A Visit to The Wall.

(December, 2019.)

I ended this year standing at Trump’s border wall, looking up. 

My partner Kristina is Latina - more specifically, she’s half Mexican, half European descent. She spent the first 18 years of her life on the border of El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. Her first long-term relationship in school was split across the two cities. Her father Luis, who is of Mexican descent, is a criminal defense attorney whose cases frequently overlap into immigration law. He has stories about the immigration system and the plight of Mexican immigrants that would make your hair stand on end, even if you’ve seen the raw-yet-made-light reports from liberal political comedians like Johns Oliver and Stewart, or if you read CNN every morning in bed and get vaguely depressed by the kids-in-cages reports before getting up and trying to make sense of the world again. 

When we went to visit her father these past few days for the holiday season, we told him we were going to drive to the border to look at the Trump Wall and take photos in morbid curiosity. His eyes lit up. He began to list off all the many reasons why the wall does nothing to keep people out. He went into the many methods for illegal entry into the US, happy to lend us books from a large library of legal practice tomes and narratives about the border, all on a sagging overweighted shelf in his law office. He even had books about his own family’s border experiences. 

There are many ways to cross the border without a US passport. The most common is to hire expert people-smugglers, known as coyotes. Despite the best efforts of less corrupt agents at the gates and bridges that separate the two countries, these smugglers are all-too-good at packing desperate families into car trunks in exchange for every single penny these families have.

Another method for getting in to the country is to obtain a legal Visa, and then simply bury yourself into hiding - a “Visa overstay,” so the US government calls it. And method #3? Get lucky and encounter border agents who are looking the other way, or pay them off. The statistics say nothing in even the top 5 methods about crawling on foot over mountain ridges, across dry deserts, through thick woods or under tall bridges that separate the two countries. There has not been any easy way to do that for decades, long before Trump was a household name. Besides the fact that the border is crawling with agents that have no other job but to find you, the rugged terrain and desert landscape make chances of survival low.

We told Luis that part of why we were going to the wall was to try to mount some sort of evidence for its ridiculousness. We wanted to take something back to the pro-Trump people in our lives, to engage in a healthy debate. “We’re looking for something concrete - statistics, pictures. Things that can maybe help convince them what a waste of time this whole thing is.” His eyes got a bit dimmer and he shook his head, his voice speaking with the inevitable wisdom and bitterness of time and experience. “You’ll never convince any of them,” he said. But, we went anyways.

The divide between El Paso and Juarez is not like most other stretches of the southern border. Here, the two cities are smashed together. From most vistas high and low, on either side, they look like one big town. The various mountain ridges, and the long stretch of mostly-dry river, look more like a border than anything man-made. In some places, even those natural formations don’t clearly illuminate the difference between Mexican land and US land.

When you drive the highways of El Paso, you get no sense of where Mexico starts. You know what side of the road it’s on, because on the other side are the Franklin Mountains, the highest ridge in this part of the Texas / New Mexico / Mexico triangle. But it’s very difficult to tell the difference between countries from most vantage points. There are two popular slogans in both El Paso and Juarez, frequently seen on t-shirts and coffee mugs and hanging as signs and banners in and over restaurants. The first is “dos naciones, un corazon.” Or in English: “Two nations, one heartbeat,” often accompanied by the letters “JRZ” for Juarez and “EPTX” for El Paso. (The second slogan is “El Paso Strong,” which was created to honor the victims of the anti-Hispanic white terrorist who shot up the local Walmart earlier in the year.)

If you go to El Paso and can’t immediately see which houses are in one country and which are in the other, there are two key ways to tell the difference. One way is to drive all the way to the border fence, which has loomed tall over Paisano Drive for years. “Fence” isn’t really an effective word for the immense, tightly-gridded iron lattice that runs across the town like a prison. 

The second way is to squint more into the distance, especially where the border land goes up into the various dry ridges that separate large portions of the two cities, and look for that surreal brown-grey monolith that has sprung up only in the last few months about a mile or two south of the iron fence. Look long enough, and you’ll see it: that’s the Trump Wall. 

