’t been declared the winner yet. He might have been by now. Hope so. Maybe Georgia has turned a corner.

Gonna sign off for now. I am writing on 1/6 still but won’t post this until tomorrow night. I want you to have time to think about what I said yesterday about what I need from you.

I just got an email that brought me so much JOY!!!

Now it’s REALLY 1/7 at almost 9 AM. I did what I said I would do yesterday and will post this tonight so this read will probably long depending on what happens. I have the most important ZOOM today with the oncologist at 2:30. Sue is going to be there. I will find out if this has spread to my brain or not. We don’t think so but the MRI results will be back and she can tell us what they are. I’m ot nervous about it. My course of action is the same whether or not it is positive.

Vesna had some trouble last night. I know kind of what’s been going on at the Capital. I get news alert on my phone and but I did not turn the TV on. Medium is telling me they can’t save this draft so I am going to start a new draft.

My Cancer Journey — 1/7 — #2

Let’s start with the Course in Miracles this Morning — Lesson 7 (and it’s an important one) “I see only the past.”

OK back to Vesna. Vesna grew up in Croatia. She went through the war in Bosnia and Crotia in the 90’s. Hard for me to imagine what going through WAR is for a young girl. She is a French teacher for little kids at a private school here. She teaches like the really young one — kindergarten age — French and at that age as we all know it’s easy for kids to pick up a new language. She’s a very happy (most of time) and loving (all the time) person who is definitely on this journey with us. She texted me last night at 11:30 that she was really scared. She had gone to get vaccinated and got her shot and on the way back from the med center she heard for the first time what was going on. She turned on the TV when she got home and had flashbacks of the Serbian (Yogoslavian) president at that time.Slobodan Milošević( Slobodan Milošević ( Serbian Cyrillic: Слободан Милошевић, pronounced [slobǒdan milǒːʃeʋitɕ] listen ); 20 August 1941…en.wikipedia.org

Here’s another link about that war.Yugoslav WarsThe Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies fought…en.wikipedia.org

Both Vesna and Sasha were growing up there during this time. I’m not sure how old they were but I would guess they were in the 20’s. I have not spoken much with either of them about this time. But Vesna I would love to talk with you SOMETIME about it. Maybe on the back deck when it’s warmer and you don’t have to go to work.

So she’s getting flashbacks and she is scared. Now I have not turned on the TV at all to watch the blow by blow. Still haven’t. I guess it got pretty bad and a few people got killed at the Capitol. I’m sorry about that. But since there was ABSOLUELY nothing I could do about it anyway, I chose to not let it intrude into my own work on cancer and my life. So I gnored the news. This is part of me breaking my addictions.

Her son Nick comes home from a camping trip (Nick has been so SOLID since his dad (Gavin) died. If you want to catch up on who these people are and see their pictures you can go back to that day when I just pounded out my thoughts as fast as I could in the beginning and didn’t even fix typos. I’m writing more thoughtfully now. Vesna — on top of these flashbacks — had to tell Nick that his grandpa (Gavin’s father — a southern minister) was in the hospital. He is 91 and Nick is very close with his grandad. So they spent the rest of the night comforting each other and getting through the night. She texted that it was just too much for one day.

I was up at 11:30 washing the dishes and knew I needed to reach out. I had been having a really good night with reading, translating, working the course in miracles and a little bit of blogging. I did eventually get to sleep around 1 AM and slept til 7:30 this morning but it took 2 ambiens. I am going to talk to the oncologist today about my sleeping problems and a new rash that showed up on my back. I see the lymphoma dermatologist tomorrow afternoon and I will have her look at it and biopsy site. I digress. So I texted Vesna back. I just talked about breathing and that the news was just noise. It WASN’T the war she went through and that she couldn’t DO anything about the situation anyway, so just focus on Nick and herself for a while and find some peace in prayer. She sings in the choir at the Catholic church she attends and has a beautiful voice. I hope she sang hymns last night to herself. Breathe. I told her that I would turn the ringer on and if she wasn’t feeling better in an hour to call me. She didn’t call back and she texted this morning that she made it through the night and was off to work. We’ll talk soon. She is a great love.

