Today’s Mad Monday is brought to you by my hatred of gooddam cancer.
It has taken my mother, my uncle. It has taken friends. It has come for friends and been fought off. I have friends still fighting it as I type. I, myself have watched a laser (on cctv) blast precancerous cells off my cervix. It was satisfying.
But I’m just off the phone from my favourite aunt. She’s got fucking cancer and it is spreading. The oncologists are on it with everything they have. She may not last three months.
She is so very upbeat. She is philosophical and full of stories and laughter and anecdotes. She is the apotheosis of grace.
Cancer is stealing her. Fuck you, cancer.
When I was in my early twenties, I loved car racing. Not watching it on TV, or watching cars go around on some track. I raced.
People laugh when I tell them I was racing in an ‘85 Micra. But she never let me down. Sure, a four-banger, but with an aluminum engine and body, there was no excess weight. Lots of forward juice, but no ballast. Dumb.
I was stupid a hundred times when racing that car. I raced the clock (17 minutes was my best time from Metrotown to home at 21st and Dunbar. That was crazy, though. 24 minutes was more relaxed at midnight) or I raced real people. I’d pull up beside some guy in a hot car, with his girlfriend sitting shotgun. I’d gun my engine.
The guy would look over, and I would smile. The girlfriend would scowl.
We’d start off. Invariably, the guy would haul ahead, because he had the better car (I’m in a Micra, remember?) but I was always swerving into the parking lane to pass, I had split-second passing timing, and I didn’t have a shrieking girlfriend in my car. All those girlfriends, I apologize to you. I was a bitch.
Many of those impromptu races, I won. But I made a lot of stupid moves that could have killed me or someone else. I could have died a dozen times. All those guys who gave in to their girlfriends’ screaming to slow down? They were acting way smarter than I was.
Some Stuff | Liz November 15, 2010 | 
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