At night, the wall is easier to see, because there are blinding white lights that shine atop it, shooting illumination through the windows of the people that live in the houses below. But during the day, it almost looks like one of the natural formations of the mountain ridge, thoroughly featureless and bland, except it’s squarer and blockier than everything around it. When you ride in a car with El Pasoans and get a tour of the town, even as they proudly point out all the beautiful town squares, natural lookouts, and delicious restaurants, they’ll always seem a little sad when their eyes look up and South and catch a glimpse of this surreal, supplementary structure standing between neighbors. My partner Kristina, who grew up here, recognizes everything about her hometown, except for this. “Oh God,” she said the first time she caught sight of it. “Wow, that’s it isn’t it? Ugh.” That pretty much summarizes everyone’s view of it here. 

This stretch of the wall was actually built by private enterprise, via the deeply conservative organization that literally call themselves We Build The Wall, Incorporated. They have zealously volunteered to take over the land on behalf of the Federal government and start the building of Trump’s grand vision. The clear majority of people in the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez disagree with We Build The Wall. But where there’s money, there’s a way. I heard one El Pasoan sum it up nicely in a bar: “It’s a little like if someone you’ve never met came to your house, where you live behind your favorite neighbor, and said, ‘I’m rich, and I’m going to use my wealth to build a wall between you and your friend. I don’t really care if either of you want one.’” In this case, that “someone you’ve never met” also happens to be from nowhere near El Paso. We Build The Wall is actually based, of all places, out of Florida, my own home state, where my family and most of my high school friends voted for Donald Trump, and will vote for him again.

My partner pulled over to the side of the road about a half mile from the actual documented border, so I could take photos of the wall. I got out and started to position my camera; it’s tricky because, this close, you’re actually looking up at the wall through the grid of the border fence - one wall through another wall. I had to position my camera just right and zoom through the spaces between the grid to get a clear enough picture. I got the lens focused on a particularly compelling piece of the wall, where it starts to rise up into the mountains. This part of it is interesting because it physically illuminates one of the more absurd aspects of the border wall: Besides the fact that crossing on foot is not one of the main ways anyone gets across the border, the wall actually goes up over dangerously steep ridges that have no paths and no practical ways to walk up. If you were going to try to walk from Mexico to the US, it wouldn’t be anywhere near here. In fact, the border fence is constructed below the mountain, at the foot of it. But this newer border wall defiantly rises right over it, in that part of the land where it makes absolutely no sense for anyone to cross, and where no one does. 

Seconds after I snapped my first photo - the only photo I had time to capture - Kristina rolled down the window and leaned out the passenger side. Her voice was urgent and worried. “Get in the car. We need to go,” she said. I looked back behind me and saw it: a large border patrol van, the kind that seats several rows of people in the back, rolling up behind us from out of nowhere. A moment ago it wasn’t there; it must have crawled up from a hidden ditch somewhere nearby. Naively, I wondered why it would matter if we got talked to by this man. We weren’t doing anything wrong - there wasn’t anything illegal about hanging out at the border and taking pictures. But my partner had been a bit nervous all along about coming down here, and her voice was scared of something I didn’t entirely understand yet. Later, she explained that these men were often on a power trip, and while they certainly wouldn’t arrest you, they could make your life very difficult. Think about any of the worst cops you know in your own hometown. These guys, are those guys. So I climbed in quickly, and we sped off. 

For about a mile, we were followed close behind. I thought the border agent would almost certainly start flashing lights and try to pull us over. But after a minute or two, he pulled up beside us, turned his head in our direction in an ineffective effort to look casual, gave us a brief visual inspection, and then made a left turn away. My partner looked visibly shook, and I understood that this was something that had been happening here at the fence long before the wall went up above it in the mountains. I got my first taste of the instinctive distrust that locals, even white locals, have of the border patrol. I felt a little over-privileged at having taken this too lightly in my head at first. She tried to pull over to a quiet place on the road to re-compose herself, but we ended up at a dead-end turnaround where an El Paso cop was waiting, also at the border fence. As we turned our car round, the cop turned his engine on, and started to follow us just like the agent had. “Of course,” my partner said in resignation. 

It was the same thing: he crawled behind us conspicuously for about a mile, pulled up beside us, took a brief look in, and turned off. My partner told me why, but it was already pretty obvious. I’m privileged, but I’m not stupid. We are white - I’m as white as morning snow, and my partner, though half Latina, looks white. And so, we were deemed not worth the time, by these agents who were paid taxpayer money to sit in ditches and watch the wall. It’s also worth noting that both agents appeared to us to be Latino themselves. “Most of them are,” her dad later told me, and I researched online later for confirmation. Lest the point is missed here: We pay the US government, to hire Latinos, often Mexican Americans, to patrol the border into their own country, to keep other Latinos out of the US.

If that makes you angry at the agents who are immigrants themselves, remember, they came to this country on a dream: The dream of having a job, any job, that would feed their family. Even if that means arresting their own people.

White Californians like me love to watch Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers and laugh at jokes about how the border wall is a representation of Trump’s penis, a sequel to all the enormous golden buildings he’s built with his name across them, a transparent attempt to stamp his name and style all over things that were better off without it. The penis jokes are our junk food, an easily digestible way to understand the world around us. We’re as guilty of casually under-analyzing what’s going on around us as the pro-Trumpers who exclusively watch Fox News and feel fully informed by it. 

But our little excursion to the border illuminated the sadder truths beneath the it’s-Trump’s-dick jokes. Every president since long before I was born has wanted to leave a legacy for themselves in the history books. Regardless of your opinions of any of their administrations, or your personal analyses of their effectiveness, each leader of the free world chose a key issue or a place in the world, and said, “this is where my name goes.” For Obama, it was health care. For George W, it was Iraq. Ironically, Reagan, the president many Trump conservatives idolize almost as much as Trump himself, was famous for his appeal to the Soviet Union. I hear his words in my head often when I watch Trump talk about his legacy: “if you seek prosperity for Eastern Europe, come here to this gate Mr. Gorbachev. Open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev. Tear down this wall.”

After our visit to the border, I talked to my partner’s father Luis again. I felt more passionate than ever about presenting my findings to my conservative family members and friends. I pushed him to help me craft a good argument to support the photo I had taken and the story around it. But as before, he shook his head. “It won’t help,” he said. “People believe what they want to believe.”

Eventually, I gave up. But later, on our way out of his law office that day, he seemed to still be reflecting on it. Finally, he acquiesced to a single argument. “You want to try to convince them, really convince them? Here’s the best argument you can give,” he said. I expected him to pull another set of statistics out about how people actually cross the border, or what it is they actually do when they get here. I thought he might point out any of the many studies and reports that line his bookshelves, all of which contradict the narrative that undocumented immigrants are, as Trump likes to say, the primary source of violence and crime in the US.

Instead, he just peered at me through his thick-rimmed glasses, his eyes tired from having delivered this argument more times than he could probably count. “You tell them this: People who come to this country, are just people. Like all people, they want to make their life better. That’s what everyone wants to do, all people, everywhere. And they’ll always find a way. They always will. Fences, walls; you can’t stop people. They will always find a way.” 

As we drove away from his office, I looked south to the lines of homes, and I didn’t see the wall, the more obvious border fence, or even the ridge line or the Rio Grande. Before all that, I saw what my girlfriend had always seen first, ever since she grew up here: just, one big city, with one heartbeat.

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(older posts)

I really, really, REALLY don't have cancer.  

Five days after my final chemotherapy, I posted a “final blog entry”  where I swore I’d never write on my cancer blog again. (You can read it down at the bottom there.) So now, two months later, I’m gonna go ahead and write on my cancer blog again. 

Zwowmp!

The truth is, I mostly wanted to use this space one last time (for realsies this time) to update everyone on my health. But there are also a couple things left to say that didn’t get said in October.

2018 has finally, finally arrived, and  in the last couple months, in preparation for the new year, I’ve been rearranging my life and putting a few things in order. Here’s the highlights:

In the month of November, I went on an apartment hunting spree. I decided that my old place in Pacific Heights had officially become my “cancer apartment,” and it was time to leave it behind and start fresh. Nothing says “next chapter of life” like a new physical space, and when I spent time in my old home I was always reminded of the darker days of 2017. So I chose a bright, sunny one bedroom in the quiet Oakland suburb known as Ivy Hill. It sits right around the corner from Lake Merritt and it’s as folksy and neighborhoody as can be. It’s far from the party and the action and yadda yadda - it is not an apartment for hip happening 23 year olds. But for post-disease healing happy-again 38 year old Jason, it’s perfect. 

