Heather:

When I was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease I characterized it as an act of terror.  By doing that I abnegated any responsibility for my circumstance. I did nothing wrong—there was nothing I could do to have prevented the disease, it was like getting on a bus that just happened to have a bomb on it.  I did not feel weak.  I did not feel that I was to blame.  It was a random, utterly arbitrary occurrence that just happened to have victimized me.  It would not come back.

When it did come back, my sense of disease as terrorism intensified.  It became a manifestation of fear.  Cancer was the terrorist bomb that could explode within my body at any moment.  I became jittery and tentative—vigilant to anything out of the ordinary.  I lived in fear, and I lived quietly, unwilling to make commitments to people or things, I locked myself indoors for worry of the terrorist threat within my body.

I am trying to stop that.

As always,

Anderson

Kind of like Academy Award Winner—only in a way that brings absolutely no positive connotations.

Back in 1988, when he won the Olympic gold medal in Seoul, Korea and shattered the world record for the 100 Metre, he was an absolute hero. I was a student in Montreal at the time and my friends and I were so euphoric, so energized by his victory that we sprinted down St. Laurent screaming for joy. It was a completely spontaneous act. We simply could not prevent ourselves from running, as every elated cell in our bodies was commanding us to do this.

Of course, you had to be willfully blind to not realize Johnson was on steroids. Even his nickname, “Big Ben,” implicitly hinted at his usage, and his eyes were jaundiced and yellow– a clear indication his liver was over-taxed from the drugs. He looked like a bull, and his mood was always remote and defensive, happier (if that could ever be a word associated with him) in the shadows than in the spotlight.

Carl Lewis, the great American athlete and his Arch Enemy, was everything that Johnson was not. Lithe, maniacally outgoing and resembling Grace Jones, Lewis loved the spotlight and seemed to effortlessly excel at every sport he touched. He sang, sold sweatshirts and played at being a kind of corporation, a latter day Muhammad Ali (only absent the charisma), if you will, and he was everything we hated about America, and then to have somebody as quiet and unloved as Johnson, not just defeat him but crush him, seemed a titanic victory for underdogs all over the world, and it was this that sent us shouting down the street.

IN YOUR FACE, USA!!

Of course, a couple of days later it was revealed that Johnson was doping. He was stripped of his medal and ever since has been known as “disgraced sprinter Ben Johnson.” Post fall, he has been in trouble for pointing a starter’s pistol– from his Porsche– at another motorist while on the highway, was hired by Gaddafi as a football coach for his son (resulting in the son being suspended from the league for drug use), raced a horse and a stock car, headed a failed clothing line called Catch Me, chased a Romani gang who robbed him of his wallet in Rome and failed to catch them, and endorsed a sport’s drink called Cheetah Power Surge, the commercials of which player off the fact Johnson was a cheater.

It’s been this nearly-forgotten way for almost thirty years, and it must get kind of exhausting, but every once in awhile Johnson raises his head from the shadows, most recently emerging for a photo-op to lend his support to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s unceasing and exhaustless bid for re-election. Disgrace, one would presume, and not her better angel redemption, being what brought the two men together under the Big, Confused Tent that is Ford Nation. *1

*1 It’s as if Marvel Comics was creating a super-group of villains in the Ford camp, all readying for some great apocalyptic battle to take place in a future issue.

In all, I spent nearly a month in hospital, and a very long winter just became very much longer and stranger. I was on a staggering array of medications, drugs that served to lend an already dislocating and vulnerable experience a trippy, unreal quality, more dreamscape than actuality. To compound matters, I spent about half my time on the rehab wing of a Francophone hospital where all of the other patients were about 30 years older than I was. Separated from language and the tribal, cultural connections of people in your age group, I drifted about in a hazy, timeless limbo.

At any rate, I returned home to Toronto on April 5^th, and on Sunday Rachelle, my sister and I drove down Queen Street to Trinity Bellwoods Park, and as we were passing familiar landmarks, it felt like a million years since I had last been in Toronto. It wasn’t that things looked different, but rather distant, remote as if seen through a smudged lens, and the feeling extended to my own life, too. I felt like a lived in a different country, even from myself, and the best I could do was quietly watch those in the midst of their lives.

The park was full of hopeful people, all there to soak in the first hints of spring. However, the park was barren, an ugly, pre-spring absence of colour, and everybody was colder and less comfortable than they thought they’d be, but they were there all the same, and so was I, all of us waiting for the light to fill us once again, and that, that was the important thing.