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 a performance, a bit like teaching a class: you go over and over the same ground, hoping something will leap out at you as Your Hook, or perhaps: Your Punchline. If you find it, you can easily work up to it, getting gasps of amazement when you catch the trapeze at exactly the right moment – but if you don't find it you're fairly sunk. (And if that sounds too journalistic or frivolous for Such A Serious Matter, just remember – I spent the 80s scraping along in San Francisco without a position or career expectations, doing any damned thing anybody asked me in terms of writing and arts administration, in addition to classy things like being the snotty, undertrained receptionist in a large firm – I have a long history of doing pretty much anything for attention, which predates any professional credentials I have now.)
As for the bad things in the past few days: I worry about them a bit – enduring being the butt of a burst of passive-aggressive rage, sleeping on a broken guest bed, a closed bridge and crazed traffic – only because I have a history of bad things happening in the lead-up to my birthday (now eight days away). Perhaps it's because I have Scorpio rising in my chart – okay I don't know much about that either, but it's suggestive that, although the Sagittarius that I'm supposedly identified with should be fiery, powerful, cheerful, male, I also have the coldest and creepiest of astrological signs threaded through my existence. In any case, rotten things happen, and life always looks fairly awful, just before most of my birthdays; then, generally on the day itself, usually in the evening or sometimes starting the morning after, things clear up and get better.
A peculiar and, you will say, unbelievable phenomenon – well no apologies here; it's a bit like the strange factoid that I only get seriously ill every four years. No sensible medical reasoning here, just the fact that my major HIV-related miseries have occurred in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004. I will, of course, observe the beginning of 2008 with narrowed eyes and folded arms.
Anyway: I hope the next week won't get too bad. And I hope I'll find that hook, that perfect thing to say tonight....
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