My name is aneurin and I sometimes feel like I have been here forever but it is really only a few months short of four years. I often wonder why I keep coming here but for some reason I still do. 680 writeups, no poetry, no bullshit, just content; by no means a great writer but I ought to get a prize for persistence, right?

Like many here I have read the recent accounts of Christine's fight with breast cancer. (See wertperch April 11, 2005 and March 18, 2005 and grundoon Going Amazonian and March 7, 2005.) I wish her and Kevin all the best. I hope she makes it. For reasons that will soon become evident these accounts have a struck a greater resonance with me than perhaps your average reader.

At the moment I find myself living in some kind of strange dream, as during the course of the past few weeks I have moved from being someone whose life was simply being inconvenienced by some minor ailments to someone whose life is threatened by serious illness.

On the 3rd March 2005 I too was diagnosed with cancer, when I was informed that there were "unmistakeable signs of a tumour" in my bladder. Subsequent medical procedures over the past few weeks appear to have established that, although my tumour is a mean son of a bitch, at present this mean son of a bitch has restricted its activities to my bladder. This apparently is good news; it makes it operable. Which means that they now intend to surgically remove the tumour, together with my entire bladder. And then they build will build me a new one; apparently we all have more intestine than we really need and a section of it can be recycled. I have been told that as far as modern surgery goes this is about as serious and complicated as it gets (it involves some pretty major internal rewiring), but apparently my survival chances are a whole lot better this way.

The point is not so much that I want to share with you this particular dramatic turn of events in my life, but that you understand that there is a chance that I might just disappear, and that I did not want anybody to think that I had left because of some disagreement or dissatisfaction with the direction that E2 is taking. It'll just be fate, boys and girls.

I have tried to clear out the work-in-progress, so to speak, and post whatever bits and pieces there were to post, but Radio Aneurin is now going offair for at least a few weeks. So rest easy in the knowledge that there will be no more of those interminable nodes about peerage titles for a while. You may continue to amuse yourselves with lesbians, vampires or whatever else takes your fancy.

My thanks to dembones et al for continuing to make this place available. My grateful thanks to everybody who has ever taken the trouble of pointing out my undoubtedly poor command of the English language, to all those who have provided me the slightest encouragement, to anyone who has ever favoured one of my write ups with a vote.

Write something. Vote often.

Gotta Go. I'm off to put my hand up Sister Morphine's skirt.

Car Wash

She said she felt dirty,

black grease clogging her pores,

from the smoking or the smog

or the garbage piling up beneath

her feet.

“How is all of this going to fit

in there?”

I grabbed the binoculars

and stared through the window

at the double-image of a Medicap

pharmacy and the blurred words

of the woman on the poster.

“I need to get my eyes checked,”

I’ve said almost daily

for the past four weeks.

The soap spray splattered my

khakis and I thought

“I’ve been meaning to wash these

for days anyway – they’re starting

to ride below my hips”

as I wiped

the suds

from

my

face.

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