Over time, I gradually add to the list of websites in my feedreader. Quite often, I prune that list in order to remove content that I no longer read, or which just doesn’t offer value to me as a reader. 

The Simple Dollar is one of those sites that has survived many a year from this ‘pruning’. It has consistently educated me, enlightened me, and set me on the path to financial freedom by continually reminding me of the value of the little things, and the benefits of simple mindfulness when dealing with money.

Today, I feel thoroughly let down. Today, The Simple Dollar posted this post. It’s clearly written by a guest poster, from Cut Media, whom Trent has recently granted access to his site. (I believe this was financially beneficial to him, but I will need to find his post on this to be certain).

This post is appalling. Utterly unrepresentative of the valued and greatly appreciated posts that Trent curates and creates regularly, packed with linkbait and polished off with an infographic that is ‘de rigeur’ these days in every SEO sensitive blog, it is also just poorly written. I sadly smelt a rat when I read the opening sentence by our new contributor, Nicole, and the second sentence is no better:

“I’m excited to begin providing an additional resource for the blog’s readers with a fun and informative weekly consumer-related infographic.”

Excited? Fun? Informative? We have all read those blogs that promise “111 great tips to lose weight” or “23 fun things you didn’t know about cheese” and many, many others in those vein, but a discerning reader will quickly gather that these posts are the meaningless fluff of the internet; offering little value, and carefully written to gather eyeballs for the benefit of advertisers and few others.

It is with great regret that I must draw the conclusion that Trent has let the same thing happen on The Simple Dollar. With no prior notification that this was to happen, no explanation at the time of writing, and countless outraged comments on the post, coupled with a personal twitter account @trenttsd that has been dormant for months and a Simple Dollar twitter account @thesimpledollar that does nothing but generate links to posts, this is a prime example of a site that has lost sight of the value of its readers.

I may come across as a simply outraged internet commenter who demands something for nothing. I’ll freely confess that I have bought little – if anything – from the site, and as such I contribute little to Trents’ financial position. I do visit the site regularly, and subscribe to his site via RSS, and read every post he writes. I generate value with my attention, and Trent has worked hard to gather his ‘clan’ of readers who contribute to the discussions and gather together to support and recommend his writing.

In my opinion, this recent post on his site is the start of a slippery slope towards an advert packed, spammy blog laden with empty posts that offer little benefit to readers and treat them as fodder for advertisers. I’ll stay subscribed to the RSS feed, and stay glued to the site as I really want to be proved wrong.

Trent, if you read this, please, please, reach out to the readers who value you and tell us why you let this happen. I think your readers deserve an explanation.

When I was in hospital, I would often spend days lying in bed. Certainly, at the start of my treatment, lying in bed was all I could do. It was an effort to move, and the energy required to lift my legs out of the bed and move them to the floor, locate my slippers, and re-arrange my clothing so I didn’t inadvertently expose myself was just too much to bear. So I spent a lot of my time just lying there. I indulged myself in conversation with my fellow ward-mates and waited for the next drug round or feeding time. In retrospect, it felt a lot like being in a zoo, with the one obvious exception of tourists not coming around to view me in my native habitat and poke food through the bars.

In an environment like this, when food and drugs were prescribed at predefined times, I allowed myself the luxury of sleep. In fact, this was not so much a luxury as a necessity – chemotherapy drugs are designed to flatline your whole antiviral system, and this in turn puts your body through a hell of a lot. On the outside, you are relaxed, calm and slightly dozy. Inside, multiple wars are being fought and won. It’s a lot of work.

When I slept, I often curled up into a ball, on one side, and drifted away. I became oblivious to the noise of the hospital and the varied comings and goings of those around me, and retreated into idle dreams and just plain flat out sleep. This was always easier in the afternoon, when shafts of bright sunlight shot through the windows and illuminated the ward.

I found that I naturally gravitated to the sun, and let it gradually warm me through as I dozed. As time went on, it became a natural thing to do – when the sun lit up my little space, I slept.

Now, nearly a year after that experience, I still find simple pleasure in sleeping in sunlight. Like a cat that curls up in front of a warm fire, or a spot on the floor that is bathed in light, I find myself wanting to catch a few moments of bliss, get comfortable, and sleep.

Perhaps this is a way for me to re-live the few pleasures I had when I was going through my treatment. Certainly while my body was wracked in pain or simply fighting a multitude of battles on my behalf, I was able to mentally relax, free of the normal structures of daily life, and let others manage my destiny for me.

I guess in retrospect it was a time when I could return to being a child, shuck off the responsibilities of adulthood, and live my life on far simpler terms. Now I am returned to the usual day to day challenges of work, I live for those moments when I can return to easier days.

Like many of the people I read on the Internet, I suffer quite badly with procrastination. That is to say, clearly the majority of the people I read on the Internet don’t suffer with procrastination, or I’d have nothing to read as they would have loads of great ideas but never get round to writing them.

I’ve been told that I’m a good writer. I’ve been fortunate enough to be blessed with the sort of friends that consider my jumpy, abject, long winded prose and the ability to never manage to write a short sentence as a good thing. I’ve been told that underneath all this self effacing concern for my ability to get anything done at all is a good deal of dry wit, something that I have been trying to exercise on the other blog – bloodycomplaining.com – but even there I sometimes fail to express myself properly and just come across as a bloody complainer.

Which, I suppose, is just the point. That’s my place to vent and complain about the world and all the injustices that it serves upon me.

Tangents… Hmmm… Lovely tangents. Where was I again?

So, I’ve been told that I would make a good writer, but the problem with that is the people who tell me that have read stuff that I have written. Ergo, they have experienced the benefits of reading good output when I finally get around to producing it, but that gestation period between an idea appearing in my head and me being sufficiently motivated to actually sit down and write about it can be a veeeery long time.

I’ve tried countless ways of addressing the good old procrastination bug, but the underlying point, I think, about procrastination in the first place is that it originates inside your head, and the inside of your head is a incredibly complex place to start messing around with. Besides, the inside of my head is also where all the reading I do about addressing procrastination goes too, and that makes it kind of hard to deal with.

It would be like trying to evict a horrible smelly flatmate by reading lots of magazine articles and books on “evicting a horrible smelly flatmate” and leaving them open all over the place – if he doesn’t want to go, no quantity of subtle hints or strategies that he knows exist because you openly share them with him are going to make a difference. Do you see what I’m getting at here? The analogy is a bit tenuous, but up there in my convoluted brain it sort of makes sense.

There is a bit of me that is stopping me doing my best thing, but I’m not going to be able to overcome it by reading more things about overcoming it, because by reading about overcoming procrastination instead of just getting started on something I love doing, I’m not actually solving the problem. At all.

Ooh, just got distracted by the idiotic laughing lady in the room next door. I’m typing this in a hotel on my iPad, just after I spent the last ten minutes wondering what the hell I was going to do because I was so bored.

Anyway.

Ironically enough, the very point about typing a post about procrastination is kind of helping me get out of the very problem I was having in the first place. You see, I started this blog with a good reason in mind, typing little posts about the horrible illness I had, and how it affected my life and everything, but as time stretches on and it fades into the distance, just like I knew it would, I find myself wanting to nurture this online place I call home, rather than letting weeds grow all over it like so many other blogs I started.

Blurgh. Long sentences, poorly punctuated. Not my greatest moment.

Anyway, that’s kind of it for the moment. My bit of procrastination busting that might spur me on to achieve more things. At least I’m not staring into the mirror and wondering what the hell I’m going to do with the next half an hour.

My anger has not been limited to just the disease I had – the frustration garnered from a total lack of control over my health or the cures that brought me back to the position that I am in today have manifested themselves in a myriad of other ways.

Take for example, my almost famous bouts of road rage. Thankfully they are limited to me shouting at other drivers while safely cosseted in my car, but when they sweep over me it takes a significant wilful effort to stop them utterly taking over.

I get angry in queues, when other people don’t take up available space in front of them, and countless other ways that I will boil and simmer about on the other blog that I have created for just that purpose.

Anger is a horrible, insidious thing. Giving in to it achieves nothing, but suppressing it makes a person even worse, eaten away by all the things they can’t control, and bottling it all up for the inevitable outburst at a loved one.

2012 is therefore going to be my year of simple acceptance. For example, I can’t change the fact that Xfactor is on the TV, or that the hideous manipulation of the general public that is inherent to these types of programme is always going to continue as long as there is a willing audience. I can’t change the fact that I simply don’t enjoy Radio 1 any more. These are things for which I no longer fit into the target demographic. When designing another ‘talent’ show, the producers don’t consider a 41 year old man to be their key audience member. Rather than ranting and raving about it, I have to simply breathe, be calm, and accept it.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

(Reinhold Neibuhr)

Acceptance is a hard thing to properly internalise, but it’s something that is worth the effort.

