Author: paulattinello
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Solstice
Last night, exceptionally strange dreams: psychotic, then sociopathic, figures – strange flashes of ruthless danger, violence. Not frightening exactly, not a feeling of nightmares, but certainly alarming – perhaps more alarming on waking: to write about them brings one to a stop, to a point of shock. Of course, in Jungian terms, some kind of…
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Types
Today was Steve's wake: of the 'eldest set' (and no, we don't have a term for ourselves – we are simply the members of the local HIV patient group who have lived the longest – generally from fifteen to twenty-odd years since diagnosis), he is actually the first, or perhaps the second, to die in…
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Maintenance
I tend to be disturbed by the times when practically everything there is to do in a given day, in this city, in the world seems to be a kind of maintenance – keeping things going, repetition – except for the things that are timewasters. Maintenance: I do tend to keep the apartment neat, I…
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Spinning
After Mom's death, recovering from what is apparently irritable bowel syndrome (sigh) and someone breaking into my office… At the analyst's. My dreams have no particular focus; I can discern an echo, like an invisible superstructure, of response to Mom's death around the edges, but otherwise there is not much to work with. He finally…
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Airports (II)
I remember that, in the first few years I went up in airplanes, and lasting well into my early twenties, I was amazed by the tops of the clouds visible through the airplane windows – and responded to them with fascination and flights of imagination, and couldn't quite understand why other people didn't watch them…
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Mom died on Sunday, very early in the morning. There have been papers to sign; my sister and brother have of course handled lion's shares of the complex work involved – contacting relatives, banks and newspapers, filling out forms, cleaning out her room, etc. I'm apologetic to say that I mostly feel a certain dim…
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… various
Three in the morning. It's a painful night – periodically for the past month or two I seem to have some new kind of digestive pains, they were wondering if my pancreas is in trouble or something like that. (Perhaps it's just a matter of endlessly taking mildly toxic medications for decades on end.) At…
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Mac
My first Macintosh was not the first model made in early 1984, but the second model – the 512K (if you can imagine an entire memory that small) in late 1984. Since then, I have tended to insist on Apple computers – even, perhaps slightly insanely, while doing my six postgraduate exams, on a Macintosh…
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Bedazzled
It has obviously been the last night of our four-day 'Indian summer'… and yes, I did rather possessively explain to someone British, who thought it was British slang for something associated with India, that it is American slang for something, well, Native American. But, as has been pointed out, 'Native American Summer' doesn't have the…
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Waiters
A gloriously unseasonable week, weather in the low-mid 70s (yes, I still think in Fahrenheit), which led me to telephone Michael and say we have to go hang out somewhere outside: because if we wait too long (according to the forecast, Sunday) it will go back to the usual northeastern weather. And then we'll all…
Paul Attinello 