And the dragon comes in the niiiiiiiight!

Have just woken up. I have today booked off work because Pixies play Castlefield today and taking time off simplifies seeing them. I did not have yesterday booked off work but had to take it because my appointment came through on Thursday for chemotherapy, which has very neatly fallen between coming back from Sonisphere on Monday and my day off today. I am currently 19 hours post-treatment with carboplatin and feeling a minimum of side-effects so far, presumably due to the injected anti-emetics and steroids they gave me. I believe they're doing something as I've woken up feeling slightly unwell and will be topping up with prescribed ondansetron and dexamethasone later this morning, which I have for a couple of days before they cast me adrift with the cheapo anti-sickness pills. It seems that i'll probably feel worse as the days go on, at least for the next two or three weeks. According to form I could end up anaemic and with a compromised immune system in the next week or so. I'd take that over the tinnitus and bleeding and peripheral neuropathy that become more likely with longer cycles, fortunately this is a one-off treatment for late stage one seminoma, and has been deemed adequate to the task of curing my cancer. The prognosis is positive once the treatment has been survived.

As for whether I care enough to go to the Pixies show depends on how I feel in the afternoon. As of right now it feels like I can get away with it. Ask me again in about 8 hours, as they're unlikely to see the stage before 7.30 this evening. It all doesn't matter that much, it's not like I haven't seen live music before or a massive amount in the last seven days, nor like I've not seen videos of their recent live show. I'm thinking about the prospect and not feeling any emotional need to go, but I also know well enough how these things go with me, and can feel the compulsion to go out there waiting in the afternoon. Still, it's a minor concern. Seeing bands that mean a lot to you is not really a great romantic moment is it? I saw Iron Maiden on Saturday, which made me realise that their music and cover art are the greatest unacknowledged influences on my life from childhood, they played two songs that i hadn't heard in twenty years and both of them were ingrained in my brain, having listened to them around my older brothers and hunted the Easter eggs in the Somewhere in Time cover before I was ten. Making a colour pencil rendering of the Aces High twelve inch cover when I was a kid set in motion my interest in illustration as much as my reading violent Marvel UK science fiction comics with similar aesthetics - half-naked cyborg corpses, both the desiccated type and those with hypertrophied muscles and shapeshifting metal gun arms with skulls showing through taut and shredded faces, grotesque, lithe cyberpunks, space samurais, barbarians, martial jerks of various kinds. Seeing Iron Maiden was not a life-affirming event, no more that downloading a few issues of Deathlok I'd not read in 20 years was, so would be seeing Pixies be anything more than a curiosity either? I'll see how I feel.

I'm told today is when I'll be next updated by my mortgage adviser regarding how the contracts on the house are going, which means that there is a near-symmetry between by treatment and the process of buying the house. I was diagnosed the day after I first met with the mortgage adviser and the last part of my proposed treatment was completed yesterday (everything after here is monitoring, tests and x-rays). Come August these storylines should be well advanced. Also the cat will be nineteen, which makes her one old-ass cat. Granted her fur is getting very matted as her kidneys continue to slowly fail, but her demeanour is otherwise bright. I've been saying that cat would see nineteen for two years and she only has a month to go.

It bears mentioning that Homestar Runner is going back into full-time operation soon too. Things are getting there.