This is something that has been rattling around in my head for a while and was most prevalent when I was sitting in a hospital bed. I’ve thought about it a lot. When I was diagnosed the experience was horrible, but I was whisked away and offered support, had nurses to hand 24 hours a day and doctors to quiz about every little problem as it arrived or I was concerned about it. I even had Macmillan nurses to hand to deal with all the little things in my life that simply got in the way of recovery.

For me, the support network was there. For my relatives, things were tougher. I’d lie in bed in a hospital 24 hours a day and had every need attended to, but my relatives had to go back to their ordinary lives knowing that they had left behind someone with an illness. For my fiancee, life was even harder – she had to go back to an empty house, and worry about what was happening to me for the 16 hours a day that she wasn’t by my hospital bed.

The benefit to me of having all that support to hand was that I could afford to be upbeat about everything. I latched onto my 95% survival rate the moment it was mentioned to me and I clung on for dear life, never even for a moment thinking that I would be in that 5% who might not make it. A positive mindset carried me through my treatment and the inevitable sickness and feeling like crap all the time, and allowed me to be one to comfort my relatives.

It’s easy to let the illness overwhelm you, and make you want to curl up in a ball and let things be done to you to make the illness go away. I know I could have done the same thing. I chose not to, and as a result I believe that my recovery was easier, faster, and had less of an impact on my relatives. But they went through an experience that was far harder than mine, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

No, before you mention it, this is not a post about cancer. I think I’ve mined that particular seam for the moment so I thought i’d do something else entirely. woop woop etc, eh?

So, the thing he mentions a lot in the podcasts is largely a challenge to the listeners, and something that i’ve heard repeated by a lot of people that I admire on the internet. Well… I admire them in real life too, but as I’m not a stalker and I don’t follow them home or even know where they live, especially as they all live in the US and so I wouldn’t stand a chance if I even knew where to start, I, er, just admire them from afar.

Anyway, the challenge he mentions is this: “What have you shipped?”. It’s all very well to ask what has been shipped, and by this he means what have you done – what have you created, for public consumption or otherwise?

I was thinking – doing that thing I do just before I sit down to make the clackity noise again – yes, i’m going to keep mentioning the clackity noise until it becomes so natural to me that I don’t feel the need to mention it again – about my job, and the cost of opportunity.

What you say? What’s that? I’m so glad you asked, because that’s what I’m going to write about. Eventually.

The cost of opportunity is that thing you do, the price you pay, to do what you do every day. Say you wanted to write and be a novellist and become all famous and celebrated in bookstores and on the internet and all that jazz. Before you can get there, you have to start. Starting is a good thing. Once you’ve got started, you have to keep going and get good at it before you can get published and achieve all the internet fame and have groupies chasing you down the street and begging you to sign any part of their bodies that they can expose to the dash of your pen without contracting an infection or getting arrested.

Off topic again. I’m really good at tangents, but not so good at mathematics, so I’d better get back on-topic again.

So, you want to be a writer and you get started and keep going and ship something, but all the time you’re doing that, you’re not getting paid, right? So you’ve got to do a job that keeps the lights on and pays for the heating and gives you enough free cash to eat and pay for all those distraction free writing environments you like so much, or all the coffees you drink while you’re in a coffee shop and “working on your novel” (insert suitable douchebag voice here), or that fancy new Mac you need so you can pose in the coffeeshop amongst all the other “writers”. Yes, i’ve got a thing about that, but that’s another post.

What do you do while you’re waiting for that big paid contract to come in? You get a day job, right? If you’re lucky, it’s something you enjoy and can happily do for the eight hours a day you’re not writing your blockbuster novel. If you’re unlucky, you hate it but you still need to sweat through it for those eight hours. Either way, the price you pay to keep the lights on and the heating on and pay for the coffees and the mac and the distraction free writing environment is the day job you do – and that is a cost.

I’m not being clear. The opportunity you have is to develop something, write a novel, sing a song, do whatever you want to do that isn’t work, but something else that plucks at your heartstrings and gets you up in the mornings when you don’t work, so you can get to doing it right away. That something that you want to ship. The cost of the opportunity is the day job.

But – I hear you say – that’s not a cost, that brings in money. Idiot. That’s a net gain, not a cost.

