Two weeks ago I woke up at 5 AM on the dot and had this entire creepy dream in my head. I went to the bathroom and scribbled it down while sitting on the toilet before I could forget it.

It being October and all, I thought I'd share this scary story...

Image source: the awesome Yeasayer music video for their song Ambling Alp

The Peep-Hole

There was peace in the village of Ghir, thanks to the Peep-Hole.

It had been this way for as long as anyone could remember.

"It's better than a thousand kings," said one shop-keeper.

"We're blessed to have the wisdom of our elders at our finger-tips," said another.

Any dispute, conflict, or argument could be brought to the Peep-Hole in the village center. No case or trial would be needed. The Peep-Hole had already seen and heard everything. A voice from the Peep-Hole would utter the Truth, and the matter resolved.

Ori had prepared his whole life to become a Watcher. To be one of the Watchers of the Peep-Hole was Ghir's greatest honor. Only the purest-of-heart and strongest-of-mind were chosen, and only once ever six years.

When Ori was six years old, his mother Cera was Chosen. It was the best day of Ori's life. The honor bestowed upon him was immense. He pledged that day to become a Watcher himself. He would join the Peep-Hole as the youngest Watcher ever, as soon as he came of age.

Everyone in town believed in Ori and thought he would be Chosen.

On the morning of the ritual, Ori woke up and asked the Peep-Hole in his hut for the weather.

"CLEAR AND CALM. LOW TO MID 70'S," replied the Peep-Hole.

Every hut in Ghir had access to the Peep-Hole. Its tubes stretched and tunneled from the village center into their homes. Any question, private or not, could be asked and would be answered by the Peep-Hole.

"Peep-Hole, what does it take to be Chosen as Watcher?" asked Ori.

"ONE MUST BE PURE-OF-HEART, STRONG-OF-MIND, AND BE OF-AGE TO BE CHOSEN."

Ori had heard these words thousands of times before.

"Peep-Hole, will I be Chosen as Watcher today?"

But the Peep-Hole was silent. Fear crept into Ori's heart. He tasted a cold sour in his teeth. Perhaps the ritual has already begun, he worried. Ori put on his finest clothes and raced to the village center.

The entire village of Ghir had already assembled. Ori was late, and the villagers glared at him. Ori took his place in the circle around the Peep-Hole.

The Peep-Hole gurgled and pulsed like liquid mercury. Its tubes flexed like the pulled off limbs of daddy-long-longs. Ori had seen the ritual twice before. He knew that the Peep-Hole would agigate and then announce a name.

"SREN"

The village gasped. Ori felt to the dirt.

A forlorn, meek boy stepped forward. Sren was a farmer's son. He was quiet and unassuming, and, like Ori, had just turned eighteen.

The village watched silently as Sren walked into the rippling quicksilver and disappeared. Before he was gone, he screamed.

Everyone screamed when they entered the Peep-Hole. No one knew why.

The villagers dispersed, but Ori remained. Fig, a younger girl of thirteen, came over to him.

"It's okay, Ori. There's always next ritual."

Ori glanced at her. He heard no kindness in her words. He only saw her as a potential rival.

When he returned home that night, Ori tried using the Peep-Hole again. But it refused to answer him.

Am I being exiled, he wondered. Being cut off from the Peep-Hole was an unimaginable exile. Worse than death.

And Ori wanted to die.

He wandered the village late that night, watching and listening to his fellow villages consult with the Peep-Hole from their fire-lit huts. He went to the town center and spat at the Peep-Hole. His spit fizzled on the liquid metal and evaporated. Ori sat down. He watched the Peep-Hole, watched it shimmer and and pulse. He wondered then, for the first time, where the Peep-Hole had come from. He fell asleep.

His sleep was dreamless, but Ori woke with a new clarity. Last night was the first night ever that he slept somewhere else, other than his hut. Somewhere far from his hut's Peep-Hole tube.

Ori felt powerful and confident.

Later that morning, he called the villagers back to the town center.

"Give it up, Ori," they grumbled.

"You weren't Chosen," they called.

But then they saw what he had done.

Pyres of wood had been stacked around the heptagonal Peep-Hole.

"People of Ghir," said Ori. "For too long we have been under a spell. Today I break that spell. People over Peep-hole!"

All the while, the Peep-Hole was gurgling uncontrollably behind him.

Ori lit a match and threw it into the pyre. Flames encircled the Peep-Hole. The quicksilver melted and slid to the ground, revealing a skeletal structure within.

Screams erupted from the crowd. Everyone vomited. Ori turned his head from the crowd to the Peep-Hole and collapsed again to the dirt, throwing up everywhere.

Inside the Peep-Hole were the Watchers. Or what was left of them. A pale, sickly blob pulsed and writhed from within the geodesic cage. Arms and legs and heads stuck out in all directions from the creature.

Ori couldn't stand the sight -- or smell -- of it burning, so he doused the fires. As the temperature cooled, the mercury reformed around the structure.

"Go," said Ori to the Peep-Hole. "Go and never return. We will lead ourselves."

The Peep-Hole thrummed loudly. It began to move, slowly, snapping off its tube arms one by one. The Peep-Hole slid out of the village center, towards the mountains. Ori watched it disappear into the forests.

The people of Ghir cheered Ori, naming him Hero.

For a while, all was well in the village. But then the disputes resumed. Ori wanted the villagers to settle things themselves, rationally, but he saw that they could not. He tried making rules for them to follow, but the people always found ways to re-interpret his words.

The Hero set up a trial system. The people came before him to argue their case, and Ori did his best to settle their disputes.

But soon the people became clever. They spun their words. Truths became indistinguishable from lies. Lies, truths. It was harder and harder for the Hero to resolve the matters of the village.

