A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

old friend, I drove home in silence.
Another day I couldn't think of a famous writer's name. I
searched frantically though my memory for it, ransacking the
associations I did have. I knew he had white hair. I could see the
hair in my mind, and intuited that his name had something to do
with the weather. Could his name be snow? Sleet? Was it Gordon
Sleet? My mind was a flurry of possibilities that led me nowhere.
Snow White? Snowy Bleach? C.P. Snow? Lord Snowed On?
I got it finally by relaxing and thinking of his face, and then
the name came to me. Only when I knew that, of course, the
writer's name was Robert Frost, did I come up with a good
mnemonic:
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
But from what I know of loss,
It could also end in frost.
It is possible to have a virulent brain tumor and feel no pain
from them. This is because, while the brain is the switching yard
for the body's nervous system, telling you how everything in your
body (and in your soul) feels, it itself has no nerves of its own,
hence no sensations. If you somehow bypass your skin and scalp,
which are loaded with nerves, you could stick a fork in your brain
and feel nothing. Think of the Ray Liotta eating-his-own-brain
scene with Hannibal Lecter.
The exception is intracranial pressure. Some, but not all brain
tumors, cause headaches. A few of these are excruciating,
migraine-level affairs. The pain of most tumor headaches,
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