Slits zine by the teenager and other artifacts.
Reading
last night, a line from Lisa Carver’s
memoir stuck with me:
“What
we want is something to spread through us, to take us over,” says Carver, “and that’s
what diseases do….” No one wants a disease. But we do want something.
From
fear to connection, Carver finds something on the stage, “it was probably the
most exhilarating moment of my life,” (p.14-5).
These
days, my teenagers are writing their own zines, painting their own stories.
We’re
tracing those exhilarating moments in our minds, our inner moments, between
reading and dreaming, dosing off, wondering if there is going to be snow, if something
else is coming, moving through us, something spreading.
It
has been four, five years of running from horror, detentions, fascism.
And
now we’re finding a distance from it all.
Our
dreams still remind us we’re not quite beyond it all.
My
friend Emily posted a request:
“I
had an epic stress dream last night where I:
-got
lost
-couldn’t
find shoes
-ran
out of gas
-forgot
my mask
-had
to do an unexpected stand up comedy routine
-only
lined one of my eyes
-had
a party ppl didn’t RSVP to
What
are your stress dreams like?”
I
find myself dashing off a few notes from where I’ve been the last few nights,
missing
vaccine appointments, meeting the ditchdigger drunk, wondering what happened,
over and over again, winding down winding stairs down a hill, in medieval town,
looking out into the distance, lost in a long stairway, trying to find my way
back up, a frenetic party, stumbling into a lost friend, forgetting where I was
going.
Over
and over, I have this dream.
Different
versions of the hallway each year, in a subway, a hotel.
We’re
all looking inside right now through this long winter.
The
loneliness of it grasps, many, with no hugs, for months on end, the cabin fever
raging, another year into the pandemic.
The
teenagers are still at home, losing senior and freshman year to online classes,
community disappearing and reappearing in different forms and dreams.
Collectives
taking shape, colors flying, paintings up on the wall.
Dreams
about random get togethers, where everyone arrives for a party in Bushwick.
Driving
through the post-apocalyptic landscape, separating, searching, looking, a teenager
and her friends, encountering a boy and his dog, the last humans on earth.
Dreaming
of Paris and our city of friends, we drive,
singing
Kimya Dawson
“I
will lose my shit if even one more dies. So, please don’t die,” she begged,
thinking
about her mom and kids, tracing her adventures…
Next
the kids ask for Joy Division.
“Now you have blue eyes,” we all sing,
melancholy words to a dance beat still appeals.
Temptation
Perfect
Kiss.
Time
passes, the kids came.
We
celebrated each birthday, many of those aunts and uncles who joined, no longer
around.
They
joined us for a bit and now they are flying off into their lives.
I
still don’t know where they came from.
Its
still a mystery.
Saturday,
a few of us meet to unpack it all, the friendships, the fights, the moving, the
beer pouring at Lavendar Lake, chatting away, wondering why Nietzsche
broke with Wagner.
What
do you do when you find out a friend has some blindspots?
Do
you cut them off?
While
Nietzsche recognized his friend was an anti-Semite, he never disavowed the
music.
Instead
he wrote
Wagner is “not
the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would wish to appear to us, but the
interpreter and clarifier of the past.”
Sadly,
he may have seen something coming which had everything to do with the future.
We
see it in weird science fiction like news every day,
a
new outbreak in Hong Kong,
the
German right is relishing the MAGA crowd storming the capital, still so much hate.
As
much as we want it to go away, each day we hear about a new loss.
Someone
else loses a brother, a sister.
In
the meantime, the homogenization steamrolling continues.
Rezonings
transforming neighborhoods,
Displacing
people and quirky spaces into a sea of identical details.
The
city is trying to use the virus to steamroller through a rezone, giving our
neighborhood to developers.
Sunday,
we meet along the Gowanus Canal:
“Message to @brad.lander no climate justice, no
rezone. We need a real racial impact study.
The Gowanus is polluted and we're muted. A
better plan is possible.
Remember Love Canal? Don't put affordable
housing on a brownfield.
If we put affordable housing on Public Place, a
toxic brownfield, what happens to the kids who grow up there? #NOGOWANUSREZONE”
A man is passing out flyers:
“Voice
of Gowanus is a coalition of community groups and neighbors concerned about
the
Gowanus rezoning…”
We
make our way through the neighborhood, winding all the way to Brad Lander’s
office, speaking out in the cold.
Monday,
more doctor appointments.
No
one’s sure the new vaccine is going to help stop the new strain.
The
Times reports its eluding the vaccines.
Well
if that’s the case, we should stop pretending we can stop this says my doctor, frustrated,
treating 14 patients with the virus.
ON
the way back from my physical, Greg texts.
Try
the vaccination portal.
My
last was canceled.
It
didn’t work last night, I say to him.
Try
again, he says.
15
minutes in, I get an appointment out in the Rockaways.
Nine
miles and two hours away.
52
minutes by bike 36 by car.
I
jump on my bike and ride.
Not
sure it’ll help but I might as well try.
I
can’t find the entrance, walking from 101st street to 103, looking
for the open door.
Two
others are looking as well.
Waiting,
looking wondering.
A
fireman welcomes us inside, approving my appointment.
You
are in seat number nine he says, smiling.
99
Luftballoons is playing.
The
fire department volunteers are dancing, cheering everyone.
It’s
a party in there.
We’re
going to get vaccines.
I
can’t get a follow up dose, but for today, I got a vaccine.
Is
there light?
The
virus is sill raging, uncertainty is all we have.