Yeah, but…. it’s a cost. If you wanted, you could spend all day, everyday, writing your novel or singing your song or developing a new Web 2.0 application that has some many cool features that VCs will beat your door down to deliver bucketloads of cash, but you will find that kind of hard from a cardboard box on the street, especially when you spend fourteen hours a day begging for spare change now, just so you can have a hot drink to keep you going enough to rifle through the bins behind your local supermarket to get something to eat. And your fancy new Mac, despite the “Air” designation, actually needs electricity to work and that’s tough to find on the street. I mean, the Local Authorities don’t exactly leave three pin powerpoints all over the pavement, do they?

Something has to be done everyday so you can have money to live, and all the time you’re earning the money to do the other thing, you’re not doing the other thing.

That’s your cost of opportunity. Wow. I really managed to draw that out, didn’t I? Do you see what I mean now? Has that made any sense?

Note to self and the dear reader – this post doesn’t really make much sense, but it was regurgitated from my brain in about fifteen minutes and part of the contract I have with myself is to just write. So it stays. In future times I may look back and regret that decision.

OK, so I promised myself I wouldn’t talk about my cancer exclusively on this blog thing, but hell, it was and still is a huge part of my life and frankly it’s this or tell you about my personal productivity system, and believe me when I tell you I’ve still got that magnum opus brewing up to be regurgitated on these pages in several umpty-million parts. So stick with what you’ve got – is a phrase I’ve yet to hear mentioned by any wise old sage so I’ve decided to use it myself until someone corrects me.

Yes, I had cancer and at the early stages it was difficult to believe me, because apart from the bags under my eyes I looked fine. It wasn’t until a good few weeks into the chemo that all my hair started falling out and I really started on the crash plan lose weight because your appetite has gone diet, and then I looked really ill and suddenly the sheer power of what I had came to me. I could get sympathy! I could talk peoples’ ears off about myself and they felt obliged to listen!

Insert maniacal chuckle here. Yes kids, I took advantage of that in the most horrible way. I mean, there must have been a whole load of people who had heard me repeat my stories about a thousand times – and believe me, dear internet, I have some real doozies – but all in all they were just too polite to tell me I was boring them. I mean, can you imagine the horror of telling someone who has cancer that they are boring? It just isn’t the done thing, darling.

So I talked and talked and made people turn green with the hospital stories and tales of things going into me, and usually not staying there so they had to come out again and go back in, and things coming out of me that weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, and endless, endless tedious detail about treatment regimes and drugs and schedules and playing Xbox at home because I was bored out of my skull.

And the seemingly new ability to talk in really long sentences without taking a breath or letting you, dear reader, think about taking one either, which you can’t really if you are reading this aloud. Although why you’d want to is beyond me. Though you’re thinking about it now, aren’t you? I’m a mind manipulating genius.

Where was I? Oh yes, stories.

The thing was I couldn’t tell if people were just being polite or if they were genuinely interested. They certainly seemed to be interested. Perhaps they never had the chance to quiz someone with cancer before. I was being remarkably upbeat about it, that’s for sure, and perhaps that made it easier to ask questions and have curiosity satisfied. And that’s all before I started to use my illness to get things moving around me.

Yes, it’s true, having cancer – and therefore playing with the preconceptions that people still, unfortunately, harbour about those poor unfortunates that have it – means that you can pretty much play artistic licence with queues and experiences. Merely hinting that you have a disease that is potentially terminal does, I must admit, rather enhance the customer care experience when in retail establishments. Ahem. Did I ever do that? Well, I might have. Just once or twice. Admittedly, most of the time, I didn’t really need to ask – my bony frame, wheezing chest and hairless appearance did help things along a bit. I got discounts. And priority treatment. It was, all in, quite a fun experience really.

Mind you, the fact that I felt like shit pretty much all of the time did take the shine off the experience a bit and perhaps the memory of being treated like I was a special person shines a bit brighter than the actual events themselves. Feeling like shit does tend to do that to you, I suppose. If you can’t walk far and your nose keeps running because your God-damned nose hair fell out (yes, even nose hair goes eventually, and no nose hair means no stopping the constant flow of snot), and you feel tired and sick and goddammit I have cancer get out of my way keeps playing in your head then while everyone does do their best to make you feel comfortable you do develop a sense of entitlement. A sense of “I feel like crap and you don’t, so sod off out of my way” is more common than most.

Anyway, I started ranting when I didn’t intend to. My message? The one thing you can take away from all of this?