Three weeks ago, I went to get my first post-chemo scan - a “pet CT” as it’s called . Scans during chemotherapy tell you if the chemo is working properly, but the real test is the scan you get afterwards. That’s when you find out if the chemo did more than punch the cancer into temporary  submission. It’s when you learn if the chemo actually killed it dead.

Well…it did. It killed it real dead.

There is no trace of the disease anywhere in my body. The remaining cancer cells they had found back in August in my chest and armpits, all wiped from the face of the Earth. I am really, really, really Free of this nonsense, Free with a capital F.  

I had to fight one final vicious battle, as the pet CT gave me terrible digestive issues for three days, leaving me out of work and nauseous and sitting in the bathroom for hours per day. I was PTSD’ing like crazy, because the stomach issues were eerily reminiscent of the worst moments from chemotherapy; and perhaps worst of all, the scan results came in late, meaning I was sitting around anxiously checking my email for news. But after all that, at the very very last moment, the oncologist walked into the room  and immediately declared, with no preamble and no fanfare, that I had no cancer and nothing to worry about. 

She said a bunch of other things to me after that, and her and my wonderful girlfriends and chemo-partners Sky and Christine had a bunch of dialogue, I think about next year’s scan and when to come in again and all that. But I was a little like a soldier coming out of a deep bunker after a cease-fire had just been declared, my ears ringing, my head feeling heavy and hollow, my heart bursting with new emotions I didn’t dare have before now: hope, faith in the future, real happiness. It was all I could do to hold myself in until we got out of the doctor’s office and I was able to sit down on a secluded bench to the side of the building. As soon as my butt hit the seat, I exploded. I cried so hard I thought my eyes would pop out. I shook, I trembled violently. I laughed. I cried harder. I think at one point it occurred to me that I wanted to dance, but there was no music and an awful lot of people around, so I danced in my head. I took the hands of Sky on my left and Christine on my right and I squeezed them like they were made of life-saving juices. I have no concept of time during all that - I don’t know how long we sat on that bench. Eventually I spoke for the first time - I think I said “OK,” and then “OK” about 8 more times until it really was. It was OK. Things are OK.

Something they don’t tell you about cancer, there are several fake moments when it seems like the nightmare is over. There’s the moment you finish your final chemo and they disconnect you from the line. The nurse says “wow that’s it, you’re really done,” and you sort of say to yourself “hey yeah, it’s really done.” But then you go home and you battle your worst nausea and more hair falls out and the drugs rock your world one last time. And then you pull out of it and you look in the mirror and you can breathe full breaths and you think, “ok, NOW it really is done!” But there’s this lingering thought: they have not declared me in remission yet. They haven’t looked inside me yet. They just THINK I’m done. So then you kind of bide your time for two months, try to get on with your life like you don’t have cancer. You tell people “I’m doing great” and reassure everyone with a thumbs-up. But you don’t really KNOW. 

It wasn’t until I sat on that bench that it really ended.  Not the CT scan; not the final battle with nausea and sickness; not even the doctor declaring the results. It was when I sat down, and cried my first happy tears over this long ordeal. That was the moment everything changed. 

This past week, I laid down on the surgical table one final time to have that stupid ugly box ripped out of my chest. The port is gone; there’s just a big scar under a bandaid left, the last physical remnants of my disease. Without that, you’d never know 2017 even happened. 

I am at home now, resting comfortably and healing from the surgery. There is nothing left to do - all of the weight of this is off my shoulders. The only doctors I have left to see are therapists. But even now I’m left with a puzzling thought: how very very difficult it is to say, “it’s over.” It FEELS over - it has since that cry on the bench. But it’ s still hard to say it out loud. People come up to me at work and they say “hey, I heard it’s finally over.” And I should be able to immediately answer, “Yes, hell yes, it’s over!” But instead I find myself sort of sideways-nodding and mumbling, “hmm, uh-huh.” I can tell the story of the CT scan and getting sick, of the late results and the bench and the port removal. It adds up to a real ending, a closure. But I think my emotions are still back there somewhere, worried irrationally that there are still battles left to fight. I guess I have just defined PTSD in a nutshell, so no surprises, but even if my mental case is ‘typical,’ it still bears writing down. 

