Some thoughts for today

I am reading this book called "Chronicle Of A Plague, Revisted: AIDS and Its Aftermath" by Andrew Holleran and I wanted to share some of the very profound and touching passages I have read today. It speaks volumnes of things I have had no words to say. So with that said..............

"AIDS quickly converted people in their twenties into old men who were blind, mad, wasting away, racked with fevers, chills, pneumonia, diaherrea, Kapposi Scarcoma, dementia, and other diseases made possible by a total breakdown in the immune system....I wrote, I felt like attending a dinner party at which some of the guests were being taken outside and shot, while making small talk. Let me update this: AIDS worked its way through.... with the malicious eye of the sectarians in Iraq--assaniating, it seemed, all the best people first".

"The final balkanization of gay life, however, was that some of us lived, others died. "How wonderful it will be," a friend of mine said to me one evening in the seventies, "when we get old--we'll all go from house to the other visting!" BUt friendships that would have evolved over time were tested by AIDS long before old age could. AIDS made people ask" What are we to one another? ....Walking into a hospital and identifying oneself to the person at the desk, the word "friend" sounded flimsy. Then there was the final breach as you watched your friends burning up in a furance you could not enter. What a way to end one's life! Did it seem like life's final penalty for being homosexual"?

"It still seems a scandal that an item scientists do not even define as living-- a microbe that can't paint angels, trumpets, clouds, or gods upon a ceiling--can devour a creature who can. It still seems a reproach that a virus can return us from the twentieth century to the Stone Age".

With those few simple thought I want to leave you tonight with my love, my prayers and my support as always my friends I think of you warmly, fondly and very often. After all "I'm here"..............................