In Memoriam to My Brother

Posted on May 16, 2022 by Professor Taboo

Several times since January of 2022 my sister and Mom explicitly urged me to getaway, to take a 4-5 night break away from my 24/7 Caretaking of Mom. She is 82-years old with severe Stage-6 Dementia. By March 31st it was so obvious to myself, to Mom, and especially my sister that I badly needed a break. Mom added, in her usual sharp wit, and said “I need a break as well, from you! It won’t just do YOU good Dwain!”

Mom was right. We had been getting on each other’s last frazzled nerves for several weeks. I soon texted and called a few of my close friends in Dallas to tell them I was coming up one weekend in April. Just planning the trip was quite reinvigorating, I hate to say. No offense Mom. But 4-5 nights just for me? Oh yeah! Where do I sign? Plus, my friends got excited, one in particular: my all-time best friend of near 25-years. Literally like a brother to me. His name? James, James E. Allen III, and he was my one and only closest male friend. Then a situation happened.

On the weekend-Sunday prior to my arrival in Dallas the following Thursday, James informed me he would have to have Quadruple Bypass Surgery and Heart-valve Replacement April 27th, the day before I arrive. My entire “Getaway” plans just changed, drastically. No longer was my trip going to be ALL fun and relaxation, especially with the main character (James) not being readily free and available as planned. Before this medical news, we had already decided to do several of our favorites things together: watch the Dallas Mavericks basketball playoff games as well as the Dallas Stars hockey playoff games together at two-three of our favorite bars. Chunk all those plans out the window now. He would be in a hospital bed my entire trip.

If you would like to read much more extensive details of my trip and the events surrounding James, my dearest friend, go here: Further details.

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Tuesday morning, May 3rd, 2022. James coded 2-3 more times during the night and wee-hours, Erin texted me. James wasn’t doing well, she said. He can barely squeeze your hand/fingers.

About 1:45pm Erin told me it was all just too much for his body. He had passed away. When I got off the phone, I broke down. My closest friend was gone, my only dearest male friend. He and I would never again talk for hours about sports, mostly his two favorite: American football and basketball. We also shared and confided everything about ourselves with each other. We laughed more than we deserved together because each other’s wit made us. And our sometimes clumsy brain-farts and bad decisions cracked us both up. We knew our best and our intimate worst parts, and yet never wavered in our loyalty to each other, through the best of times and times of pure hell. James was a dependable brother to me like no other guy I’ve ever known. Life will not be the same without him.

James E. Allen, III: b. August 10, 1970 — d. May 3, 2022.

Allen family (L to R): James, sisters Nicole & Misha, brother Troy.
James and sons Tommy (center) & Nickolas (Nick)
At Lonnegan’s, Arlington, TX
James & close friend Terrence
Tommy, James, and Nick
Myself, Molly, & James – Lonnegan’s
Nickolas & James
Tommy & James, at football practice
At Penn State, James, Erin, & Terrence
Molly & James, Lonnegan’s
Nick & James at PSU and the Ohio State game 2016
Suzanne & James
With Joe Paterno at Penn State

I will miss you terribly brother for the rest of my days. There’s another empty void now in my life, as well as one for many others. RIP James.

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A Cure is Here

Posted on April 28, 2020 by Professor Taboo

Given my intense irritation recently at the Anti-Safety, Pro-COVID-19 propagators in the news and their public defiance of intelligent, virological Social-distancing and Stay-at-Home Orders—while coronavirus infections continue to rise in alarming numbers—I thought it would be fantastic to post some remarkable, positive humanitarian news in the area of science and medical therapies in the fight against cancer! After all, we reasonable, well-educated people have been in need for an exciting story that reinforces the enriching necessity for expert, scholarly science, breakthrough medical science especially that ushers hundreds and hundreds of happy results, happy recoveries, and lengthy remissions! Ah, every so often something good does come out of Texas! It’s good to be proven wrong sometimes.

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Dr. Allison, the 2018 Nobel Prize Co-Winner in Physiology or Medicine, is the subject of a riveting documentary that shows the spotlight on his groundbreaking work and serves as a stark, prophetic reminder of the obligation for extensive science in the year of COVID-19. Perhaps COVID-20 as well.

Last night I was fortunate to catch the broadcast by PBS’ Independent Lens the documentary film Jim Allison: Breakthrough. Boy was it a much needed encouragement and frequent cheer-leading shouts of “YES, OH MY STARS & GALAXIES,” and “I LOVE YOU SCIENCE” that I needed right now. Watching too much current news can really begin to dampen and darken your spirit for life. Your levels of endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin can suffer from too much prolonged cortisol.

From our own University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center website on Dr. Allison’s astounding research and work. I highly recommend reading the entire webpage:

Immunotherapy innovator Jim Allison’s Nobel purpose, some excerpts

Jim Allison, Ph.D., chair of Immunology and executive director of the immunotherapy platform, pioneered a revolutionary cancer treatment that frees the immune system to attack tumors.

“By stimulating the ability of our immune system to attack tumor cells, this year’s Nobel Prize laureates have established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy”

[…]

Allison showed that the protein CTLA-4, which is found on the surface of T cells, acts as a brake — a type of immune system checkpoint the body uses to avoid a dangerously over-reactive immune response. He then developed an antibody to block CTLA-4’s “braking” action, freeing T cells to attack cancer.

