A Moment in the Campaign — Gonzo Dispatch

 

Yep. It’s like that.

The war against charlie grinds on, a low-budget jungle operation with no theme music and no goddamn medals. No artillery barrages lighting up the sky—just the long, paranoid shuffle of a campaign that refuses to end. Weeks of uneasy quiet, then a flare in the brush. Not enough to call in air support. Just enough to remind you the enemy never signed a treaty.

This wasn’t D-Day. It was Tuesday.

Another checkpoint. Another slog through the bureaucratic swamp—appointments breeding in the calendar like mosquitoes, paperwork stacked in sterile white towers, waiting rooms humming with the soft mechanical purr of machines that look like they were designed by cheerful Nazis. No smoke. No gunfire. Just fluorescent lighting and the smell of disinfectant. But don’t kid yourself—the vigilance is real. You never stand down. Not when there’s always another scan circled on the horizon like a distant artillery coordinate.

So I went in for the first scan. Recon mission. Easy on the throttle. A cautious stroll into the fog, telling myself this is just the beginning of a long road. And in this campaign, a long road is good news. A long road means you’re still breathing dust and cursing the map.

But dread is a faithful companion.

Five days of it. Not hysterical, not frothing—just a low electrical buzz under the skin. The kind of hum you get waiting for a verdict from a judge who doesn’t know your name. Each day stretched thin and brittle. Each night wandering into speculative madness. By day three I was pacing. By day five I was sick of hauling that invisible question around like a duffel bag full of bricks.

Then today the report dropped.

Clean.

No sign of the rat bastard charlie. No tracks in the mud. No smoke on the ridgeline. Just a crisp clinical communiqué from the front lines: Not this time.

No parade. No ticker tape. Just a bureaucratic sigh and a new date inked at the beginning of May. A reprieve stamped in twelve-point font. Breathing room. The jungle goes quiet, but nobody holsters their weapon.

And now—because the campaign must expand—another practitioner of the medical arts enters the theater. I’ve been referred to a dermatologist. A new specialist in the relentless hunt for insurgent freckles. Annual inspections. Another arena. The rat bastard has forced us into amphibious operations.

It could wear a man down, living life in quarterly installments. Measuring existence in scans and reports and follow-ups. Time reduced to medical checkpoints. But for now, clean is clean.

As the old song says, the lion sleeps tonight. The jungle is still.

And in this war, stillness is victory enough.

 

 

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

 

 

The Road Goes On Forever

Yeah. It does.

No finish line. No triumphant final chapter. Just the same cracked asphalt stretching out ahead, narrowing into a thin gray thread until it disappears somewhere over the horizon—probably right around the bend where they keep all the answers, the closure, and the affordable health insurance.

Last week I officially entered the sacred phase of the anti-charlie campaign:

Wait. Look. See.

The medical world calls it “monitoring.”
I call it state-sponsored psychological torture.

We’re on the sacred 90-day cycle now:

Labs. Scan. Evaluate. Report. Repeat.

Like a deranged subscription service nobody asked for. Netflix at least has the decency to cancel shows before you get emotionally invested. This one just keeps renewing itself automatically.  And I think I know how this is going to play out.

First comes the scan.
Then comes A few days of dread—that exquisite limbo where your brain becomes a 24-hour doom factory, churning out worst-case scenarios with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated intern.

Then the results drop, and you get one of two outcomes:

1. “Nothing to see here, move along.”

2. “Oh shit… more tests. STAT.”

Both are terrible, just in different flavors.

Option One sounds good on paper, but it’s really just the universe saying, “Congratulations. You get to restart the waiting game.”
Like surviving a car wreck only to realize you’re still stuck in traffic.

Option Two at least has the decency to be honest. It’s panic with a purpose. It’s the hospital equivalent of, “Alright boys, load the rifles—we’re going back in.”

And honestly? Sometimes I wonder if that’s better.

Because “move along” isn’t peace. It’s not relief. It’s just a temporary ceasefire while you sit in the trench counting days like cigarettes.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a high-definition prostate MRI scheduled for March—because apparently the universe looked at my medical chart and said, “You know what this guy needs? A whole new subplot.”

The oncologist has pretty much dismissed the old “prostitute gland” as being involved.

Which is comforting.  In the same way it would be comforting if a man on a sinking ship said, “Relax, I’m pretty sure the iceberg wasn’t that bad.”

I wish I had his confidence. Truly. Must be nice to walk around with that kind of optimism, like a golden retriever in a lab coat.