More than once as he stood in the town center, Ori caught a glimmer of silver in the corner of his eye, far away on the mountain-tops.

It became too much for the Hero. That day, the people came to the town center and didn't find Ori.

"He's abandoned us, too."

For many days, the villagers retreated to their huts and waited.

Then, one morning, the tubes in their huts were lit. They walked to the town-center.

The Peep-Hole had returned.

Ori was never seen again.

The giant robot looks like a WED Treadwell, my favorite robot of all the Star Wars droids. I admit, I was worried that it would look organic, like a Sentinel from The Matrix, with wriggling Dr. Octopus arms and pinchy pincers that pinch. But I'm calmed by the robot's EVE-like exterior.

The room is sterile. A dozen masked, gloved attendants in blue buzz. I imagine I'm an astronaut about to step into the rocketship capsule.

Except I won't be going anywhere on this particular journey, unless something goes very, very wrong. In fact, I've already been asked repeatedly by various staffers to describe what I'm expecting to happen in this room over the next few hours:

"I'm here to remove my sigmoid colon via robotic surgery because of the cancerous tumor inside."

I'm 34 years old. It's October 12th, 2020. Five weeks ago I was diagnosed with colon cancer.

Stool, bloody stool

I've always been a standing wiper. Not sure entirely why. I must have once, accidentally, touched a load of poo during a seated wipe. That sort of thing can change a person.

This charming anecdote does factor into our story, because it means I've always had a pretty good sense for my poo. Consistency, quality, and color, both in the bowl and on the TP. Did you know, there's even a seven-stage scientific classification system for your poo, called the Bristol stool scale?!

I first noticed blood two or three years ago. On a monthly or so cadence, I'd wipe and notice a reddish tinge. Not bright red, more like muddy-red. Poopy-red. Initially, I thought little of it. Just a minor curiousity. It certainly didn't happen every time. Still, I decided to check off the Blood in stool box on the forms at my annual physical with my primary care doctor that year.

A brief aside on the phrase "your primary care doctor." Like in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the last doctor I really thought of as "my doctor" was my pediatrician. Since "becoming an adult", I've lived in three cities in two countries, which means that I've generally had no idea who my primary care doctor is or was, only that I'd need to find one to give me a referral to get this wart on my foot removed.

Anyway, this season's Dr. Who told me not to worry about the blood. "It's probably hemorrhoids."

WTF is a hemorrhoid? I wondered to myself as I said to him, "Sounds good." Googled it after, and I learned that it's a vein that pokes out a little in your butt and doesn't really want to be poking out a little, so it bleeds. Seems like a thing that can happen, so I more or less returned to regularly scheduled programming and just dealt with the occasional poopy-red wipe. This doc also said I probably don't need to come for a physical for a few years, that annual physicals are a myth, dry land in a water world.

Fast-forward to 2020. Everything sucks. And the bloody wipes are making a resurgence. Because, of course, they are. About four months ago I noticed that my first poop of the day (I usually go 2x) would have this purple-red streak embedded in it, like a racing stripe from hell. And it would happen almost without fail every single morning. That just didn't seem right, no matter what Doctors of Physicals Past told me. And then one morning I felt like I had actual blood dripping from my butt.

Now I consider myself to be a mostly healthy person. I eat fairly well (even though I enjoy the occasional sourdough loaf and hazy IPA), I run and bike and hike regularly, I ran an IRONMAN in 2016 and a few ultramarathons since. I also don't like being sick (who does?). But, like with most things in my life, I want to be "good" at health. An ideal dental appointment for me would go something like this, "Wow, Charlie, these are the straightest, whitest teeth we've ever seen. We'd like you to come in and be the model for our Instagram ads and also be our 3D teeth model for dentures. Congratulations. Here's two free toothbrushes. You also never need to floss again."

Anything that deviates from that ideal makes me squirm and I do think I can fix anything. For what it's worth I still believe that, if I ever encounter a blue flower on a mountain-top, I'm only a few months of mystical training away from becoming Batman. I already have the cape (it's actually a Harry Potter robe, but, hey, I'm scrappy).

At the same time, I counterweight this with a mild touch of hypochondria. I'll see the poison oak in the mistletoe, so to speak. In this case it was a gift. I googled again for stool, bloody stool and the dreaded colon cancer came back. Last time, I averted my eyes from these search results. But the bloody racing stripes weren't going away. I needed to get myself checked out.

Then I remembered an email from work: I was eligible for a OneMedical membership. I knew there was hype about OneMedical, certainly I've seen the billboards, but I still wasn't exactly sure what they were all about. It had been a few years since my last physical, as you know, so I was primary-care-less, with a bloody problem on my hands. I downloaded the OneMedical app, uploaded a photo of my insurance card, beep-boop, and I've got an appointment with a new doc in a few days in one of their nearby clinics. Already, I loved the experience - I could text my questions any time (see foot wart above). I'd describe OneMedical as a network of clinics with an app for scheduling appointments and texting with a doc. Sure, ZocDoc kinda does the scheduling thing, but Zocdoc feels like you're sifting through the classifieds. Gimme some non-user-generated-ratings-based curation, please.

So, I met with the doc, liked him a lot, discussed my bloody poops, and sheepishly asked if he'd be my new primary care. He agreed, and he also referred me to UCSF for a colonoscopy. Sure, I'm young, and it's probably hemorrhoids, we agreed, but it's the only way to be sure.

After some jiggling about with the referral documentation, we finally get the colonoscopy scheduled for a few weeks later on Sept 9th.

Then, on August 28th, Chadwick Boseman died of complications from colon cancer.

I wasn't freaked out. Okay, yes, I was very freaked out.

Colonoscopies are not bad

What's a colonoscopy? It's a surgical procedure where the doctor goes all the way up your butt to see what's going on in there. You are completely knocked out, so you feel nothing. The only thing you need to do is what we in the business like to call "bowel prep."

