Cancer is the most feared disease in our society, and understandably so, as the statistics are overwhelmingly in favor of slow death rather than recovery.

Dear Friend: I am in the greatest transition of my life so far and am writing to share this experience with you. I have cancer in my right breast and the medical report is that the cells are a fast growing and invasive kind.

Theophilus Neutron was a generational transvestite. That is, he was capable of slipping from one peer mode into another with all the deceptive ease of a West Villager trading jockey shorts for lace panties. As near as he could tell, this behavioral quirk began twittering at exactly the same moment as he did — he was conceived at the precise moment the bomb landed on Hiroshima. Though few physical conclusions can be derived from that fact, it was, as Theophilus said about everything that happened to him, a remarkable coincidence; for moments after the bombay fingers opened and the cargo parachuted lazily earthward, an electron-size gap was split open between the generation of the War Babies and the generation of the Post War Boom Babies, and Theophilus Neutron was condemned to a lifetime of confusion in the middle. He was half the product of the despair of war and half the product of the hope for peace — yet it was his War Baby side that hoped and his Boom Baby side that despaired. The residual generics of the terms War Baby/Boom Baby labelled him into a lifelong condition of infancy (known in more sophisticated jargon as innocent, idealistic and naive) while the transitional war boom (reverberations from the bomb) jolted him out of so many historical wombs he felt like a metaphysical vagabond. Half of him viewed social revolutions as events that transpired leisurely over eras, centuries and decades, while the other half watched society revolve at rates relative only to each other and the speed of light. And he never could figure out whether it was man or God that rolled an oversized marble into Sisyphus’s life cycle.