Category: Illness
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Dark pasts
A couple of weeks ago – Saturday – D. and I went to see Matthew Bourne's The Midnight Bell. Based on books by Patrick Hamilton, who wrote a lot about being down and out and drunk in London in the 1930s (and died in his fifties, predictably of deterioration after a life of drinking), it's…
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Zürich in winter: 2025
Monday The first night in Zürich. The flight wasn’t bad; was thinking about small things going wrong while traveling, after reading someone who claims that such things are ruinous but one forgets them. I don’t really agree: for some people, at some times, yes, but… And, finally in my hotel room, I break a glass…
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Year
A strange year. Or, an expectable year. A year that was opaque for much of its length, but which now seems transparent as glass…. A sense that thoughts and emotions, and in fact much of what I call myself, has settled into something more… well, integrated, simpler. The awfulnesses on the horizon – two wars,…
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Another August
Yet another interesting time… In mid-June I saw my HIV doctor, the kind, meticulous Scottish one, the one who managed our large teaching hospital's COVID care through much of the pandemic. (The department is Infectious Diseases, so, there you go.) I was surprisingly tired and weak – I'd asked to see him out of the…
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Stats
June 5 is HIV Long-Term Survivors Day – it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon, with varied definitions. It's 5 June because that's when an article talking about five cases first appeared in the press, so – as in the work I'm writing (or supposed to be writing) now, it's not about the existence of the…
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Anniversary, and questions
A few days ago was the fifteenth anniversary of this blog – 14 May 2006. I wanted to finish a blog entry from September 2019 – so a bit more than a year and a half ago – a fairly amazing late-summer experience of Vienna, Barcelona, Sitges, and life, and excitement, and death, and ending.…
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Familiar
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by
in Academia, AIDS/HIV, Death, Illness, Imagined, Memory, Music, On writing, Personal, Psychology, TelevisionThe image seems clear, even obvious, to me – it could be from one of the better-written fantasies, or from a film about some medieval saga… an old man living alone in the woods; there is a shift in the wind, or the light – he looks up, creases his forehead slightly, sniffs the air…
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Writing a Story for You
[A 1991 story written in Terry Wolverton's writing group; about Reid Beitrusten, who died 2 December 1983.] You’re dead, but you wanted to write stories. You were just about to get published, just about to start making it. So I’m writing a story for you, I started it in the laundromat, I went next door…
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Defense / critique
2:18 a.m. Zürich time: my thesis defense at the Jung-Institut is at 9 am. My phone's alarm is set for 6:20 – very early for me; and because I frequently get annoying side effects at night (headaches, itching, stomach aches) I did not take my HIV meds at dinner. It's okay – statistically 95-98% compliance…
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Finishing the year
When you read older fiction and someone refers to dragging a steel bath into the kitchen and filling it with kettles of boiling water, do you wonder… what would that be like? I don't think I could stand it. ••• I didn't quite have a Christmas to speak of this year – it was interrupted…
Paul Attinello 