Author: paulattinello
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The hospital room, at midnight
Drained neatly, each hour, stapled to a network of steel, wet plastic, web of blood and urine. Before the final bell of this fluorescent night: an orange. Oils burst, wild, juices glow, virginal, cold – alive! – a caravan, the blue-white sky, red haze of cinnamon, and bitter aloes, desert wind. In any trap, escape…
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…lazy…
Semi-demi-at-the-beginning-or-in-the-midst-of writing out the Sondheim/Heidegger paper. Various possible procrastination techniques from my extensive store of them are coming up, of course. There are a few concerts I have to see… the weather’s a bit dim… have to make dinner… might play another game of computer solitaire…. Wouldn’t it be interesting if I had somehow learned…
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Points on a curve
Last weekend I was in Manchester to hang out on the gay scene for two summer days, with P-. Various things occurred to me, and were written in one of my little notebooks. These points don’t really collect into a focused argument or linear series, but they do seem to sort of follow one from…
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WDC ➔ SFO
I grew up in Washington, D.C., where people are always careful of what they say. There are many gay men, but they don’t tell those who can’t use the information: congressmen and lawyers don’t want just anyone to know about their personal lives, and they give you only their first names. There is a lot…
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Sunny
The weather is sunny, and so am I (mostly – with a cheerfully anxious tinge to it). Shows that I really should live in a warm climate, yes? Ah well. Tonight, about ten people coming over – party/dinner – so cooking. As always I’m more enthusiastic than competent in the kitchen, so have gotten much…
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Ghosts
Tonight I saw an Ozzie comedy show, with many Oceanic celebrities, everyone having fun, in-jokes, etc….. When I’m really frustrated – aching, rather than bitter or resentful – at the Sydney debacle, at not living in that city, I don’t think about the really grand or remarkable times or scenes – not the bridge, not…
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Grey
[N.B. not, in this case, ‘gray’ – I’m not generally enamored (enamoured?) of British spellings; ‘analyse’ seems rather nice, sort of aesthetic, but ‘colour’ is merely affected (English isn’t French, however many Norman aristocrats would have wanted it that way) and ‘programme’, which comes up daily at work, is just ridiculous. But I’ll admit that…
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Dreams II
Not yet asleep, his house, his bed, I breathe His skin, reshape my legs to fit his legs; But when I leave the waking dark to feel Another air, I’m faithless to this place: Dream buildings. See, they rise with radiant walls, Yet skeletally, fling steel bones from earth To air, float nets of brick…
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The hillside
‘And I fell asleep and had this dream’: after continuing to read about awareness, eternity, and timeless responses to tragedy or despair in the Upanishads and Buddhism and Taoism; after the last in a long chain of long days of meetings, tired of but not upset about so many things, and after some champagne (the…
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Demi-overload
Another long day in a series of long days. Some things going well, some exasperating, near to maddening. Colleagues intermittently pleasant, wise and helpful, or occasionally, luckily and mercifully briefly, flaming assholes. Not so bad I suppose – many in business deal with much more, and much worse; and I have of course fought intermittently…
Paul Attinello 