Allow me to describe bowel prep: the day before the procedure, you will poop your ever-living guts out for a few hours until you are clean-as-a-whistle, stem to stern. They'll give you a prescription for a gigantic jug of clear laxatives that you'll drink every 15 minutes or so for a few hours. In today's toilet-paper hoarding economy, I'd make sure that you are stocked up, because this gets messy.

Other then the laxatives, you're allowed to drink clear liquids - which is confusing because you can enjoy such clear liquids as black coffee, Gatorade, broth, even green jello.

But that's it. Easy. I watched Stranger Things season 3 again during my bowel prep day. Might not have been the best choice, as I intermittently had to pause Netflix to contribute my own liquified form of the Mind-Flayer, but it got the job done, and I cried my way thru Dustin and Suzie's hymn to childhood, again, as expected.

Okay, next, I woke up on September 9th. My appointment is around 2 PM. Normal day, right?

A strange, apocalyptic orange-red sky looms over the Bay Area. Here's what you need to know.
Read more: https://t.co/JxpYSnUPG9 pic.twitter.com/ZPOj4X3jRg

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) September 9, 2020

Nope.

I decide to walk over to the UCSF Parnassus building in the creepy Mars firelight, imagining I'm the last man on Earth (and hoping I don't step on my reading glasses). Carly makes a plan to pick me up in a few hours in our car.

As expected, the procedure was painless. My only bit of further colonoscopy advice here is to ALWAYS bring a book with you, to every single medical appointment you have, because there's always going to be some sort of delay or waiting room.

An hour or so later, I woke up feeling the feels of that post-anesthesia giddiness. Except no one else was happy. Carly was in the room, a surprise to me. And my doctor looked quite serious.

In addition to two small polyps (which she removed), my colonoscopy surgeon found a tumor in my sigmoid colon. At this point, I don't know a sigmoid colon from a semi-colon, but I knew it wasn't good news. Go 2020!

Despite the odds (my youth, my health), I now had cancer. Well, I probably had it for awhile, but we just found out I had it.

My doc said I'd need to meet with UCSF's colorectal surgery team, and I'd also need to get CT scans ("cat scans") to see if the cancer had spread anywhere else in my body.

And so began one of the worst weeks of our lives.

A brief family history

Let's talk about the odds for a moment.

We've already discussed my vigorous, proto-Batman level of health. And how I'm a fresh-faced, occasionally-bearded, 34 year old with the heart of a child and the strength of a chimpanzee (no, that's a humanzee).

Speaking of unfortunate genetics, it turns out that I have some family history of colon cancer.

Here's the scoop: my pops (that's cool talk for Dad) has had benign (non-cancerous) polyps in his previous colonoscopies. What's a poylp? It's a little growth thingy in your colon that may evolve into a tumor. Just like how a Charmander becomes a Charmeleon, polyps can grow bigger and more serious with more destructive power. Polyps are usually just snipped out during your colonoscopy and sent off for pathology (aka to see if they have cancer in them). Most do not. This is the case with my dad's polyp experience. Even though none of his have been cancerous, he still needs to go in for colonoscopies more regularly than those who don't have polyps.

My own tumor began as a lowly polyp, perhaps some ten years ago. We don't know exactly. But if I'd had a colonoscopy ten years ago, or five years ago, they might have seen it and snipped it out and you wouldn't be reading this.

If you go further up the Harrington tree, you'll learn that my dad's aunt (my father's mother's sister) died of colon cancer in her early 60s. And his other aunt (same side, same family) died of colon cancer in her 80s. Two factoids that I had no idea about until I asked my parents for their help filling out one of the many UCSF cancer history surveys. Also, on my mom's side, my grandfather's mother (my great-grandmother, who I never met) probably had colon cancer.

So, colon cancer is bouncing around in my family tree. But neither of my parents have it, and none of my grandparents had it, which I suppose is good. That said, I learned that my grandparents did have other sorts of cancers.

Getting confusing, right? I cannot stress this enough: Learn your family's medical history and write it down in a note on your phone. You'll be asked for this info 10,000 times before every single appointment. But, more importantly, your family history can be a signal to you and your docs whether are "higher-risk" for certain conditions.

I just didn't know about any of this. I knew there were some heart attacks in there, but not really about any of the cancer stuff. Ideally, each person would be given some sort of family history report when they're born or when they turn 18 or when they get their first Nintendo.

But that's just it. You don't get health info automatically. There's no one, other than you, to own your medical health story. You must become your own health advocate. Spoiler alert, but this is the number one lesson I learned during this entire cancer experience. Health literacy is just as important as financial literary or literacy literacy.

There are tools to help, and I'm still digging into them now. I'm much more excited now by the Apple Health stuff on iOS. I'm hoping it can become some sort of private, secure repository for my health data that I carry with me. For example, how many of you, dear readers, know your blood type? There's all sorts of little info-nuggets that you can track down NOW to pay-it-forward for FUTURE you. Cause, ain't nobody else gonna. It's like a scavenger hunt. Okay, enough proselytizing, dude.

Stage-wise limbo

Back to our story, we've just learned that I have a cancerous tumor up my butt and we've also filled out a few frightening family history reports. This is where UCSF kicks it into high gear (and, my goodness, do I love UCSF? Yes, yes I do. They are absolutely, amazingly wonderful, competent, and life-changing!).

I'm now starting to get booked for all sorts of appointments, starting with the ones previously mentioned: (1) CT scans of my abdomen and chest and (2) then the consult with the colorectal surgeon.

Because, as I later learned from my colorectal surgeon (who is the best!), when colon cancer spreads, it usually does the evolution thing from cancerous polyp (Stage 1) into tumor (Stage 2). After that, it can break through the wall of the colon into the nearby lymph nodes (Stage 3). Finally, it becomes (Stage 4) if it spreads to other organs, the first often being the liver and the lungs. At least, this is how I understand the various stages. I'm sure I'm missing some technical details and nuance. When reading about Chadwick Boseman, you'll learn that he was initially diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2016, which eventually became Stage 4. In sum, you want your stage to be as low as possible.

At this point, pre-CT scan, Carly and I have no idea what stage I'm at. Well, we do know that I'm somewhere from 2 - 4. These appointments are going to help us understand where I'm at. Specifically, the CT scans will tell us if I'm Stage 4 or not.

Carly and I are in a daze for most of the next week. And so are our parents and our siblings. I honestly can't remember how many friends we told at this point, I know a few, but not that many. I didn't know what to say or feel.

Much like the South Park lament "The Simpsons did it!", there's usually an xkcd for whatever you're feeling or thinking:

As a wannabe stoic, I allow my negative visualization to run rampant. I'm thinking of the possibility that I've got only a few years (months?) left to live.

My CT scans are scheduled for Thursday afternoon and the meeting with the surgeon is Friday morning. Between then and now, we have the horrible Internet to do horrible searches and we have the two-page summary printout of my colonoscopy, replete with some terrifying photos of the tumor. The tumor looks like a cross between a tadpole and an eyeball (two things that I'd normally love). I don't like looking at this picture, at all, but the two-page summary somehow keeps traveling around our house, and no matter where I look, I see the pink tadpole eye staring back at me, and I wonder, "Are you my death sentence?"

The sound of silence

On Thursday, Carly and I walk over to the UCSF CT scanning place. It's slightly less hostile to human life outside today, so that's nice. After checking in with the front desk, I quickly pass through the first waiting room into the second waiting room. There's always a second waiting room.

It's here I realize that the sound of a major health issue is rapidly opening and shutting hospital doors. I scribble this pithy witicism into the back cover of my paperback copy of Flow and wait my turn with the CT machine. I'm given two bottles of "contrast" provided by reknowned-drink-maker General Electric to drink. These iodine cocktails will help the machine see my inside stuff. They taste like you're drinking printer ink. They're not that bad at all. Everyone else in here is at least fifty years old. I decide to do a five minute wall-sit to prove my vigor. Finally, I'm called back to the machine.

The CT machine looks like a coldsleep chamber crossed with a Weyland Corporation interdimensional portal. It's over in less than a minute.

Plan of attack

The scans are done and now it's up to the radiologist to read them. I'm sure some neat TensorFlow or PyTorch deep learning computer vision model could help here, but I don't have access to the dataset.

The next morning we drive over to the UCSF Center for Colorectal Surgery. It's in the beautiful ghost town of the greater Chase Center-Mission Bay area. I look up at the sun before heading in, thinking, "The next time I see you, ball of gas burning billions of miles away (quoth Pumbaa), we'll know the CT results and we'll know the plan."

When I see the sun again, we do.

The CT scans were clean. There's no sign that the cancer spread to other organs, ruling out Stage 4. This is the best news ever.

The second best news we hear is that the tumor is in a relatively excellent spot for surgery. After an impromptu rectal exam that morning (hello!) to make sure there was no cancer in the rectum, my surgeon gives us an overview of the situation and a plan of attack.

He's going to remove my entire sigmoid colon (which is about a foot long), and then simply reattach the rectum to the rest of the colon. And he's going to do this all via "robotic surgery" (using the WED Treadwell-like da Vinci Surgical System), so the scars will be teeny and the recovery much easier.

We'll only be able to tell if I'm Stage 2 or Stage 3 post-surgery. He's planning to remove the nearby lymph nodes and a pathology report will tell us if they're cancerous. If they're positive, it's Stage 3.

But, either way, we're getting this thing out of my butt, pronto.

Carly and I have a plan. We're planners. We needed this. A bit of our haze is lifted as we head into our next agenda item.

Gettin' hitched

We got married (eloped, both technically and social-distanced-ly) on Sept. 30th!

Look at those oblivious smiles. Wait -- we aren't oblivious, I have cancer. We just love eachother.

Originally slated for 2019, then after bouncing around in 2020, our cute elopement threaded a very small needle with a teeny ceremony and it was beautiful and wonderful and just what we hoped for.

Now, onto our first act as a married couple: my surgery on Monday, Oct 12th (and another round of bowel prep the day before).

Surgery ain't no joke

I don't have much to add about the surgery itself. I was there. But I don't remember anything. Thank goodness. I also haven't yet watched any YouTubes of how the da Vinci robot works. I didn't want to know before the surgery, and I'm not quite ready now to see it.

I did remember to bring a book, though:

And, then, after glimpsing my many-limbed robotic friend in the surgery room, it's lights out.

The next thing I know it's five hours later and I'm in a hospital bed and calling Carly to give her my room number. The nurses in the recovery area are amazing. I'm hooked up to an IV and they're monitoring my "ins" and my "outs" (my foods and my pees and poops). They do this every four hours, so you're not exactly going to get a perfect night's sleep here, but it's great to know that they're paying good attention to you.

The big goal for me for the next 24 hours is to walk around. Being the Big Hero 6 that I am, I try to walk at 9 PM on the day of my surgery (which concluded around 6 PM), and I stand up, but my heart starts racing, so I slowly plop back into bed. Then, at midnight, my nurse helps my try again, and I do it. I shuffle around the hallway like a zombie, wheeling along my IV stand. It's a huge win. I end up walking six more times that day, between many Breath of the Wild sessions and most of The Umbrella Academy Season 2.

Sure, my guts feel like someone took a blender to them, but I'm in great spirits, with incredible support from the UCSF team, Carly, and my mom.

Side note that IVs are interesting. They're like open ports into your body, allowing the medical team to either remove or add fluids. I didn't expect that they'd just keep these ports open during your hospital stay, but they do. I guess that makes sense.

Another secret weapon of mine that aided in my recovery: this cute avocado buddy that my sister and her boyfriend sent me:

I'm squeezing this thing every time I'm jabbed with a needle (many, many times), using it as a pillow, and just loving it, cause it's so cute.

On Wednesday, after I've started farting and pooping again (great signs!), I'm sent home early.

The future

I'm home and moving slow and still feel a bunch of surgical pain in my tummy, but overall feel so happy about my progress. I have some cool scars, which I'm thinking about submitting to the @secret_buttholes Instagram:

On Thursday, I get a call from my surgeon. The pathology is back early. There's no signs that the cancer spread past the colon walls. The lymph nodes don't show any signs of cancer in them. Which essentially means I had Stage 2 cancer. Per my doctors, there's no immediate need for chemotherapy.

We did it.

I still have some upcoming follow-up appointments, and meetings with cancer genetics to learn if I'm genetically predisposed to cancers. And I'm sure I'll be doing many more colonoscopies and other tests in the future. And I'm still recovering from the surgery, too.

But I (think) I'm cancer-free now. Now, there's no way to know that little microscopic cancer cells didn't manage to break through somehow, or that I don't have cancer in some other random part of my body, so it's kinda arbitrary to say something like "cancer-free." But we do know, for sure, that my colon cancer tumor was safely removed and that my doctors are extremely pleased with the results and the signs that it hasn't spread.

Hello, impostor's syndrome, my old friend

So, I guess that means I'm a cancer survivor.

Which is weird to say, because this whole thing happened very quickly. All I did was "bowel prep" for two days and then fall asleep and wake up with a painful stomach.

But I am a survivor.

In fact, I'm probably the luckiest cancer survivor ever, from my access to incredible people and resources at UCSF to the actual state of my tumor to my family and friends support network. I paid attention to my body (noticing the bloody poops) and got the support and encouragement needed to get checked.

UCSF has me signed up for a 5+ year relationship with their cancer survivors unit (I'll learn more in a few weeks when I have my first session). I'm excited about this, because I want to learn as much as I can about how to stay safe and healthy going forward. A few of my friends have told me that there's good research into fasting and Keto and their link with preventing colon cancers. I'm queuing up some Tim Ferriss episodes with Dom D'Agostino about this topic.

My wife and my family are depending on me to stay healthy, and I'm going to do everything I can to do so. I'm going to own my health and be my own health advocate.

Some thanks

It's now about a week and half out from my surgery. I'm doing better on the Bristol scale, but not quite back to normal yet.

Monday was my surgery. Tuesday didn't capture my walks, because I didn't have my phone on me. But I'm moving around again, and eager to get back to regularly-scheduled life.

Thank you for reading this story. I hope it is informative and shocking and helps you think about your health and the health of those around you. For example, Molly - my sister - is definitely going to have to get a colonoscopy ASAP.

Thank you to:

• My incredible, magical, beautiful wife Carly!
• My parents and my mother-in-law and our siblings!
• Our friends and family!
• UCSF!
• OneMedical!

Also, if I got anything wrong in this missive from a medical perspective, let me know and I can attept to correct the errata. This is meant to be my understanding of my situation, YMMV.

2021 Update! Read Part II of my cancer story: Notes on My Chemotherapy

Maybe you caught this week's HN post that Studio Ghibli dropped 400 images into the public domain. The comments suggested that there's something odd in Japanese copyright law about taking screenshots of films, and that Studio Ghibli might have furnished these to help keep people talking about their films in reviews and whatnot.

A more useful comment gave a nice tip for scraping the images in a single wget command:

wget --random-wait --timestamping http://www.ghibli.jp/gallery/{ged,chihiro,karigurashi,ponyo,kokurikozaka,marnie,kaguyahime,kazetachinu}{001..050}.jpg

This uses the nice shell trick of using curly braces {} to expand commands and .. to expand in a numerical or alphabetical series. I first encountered this technique in the MIT course for The Missing Semester of your CS Education, which I highly recommend checking out.

For example, echo foo.{png,jpg} will expand to echo foo.png foo.jpg, and echo {1..10} will expand to echo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

Perhaps this might prove useful in your terminal travels.

Back to Ghibli. So, now that I've got all these screenshots downloaded, what can I do with them?

My little Raspberry Pi server

I've got a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM on my home network that I can connect to via Tailscale. Usually, I like to SSH in there and sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade just to feel alive. But I also have a few other use-cases.

I run a Plex server on the Pi. For a while, I also experimented with running Home Assistant on the Pi, but I just don't have that many internet of things devices (yet). I'm also planning to set up Minecraft server on the Pi, but I haven't found a non-sketchy tutorial yet.

Finally, I also occasionally VNC in using VNC Viewer to check out the latest magazines in the awesome Raspberry Pi magazine app, where they have free subscriptions all these awesome "maker" magazines. This alone is worth the price of a Pi, IMHO.

But, I was getting pretty tired of looking at the same stock desktop background everytime I VNC'ed in.

Using the Ghibli images as the Pi's desktop background

There's a neat command to change your Pi's desktop background from the terminal:

pcman --set-wallpaper /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli/ged009.jpg

Make sure that you've given the proper directory location for your Ghibli images, which, of course, you can get with the pwd print working directory command.

Now, I've already admit that I enjoy manually running apt-get updates, but I definitely don't want to be manually changing the background, so how about some automation?

