Six-Month Reprieve

I’m brimming with gratitude for having wrapped up a great week. On Monday, Memorial Day, my memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood, was officially released by Toplight Books, an imprint of McFarland & Company. My Goodreads Giveaway continues until June 1 if you want to try to win a copy.

You can also find the book on Amazon or Bookshop.

On Tuesday afternoon, I had my sixth-month follow-up appointment with my neurosurgeon, Dr. H. I received the radiologist’s report early Tuesday morning when I logged into Upstate’s patient portal. Upon reading that the tumor had grown measurably since the last scan in September, two thoughts swam through my brain—can the radiation oncology team hit the tumor with another round of Gamma Knife radiosurgery, and, if not, can I schedule my brain surgery over the summer so it won’t disrupt my busy work schedule that ramps up during the fall semester at Syracuse University?

To make it to my appointment, I had to take a Centro bus out to the Upstate University Medicine office in the Township 5 shopping center in Camillus, which is an Area 51-sized example of suburban sprawl.

Here are the quotes from the report that troubled me:

There has been “significant interval enlargement of the sellar and suprasellar mass consistent with known craniopharyngioma. On the current examination the mass measures 2.3 x 1.4 x 2.1 cm. On the comparison study dated 9/3/2025 the mass measured 1.6 x 1.1 x 1.7 cm.

“. . . There is worsened superior displacement and compression of the optic chiasm right worse than left.”

Yet when I see the always sanguine, gum-snapping Dr. H., he’s unruffled by the latest report. Dressed in a green, plaid flannel shirt and brown khakis, he takes a seat and explains that he reviewed the previous scans, lined everything up, and determined that the tumor has not grown significantly. He tries to allay my fears by giving me a detailed description of how different MRI machines or variations in the “slices of images” can affect the interpretation of the scan.

My two latest MRI scans appear on computer screens. The image on the left is from September, and the one on the right is from this May. The craniopharyngioma is the circular object in the middle of the brain.

Dr. H’s recommendation: Wait and see. Reschedule another MRI in six months.

I have no objection to this approach, and I left the office feeling grateful for another six-month reprieve—another half a year to live with no scheduled surgical intervention.

At the same time, I know the tumor isn’t sitting idle. It’s in a constant state of aggregation, growing steadily as the fluid inside expands, and at some point, it will likely provoke headaches and double vision (more than just to my extreme right).

But I try not to fall victim to the futility of worrying about my health (easier said than done).

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On Friday, Upstate posted my conversation with host Amber Smith on the Informed Patient podcast. I much prefer pitching questions instead of fielding them.

I’ve conducted countless interviews in my role as a video producer at SU since 2007, and it’s definitely weird to be on the other side, to be the interviewee and not the interviewer. But it gave me a warm feeling of nostalgia for my radio days (circa 1996-2006).

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Book Release and Giveaway

Today marks the completion of a dream with the publication of my memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. To celebrate my publication date, I am running a Goodreads giveaway. It ends on June 1, and I’ll be giving away two signed copies of the book.

I don’t have much experience with signing books, but I have never understood the practice of authors crossing out their printed name when they sign their books. To me it feels like defacing a work of art.

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Silly Little Adventure of Earth

I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and I wanted to share one more passage that stood out to me. In this scene, during a massive going-away party for the character Japhy, held in Berkeley, California, the narrator, Ray Smith (Kerouac), reflects on people and existence:

“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought was this and that, ain’t this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”

My battered copy of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

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My Books Arrive

My first shipment of books from McFarland & Company arrived yesterday. I’m so glad to see this book become a real thing—not just an idea in my head—because the project took more than 10 years to complete.

“Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood” is a coming-of-age story about identity and self-acceptance, told through the lens of my journey to adulthood after being diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 15 years old.

The contains about 40 black-and-white photographs, medical records dating back to 1984, and diary entries from the early 1990s and beyond. It’s also loaded with sports and pop culture references from the ’80s and ’90s (e.g., Doug Flutie and The Cure).

I’m scheduled to give a reading at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 23, at Jervis Public Library in Rome, where, as a youth, I discovered my love of books and was introduced to authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. I hope I won’t be so nervous that I ramble and babble.

A certificate for my participation in a summer reading program at Jervis Public Library in Rome in 1976.

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Writing in the Morning

An early spring morning.
The refrigerator hums
in the kitchen
and sunlight streams
into the living room
while I write in a spiral notebook,
the sound of the ballpoint pen tip
scratching against the white paper.

In this moment
I realize the act of writing—
the mechanical activity
of jotting down
one word after the other,
leading to verbal connections
and accumulated sentences—
delights me and uplifts my spirit,
even if the words I write
add up to nothing.

And I will keep writing
without knowing the result,
having no expectation of success,
because I must—
because stopping is impossible,
since writing was never a choice for me—
instead, it’s an involuntary exercise
with the pen moving across paper
providing evidence of my existence.

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Buddha Bliss

I haven’t had a chance to blog in a while because I had to finish proofreading and indexing my forthcoming memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. Producing a back-of-the-book index was an exhausting, onerous project—especially because my book is loaded with medical terminology and pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s. Example: U2 see also The Edge, The Joshua Tree, Mullen, Larry Jr.

My messy index in process.

To avoid having to write an index for my follow-up memoir, I’ll make it 97 percent fact and 3 percent fantasy and call it autofiction.

But that’s not why I wanted to post today.

I am re-reading the autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, which I think is a very underrated Kerouac work.

One passage caught my attention, and I wanted to share it.

