Good morning, John.

It is one of the days. For you, it's Friday. For me, could be any-could be any of the major ones. Any of the major seven of the days. So there's this young guy I started following on TikTok after I got cancer cause he was talking about his cancer story. And he's still posting videos, uh, but he also died, so that's-. And the videos aren't like I'm dead and-. They're just like his normal content. There is like funny videos. So I don't know whether he scheduled them, knowing he was gonna be dead or not knowing that, but either way it makes you think.

So I knew that there was gonna be a bunch of side effects to cancer and chemotherapy, but I did not realize that there would be a bunch of, like, side effects to stopping chemotherapy and cancer. I don't know if that's the right way to say it. One of the side effects of not having cancer anymore that I-is a kind of a bonus, I'm a universal donor—O-—so like, I always feel guilty whenever I'm not donating blood. I don't have to have that one anymore because they will no longer let me donate my blood, so freedom. I'm free of that one.

People told me that this would happen, when you lose your hair because of chemo and then it grows back. You basically like re-roll your whole head. Like, it's your Dungeon and Dragon's character, you're rolling for charisma and for-for strength and stuff. That happens for like all the hair. Now you don't get to choose what you roll, but you do re-roll. So if you had curly hair, you might have straight hair. If you had a straight hair, curly hair. If you were bald, you might get hair again. If you had hair, you might be bald. People will lose their gray hair, they'll gain gray hair. They will become ginger. Like this is not, like, lining up with how I understand these things are supposed to work and I haven't found any research talking about how it works because it doesn't seem like it matters that much. I mean, compared to with all the rest of what you go through, it is fairly trivial.

So, having re-rolled my head, I now appear to have less head hair. I'm more bald I think. I'm gonna be more bald than I was. Now it might be important for me to say here that I have traditionally been the kind of guy who could, like, get on a first name basis with like all of his facial hairs. I've been mostly okay with this. I've attempted to do the goatee thing two times, outcomes not fantastic. But now, I might kind of be able to grow a beard. Now I'm talking a big game here and I don't know what's gonna happen, but you might be looking at me and you're thinking, "Oh my God, that doesn't look like Hank Green. That looks like a nerdy Jason Statham." You weren't thinking that, no one was thinking that.

I find myself, uh, staring at beards. Like, I was at a housewarming party and I got like really quite close to a friend of mine—who's more like a former colleague than a friend—and I was, like, "Oh, I'm just looking at how your beard hair grows in because I don't know how that works. Like do you have longer or more or darker or thicker hair than me, like what's it gonna be like if all of this hair grows in? Am I shaving correctly? I'm not really. I think I went too high." I'm over here like a 43 year old man asking, like, teen boy questions. Like is it normal for it to be itchy?

Now I've never personally been super worried about my facial hair situation, but this does make me concerned because I know that there are a lot of guys who work really hard to try and get facial hair; And I'm worried that if they find out chemo can do that they will find a way to start getting chemo. And I just don't wanna see chemo beard trending on TikTok I think that we all kind of get to keep posting after we're gone. Not like on TikTok necessarily, but in a way right? Y'know, all the words I'm saying right now are words that some person that we've forgotten came up with. Like culture and thus I am made up of millions of tiny little influences from people that I don't know about and can never know about. We'll never know about. Like me making words and having thoughts is kind of them all still posting. What a thing to get to be a part of.

Another weird side effect of getting done with chemotherapy is ocular migraines, which have not been fun, uh, where I, uh, I see like a little light show before I start getting nauseous and my head starts to throb. But they don't last very long for me, so that's something, I guess, to be grateful for. And of course, the last of the most interesting side effects are all psychological. We've got, uh, you know health anxiety, and I thought, I thought I honestly did, that my work anxiety would help distract me from my health anxiety, but it turns out, at least so far, that's not how it's worked. Like I get work anxiety and the feeling of the anxiety triggers my health anxiety. Why does it work that way y'all? And also I didn't think that this would happen to me but I have a little tinge of the survivor guilt. I feel like I don't have any, like, space to talk about cancer because it didn't hurt me enough. And I know that that's irrational but so are a lot of my thoughts these days and we're just working through them. And then, of course, there's like the most me specific side effect, which is that like despite feeling, you know, tremendously necessary for the last many years, I was able to just stop and go do what I needed to do. And that comes down to a lot of help from a lot of people. It comes down, of course, to you, John. But also, of course, there's lots of stuff that you didn't know. Uh, and there are many people who are able to sort of make it work and keep  everything not just like, uh, working but moving forward. And that felt really good.

Taking a step back from me, slowing down a little bit, you know, I think it would have happened eventually. But I did get my hand forced a little bit and so we did it. And it turned out it was entirely doable. So despite the fact that I felt like I was needed for everything, I wasn't and that's great news and also a lesson to learn. I mean it's not surprising that I would be fascinated by the idea of videos still coming out after you're gone. Like, what is it trying to do? What's it trying to say? Is it trying to say like even though I know I'm not gonna be here, I still care what people are gonna think about me after I'm gone? Or is it saying this isn't about me? I want to make people laugh whether I'm here to see it or not. I want people to leave comments whether I'm there to respond to them or not. Maybe it's a way of saying, like, the things that we make aren't really about us. And-and it's interesting to ask, like, what would you make if you knew people would watch it, but you wouldn't be there to see how they felt about it? That's very different from how I imagine creation.

Oh, and having thought through what this video is going to look like. Just for clarity, I'm not dead. I didn't, like, make a bunch of videos, edit them, and then die and then schedule them. Like it seems, like especially because in the beginning I didn't know what day it was that maybe that's what I was implying. No, I'm alive. I just legitimately didn't know what day it was.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.