I have a confession to make. After all I've boasted and bragged (not really) about not having a phone, I actually do have an iPhone. I've had an iPhone since April 2018. OK, I've physically had an iPhone in my apartment since April 2018 after I went down to Kaohsiung for a family matter that required my signature and my aunt foisted an old iPhone on me in case I decided I needed wanted needed a phone. Figuring the iPhone was a spare and likely no sacrifice on my aunt's part, I accepted it and upon returning to Taipei, placed it in a ziplock bag with some silica packets and stuffed it away out of sight and out of mind. 

Recognition of the iPhone in my apartment wasn't revived until over a year later when I got Samsung blootueth Galaxy buds for my computer. I wondered if, even without a 4G phone account, the iPhone could be used as a bluetooth mp3 player. I'm technologically inept, so it took about a month before I concluded it cannot. The month included several weeks before I found my aunt had included a sim card hidden in the iPhone case so I could actually activate it, only to find iPhones won't sync with anything but the latest version of iTunes (at least I'm assuming that's the reason for my computer's immediate and unequivocal (almost disdainful) rejection of the iPhone or vice versa). Years ago I tried a newer version of iTunes, but it was so unsightly and counter to my use of iTunes that I immediately re-installed the older version and stuck to it with every new laptop I've gotten. There will be no syncing this iPhone to my computer and no loading music onto it.

This epitomizes my relation with smartphone technology, mind you. Useless. All dead ends.

But fiddling with this iPhone also reminded me this thing is a camera, too! I was actually aware of that fact, believe it or not, but didn't care since I had all but hard-stopped photography way back in 2011. After smartphones and their camera capabilities started to become ubiquitous, I was really happy that I had already stopped shooting because they rendered my kind of street shooting meaningless with everyone shooting everything all the time, and the truth of the matter is my photography was nothing special and no better than what everyone was photo-dumping online. Why bother?

But I fiddled with the iPhone 6 camera just out of curiosity.

September 2, 4:56 p.m. - The neighborhood park on the block I live on. They fenced off the playground area for several weeks and now it appears they're building something over the concrete slides that haven't changed since I moved here. I'm curious what they're doing to it.

September 8, 4:34 p.m. - Riverside park near the closest access point by bike from where I live (Minsheng E. Rd). The arches of Maishuai Bridges #1 and #2 visible. The closest riverside park access point on foot, if I was, say, hypothetically in excruciating abdominal pain, from my apartment, less than half a mile, is by the closer bridge.

Although not at all interested in doing it again, it got me looking around my apartment at whatever was remnant of photography. I dug up a Ricoh Caplio R4 digital point-and-shoot that actually still works! The screen is a bit foggy (but was always terrible anyway), but the battery still had charge(!) and apparently I had taken some shots with it in 2016 (prior to that, the last pics are from 2008). I also have a Canon IXUS 860 IS digital point-and-shoot that succeeded the Ricoh and was a much better camera, but its battery was completely depleted. Then I remembered laptops have SD memory card ports so I was able to inspect what activity there had been between 2011 and when the battery died, and found images on it taken here and there until 2015. Not a lot, mind you, about a hundred pictures with almost half taken at the National Air and Space Museum annex outside D.C., and I do remember whenever I used the camera I had no immediate intention of doing anything with the pictures. I was just putting them into the camera. I was done with "photography".

I created a folder cache for those years to put into my records on my computer, but it's quite paltry. When I was actively shooting I had folders organized by months (digital) or rolls (film) in folders by years/series, organized by camera. The whole of my photo records comes in at almost 23GB (not high quality) and 436 folders, including some 16 years of black & white shooting.

I still have a Lomo Fisheye 2 that even has film in it. The last roll of Lomo Fisheye I had developed was in July 2010 (and none of that appears to have been posted anywhere, indicating reasons for the photography hard-stop actually started a while before the actual stop), so I assume the roll was loaded right after that. Three frames had been exposed, but I have no intention of finishing the roll, although after nearly 10 years it might be interesting. The camera is covered in crud and I'm considering giving it a cosmetic cleaning just to give it the respect it's due.

The only film SLR I still have here is my brother's Nikon N70 and it hasn't stored well (no ziplock or silica pack storage). It's a very sad camera, but not beyond rehabilitation if I wanted to use it. I don't, but I do still have a roll of Ilford XP2 Super in the fridge that expired in 2012. Admittedly, film that old makes me want to shoot it just to see the results (sometimes expired film, unlike food, brings serendipity). The SLRs that I took back to New Jersey after I stopped shooting are my Pentax ZX-5n, which I loved, and a digital Nikon D80 that my brother gave me after he upgraded, but I only used it for a few months before the hard-stop.