The narrator, Ray Smith, has traveled from the industrial wasteland of Los Angeles to Riverside, California, as he tries to make his way to North Carolina to visit his mother. He camps for the night in a bamboo grove.

“And then I thought, later, lying on my bag, smoking, ‘Everything is possible. I am God, I am Buddha, I am imperfect Ray Smith, all at the same time, I am empty space, I am all things. I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels.’”

And I know this is a quote I will revisit during stressful times. Have a good weekend, everyone.

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Jenna Finds A Dog

My former Metro Networks’ colleague Terry Rousseau has written a middle-grade novel entitled Jenna Finds A Dog.

Jenna Finds a Dog cover.

I’m looking forward to reading it. In the biography, Terry mentions residing in an isolated village in the New Mexico mountains. And he cracked me up with this line: “His most recent hobby, not by choice, is cutting down the hundreds dead trees on his property with his electric chainsaw thanks to prolonged drought and bark beetles.”

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Poems by Hermann Hesse

I am re-reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. And in doing a little Wiki research on the German novelist, I discovered he also wrote poetry. I bought a collection of his verses entitled Poems by Hermann Hesse: Selected and Translated By James Wright (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). Most of the poems are short (which I love), and he explores such themes as youth, nature, identity, longing, and loneliness.

An added bonus—the used book arrived with a nice bookmark from Normals Books & Records in Baltimore, which looks like a really cool store.

Here are a few selections from the book that I wanted to share:

Mountains at Night

The lake has died down,
The reed, black in its sleep,
Whispers in a dream.
Expanding immensely into the countryside,
The mountains loom, outspread.
They are not resting.
They breathe deeply, and hold themselves,
Pressed tightly, to one another.
Deeply breathing,
Laden with mute forces,
Caught in a wasting passion.

On a Journey

Don’t be downcast, soon the night will come,
When we can see the cool moon laughing in secret
Over the faint countryside,
And we rest, hand in hand.

Don’t be downcast, the time will soon come
When we can have rest. Our small crosses will stand
On the bright edge of the road together,
And rain fall, and snow fall,
And the winds come and go.

Night

I like the dark night well enough;
But sometimes, when it turns bleak
And peaked, as my suffering laughs at me,
Its dreadful kingdom horrifies me,

And I wish to God I could take one look at the sunlight
And the blue of heaven brought back to light by its clouds,
And I want to lie down warm in the wide spaces of the day.
Then I can dream of the night.

Destiny

In our fury and muddle,
We act like children, cut off,
Fled from ourselves,
Bound by silly shame.

The years clump past
In their agony, waiting.
Not a single path leads back
To the garden of our youth.

How Heavy The Days . . . 

How heavy the days are.
There’s not a fire that can warm me,
Not a sun to laugh with me,
Everything bare,
Everything cold and merciless,
And even the beloved, clear
Stars look desolately down,
Since I learned in my heart that
Love can die.

And here are a few spring-themed poems:

The First Flowers

Beside the brook
Toward the willows,
During these days
So many yellow flowers have opened
Their eyes into gold.
I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory
Touches my depth, the golden hours of morning, and gazes
Brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers.
I was going to pick flowers;
Now I leave them all standing
And walk home, an old man.

Spring Day

Wind in bushes and bird piping
And high in the highest fresh blue
A haughty cloud ship, becalmed . . .
I dream of a blond woman,
I dream of my youth,
The high heaven blue and outspread
Is the cradle of my longing
Where I choose to lie calm
And blessedly warm
With the soft humming,
Just like a child held
On his mother’s arm.

Flowers, Too

Flowers, too, suffer death,
And yet they are guiltless.
So, too, our own being is pure
And suffers only grief,
Where we ourselves do not wish to understand.
What we call guilt
Is absorbed by the sun,
It comes to meet us out of the pure throats
Of flowers, fragrance and the moving gaze of children.
And as flowers die,
So we die, too,
Only the death of deliverance,
Only the death of rebirth.

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A Quote Worth Sharing

I am currently reading The 90-Day Memoir: Tell the Story of Your Life by Alan Watt. Each chapter begins with a quote. I wanted to share this one because I thought it was profound. There’s some debate online about the origin of the quote, whether it came from a Cherokee legend or from somewhere else. But either way, the words are worth noting.

It also reminded me of a poem I wrote about a wolf several years ago.

The Mystery of the Wolf

A summer evening in upstate New York—
a backyard sprinkler hisses
while the smell of fresh-cut grass
is pungent and delicious.
Crickets chirp and a coffee-colored mare
snorts from across the barbed-wire fence.

I am alone, kicking a soccer ball,
when a gray wolf emerges from
the high weeds lining the fence.
I try to run, but my legs lock up,
and I tumble to the ground.

The wolf circles me,
then sweeps in on my limp frame.
I can hear its stomach growling
as it hovers over me.
The tongue is extended
and drool splashes my face.
The wolf takes my neck in its mouth,
but does not bite down.

And I wake up in my bed,
thankful that the encounter is just a dream.
I am safe, and no wolf invades my room.
Yet I remain troubled,
afraid of closing my eyes,
drifting back to sleep
and ending up at the mercy
of another predator.

Previously published in the collection Dreaming of Lemon Trees: Selected Poems by Francis DiClemente (Finishing Line Press, 2019).

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Birthday Photos

Following up on my last post, I wanted to share some photos of Colin from his birthday celebrations, which stretched from last Thursday (2/26) until Saturday evening (2/28). These are just unedited shots taken with my shoddy iPhone 8. But I wanted to save them here so I can find them in the future.

I hope everyone has a great week ahead.

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