JANUARY 2001
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A Master of the Wired World?
I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.
If I had my meningioma for as much as twenty years, as Dr. Gregory suggested, then I could possibly pinpoint a cause for it, that far back in the past.
No one knows what causes brain tumors. Scientists suspect genetic damage, immune deficiencies, diet, chemicals, and hormones. A sick fascination of brain tumor people is to lie awake and envision the exact moment that something went wrong – when the first cell went south inside them, and decided to mutate to a different drummer.
There are so many possible causes. “Everyone knows” a food ingredient like aspartame is safe and natural, but everyone also knows stories of other safe and natural ingredients that are found to cause problems – MSG, saccharine, cyclamates, ordinary table salt.
Imagine how difficult it is to unscramble all the environmental factors – air pollution, crowdedness, chemicals, noise, greenhouse gases.
Then there are X-factors – things no one has thought of, which future generations will slap themselves on the foreheads for, and say, “What were they thinking?” Maybe newspapers cause tumors. Maybe Worcestershire sauce.
We want it to be something we already despise, like cigarettes and bus exhaust. If it is something we love, like cold beer and buttered popcorn, we’ll have tumors sprouting everywhere, and everyone hunching their shoulders in denial.
I think about my stepfather Dick’s tumor. He had no family history of brain tumors. Many people believe that, over the years, Dick accepted from his industrial clients, out of friendship and to be a good fella, hundreds of barrels of toxic waste, containing substances like carbon tetrachloride, formaldehyde, and PCBs, and buried them out in back of our house somewhere. It is not hard to imagine that fumes or leachage from these chemicals could, over a period of decades, make their way into his sleeping, breathing skull.
His main client was Ohio Edison, the electric company. His job was to build and maintain utility roads between powerline towers. He must have spent months of his life under those crackling power lines, absorbing the electromagnetic fields that sputtered around them.
There was an analog to these power lines and my life -- the electromagnetic fields emitted from my computer monitors. That they emit radiation is not in doubt. A monitor is just a cathode ray tube, like a TV. These rays are quite benign in the exposures people experienced for the last 100,000 years. But when you bathe in them day after day, for half a lifetime, the way a writer who loves to write might -- who knows?
I find this ironic, because Dick hated computers, just as I hated excavating – but each pastime may have brought us closer to our fates.
Among the 500 hats I have worn is the hat of computer writer. I wrote, in 1986, a handful of not especially seminal articles about radiation health.
“Computer monitor radiation,” I said, “has never been positively linked to higher incidents of cancer, birth defects or miscarriages, but that there are scattered stories of computer workrooms with abnormally high cancer rates, so that some experts suggest that pregnant women should consider not sitting too long in front of one.”
Isn't that the kind of advice you've grown to love? Alas, it was all I was able to put forth. Today I'm looking furiously across the Internet for more conclusive studies -- and the jury appears to still be out.
Computers teach you to be comfortable with uncertainty. When a mainboard or hard drive dies, you can never establish why the failure occurred. It costs too much to establish causation with any certainty, and parts are cheap -- you simply replace the mystery component and go on with your computing life.
Wish I could do that with my head.
The thing about uncertainty is, you're not even certain what you're uncertain about. If monitor radiation caused my tumor, for instance, is it wise for me to be typing this even now, in front of my monitor? Have I been cooking my tumor all these years, and am I still basting it in its own juices it today?
Or was formation of the tumor a one-time, one-cell event, that happened back in 1985, with that crummy, noisy CGA monitor I used for a year before the VGA standard arrived -- a one-time, one-cell event that, even if I had shut off my PC forever the moment after that single cell went kablooey, would have grown into what it is today regardless?
I don't know.
I have another theory about my tumor. It involves a blow to the head I experienced in January, 1970 -- the perfect time window for tumor genesis.
I was working at M&L Motor Supply on University Avenue across from Montomery Ward, making $108 a week as an order filler guy while attending college part time. My parents had disenfranchised me at my request so I could qualify for resident tuition at the University of Minnesota. They were awfully quick to take me up on the idea, though.
My job was to take phoned-in orders, push a cart through the warehouse, locate the parts that were in stock, box them for shipment, and backorder everything I couldn't find.
This particular day, I was standing on a five-foot stepladder poking at the box-end of a Mopar combo tailpipe and muffler for a '64 Plymouth Fury. Suddenly, the tailpipe, which was stacked awkwardly on top of other tailpipes, began sliding down toward me.
The box was eight foot long and contained 46 lbs. of hardened steel. It was falling now, accelerating every inch, sailing down to me like a bride from a balcony. All I could do, balanced precariously on the ladder, was stare up at it as it drew closer to me.
It struck me on the left side of my forehead with a loud cloink. The blow alone would have knocked me out, a baseball bat could not have hit harder, but first it sent the ladder teetering, back, back until I fell backward and crashed to the floor.
I imagine I was out for several seconds. When I came to, however, I was changed. The rest of the afternoon took on a weird, mythic, skull-butted flavor. I struggled to stand. My fingers tingled. I felt an egg, a bud protruding from my brow. I looked in the mirror in the warehouse toilet and wiped away the blood.
The bump was on me for weeks, and today I can still see it in a certain light. And thinking back, I wonder if that jolt did something to my melon, caused a single cell to rebel and turn tumorous.
It doesn't matter if it did or if it didn't. But I like having a story to fit it into.
A
KICK 
