About the Author. And his Dad.

Part 1 of a series. This has nothing to do with Star Wars, but it is funny. I mean, it's about cancer, but like... *funny* cancer. Ha ha. Like a clown.

I don't really have tact. I understand what it is, conceptually, but in practice I tend to blurt out just about anything that strikes me as funny, regardless of context or decorum. About twenty years ago, I told my Dad a joke about cancer. While he had cancer. As he's quick to tell anyone within earshot, he still has cancer today. I should mention that these are different cancers. Twenty years ago it was throat cancer. Then prostate cancer. Then lymphoma. Then skin. Then a curious bump on his kidney that has since vanished without treatment. And now skin again, but a different, much more annoying variety that makes him, as he describes it, “itchy.” His doctor likes to tell him cheery things such as that he's her longest-lived patient, or that he's now more likely to die of a heart attack than of cancer. The “good news” is no longer that he's going to live, but rather that he's going to die in a different, marginally more pleasant way.

Actually I don't know which would be more pleasant. Personally, I think I'd prefer suffocating in an oxygen deprivation chamber, what with the euphoria and all, but that's just me, and also that isn't a disease that you catch, which is just so typical of my luck, I suppose. Either way I think all this talk of my Dad dying is hogwash; the man is clearly immortal.