Automating a rotating background with a cron job

We can use a simple cron job for this! First, let's write a one-liner command to randomly set the background from an image in our folder:

ls /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli | shuf -n 1 | xargs -I{} pcmanfm --set-wallpaper /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli/{}

It looks kinda hairy, but it's pretty simple. First, we list the contents of our directory, then we used shuf to randomly select one of the files. In fact, if you just stopped there, your output would look like this:

ls /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli | shuf -n 1
karigurashi024.jpg

But we want to pipe this randomly selected file to the pcmanfm command! I'm using xargs to do that in the next part of the command. There's probably an easier way, but this works for me.

So, now that we have our command to randomly select a background, we just need to write a cron job to run this command every... let's say, ten minutes. First, open up your computer's crontab file:

crontab -e

And add this to the bottom:

*/10 * * * * ls /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli | shuf -n 1 | xargs -I{} pcmanfm --set-wallpaper /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli/{}

Save the file, and you're done. Right? No. That didn't work for me. Let's look at the cron logs with this command: grep CRON /var/log/syslog

raspberrypi CRON[3870]: (pi) CMD (DISPLAY=:0.0 && ls /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli | shuf -n 1 | xargs -I{} pcmanfm --set-wallpaper /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli/{})
raspberrypi CRON[3866]: (CRON) info (No MTA installed, discarding output)

Not super helful. It does confirm that job ran, which is good, though. That rules out cron syntax errors. This info log is interesting. Discarding output. I don't like the sound of that. Googling reveals that we need to install a local mail server, so here we go.

sudo apt-get install postfix

You should choose a "Local" installation. Once we have a mail server, we can now inspect the cron job "mail" logs:

sudo tail -f /var/mail/pi

After a bunch of email header jargon, we finally see the error:

Cannot open display: 

--1332E5E8FA.1601069882/raspberrypi--

Awesome! I mean, the cron job still doesn't work, but at least we have some more info. That's a win. So, what have we learned? It seems like our cron job can't "open" the display. Some more Googling suggests that I need to add an env var for the display, so I add this export DISPLAY=:0.0 to the beginning on my cron job right after the cron syntax.

Did that fix it? No. But we get a new error message:

Message: x-terminal-emulator has very limited support, consider choose another terminal

Cool. Okay, so, what does this one mean? This stack overflow answer suggests that I may need to add another env var to my command. Here goes:

*/10 * * * * export DISPLAY=":0.0" XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/usr/1000  ls /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli | shuf -n 1 | xargs -I{} pcmanfm --set-wallpaper /home/pi/Pictures/ghibli/{}

Yes! Our cron job works!

What are these DISPLAY and XDG_RUNTIME_DIR? According to this other Stack Overflow answer, DISPLAY is an address for your display and XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is a place to store temporary files for your user. Probably some more to dig into here, but for now, I'm just going to stare at my VNC Viewer and watch the background change.

After all this Googling and debugging, we've now got all these cute images keeping our computer happy, even when we're not there.

Automating stuff like this is part of the magic of computers. And that's why I think it goes so well with these magical Studio Ghibli images.

Watching the Studio Ghibli films

But, now I've got a ticking clock...

I hate spoilers, and I'm sad to say that I've only seen Howl's Moving Castle (after reading the book earlier this year). I loved it, much more so than book. Which means I need to watch all the Ghibli films fast, before I spoil my way through them with my desktop backgrounds.

In our first episode of the Escaping Web podcast, Oz and I chatted with Felix Tripier who brought up Grave of the Fireflies. I didn't know about the film during our conversation, but I've just discovered that it's available on Hulu. I'll be watching it very soon. As for the rest of films, I've heard they're on HBO GOMAXPROPLUS in the US and Netflix everywhere else in the world.

For now, I'm just glad to have these images on my little server whenever I log in. It's a nice happy thing in my life, and I thank the orange website for the tiny dose of inspiration.

Beware of scissors

The other day I lopped off a sizeable chunk of my thumbprint while making a robot. The cut? It was one of those bright-red, swiftly-flowing ones, where you're pretty sure you're seeing bone or muscle or some other gross-thing-that-should-probably-stay-inside-your-body. The robot? It was made of cardboard and beer cans:

This little guy is one of many cardboard robots that I've made over the years. During summers, my sister and I would go to Vineland, New Jersey to stay with my aunt and cousins for a glorious week of catching frogs, playing Sega Genesis, eating spoonfuls of iced tea mix, and arts 'n' crafts.

For some reason, we'd always center on a unique theme each year for our arts 'n' crafts. One summer, it was Klutz Press friendship bracelets. Another was god's eyes - we made hundreds. Our proudest summer craft of them all? A "working" cardboard R2-D2. If not for a late '90s winter basement flood, Cardboard Artoo would still be with us today.

I decided to try my hand at making another cardboard robot because I've been thinking a lot about them. Mostly because I'm writing a children's novel about robots, but also cause it's summer and that's the sort of thing you do during summer.

There are all kinds of robots, cardboard and not. But there's a certain sort of robot that makes my gears turn. The rest of this post will review my favorite robots (and the kid who loves them).

Robots I Love

R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy)

It's a robot... for your original Nintendo. I'm embarassed to admit it, but I've never seen a R.O.B. in real-life, despite scouring every local garage sale in New Jersey for years.

Source: Wikipedia

These Nintendo ads are just perfection. I'm still more excited for the promise of this system than any game console out today.

Source: Twitter

R.O.B. only ever worked with two Nintendo games. From what I've read, neither is very fun. But I'm sure there are some great ROM-hacks out there with more robotic operating buddy interactions.

Johnny 5

Duh.

Johnny 5 looks a lot like R.O.B., except with more nuclear-weapons. He loves reading, loves input, loves New York City. A loyal friend, and perhaps a bit too gullible for his own good.

Source: Synthiam

Wall-E

What do you get when you cross R.O.B., Johnny 5, and a Tonka truck? This lil' garbage-collecting cutie!