So here is Lonnie and Carla. They have been really good friends since I moved to Atlanta. They lived in Orlando. On that first outside sales job I had my territory was the Southeast and I was the OEM sales manager. OEM means Original Equipment Manufacturer. I was selling daisy wheel printers and my accounts were the big word processing companies in my territory. These were the days before PC’s when everything was done by what they called minicomputers (what we now call servers). The clients were dumb devices like CRT terminals (which btw I sold for most of my sales career and we’ll get to that sometime I hope) but at this time I was selling daisy wheel printers to OEM’s and Lonnoe was the QA mananger for one of my biggest customers, Burroughs.Daisy wheel printingDaisy wheel printing is an impact printing technology invented in 1970 by Dr Andrew Gabor at Diablo Data Systems. It…en.wikipedia.org

Betweeen 2 of my customers — Burrough and Lanier in Atlanta — I made 90% of my considerable nut. My quota was like $27M a year. I’ve never had a nut that big ever since in my entire sales career. But both were established accounts and rolling with a private label printer program that just ATE printers like candy. My job was really to keep things rolling along so the revenue flow did not get interupted. My comapny was QUME (Quality is You and Me) Cheesy slogan. We didn’t use it. We were just QUME we OWNED the Letter quality printer market. So the word processing companies wanted letter quality printing and we were really the only game in town. You could use dot matrix printers and other technologies but you couldn’t get letter quality printing. You know like using a typewriter so the letters didn’t have little dots defining them. Laser printers eventually made daisy wheel impact printing obsolete. I’ll tell a funny story about that. So I have all the big wigs from Lanier out in San Jose (South Silicon Valley)to discuss the program with all the Qume Execs. Now Lanier was a HUGE account. And one of their executives asks, what do you think about his new laser technology from HP?Wel the VP of Marketing at Qume speaks up. Well, we think that companies will always need impact printing for multi part forms. So we are not pursuing that technology at this time. Did any of you ever read GOOD to Great by Jim Collins. A really good book btw. That story is not in the book but all the stories in that book are like this one. Qume did not survive. By the time they tried to get in the laser game it was too late.

So I called on Burroughs and Lanier ALOT. They were my bread and butter. Also tried to pick up some smaller OEM’s in Hunstville and Raleigh but those 2 were my main focus. When they called, I jumped. Lonnie was my main contact at Burroughs. He was QA and he had to make sure that everything we sent could be integrated seamlessly with the systems they sent to their customers. Their customer SAW a Burroughs printer Not a Qume printer. This was all private label, custom color mold injection, their logo — we built their printer to their specifications and it had to be right. And Lonnie’s job was to make sure it was. So we went to the factory in Puerto Rico several times so he could inspect the plant there and I would go to Orlando maybe twice a month for something. I got very close with Lonnie and Carla. They had me over. Carla was a golfer and she I would play golf. Lonnie didn’t play. Carla was a fifth grade teacher and a better golfer than me. They had met at FSU and every Thanksgiving (Rivalry weekend) they hosted a GATOR HATER party for the FSU/Florida game. I mean huge parties, kegs and all. They’d rent big screen TV’s and had them around the pool and in every room. I even bought an FSU shirt (which I still have and need to give away) for these parties. I went whenever I didn’t go to California for Thanksgiving with my family which I did most years. There was always a token Gator in attendance — one guy wearing orange and blue. James — It coulda been you — (if you even read this far.)

Lonnie and Carla loved to party and Lonnie built these magnicfgient homes they lived in in Orlando 2 of them. He designed them and built them himself. Took him years. They had pools and screend in porches. He even a half mile above ground boardwalk over the swamp to the lake a half a mile away. They had large gardens with flowers and vegetable and all kind of things. I been to both of these Orlando houses many times. They were magnificent and just great party places. We were great friends over those years. After I had moved on to a new job we still saw each other whenever I was in town. Florida was always in my territory all the time no matter who I worked for or what I sold. But we didn’t see each other as much. They came to my wedding and the picture is from that day.

So Lonnie and Carla moved to Islandia near Melbourne FL on the other side of the intercoastal. For a new job that Lonnie got I think. I visited them there but not as much. This was not a custom built home like their Orlando houses were but it was nice. Lonnie got cancer — prostate I think — and was fading pretty fast. Carla let me know and I rearranged my work schedule to try to get down there as soon as I could. I wanted to say good bye. I had my travel plans all made but Lonnie died 2 days before I got there. I went anyway and stayed with Carla for a couple of days. That was the year that Georgia Tech had a really good team and they played FSU for the ACC championship. Carla and I watched that game together — me pulling for Tech and her pulling for FSU. FSU won. But Tech went to a big bowl game (Sugar Bowl I think) that year and played Mississippi State led by Dak Prescott and won that bowl game. Carla and I talked about how Lonnie’s presence was still there. I had learned about the Bardo from Buddhism and we could both feel him. She got comfortable ackowledging his presence and mourning his loss. We’ve lost touch in these subsequest years but she would want to know I have cancer too. We were close and we had some great times together. I am going to put that picture on my refrigerator in my gallery of my support system.

