Overlapping experiences, overlapping responses to them: last night's relaxed social dinner with colleagues and friends, today's anxious management of some administration in a frantically brief time before going to the hospital to do another HIV presentation, then went to the nearby Indian grocery, then off to a festive department dinner, then a brief visit to some final student rock band performances...
and home to see part one of 'The Age of AIDS,' a television documentary that spends about four hours on the news, politics, medicine, etc. of the past twenty-five years. Perhaps this is some underlying, hidden response to the fact that I spend so much of my time so casually telling people about AIDS, teaching about it, making offhand references to medical things. No big deal. Not a problem really. Been doing this for years, not upsetting at all.
But seeing that history, especially those vile videotapes of Reagan waffling about it, the nasty memos from White House staff that deleted planned mentions of the disease, that avoided questions of funding, that so screwed up so many things for so many years... and helped kill so many people.... well I suppose one can always hope those politicians have gone to their just, and hopefully fiery, reward.
Painful, really. Beneath the apparent actions of living is what is really happening: dinner with friends, catching the bus, shopping for produce – none of that feels very real: what is real, endlessly so, is having been involved with, having witnessed, having lived through, this terrible foolishness, this appalling, hideously mismanaged eruption of tragedy.
I don't know how I can even expect myself to keep on, day after day, with that behind everything....
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