rash

     This was taken with my brother's iphone.  It did end up coming to me.  But in order for this phone to be useful to me as a doctor-in-training, I had to wipe it clean.  Reset it.  Start over.  In other words, I had to remove any trace of my brother from it and make it mine.  All the text messages to his wife and kids.  All the photos.  There were some of him and our dad working.  He actually looks healthier than my dad which I guess makes sense given that my dad also had cancer, though we didn't know it at the time.  His songs.  And his voice.  Ouch.  And anger all over again.
     The brief movie is from the Rush concert last week.  My wife and I ventured out to Austin (sans son strangely) and the seats ended up being the best seats I've ever had, and I've been to a lot of Rush concerts.  If you've never been, a Rush concert is an experience in sensory overload in every sense - the music, the lyrics, the visuals, the energy, the intensity.  I felt alive.  But after?  That was another story.
     The lead singer wears a shirt with a self-deprecating joke of their name.  It says 'RASH'.  Being a doctor-in-training, I had to have that shirt, courtesy of my wife.  And the image struck me.  Have you ever had a rash?  And I mean a bad one.  Like getting into a bed of poison ivy.  Your skin is raw and hypersensitive to the slightest stimulation.  Any amount of heat or sunlight brings an intense aggravation to already overloaded pain fibers.  And you want so desperately to scratch it.  But the itching just makes it worse, doesn't it?  And that's how my anger feels now.  I feel like a rash that's been rubbed raw, super sensitive to any relation to the world outside me.  So the exposure to something as intensely pleasurable and moving as a Rush concert (the last time I had tickets were a present from my brother - his son went along for his first Rush concert), inevitably pulled off all the scabs and opened the blisters.  The anger has begun to evolve and I guess that's something.