Ricoh Caplio R4 (I'm quite pleased that for my kind of photography, smartphones render inferior image quality from even digital point-and-shoots):

September 22, 4:02 p.m. - Fuming Ecological Park (富民生態公園), actually just a glorified neighborhood park that's really, really angry - it's fuming! (I'm actually making fun of the English signage for the park, 富民 should be Fumin). Hey, no one gets it, but I laughed when I saw it.

4:05 p.m. - The R4 has always given me blurry results in poor light, but these kids were also moving as I spy shot them. 

4:22 p.m. - Shooting north from Minquan Rd. Bridge. I'm right above the flood wall that protects residents in case the Keelung River floods during typhoons. The Keelung River on the right makes a hard left turn west and runs south of Neihu District directly ahead.

4:29 p.m. - Back down off the Minquan Bridge, since I didn't intend to cross the bridge, by the river bank shooting south with the arches of the two Maishuai Bridges under the rather plain, utilitarian Minquan Bridge.

I did a little thought experiment with that cancer blog I read and went back to the beginning of his experience to see how far I would've made it if I found myself in a parallel situation. I swear I'm not obsessed with his blog or anything, but there is a lot to think about and mull over theoretically about living and dying from what he presents.

He first noticed something wrong with his guts during a road trip in the latter part of May 2014, initially thinking it was a bad omelette while driving out to Chicago. He endured symptoms over the course of the road trip with his brother taking Route 66 (and copious amounts of over-the-counter stomach medicine) from Chicago to Santa Monica, and by the end of May he was back in Seattle. I imagine I would've done exactly the same. If it was physically possible for me to keep pushing on, I think I would have in silent complaint. 

The next milestone was stabbing abdominal pains on June 9 that kept him up all night wondering whether he should go to the ER. By morning he quickly realized going to work was not going to happen and he went to the ER that was three blocks away from his condo in Capitol Hill. He calls it Group Health, but from Google maps (no I'm not obsessing), I think he's referring to the Kaiser Permanente, a west coast health care behemoth with which I'm unfortunately familiar. 

Could I even get to the ER? I was once in a similar situation a bunch of years ago (whoa, dude! That was coincidentally also in September! I didn't look for the post to get the link, but just came across it in the course of things. I call it 911 in that post for familiarity, but here, and most of Asia, it's 119). Five or six hours of excruciating, stabbing abdominal pains that had me laid out gripping my mattress, sweating with the air conditioning on, making frequent trips to the bathroom whenever that seemed to be an option for some relief from the pain. I had my backpack prepared as a go-bag with things I thought I'd need if it got so bad that I felt it was absolutely necessary to make a dash out into the rain and hail a cab for the nearest hospital. But it abated after five or six hours and never came to that. I never told anyone about it, but my best guess is that it was kidney stones which I hear are very painful but no permanent damage after they pass.

I don't know what my breaking point is to go to the ER when enduring that kind of pain, but it's safe to say more than five or six hours. But what if the pain continued and didn't look like it was going to let up? I'm going to assume for this experiment that I make it to the ER, but because I'm me I have to consider the possibility that I wouldn't get to the ER. Faced with needing to do something, no longer being able to endure enduring the pain at home, I might just make my way to the river about a half mile away (possibly less than three Seattle blocks), and I have no idea how that scenario continues. Collapse and die? Collapse and fall into the river and drown? Collapse and someone notices and calls 119? 

But I get to the ER because he did. He had health insurance and I don't, but Taiwan has national health. I don't know how that works nor where I fit into it, but let's say, like him, I don't have to worry about that (my national health card would've been thrown into the go-bag). A CT scan is required. He had a problem lying down for any period of time because of back problems, but I don't. The scan results pointed to needing a colonoscopy and he had to be sent to another hospital for that as an in-patient, but he couldn't just head over there himself. He needed to call someone to go with him. He had to go through his metaphorical rolodex and his younger sister was finally able to accommodate. 

Me?: "Is there anyone you can call?" No. No family? No. Friends? No. No friends? I don't even have a phone. I don't have anyone's phone number, much less anyone with a car. I can't even call my landlord. Imagine if that was where it all ends, lol! But as far as this thought experiment goes, it just may as well be. If in that parallel situation, I suppose they would arrange an ambulance or (more likely) a taxi to transport me (or they might have the facilities to do the colonoscopy), but once the reality of the colonoscopy* became manifest along with the discovery of the mass and the surgery required to cut it out, I would go along only as far they rolled me along that path telling me what needed to happen, and only as long as they actually instigated it. As soon as I could make an escape, out of their sight and their control, it would be endgame for me. If at any point I could say, "I need to go home and think about it" and they let me, that would be it and I'd be gone. If they said, "No, we can't let you go under these conditions", then I'd play along until I could get away. I'm a very patient patient.

