Author: paulattinello
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Retrospect
I continue to be slightly… what? – unclear, disoriented, mildly frustrated? – about my previous post, about my feelings on Christmas night. There was a lucid sense of time and the year, of eternity and life and death, of change as perfect and inevitable. And, quite honestly – and this is rare for me –…
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This Christmas night
A quiet night. Before Christmas, there was a pleasant trip up to Morpeth to see Merrie and Bennett – my gift from them turned out to be not only their own elderberry jelly, but one of Bennett's newly turned bowls, a beautiful and sensual piece of work in greens and golds. He hasn't been doing…
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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…
Paul Attinello 