If you’re unlucky enough to have cancer, milk it for all you can get. Who knows, you might just end up feeling a little better for it from time to time. And you know what? That makes every day easier to get on with, and you bloody deserve that.

I suppose some sort of dramatic music should be playing at this point. I’ll wait while you go ahead and play some, or imagine some in your head, or whatever. I’ll keep making the clackity noise while I wait.

I suppose I could reel off stories of my past, and the dramatic bits and all that jazz, but in truth I have only one that I really remember. The day I was told I had cancer. dun dun darrrr!

Please note that the word is ‘had’, not ‘have’. I had cancer. I don’t have it anymore. I’m one of the lucky ones, if having a form of cancer that is eminently treatable and curable and only needs four months of chemo and some surgery can be viewed as lucky.

I’ll bore you to death with the stories of how difficult these posts are to write, but they are true. Quite why, I don’t know, but they are difficult to get down out of my head and onto the glowing pixels in a little window on my monitor. I think one of the reasons that it’s so hard is because I’m a truly awful typist, and I keep misspelling words and having to go back and correct them all the time, which frankly is a pain in the arse.

So, clackity, clackity, I was told on valentines day in 2011 that I had testicular cancer, and not only was it in my testicle but the little swine had been on holiday up my lymph node system and had decided on establishing a little pied a terre in the lymph nodes in my back. I can’t recall the exact name of the place at the moment, but a wikipedia link will tell you all that you want to know and probably too much.

I could go on in a suitably Mills and Boon soft focus way about the moment, and the emotionally charged feeling and all the adrenaline in my system that was triggered by the dumb lizard brain that thought a fight or flight reaction was a good way to try and flee the thing that was growing inside me, but that wouldn’t do the moment justice. I was scared. Really fucking scared. Sorry for the swears, kids, but I was fucking terrified and thought I was going to fucking die. There’s just no other way to put it.

Lisa and I clung to each other like we were on the deck of the titanic and the band was still playing while any foundation we had was slipping and sliding away underneath us.

That, for me, lasted about a minute. Then, like a TV gaining focus when it’s been banged on the side or sworn at, the dull beige colours of the ward I was in snapped back into focus, the clearly thinking part of my mind got its’ shit together, and we started asking questions.

The speed at which I was whipped off the ward and into chemo belies the stories you may hear about the failings of the NHS – within two days I was in Mount Vernon Cancer Centre and chemotherapy was underway. The only reason it took two whole days was because of some complicated surgery stuff which is too boring to go into here.

So, in summary for the tl;dr crowd: Once my pain started getting worse, I was in hospital straight away. I had lots of scans and blood tests, then told I had cancer. Two days later, I was in a dedicated treatment centre and on chemotherapy.

Cancer may seem scary when you’re told you have it, but once the healthcare system starts rolling, you just cling on for the ride. And what a ride that was…

Why?

Because he’s so good at pulling at your heartstrings when he talks about his memories of when his dad let him steer the car when he was a child, that just reading it starts to make me cry. Not cry at the story, and not really start crying right here (i’m in a hotel bar and the place is empty: even that well deserved outpouring of emotions would look strange here) but deep down in my heart, where memories reside and make the rest of me work and just do things, a little part of me is in tears.

I guess the point i’m trying (poorly) to make is that I have memories too and they make me want to cry, and laugh, and sit back and shake my head and wonder what happened. My most recurring memory of recent times is the sheer, unparalleled joy I’d get from eating a bowl of bran flakes at 7.30 in the morning.

Yes, there’s a meaning to the last sentence above. Deep, deep, meaning. The bowl of bran flakes was what i asked for every morning when i was in hospital. I’d perch on the end of my bed, wheel the tray so it was over my lap, carefully adjust my IV line and the pump so they were within reach and didn’t snag on anything, then savour every last god-damn spoonful of that little bowl. Then I’d have my single piece of toast, lightly spread with some sort of butter substitute, and sit back in bed, satisfied. Those moments of breakfast bliss were treasured, looking back, because every day I had them was another day I was alive.

There. Now i’m crying. really. just a little bit.

You’ll read countless other stories about how cancer is this thing, this disease that takes people away from us and ruins peoples’ lives and causes many others to throw off the shackles of life and just get on with that one thing they’d always wanted to do before they can’t do anything at all any more, but for me, cancer has a metric shit-ton of connotations and memories. That’s one.