Cancer wants to have a beer with me.
His invitation popped up as a text message on my cell phone while I was driving around town on Saturday. Creeped me out; it really did. Almost made me crack up the car! I pulled over and parked to make sure that I read the message correctly.
Seems fishy, coming on the heels of the fiasco in Cambridge and Obama's "teachable moment" with that cop and Skip Gates.
Does it sound like a trap? Is this some kind of clever marketing gimmick, a mass text message sent to thousands of people at the same time? City of Hope and Kaiser have been doing a lot of radio buys recently, so maybe this is Cancer's way of striking back. I imagine Cancer would have a hard time buying a spot on KNX-AM, even with the Fairness Doctrine and all.
Or maybe this text message was directly solely at me. I have been dissing Cancer a lot in this blog. Maybe Cancer wants to give me his spin on what I've been spewing.
Or maybe Cancer wants to go
mano a mano.
Call me crazy, but I'm tempted to take the bait. It would be quite a beer date. I'm confident that I can handle any questions Cancer has for me, and this would give me a chance to get Cancer on the record about things that I want to know.
At the top of that list: Dude, are you still in me or not? And if you are still lurking in me, when are you gonna pack it up and leave?
Oh, and I would love to see Cancer's reaction as I unbutton my shirt to pour my brew into a syringe attached to my G-tube.
Still, I don't want to act hastily. After almost 20 years of kvetching publicly about HIV, I've never gotten invited on a beer date with AIDS.
So it just seems odd.
I sat in my car, reading the message over and over, while tapping my fingertips on the dashboard. I didn't want to blow Cancer off right away, and risk pissing him off. Cancer went to the trouble to text me; Cancer deserved a timely response. So I hit Reply, and texted back to him:
"OK with U if I bring along Joe Biden?"
I'll let you know if I hear back.