Either way, one or the other has the capability to put a big red stamp on my life in the next few days.

So until then, I roam around here at the forest compound like some half-feral groundskeeper in exile. I take care of business, sure—but only the bare minimum. The essentials. The survival chores.

Because starting a long-term project right now feels like planting a garden on the deck of the Titanic.

Why build anything when you’re not sure if the next scan is going to come back with:

“Good news!”   or    “We’re gonna need to borrow you again for additional suffering.”

So I drift.  A man on a long road with no visible end, watching the horizon like it owes me money.

And it does.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

 

Eyeball to eyeball.

 

A long time ago—back when the first war with Charlie was still raging and I was young enough to believe in medical promises—a dentist casually informed me that after he removed all my teeth, I’d be getting “appliances.”

Appliances.

Like I’m a damn kitchen.

I was hoping for an ice maker. Maybe a small dishwasher. Something practical. But no. Teeth. Plastic. Regret.

Fast forward to the current campaign in this never-ending war against my own body, and now we’re upgrading the face hardware. Since the removal of the main peeper, I’ve been walking around with a vacancy that needed filling—like a condemned building where the lights still flicker but nobody should go inside.

The eye surgeon, with the cold confidence of a man who has seen things and stopped caring sometime during the Reagan administration, wrote the following in my chart:

“Enucleation with 20 mm Medpor orbital implant, right eye.”

Translation: “Make him a pirate.”

At first, I assumed the “20 mm Medpor implant” was the device they used to actually perform the enucleation—which immediately brought to mind some kind of surgical golf tee and mallet scenario.

WHACK.

“Hold still, sir.”

But no. The Medpor is just the medically approved space-holder. A corporate placeholder for the hole where your eyeball used to live. I did a little Googling—because in America, you don’t need a medical degree, you just need Wi-Fi and anxiety—and discovered Medpor is high-density porous polyethylene.

In other words: a medical-grade golf ball.

Trust me, I stayed at a Marriott over the weekend. I’m basically a doctor now.

So then came the meetings. Not with surgeons. Not with priests. No, I met with the ocular prosthesis design group, which sounds less like a medical department and more like a secret government team that builds replacement parts for malfunctioning senators.

Their mission: build me a new eyeball.

And here’s the fun part—they’re trying to replicate the only remaining eye, the one doing 100% of the work, like some overworked intern holding together the entire company while management takes a lunch break.

Bad news: I showed up to the first meeting with a hangover.

And not a cute hangover. Not a “haha, I had a margarita” hangover. I mean a real, full-spectrum, bourbon-and-bad-decisions hangover. The good eye looked like it had been through a divorce and lost custody.

So the “model eye” they were supposed to copy looked like it had been dragged out of a bar at 2 AM by the collar.

Not exactly the kind of reference photo you want when someone is custom-painting a prosthetic organ.

The second meeting was the final design session. Thankfully, this time I arrived sober, and they included all the little red veins that normally spiderweb across the whites of the eye. No hangover meant my real eye wasn’t inflamed and screaming for mercy, so there was an abundance of “material” to reference.

Basically, my sobriety provided the necessary aesthetic restraint.

The replacement itself is like a giant contact lens. You pop it in, pop it out. It’s meant to be worn long-term—overnight, all day, all week.

Time is irrelevant.    Sleep is irrelevant.    Reality is irrelevant.

This thing is the Apple AirPod of human flesh. It’s just supposed to be in there forever, quietly judging your life choices.

But then I discovered the fatal flaw: rubbing my eye pops it out.

Apparently, the human instinct to rub your face when it itches is now considered an extreme sport. So I’m learning to rub from the bridge of my nose outward, like some delicate Victorian woman adjusting her glove.

Because if I rub the wrong way, I’ll end up literally “keeping an eye out for you.”

So now I’m beginning to suspect the thing might be defective.

Every morning I open my eyes and still can’t see a damn thing on that side.

But it looks great.

Functionally useless, aesthetically flawless.

A perfect metaphor for most of modern society.

And I can’t wait for family gatherings—especially the ones with small children—because eventually I’m going to get bored, pop that sucker out, and hold it up like a magic trick.

“Hey kids… wanna see something?”

And just like that, I’ll become a living cautionary tale.

Not a man.

Not a hero.

Just a half-blind pirate with a medical golf ball in his skull, traumatizing the rug rats for sport.

And honestly?

That’s the closest thing to joy I’ve had in years.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler