The bad cancer news keeps coming. I learned yesterday that a friend back in the States is probably going to die from cancer in the next few days. This afternoon, a friend on the East Coast e-mailed to say that his sister is entering hospice, because cancer has finally beaten her.

As regular readers know, I’m in the Netherlands at the moment visiting an old friend suffering from stage four cancer. So cancer is something I’m thinking of a lot anyway. And now this.

I have a number of essays and articles I want to link to for discussion in this space, but I can’t muster the wherewithal to get to it. Sorry about that. I feel that I’ve been holding out on y’all, because I’ve been so busy over here in Holland, and dragging butt around taking naps — two of them today, in fact — because of mono (called in Dutch by the exotic and villainous name “ziekte von Pfeiffer”). I’m worn out from thinking about illness, and when it comes to cancer, it’s starting to feel like Panzers are rolling across the border, and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it.