Steve Jobs is dead. It’s still something I’m trying to process. I don’t choke up as badly now as I did when it first happened.

Two more to go. Tomorrow I go in for my second to last chemo treatment. (The side effects have been getting progressively worse, but that’s to be expected. I don’t know if I could handle more than a couple more of them.)

This is what my brain does when the indigestion is keeping it awake at three in the morning. (Sung to the tune of the old Spiderman cartoon.)

I can feel my teeth.

I remember the first time my father looked old.

I mean, he’s always looked older to me, mainly because he is older than me. But from when I was a kid, he’s always looked pretty much the same to me. There might be grayer hairs, or a few more wrinkles, but he was still always the same old dad.

And then we went to visit him and Mom after he had had his heart attack, and he wasn’t the same old dad. He was tired. He shuffled his feet as he walked. He was still quick with a snappy comeback, but there wasn’t as much snap in his voice. He was old.

A few months ago, a cell divided. It happens constantly, a biochemical dance of enzymes unzipping and copying and stitching chromosomes, dividing the cellular contents up in a million miniature divorces a minute, you making you out of you, right under (and in) your nose.

Except this time there was a mistake.

The doctor broke Nancy’s water at about a quarter to noon after she’d been on oxytocin for a few hours, just like he had with Sean. I knew that things would start to progress and went outside to get a cell signal and let family know that we’d have a new baby in a few hours. Except it wasn’t a few hours. By the time I came back in, Nancy was almost ready to start pushing. They barely got the epidural done, and a few contractions later, Scott came slithering out, slimy and upset and perfect.

Well, almost perfect.