Source: Blogspot

It's probably becoming quite clear that I'm drawn to a rectangular face on a telescopic neck with tread-like wheels. That's just my type.

I also just discovered this video of someone's real-life Wall-E, and it's frightenly real-looking. Maybe this means I'll get to meet a Wall-E one day, hopefully not on a post-apocalyptic wasteland Earth.

The flying robots from *Batteries Not Included

I don't remember much about this movie, other than that my sister and I watched the recorded-from-TV VHS tape all the time, and there were these super cute baby flying robots who lived with a bunch of old people in an apartment building in New York City.

Source: Google Play Store

I think these robots might actually be aliens, but I'm not sure, so let's keep 'em around.

2-XL

I'm all about using robots for learning (see my post on Mindstorms, Seymour Papert, and his cute LOGO Turtle robots for teaching kids how to program computers), and 2-XL was my first introduction to robot-powered-learning.

Source: Wikipedia

We got our 2-XL at a garage sale (garage sales were things of wonder to me as a child). Yes, we had the original 2-XL, the eight-track one. In fact, 2-XL was my first and only interaction with an eight-track system. In the early `90s, Tiger Electronics must have bought 2-XL, and they came out with a cassette-version.

Source: Wikipedia

But I'll always prefer our smart-alecky 8-track 2-XL, and my fond memories of jamming catridges into his belly, wishing that he was a Nintendo Entertainment System instead.

Mega Man X

When I was a kid, I was pretty sure that one day I was going to become Mega Man X. Buried alive in a weird time capsule, awokened years later to avenge my creator, upgrading my body with strange new powers.

Source: Amazon

I'm still waiting for that to happen, but the the mean time, I recently started playing Mega Max X2, and it's hard! I'm four bosses in, haven't found a single upgrade, and only snagged one heart container so far. Wish me luck.

DUM-E and U

Robot arms with quirky personalities, built by someone named Tony Stark.

Source: Fandom

PSA - check out Sourdough by Robin Sloan for a great little novel on robot arms, bread-making, and San Francisco.

Metal Head

Two of my favorite things in one terrifying package - turtles and robots:

Source: Fandom

Not to be confused with the always-evil Mechaturtles from the impossible original Nintendo TMNT game:

Source: Fandom

Sonic Sam

I had one of these (it's still in my parent's attic). This guy rolled around our kitchen, flashing its eyes and emitting weird smoke from its mouth.

Source: Spotern

And it's now memorialized in one of my favorite TV shows.

Robo from Chrono Trigger

The best JRPG of all time? I think so. I loved Chrono and his gang. I used to draw them all the time. Frog and Robo were my favs.

Source: Fandom

The Iron Giant

Sometimes giant robots are gentle and curious. They just want to love and learn. The Iron Giant is one of those robots.

Source: Wikipedia

Kids and robots just go together, like kids and E.T.

Cozmo

A programmable robot!

Source: Digital Dream Labs

Cozmo's fatal flaw is how nearly impossible it is to connect your phone to the robot's local wifi service, which is how you are forced to control and interact with Cozmo. The connection process is random, non-deterministic, and saps up most of the time you've allocated to play with Cozmo. Also, Cozmo's parent company recently went out of business, which is a huge bummer for the robot-toy industry.

That said, I've had a lot fun with Cozmo, including teaching him how to find my toothpaste with a TensorFlow computer vision model.

Droids

Okay, the main event. Droids.

The Star Wars folks who put together the droids for A New Hope are complete geniuses. They're dirty, they're resilient, they're loyal, they're funny, they're everywhere. I could go through a whole list of them, cause I really do love them all (GNKs, Artoo, Threepio, IG-88, BB-8, those little mouse-like black boxes in the Death Star), but in a rare dose of restraint, here's my favorite Star Wars droid!

WED-15-1016

It's R.O.B. with a longer neck, a blue face, and way more creepy claw arms. You may remember this robot critter from its role in repairing the Millenium Falcon at Hoth Base in Empire Strikes Back. Or at least attempting to repair.

Source: Star Wars At a Glance

I treasuring my WED-15-1016 card from the Star Wars collectible card game, and I'd play it every single one of our daily games in latchkey, no matter what. (Side note: listen to this great Zachtronics podcast episode with one of the designers of the Star Wars and Star Trek collectible card games)

Source: Card Game DB

Here is one of WED-15-1016's cousins, a fully tricked-out WED Treadwell with all sorts of terrifying arms and claws:

Source: Fandom

I even found this questionably-real deleted scene from A New Hope showing an impatient Luke Skywalker interacting with a Treadwell on Tattoine:

More robots

So, who did I miss in my list? Data? He's an android, so not exactly a robot. But possibly Mega Man X is an android, so maybe I'm already mixing things up.

Speaking of lists, I also found this gigantic list of fictional robots and androids on Wikipedia.

I'm not-so-secretly hoping that, one day, the robots in my book will be added to this Wikipedia list. Yes, I could edit the Wikipedia page myself, but c'mon, that's not the goal here.

From cardboard to ciruit boards

Also, it's high time to upgrade my hobby. I've begun looking into basic robotics kits, and I'll hopefully be constructing some new robotic best friends very soon. Maybe not Maker-Faire worthy, but ya gotta start somewhere.

Create wonderful things, be good, have fun

This is the credo of Klutz Press, the most important book publisher of my childhood. It being summer and all, Hobbes, ol' buddy... let's going exploring!

What makes a Klutz Press book so good for learning stuff?

If you've heard of Klutz, then you've likely seen their debut: Juggling For the Complete Klutz.

If not, I highly suggest seeking out a copy. Keep in mind, it's more than just a book -- Juggling for the Complete Klutz has these amazing attributes:

• It's spiral-bound
• It has hilarious drawings
• It comes attached with three real-life bean bags!

