Category: AIDS/HIV
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Fifth Continent (part 1)
And so, with various fussing and excitement and minor anxiety, and bringing a lot of medications related to digestive and allergic side effects, I boarded an airplane… and journeyed to the Fifth Continent. ••• Not the world's fifth continent, but my fifth continent: I have lived and worked on North America, Asia, Oceania (if we define…
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Shift
A dream fragment: One of two simultaneous dream narratives, partly remembered – don't remember the other one. A friend and I are at the front door of a house, a porch light over the door; an old woman is inside. We come to talk to her, twice – I know she won’t remember or understand…
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Easter week
Maundy Thursday. In the night I wake coughing – side effects I think, but perhaps I also caught a minor cold on the train back on Wednesday. Paracodeine (given to me by Antonio, a couple of years ago – I had the flu in Zürich, missed most of the classes that month; on the last day Antonio, who is…
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Closing doors
So: in a burst of extraordinarily blinkered and sociopolitically aggressive pettiness, the UK government pulls us out of the EU. I've been joking for months that I have two passports, but unfortunately they're the ones nobody wants… but just try to trade them for something more respectable, better. Slovenia? Great, flat trade, or shall I give…
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Shafts of light
From the chilly, detached sadness of last week, unexpected changes – a day and a bit that were more entwined with the life, and lives, around me – Friday, an official reception – you know the drill: speeches, food, suits, paintings for sale. But this one has much more life in it than most: an LGBT History…
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What is it to…
What is it to 'go on', to 'leave behind', to 'finish with'? I don't quite mean moving on to doing something else, which is often coloured with the anticipation and energy of whatever it is that is new. ••• Over the past few weeks, my cable company has been running episodes of The Closer back…
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A Hollywood ending
So: although it has been a bad year – illness, anxiety, possible collapse of plans, disconnected from a culturally suicidal Britain, feeling cornered by the future – hospital, new medications, side effects – that year is now having a big Hollywood ending: after three or four days of some of the worst side effects I remember ever having, they are suddenly…
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At the moment…
things aren't bad today. My chest, stomach feel a bit heavy, a shadow of a headache, a sort of – can I say a fuzzy version of tingling, a bit like when you focus on parts of the body in meditations and body processes, except in this case not temporary? Don't know what you'd call that. I…
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Unexpected…
[8 July 2016] I am in Zürich for a week, at the end of the normal Jung-Institut training sessions… I went to the graduation ceremony; there was an unusually large number of graduates, including a lot of friends (some of whom started after I did, but oh well). Hope to be up there in a…
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Cracks in the world
A strange and fragmented time. It feels like a distant echo of the 1930s: erosion, disintegration of supports and safety. Feral rage, roving attacks. A distant whiff of rot and gunpowder. Milder, of course, by far – at least at this point in history: that weird sense that, with a massacre of innocents at a Florida gay bar,…
Paul Attinello 