So here I am, 12 months out from the first signs of cancer, 10 months out from my diagnosis, 8 months from when chemotherapy started, 2 months from when it ended, and just a tiny handful of days from when the doctor said, “you’re really fine. We’re sure now. Go home.”  A lot has changed since my previous “final blog post.” I’m not angry anymore.  My hair grew back. My nails don’t look like a freak show anymore.  The world-weariness and mental exhaustion is gradually excising itself from my mind and my body. I’m starting to feel enthusiasm for life again. I am much closer to joy. 

But some things haven’t changed: I’m still afraid. I think I will be for a long time. It will be the Great Work of 2018 for me to learn how to live my life without fear again. On the plus side, my gratitude for my friends and family, for everyone who helped me pull through, is still bursting to overflowing. And I’m maintaining the determined optimism I promised myself when I first closed this blog up. 

I’m ready to go to festivals, to camp in the redwoods, to get my sexy back with my romantic partners, to find old love and new love again, to breathe and to run and to bike and to live, and to do it all without the lumps I carried in my throat and in my heart for so so so long. 

I am ready. If you’re reading this, come join me. Seriously - send me a text. Let’s go.

__

The End. (Really.)

I don't have cancer. (the original last post.)

I've thought about this particular blog entry more times than I can count this year. It's Saturday, 5 days after the final chemo. I am "free."

I thought, on this day, that I would feel ecstatically happy and triumphant; eager and able to put this rottenness behind me; excited to get back to my 'real life.' 

The reality is a bit different. I'm feeling some unexpected stuff, most notably anger. I'm angry, as angry as I was when I first got the cancer news. I'm angry at the medical establishment, for being so damned impersonal. I'm angry at insurance companies, for being greedy and terrible. I'm angry at the bureaucracy, the deep layers of tangled administration within hospitals and doctor's offices and laboratories. I'm angry at the cancer. I'm angry at Trump and the Republicans for being so blind to suffering and the right solutions for people like me with pre-existing conditions. I'm angry at how this experience has changed me forever. I'm getting my first chance to look back on all this and think about it, and I am really just furiously angry.

I'm also terrified. I know in my heart I will never believe that this cancer is gone. I'll be waking up mornings feeling my throat, looking for lumps. I'll be going to each of my future scans with trepidation and fear, wondering if that's the day that kicks off another 6-month cycle of pain and torture. I'll probably be doing this for years. It is the very definition of PTSD, and it's going to take some serious therapy to move on. 

I want to keep this blog honest, so there it is, the hard truth: this is not a joyous day. I don't feel elation. I'm not even hopeful yet. I'm just tired, world-weary. California is on fire, people are losing their homes, the air is pungent with the stench of stale flame. Our insane president is trying to launch World War III. People in Puerto Rico are drinking waste water to stay alive. My toes are numb, my fingernails are still falling off, my head is bald. This is the first day I haven't felt nauseous. I'm a long way from joy. 

I want to say this, though, and there is a lot of raw power in these words:

There is no cancer in my body.

Scans actually showed that a long time ago, months in fact. There are no lumps, no rashes, no night sweats. The chemo pounded it into the ground, just as it was supposed to, and kept pounding long after the cancer was eradicated. I am "in remission."

And even though I may not feel like celebrating yet, I'm going to celebrate anyway. I'm going to reunite with old friends, I'm going to go out, I'm going to throw a party, probably two or three of them. I'm going to travel and write songs and do all the things I often didn't have the energy to do. 

I don't believe in my heart that good things are coming, because I'm deep in this PTSD, real real deep. But I'm still going to plan as though good things are on the way. I'm going to live optimistically, even if optimism isn't in my heart. I'm going to act like this cancer is never coming back. 

These are my selfish words in closing. I have no deeper platitudes for you; at this point, 5 days out from the end of a 180 day war, I don't have any life lessons to offer, no conclusions. I'm still working on believing that I can actually live again without cancer. Hope and learning will come later, long after this blog is closed down for good. 