His work and determination led to the development of Ipilimumab, the first in a class of drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors. In 2011, the drug — commercially named Yervoy — was approved for late-stage melanoma by the Food and Drug Administration. It has yielded unprecedented results. Twenty percent of patients with advanced melanoma who took the drug now live for at least three years, and many live 10 years and beyond.

[…]

Crucial funding for his research over the years has come from the National Institutes of Health, particularly the National Cancer Institute, the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Cancer Research Institute, Prostate Cancer Foundation, Stand Up To Cancer and PICI.

Toward the end of this documentary film Dr. Allison is reading a letter he received from a lady, a wife, a total stranger. I am not going to spoil it for you, but it is definitely a moment that all we human beings with a grateful, compassionate, unselfish heart must hear/read more often than not. Perspective needed. This is unprecedented news in this daunting, beautiful life we’ve been privileged to live, inside this tiny minuscule space in time, on one tiny, tiny pale-blue rock among billions and billions of other stars and planets in our ONE little galaxy… among billions or trillions of other galaxies. It is called the Overview Effect. Get some.

Share any thoughts below you might have once you’ve watched the film, or not watched if you’re already familiar with this man’s phenomenal work and dedication over many decades of incessant persistence. It is truly a man, a scientist, and story to greatly admire. I do.

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Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always — Stay Curious!

Visiting Our Cusp, Limits, Fearlessly

Posted on December 21, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Sometimes during unsettled times when so many around us are disconnected, cold, detached, uncaring, and avoiding simple social kindness to one another, or hyper-charged looking for drama and some type of controversy—perhaps because they’ve been living too long in begrudging routine mediocrity or luxury—we lose sight of what really matters in life as simple human beings. We forget that there is very little difference between all of us. In fact, genetically less than 0.1%. If we would embrace this commonality, this intimate reality, our very fragility and vulnerability with each other in this daunting, life-giving Universe… then we are never alone. Never unwanted or not needed. Never without friend or family. This primal, very basic organic condition we all share will never, EVER change; at least not in the next 100,000 years or more.

Be that as it may, we do sometimes need reminding, refreshers in how very minuscule each of us are in this vast, never-ending, beautifully inhumane Cosmos that completely dictates our quality of life and death. Our time here is but a flash in the bucket in the biggest picture, BUT remarkably impactful for the ‘millisecond’ of life and memories with other loved ones. With so many things uncertain yet ready to experience, its marrow ready to be sucked down to the last molecule of our 80, 70, 50, 20, or 10-years of life, whatever it is to be, makes it… pure gold! Every second, every ounce! How will you spend it? How will others experience you and remember you?

I posted this years ago from Oriah Mountain Dreamer. I want to post it again, as a reminder… that we usually have only one chance to make the most of this short, mortal, beautifully remarkable gift called life really count the most. Oriah knows exactly how to best live and die in it:

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

For the rest of Oriah’s powerful, to the bone and straight to the heart realism, go here.

If we do not test ourselves when life is good, plush for ourselves, and push our abilities our kind empathy, understanding, and what we can manage and gladly give, then how can we ever truthfully know how much our proactive help matters? How much does our charitable action count? How much does our voice count to help make other’s lives easier, happier in a purely humane way? It takes so much more to join the disadvantaged… raw in person and heart than simply saying words or writing a check. Joining all of humanity, the worst, the most unfortunate is where the most profound, deepest fulfillment of living is discovered. The alternative is a planet of unfeeling, insensitive, self-absorbed, non-humanity, as this song aptly describes…

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Nigh, give me the living, the marrow of life any day, every day.

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Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

Hallows Coming – Frost

Posted on October 19, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Frost’s poem diverges a bit from my previous Halloween poems. Loss and loneliness is experienced in many various ways by different people in unique settings, none exactly identical. Memories of missed loved ones can inspire or haunt us, or both.

∼ ∼ ∼ § ∼ ∼ ∼

Dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me–
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,–
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

— Robert Frost, Ghost House

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Status Update

Posted on April 8, 2019 by Professor Taboo

Several of you might be curious as to my delay in posting the 4th part and conclusion to Black Underworld Inc. I am glad to say Part IV is over three-quarters finished along with much of the conclusion. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on who you are 😉 and your preferred tastes of blog-subjects, I have been beset by several simultaneous life, family, and other related significant occurrences and their ripple-effects. Obviously, these have made several inevitable interruptions and postponement to the finish of this 5-part series and any other blog-posts of late I had intended to tackle, compose, and publish. This is the quick explanation.

Thank you all for your patience, inquiries, concerns, etc. I do foresee a respite of these events and their consequences in the near future. But I can not say with any precision when it might be—as Robert Frost candidly puts it, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” And I am not a psychic or fortune-teller. There could very well be more unexpected curve-balls and shenanigans that the infamous Murphy and his law firm of sinister pranksters have in store for me. I hope not.

There are some gremlins too that I know could arrive at my doorstep, through unlocked windows or hatches, tunnels, ventilation pipes, or by phone… IF particular events and circumstances beyond my control went left, right, up, or down and at a particular time. Inopportune times too! Hah! I’d imagine this is exactly what an insurance underwriter wrestles with and considers daily: damage control and minimization of risk/exposure. Can’t you just hear him punching his adding machine and the clah-clicks tallying totals as the paper-roll moves across the floor?

Bah! So that’s the polite short of it.

I am still here. Until that day or evening of some respite, please do check your new blog notifications for the Professor. I shall return as soon as all my escaped circus animals are located, returned, and settled back to normal… whatever is considered “normal.” 😛

Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always

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