This is no joke. Honest. But I can be funny about it.

I have a really big nasty malignant tumor in my left kidney. It might be fatal. There’s no way of knowing right now. But one thing I know for sure is something I hear all the time from fanatical fundamentalists trying to explain everything in the universe that they do not understand: God did it.

I don’t know how it happened. Maybe I masturbated one too many times. I hear that God doesn’t like that. Maybe I made one too many posts to the alt.atheism newsgroup arguing that God doesn’t exist. That would piss God off. Maybe just refusing to believe in such an absurd concept as an intelligent designer who seats us in the smoking or non-smoking sections for all eternity after we die is enough to enrage the deity to take me out before my time. But if a god created everything then he surely created my cancer for a reason I can only assume is to stop me from completing my epic and "evil" musical project. After all, in "Food for the Gods", I deconstruct as many gods as I possibly can in an attempt to reveal them as being the products of humans who need someone to love and be loved by as well as something to justify their hatred and atrocities. What god wouldn’t be angered by such an explanation. And worst of all the music is really cool, so a large number of people are going to hear it and possibly be tempted into not believing. It’s a simple equation. If you take out one sinner and send him to hell immediately, you will save all the people that he would have taken with him. God is just doing the math.

I know that it’s hard to imagine that a god would be so petty as to inflict suffering and death upon someone for making him angry. But if you read the bible, and many other holy books, you might be surprised to find out how petty the gods described in them really are. Often they act like children who have been given all the power in the universe to use or abuse as they will. Taking a look at the leaders of the world past and present it’s not hard to see where the authors of holy books got their ideas from. But today we’re supposedly more enlightened and so we metaphorically take a big black marker and cross out the parts of our holy books that we don’t like anymore. So if you don’t think or feel that a god would give me cancer then you can find a good explanation for why that isn’t so. Just don’t think that you’ve proven anything because it’s all just a big word game. All you need to do is to craft an explanation that makes you feel better and voila, it becomes the truth, for you.

For me the vision of a god that makes me feel better is one closer to Kali than the Christian god. A goddess who his cold, calculating, and ruthless has far more appeal to me than one who is angry or emotional or one that is male. I don’t know exactly why that is, it’s probably just an assemblage of the things that I admire and respect in the people I’ve met over the years. If the Christian mythology were true I’d have to take an adversarial position to their god. He’s an asshole. He’s a dictator. Do as he says and you will be loved. Disobey him and you will burn. Isn’t that the type of thing that we’ve been taught to abhor and resist? Why spend your life fighting dictators on earth only to surrender to the ultimate dictator in heaven? But as much as I’d like for there to be a real goddess as I imagine her to be I have to disabuse myself of such notions because they do not fit with my understanding of the world. I’ve spent my adult life practicing an applied science and the one thing that I have been made painfully aware of is what terribly unreliable tools your intuition, emotions, and gut feelings are. I remember how many times I thought that I knew the answer to a problem only to discover that I was completely wrong and I’ve learned that the path to discovering the truth is not one that can afford the luxury of faith or convenient assumptions that cannot be proven wrong. Simply put, God is bullshit, Kali is bullshit, and life is too complex, difficult, and treacherous to spend it basing your decisions on fantastical notions of deities, commandments, and divine punishment. When the pressure is on, you must set aside your feelings and use what you know. The best way to deal with things, is to deal with them.

Some of you may feel that the best way for you to deal with my illness is to pray for me or to do the secular equivalent of praying and hope for my survival. I can assure you that it won’t matter to me, but it may help you, so go ahead and do it. But if you have to pray, try praying to Kali instead of whoever you usually pray to since what I need now is a goddess who knows how to destroy, that is, one who can purge the cancer out of my system. Kali has got to be the best choice. So repeat this prayer,

"Kali, great and terrible goddess of destruction, please refrain from your work in Iraq (or wherever) if only for a moment and tend to the needs of one of your children. Obliterated his cancer. Crush it in your mighty hand so that he may rise and finish his epic musical project in which he calls out your name. After that you can waste him, but not before then because ‘Food for the Gods’ is some seriously rocking music that I really want to hear and I need you to help him to complete it."

I recommend that you should then sacrifice something valuable since that’s how real gods and goddesses work.