What I do have to offer is tremendous thanks in my heart. I have so much love and thanks and praise for the people around me. It wasn't contained adequately in the last month of blog posts about all my best friends and loved ones. So I want to add to the list of people I've written about with thanks and gratitude. Call it an "honorable mentions" list. 

Sarah and Makiko

My bandmates have been looking out for me through this whole process. And while I've always been personally closer to Sean and Meredith, my fellow collaborators Sarah and Makiko have been there for me too. They helped me find resources to deal with my cancer, got me in touch with other artists who had struggled with illness; they launched a big t-shirt campaign to raise money for my treatments through our Great Highway website and through friends and family; they planned the agenda of the band around my illness, gigging when I was strong enough to gig, rehearsing when I could rehearse, focusing on online stuff and recording when I was bed-ridden. They've been friends and allies in this fight, and they've been infinitely patient as I slowly climbed out of this hole. I'm grateful to them, and I couldn't ask for a more talented or more lovely band. 

Mary

My sis from another miss (sister from another mister?) in Seattle has been looking out for me from afar, sending me cookies in the mail, cards, emails, texts. After she moved away from San Francisco and had her first baby, we stayed in touch less, but we have always been best friends and kindred spirits. I've known Mary most of my adult life, and she's always been very kind to me. Her cookies are also crazy delicious.

My GA Peeps

One of the last major things I did in my life before I got cancer was to graduate from General Assembly's design immersive program. Since the cancer derailed my plans to relaunch my career and push myself into the next level up, my fellow students have been extraordinarily nice to me over Facebook and in emails and texts. I've gotten kind letters of empathy and optimism from a sizable handful, and some, most notably my pal Eric, have written me many times to check up and ask if there's anything they could do. A thousand thanks to this hugely talented group. 

Adina

My lovely opera star friend and friend of the band has also been regularly pinging me on Facebook messenger to check on my progress. She's a deep well of musical talent, and she's also extraordinarily compassionate and kind. I can't wait til I'm fully better, and can find new and creative ways to use her remarkable voice on another Great Highway track! 

Caroline and Will

I think one of the most touching moments of my whole life is the day that, somewhere in the dark middle of this whole nightmare, Caroline sent me a song that she'd composed and recorded with her beau, about me and my struggle. It was a light-hearted and funny little acoustic number, but I cried as much as I laughed, and probably listened to it 50 times that day. I still have it tucked away on my iTunes playlist. To my festival partners and international friends, I miss you two, and hope to see you at Lightning In A Bottle again - say, in 2018? 

There are still others to thank too, But I know this entry is getting long, and we still have the best Great Highway song ever to talk about. So I'll wrap this up by saying, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone.

We did it guys. We beat cancer! Phew.

I'm gonna go lay down. 

Read about 15 people who saved my life >

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But wait! Now, the Great Highway cancer countdown CONCLUDES!

Read about my two favorite songs of all-time by the band, and listen to the whole collection from 1 to 40.

#2. "The Dance of Thrones" - our funky electronica cover of the Game of Thrones theme song is an unlikely track to put at #2. But this instrumental jam is fucking magical. Everyone loves it every time we play it on stage, and for some strange reason it turned out amazing, like far more amazing than any of us expected. Adina's guest-star opera vocals, Sean's blistering guitar solos, my first saxophone solo in the band, and that driving relentless power-violin from Makiko. You must dig it!  

#1. "Little Black Book" - I told Sarah when we first released Industrial Love Scene that this was the best produced and best composed song in Great Highway. Yep, and it has never been beat since. The lyrics are tight, snappy, every word is a piece of art. The synth and acoustic layers are in perfect balance. Sarah's vocals are perfectly intense yet understated. It's sort of like the perfectly engineered indie pop song. Even without the little finishing touches, like Sean's added-late guitar solo towards the end or the power tom drums banging in the background, it'd already be an amazing tune. I think we will top it - Sarah and the band are already cooking up some pretty phenomenal tracks in the studio for 2018. But let it be known that, as-of this date in history, Little Black Book is hands-down my favorite song in Great Highway.

Check out the rest of the Great Highway cancer countdown >