* They literally, not metaphorically, shove a camera up your asshole after 24 hours of cleaning out all the shit, literally, with the medical metaphor of Drano and look for anything that doesn't belong there.

Needless to say, there would be no chemo for me. Once a terminal diagnosis is made, I wouldn't do anything to further treatment. I don't know if I would even tell anyone, but stranger things have happened and I just don't know myself well enough to guess what I would do (that's a totally separate (and futile) thought experiment). My hope would be just to have enough time to metaphorically clear my browser history (as well as literally clear my browser history since that seems to be what people do, not sure why), finish up any loose ends and proceed with plan A, involving dying without dignity. 

I finished reading that blog by the person who had terminal cancer, and unfortunately his final post, entitled "My Final Post", was not to report a miracle cure and that the cancer was gone and there was no more need to maintain the blog. I'm sure the hope he was hoping against was more than mine.

All that was done and dusted 3 years ago, and it was still sad when the end came and how. Actually no, it didn't matter how, just that the end came. There was a lot that was left out in his last days, I shouldn't wonder, but he would be forgiven if the pain he was in precluded blogging about it. It's not clear if the cancer killed him or if he "died with dignity", taking the killer drugs that under state law allowed him to end his life himself when the suffering became too great.

Ironically, he created what I think is a valuable document. One of his gripes early on when obsessively researching cancer after he was diagnosed (a quite common reaction), was that all of the testimony regarding treatment and drug therapies were by survivors. People testifying this or that was great or worked, but what about the people for whom those treatments didn't work? His blog now exists as a voice of someone who didn't survive, and even as his was stage 4 terminal cancer with little chance of long-term survival, he voices an experience of the various treatments he underwent, while clearly stating the kind of patient he was: a cancer specialist's nightmare, i.e., one who wasn't willing to sacrifice quality of life. He was willing to forego treatment, i.e., die sooner, if it meant day-to-day present moment pain was more manageable, rather than subject himself to the mercy (or lack thereof) of the medical/big pharma/insurance industry and their mess of a system with whatever treatment they conjure to live longer but in considerably more misery. What's worth what to whom is totally subjective and up to the individual.

And it should not be missed that the big turning point in his decision about continuing treatment, which was to not continue treatment, i.e., give up, i.e., fuckitall, was because of the mental frustrations dealing with the quixotic clown show (or goat rodeo, as he might call it but actually doesn't) of the health care industry and its administrative system (not the hands-on medical professionals trying to treat him).

My personal take from his experience is that I'm pretty confident I'm not fooling myself about my attitude towards death or dying. He would write things distinctly from the perspective of someone facing death, and I would recognize it as the reality-perspective I steep in. To him it was something new he was facing and realizing. It's my normal. Like from his normal, he would forewarn readers when he would be writing about death and dying, assuming it was unpleasant and depressing, but for me that was the stuff I wanted to know. It was my version of what a cancer patient starts researching obsessively once diagnosed. It's the distinction between someone living an ordinary life and suddenly coming to terms that this life must end, and having that as an acknowledged assumption from the start. Am I dying of anything? Not that I know of. Am I dying? We all are, honey.

Another take away from his blog is that personal blogs can endure! It's been almost three years since his last post and still I found his blog and read it and found it meaningful and worthy (even with its shortcomings). I don't remember how I found it. Sometimes after I do a web search I'll do the same search with "blog" added at the end. I think that's how I found his, but I forget the search term and haven't been able to re-create it. And anyway that technique of looking for blogs has become less effective as search engines, especially "evil is OK!" Google, gear and funnel results towards corporate, profitable or trending hits. Web searches are no longer democratic emphasizing the actual search terms (otherwise when you search "patagonia", for example, you'd get the place first, not the company. If someone created a successful company called "Suicide, Inc.", their website would probably end up superseding the topic), and it's almost impossible to find personal blogs worth reading; little voices who are just stating their experience and reality. It was hard enough even when Blogger had a "Next Blog" function that led to a random Blogger blog, but Google removed that citing "lack of use", ensuring absolute "non-use".

A possible good thing about that is that it's more safe to maintain a personal blog because the chances are low that someone they know will randomly find it. A lot of people I knew ended their blogs over concerns about what they were putting out and who might find it and possible unexpected and unpredictable consequences. I was never concerned about that because I never felt anyone would care about anything I put out.