I feel that some of you are wondering about the message that I’m trying to get across with all my music and my writings and so forth. I probably haven’t been completely clear, either because the subject matter is difficult, or my manner of speaking isn’t plain, or that you have hundreds of question or arguments that I haven’t addressed. I could probably spend my whole life trying to describe how I think the world operates and not come a step closer to proving it in any definitive manner. I could also spend my whole life trying to prove it and only contribute a small piece to the puzzle. But there is one thing that I can make perfectly clear and that is if you read something that I have written and want to ask something that begins with, "So you’re saying that we should...", then you have missed the point. My purpose has never been to propose a course of action. I’m only trying to establish how I think things are. I’m trying to construct the big picture. No one should use it to determine what we should do until we sufficiently understand everything, sufficiently test everything, and actually set a clear goal. In my view the world today lacks all three things. Without understanding we all have to guess what we should do and the consequences of guessing wrong at the highest levels are growing more catastrophic every day. I personally don’t think that we’re going to understand the world around us before we go over the brink, but that doesn’t mean that all is futile. Nihilism only means that it doesn’t truly matter what we do. It’s taken me a while to get used to that idea but now I can see what it means. Sure I’d like to live a long life. I’d like to complete my projects and see how everything turns out, but I realize that these desires I have are just arbitrary. If I had been born in another country or in another time I’d have different desires, and as long as I live I will always have something that I want to finish before I die. The exact ending point is inconsequential. We expect to live about 70 years, so it seems like a shame if someone dies before then, but is any time truly a better time to die than any other? Sure, it’s no fun to be alive when your body doesn’t work like it used to anymore and you know that it is just a matter of time before the end, but we always want to see one more day. Whether that is because of curiosity or our innate desire to live it doesn’t really matter. So I’ve realized that it doesn’t really matter which day it is that you die, the important part is trying to live. The same can be said about the human race as a whole. We look at all our progress and advancement and speculate that we will continue to thrive and one day be literally the rulers of the universe. But does it really matter if we succeed? So many philosophies emphasize that the journey is the important part, not the destination. Being alive is to be traveling somewhere, reaching for some goal, or trying to live out your dreams. So if we are always traveling to a new destination, setting our sights higher with each new day, it doesn’t matter when we get there or if we get there at all. The end can come any time, and the result is always the same, but instead we believe that our future is to be judged and we spend our lives in fear.

I think that we as a race of humans are racing too fast towards our destinations and that the journey is getting less and less enjoyable with each passing year. Our bodies get pushed past their natural limits and maybe the cancer that I have is a result of that pushing. I think that our belief in gods is the driving force behind our pushing ourselves past our limits, so perhaps in that respect the gods did cause my cancer. I know that my surgeon’s devotion to his gods have resulted in his skills. He had to push himself through medical school and build a thriving practice to get where he is today. The gods are not real, but that doesn’t mean that "faith" can’t move mountains, or destroy them. The problem is that we are collectively trading our present for our future and we are all paying a very high price.

I do have one specific message to pass on should this be my last newsletter. If it’s not then you should forget what I’m saying because I’m sure to change my mind down the road. If you want to keep it be sure to print it out. Hard copies are more reliable than hard drives, and if the payments stop going to my provider my site will go away, so be warned, Fireaxe may one day disappear.

Most of your life will be spent in drudgery, working towards those rare times of bliss, and the longer you live, the harder you must work to revel in those fleeting moments. Don’t be afraid to suffer as you toil for suffering will yield strength. Don’t be afraid to travel down long lonely roads for they lead to new and different lands. And when the world’s door opens for you just a crack and your wisdom tells you that your time is now, don’t be afraid to charge full speed into the fray with your eyes wide open and your hands gripping the reigns for success is never measured in victories, but in glory.

It’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s good advice.

I’ve had time to think about dying, and the more I think about it the more I realize that the most important thing to me, at least right now, is "Food for the Gods". The strange part is that it would be somewhat ironic or perhaps appropriate that I die at this particular part of the project. When you get your copy and get to the final part of the work you’ll understand and may get a wry laugh out of it. Should I be given the customary six months to live, or end up living out my days in chemotherapy struggling to survive I will put my last ounce of effort into finishing this work. I feel that it is not only the pinnacle of my efforts as a musician but as a person as well, at least in the philosophical sense. It’s not just a CD, it’s the highest form of art that I can create and I would regret not being able to make it as good as I can due to being less than full strength. Also I doubt that even if I do survive that I would take on something of this magnitude again. It has been quite a challenge.

Or maybe I will.