These are book super-powers, in my book (a Klutz-worthy pun?). In our day, my sister and I owned, devoured, and treasured these Klutz titles:

• Country and Blues Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless (comes with instructional cassette and a gen-u-ine Hohner harmonica)
• Friendship Bracelets Craft Kit (comes with string and supplies for making friendship bracelets)
• Table Top Football: A Guide to the Classic Lunchroom Sport (comes with an amazing leather-ish table top football)
• Cats Cradle (comes with a tie-die cat's cradle string)
• Bead Loom Bracelets: Learn to Make Beautiful Beaded Bracelets (comes with beads and string)
• Kids Shenanigans (comes with a Whoopie cushion!)
• Earthsearch: A Kid's Geography Museum in a Book (comes with interactive spinners, a sand-powered clock, and a real-life penny)
• Explorabook: A Kid's Science Museum in a Book (comes with a bunch more interactive projects and whatnots inside the book, like mirrors, spinners, and a packet of algae that you can grow)

As a kid, there was nothing better than getting a new Klutz book (ok, maybe a Super Nintendo game). But unlike a replay of Super Mario RPG, these Klutz books require no nostaglia goggles. Here's why I think they're magic:

Klutz books are spiral-bound

Books for learning stuff should be able to open up and stay flat. The old 1980s computer manuals for computers like the Commodore VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and my new old Apple IIe knew this much -- their manuals were spiral-bound and spell-binding.

So, why don't we see more spiral-bound books? Without knowing that much about printing costs, I imagine they're more expensive. Also, they do look slightly worse on a bookshelf, especially if you're going for that 'grammable color pattern look (so, just don't do this).

Klutz books come with the required materials

The little "paper" football that came with the Table Top Football: A Guide to the Classic Lunchroom Sport was a revered grail of mine. I remember that my dad took a sheetrock knife and made a small incision in its plastic case attached to the book so that the football could be slid in and out, with the explicit rule that the football must either be in the case or being used in a game. This is much like the inexorable Jon Siracusan rule for Airpods. Obey, or the Airpods will be instantly lost forever.

Side note that there are some people who just love making small cuts into the plastic cases for things, so that you easily return them to their "pristine" condition. I, myself, don't understand these people. I like wripping these cases to shreds instantly.

Anyway, back to these Klutz books. By including juggling bean bags, yarn for friendship bracelets, or a real harmonica, Klutz Press books gave you everything you needed to get your hands dirty. "Active learning", or something like that. Playing = learning. Etcetera.

Klutz books have hilarious art

Just look at that paper airplane stuck in the teacher's hair!

Klutz had a particular art direction that spoke to me as a child. The goofy people in their guides made me feel like it was okay to be a klutz.

Which brings me to the most important reason that Klutz books are special.

Klutz books embrace the Beginner's Mindset

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the experts mind there are few - Shunryū Suzuki

Everyone starts out as a klutz. No matter what. That means it's okay to make mistakes. It can even be funny - in fact, it should be funny! Because it's fun to learn new things.

Being a klutz, making mistakes, having fun, this is the path to wonderful things.

Who's behind Klutz Press?

According to Wikipedia, Klutz Press was founded in 1977 by three friends in Palo Alto.

The apocryphal story is that John Cassidy, a recent Stanford grad working as a high school teacher, brought a bucket of tennis balls and some hand-written instructions for juggling to his remedial reading class. The laughs and learning and genuine reading and genuine juggling that ensued inspired Cassidy and his buddies from Stanford to publish Juggling For the Complete Klutz under their new company: Klutz Press.

Juggling For the Complete Klutz has sold over 2.5 million copies. But Googling for Klutz Press is somewhat challenging these days. In 2000, Klutz was acquired by a company called Nelvana for $74 million, and in 2002 Klutz became a subsidiary of Scholastic, Inc. This latter merger is a good match in my book, as the Scholastic Book Fair also ranks heavily in my childhood memories of learning to love reading. The only other company I'd feel comfortable with owning Klutz Press is Pizza Hut - thanks to their delicious BOOK-IT! reading program, which brought me dozens of delicious cheese Personal Pan Pizzas during the 1990s. My parents couldn't decide if they hated or loved Pizza Hut for this.

Nowadays, Klutz.com redirects to the Scholastic website, and it's unclear what's out-of-print or available from the voluminous Klutz catalog. So if you do find a genuine Klutz book and kit, I'd snag them quickly!

Luckily, I was able to find a good interview with Cassidy from 1995 on the Wayback Machine. In 1995, Klutz was at the height of their power and influence in kid's minds. Here are some choice quotes from Cassidy:

On their company culture at Klutz Press:

"In terms of being laid back, we take a back seat to nobody."

On their "teaching" style:

"Talk to a kid about fun and math, and it's like you're talking about two different sides of the universe. If we can climb this mountain, there's nothing we can't tackle."

"Kids don't learn all that much by listening or reading. They need to get elbow-deep in a subject and touch it, feel it, and smell it."

This reminds me of Seymour Paypert's Mindstorms book about his work with LOGO and the Turtle machine (you can check out my notes on the book)

The article explains a bit about their business:

• All of Klutz' books sell for less than $20
• They can have low prices because: (1) the books (with their accompanying "stuff") are viewed as more than books - but "toys/novelties", so more retailers than booksellers are interesting in carring them, and (2) they do large printing runs (150k copies vs the usual 10k for children's books)

And, importantly, the final word from Cassidy:

"I can hang a spoon off my nose," Cassidy boasts, "and I take a lot of pride in that".

Create wonderful things, be good, have fun

I just wanted to write that out again. I've decided to adopt their credo as my own life motto.

I learned so much from Klutz Press as a kid. I'm still learning now. Thank you, John Cassidy and team, for making these wonderful books. My juggling is finally starting to get pretty good, but I'll always be a klutz.