Category: AIDS/HIV
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Us and Them
[Speech for the third World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2006. The speech for the 2004 vigil is here, and for the 2005 vigil here.] I’m a member of the Newcastle HIV patient group. One of the things we do fairly often is talk to medical students, most of whom look,…
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A bit wound up
Today is World AIDS Day; after the past few chaotic, often fun but occasionally fairly awful days, I need to get my brain around a BBC interview in the morning, and then I have the afternoon to somehow get my thoughts in order to find something to say at tonight’s vigil. It’s a bit like…
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AIDS and Memory
[Speech for the second World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, on December 1, 2005. My speech for the 2004 vigil is here.] It’s a difficult thing, to lose someone… but we still have the stories, the memories. A couple of weeks ago, I received a fairly large package from an obscure address in the…
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Unusual
Weirdly energetic today. No, strike that: not weirdly – normally, but unaccustomedly, energetic. (Beep beep beep: adverbial overload alert.) Feeling fairly calm, physically not depressed, awake, all the way down to my ‘core’ sense of my body. Woke after sleeping only six hours (short for me) ready to do things – vacuumed, did a bit…
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The Process
[Los Angeles, 1991] I’m not dying. I’m sitting on the couch next to the windows with my feet up, feeling the breath of the afternoon air; the sun slants away across the grass and its sprinklers. I’m wearing my gray robe, the heavy warm one, and waiting stoically for another coughing fit. I’m sick again…
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Toxic
Headaches, diarrhea, sudden bursts of fatigue. Not overwhelming, just enough to notice, and to make me stay home when invited to see Guy Fawkes fireworks. It does seem rather weird, doesn’t it, that a “reformulated” Kaletra would give me transitional reactions like a new medicine – but perhaps this confirms that this reformulation is different,…
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Promises
Friday: a day of things whose colors were muted, rather dull colors mixed with gray; but those things, quiet and apparently unimportant, were nonetheless good, and important. Reading Sontag on Goodman and Artaud, for no real reason, just because it was the book I picked up on the way to the bus, on the way…
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Workshopping
Today I co-presented a workshop on writing about AIDS for the local gay and lesbian writer’s festival. During the months of arranging for this workshop, I’d worried that the overlap between the HIV and writing communities here was small or nonexistent – which is probably true; but we managed to guilt some of our friends…
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AIDS in the World
[Speech for the first World AIDS Day vigil in Newcastle, UK, December 1, 2004.] Tonight I’m thinking about some of the places I’ve lived and visited, and some the people I’ve seen and known, over the last twenty years. Many of those people have been touched by, or concerned about, AIDS, and a lot of…
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Politics of border crossing
I tend not to believe much in politics; only in the past few years did I begin to think about my own past, and why that might be – after all I was sixteen when Nixon made Watergate; a few years later I moved to San Francisco, to a thriving arts community, just in time…
Paul Attinello 