Sue just called and we went over our strategy for the call with the oncologist today. I didn’t know this but thre is a new section on the portal that has all the clinical reports of all my meeting with all the doctors. I need to spend about and hour reviewing the reports, making notes, and then Sue and Ill have a prep meeting for about 20 minutes to prepare an agenda for the call with the oncologist. So I’m gonna go grab my shower, get something to eat and get cranking on my research. Back later.

I have soooo much to do today and I am slowing down a little. Allen just brought groceries over. We chatted on the deck for a few minutes. He mentioned and I agree…STACY ABRAMS IS THE WOMAN OF THE YEAR.Stacey AbramsStacey Yvonne Abrams (; born December 9, 1973) is an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, and author…en.wikipedia.org

She DELIVERED Georgia and changed the entire course of our nation and if you think about it, the entire world. We now have hope for the future that was not there before. And it was all because she LOST a narrow election for governor and decided to go into action to make politics a FAIR FIGHT.

Tried to put a link in of that site and the blog crashed. I’ll just post it without a link and you can copy it and paste it if you want. I gave them a donation at the end of 2020. Copy and Paste and send them some $ — www.fair fight.com.The fight is not over yet by any means and not by a long shot.

Sorry to Pete and any other Republicans reading this. It’s just how I feel about it.

Here she is the night before the election on Colbert. Allen sent me this link cuz well I’m not looking at TV these days on my own. It is AWESOME.

I got another email from the same person and it brought me more JOY. I am overflowing with JOY.

John this Apple music is great. I wanted to listen to some chanting in Latin and found a playlist someone had posted. It fills the house. That playlist ended and now I have some monks chanting while I polish (correct typos) on what I wrote so far.

You know I have no idea who reads this. Sylvia called me and asked if I needed anything at the store. I didn’t since Allen already went today. We talked and she asked me to text her a link to this. The beginning might be too rough for her but ….text didn’t go through. That Apple vs Android communication problem. Anyway I’ll email her but she is as inconsistent with email as Ronna.

So I have had my ZOOM with the oncologist. Sue helped me keep on track and cover everything. All good news. I am not cured. I still have 5 rounds of chemo ahead but the cancer is NOT in my brain or in my Spine. They will still give me chemo in the spine with another spinal tap in the next round of chemo since I have lymphocytes in the spinal fluid. The call was pretty much all good news. We went over all my labs and my symptoms and side effects and she gave me a pretty high survival percentage. I have a risk score of 3 out of 10 and she estimates an 80% chance of long term survival. I’ll take it. All day long.

So I will keep writing and doing my work. I told her I would do my job and she is doing hers and she said today that it was a marathon not a sprint. I’ll take that too. I have always been better at long distance but slower running. I could go forever when I was a runner but I was never very fast. Never done anything close to a marathon (like Jack) but at least I can keep pace longer. Pace was a key word in my Translation last night about my cold feet. So other than getting an electric blanket and/or mattress heating pad to keep my feet warm and trying Benadryl instead of Ambien for getting to sleep, my side effects are pretty normal and my labs while having a few concerns to watch are OK for the time being. I see Dr. Tarabadkar, the lymphoma dermatologust tomorrow about the open sore on my leg from the biopsy site. It is not infected anymore. But it hasn’t healed either. I will also have her look at a new rash on my back and look at my gums as well. So everything is moving forward. Nothing for any of you to worry about. I have good medical support and a team of you helping me on this journey so Its all good.

So I’m kinda going to stop searching for links on YouTube for music. I’m mostly listening to Apple Music since I subscribed. Yes John I am on the dark side now. I will research that iPad link you sent. Once I get an iPad I will 100% on the dark side. On Apple music you can all find your own music adn the classsical library is vast. I’ll post something if it really moves me but I can’t post directly from Apple music so I’m not going to post music as much. I’m just gonna keep writing and listening and doing my own thing. Also probably gonna kill my subscriptions to Netflix and HBO Max. Just not looking at TV at all and don’t want to. Writing is so much more creative for me these days. I had forgotten since I hadn’t really done much writing in a long time.

OK one more from Emmy Lou. This just popped up on the playlist. It’s a Townes Van Zandt song. He died young at age 52. He was a hoeroin addict and stuggled with his deomons his whole life but he wrote some gorgeous songs.Townes Van ZandtJohn Townes Van Zandt (March 7, 1944 – January 1, 1997), better known as Townes Van Zandt, was an American…en.wikipedia.org

and Emmy Lou does a great version of this one.

Trying to figure out how to post icons of pictures instead of copies of photos. Reading Image Resizer but it’s not working. David Garry where are you when I need you?

Took some time to write along email. I’m now listening to Rachmaninov Vespers. Highly recommended. We sang several of them in one of the Collegium concerts. That’s all for now.