More 19th Anniversary thougths.......

I guess I am just a thinking mood here the last few days, maybe it is the not being in school that has prompted all this thinking in the first place. I don't feel much different today 19 years later and I guess I expected to. Somehow older, wiser, more focused, more in tune to myself. G-d did I get that all wrong.

I have gotten over the fact that nobody remembers this day but me, after all this day nineteen years only changed everything for me. No one else was changed forever. Its true. Maybe its time for today to become just another day, no more milestones although 20 years livig with AIDS for some reason sounds much better than 19 years . I know goofy as all hell.

I was 25 years old then and I am still all this time later trying to find myself. I read this book quite sometime ago and I find the quotes still relevant today---

"Were AIDS a disease which one contracted, brought death within forty-eight hours of exposure, it would be a far more easily avoided illness-but because it is not, because it is invisible, unknown, for such a long period of time, because it is something people got before they even knew it existed (with each passing year, the time gets longer), the Fear of AIDS is limitless....There's a memory--of an evening, an incident--to justify every fear. And nothing exists that will guarantee the fearful that even if they are functioning now they will not get caught in the future".
 "Looking at some of the guests I can tell which ones are celibate; which ones are having less, more cautious sex; and which ones are going right on with the old ways. It has nothing to do with one's degree of personal exposure to the dying; it has to do with temperament, with the way different minds respond to the same facts. We face each other, after all, over freshly dug graves. There are ghosts among us. We are the actresses who meet in the ruined theater in Follies. We're the tourists who have been admited to an exhibit of our own former lives".

These quotes are from "Chronicle Of A Plague Revisted: AIDS and It's Aftermath" by Andrew Holleran and for me this year I guess I am more aware than ever of the ghosts among us.  Those that we loved who are no longer gone.  I may have said this before but when Ron died now almost eight years ago I stopped counting those who died of AIDS.  Ron was number 600, unbelieveable isn't it.  Today all those years ago changed everything I ever knew and changed forever who I am.  Many ways I am grateful, in some ways I am not.  It just is.  Better or worse for the time being AIDS is going no where and by G-d neither am I.  I have fought this long what the hell is another twenty years?

Well until next time I am so glad we had this time together. Ok fair warning this Lady Gaga spoof is a little much with the "blue language", some erotic themes, near nudity and someover all offensive themes THIS VIDEO IS NOT FOR EVERYONE! But I thought it clever, funny as all get out, So if its your cup of tea enjoy!