I
ride home, past the cemetery, through East New York, to the Brooklyn Greenway,
stopping for a minute to have a coke, to think, remembering the last time I was
there when I learned Ruth Badar Ginsberg had died.
The
Hasidim are still zipping to and from.
The
kids going to school.
My
friendship research is moving.
Keegan
wrote to remind me about Assata Skakur’s recognition:
“One
of the best things about struggling is the people you meet. Before I became involved, I never dreamed
such beautiful people existed. Of course,
there are some creeps, but I can say without the slightest hesitation that I have
been blessed with meeting some of the kindest, most courageous, most principled,
most informed and intelligent people on the face of the earth. I owe a great deal to those who have helped
me, loved me, taught me, and pulled my coast when I was moving in the wrong
direction. If there is such a thing as luck, I’ve had an abundance of it, and the
who have brought it to me are my friends and comrads. MY wild, big hearted friends, with their
pretty ways and pretty thoughts, have given me more happiness that I will ever
deserve. There was never a time, no
matter what horrible things I was undergoing, when I felt completely
alone. Maybe its ironic, I don’t know
but the one thing I do know is that the
Black Liberation Movement has done more for me than I will ever be able to do
for it,” (p. 223).
Friends
come together to do great things, to take on huge challenges:
Yet,
none of us are really sure what having such a friend means.
At
night, I’ve been reading Michel Eyquem
de Montaigne, who wrote about the loss of his closest friend, poet Étienne
de La Boétie,
in 1563,
drafting his seminal essay “On Friendship.”
After La Boétie, passed, he was alone. The essay on the nature of friendship became
a way to communicate with his lost friend:
“Moreover
what we normally call friends and friendships are no more than acquaintances
and familiar relationships bound by some change or some suitability, by means
of which our souls support each other.
In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingles and
confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seams which joins
them together. So that if cannot be found.
If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be
expressed except by replying: ‘Because if was him: because it was me.’
Mediating this union there was beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can
say specifically about it, some inexplicable force of destiny,” (9-10).
We’re
all trying to come to grips with those larger forces.
I
run into an old video of my favorite ACT UP action with Andy Velez from 2009, fighting
for healthcare for all.
“On a
rainy day, it comes down and you need help,” says Andy.
RIP.
Flipping
through messages, I see a note from luminary activist John Jordan:
3rd time unlucky ( in 15 years) my hsv virus
attacks my facial nerves again and gives me Bell’s Palsy, paralysis of half my
face. I’m lucky that normally the nerves regrow but it takes months and last
time In 2017 it was the trigger for mega burn out from which I never recovered
my old self. These moments are lessons... The last one was the unburying of my
witchy self, a self that over rationalist modern patriarchal political culture
had crushed, back in the early 80’s before being involved in direct action
movements i was immersed in the craft and gave it all up until
Star Hawk
enabled me to begin to reclaim that part of me
and see it as no different from activism or art, but it still took years to feel
ok with it, the collapse enabled the change. This time the lesson is not yet
clear, days floored by antiviral drugs in bed might reveal it, but I think it’s
linked to my discovery of having being exposed to huge doses of synthetic
estrogen in the form of Diethylstilbestrol (DES) in my mother’s womb and that
this can have effects on amab’s ( assigned men at birth ) sense of gender. 56
years of a kind of wierd dysphoria, never feeling in my body, hating much of
masculinity, always being the only ‘boy’ in the dance class as a kid, and a
whole secret trans life where all this was hidden, except in early 80’ when I
presented as non binary and went clubbing with the boy George crew in London.
But this got again pushed into a closet that only opened occasionally during
performances or disguised to not be recognized by cops during actions ! One day
I’ll come out about the secret life but not here or now.. maybe I’ll turn it
into a funny performance! But the lesson is the body always knows you more than
you think and repressing desires and fearing being judged or being a freak is a
recipe for illness and collapse!! Right now I can no longer smile but the
nerves will regrow and With them my confidence and I’ll perhaps be able to
smile without shame again...”
Meanwhile, Joseph exited the stage:
More very sad news. Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a courageous pioneer
in the fight against HIV/AIDS from its inception, has died at 88 in London. Not
only did he take patients with GRID (later AIDS) when no one else would, he won
a groundbreaking discrimination case when the building where his office was (in
Greenwich Village!) tried to evict him for treating PWAs. He worked with
Michael Callen, Richard Berkowitz, and Richard Dworkin in the development of
their life-saving booklet "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic" in 1983.
Honored to have worked with him and Michael and Thomas Hannan in the PWA Health
Group in 1986 dedicated to making treatments available that "might help
but couldn't hurt" when there was simply nothing available to treat AIDS.
He was a giant.
Release from Jay Blotcher:
Pioneering AIDS researcher and clinician Joseph Sonnabend, 88,
died January 24, 2021 at the Wellington Hospital in London, after suffering a
heart attack on January 3, 2021.
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a physician mother and
university professor father, Joseph Adolph Sonnabend grew up in Bulawayo, in
what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He trained in infectious diseases at the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Royal College of
Physicians in Edinburgh.
In the 1960s, Sonnabend worked in London under Alick Isaacs, the
co-discoverer of interferon, at the National Institute of Medical Research. In
the early 1970s, he moved to New York City to continue interferon research as
associate professor at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Sonnabend later served
as Director of Continuing Medical Education at the Bureau of VD Control at the
New York City Department of Health, where he advocated for a focus on gay men’s
health, particularly programs to reduce sexually-transmitted infections.
In 1978, he volunteered at the Gay Men’s Health Project in
Sheridan Square, Greenwich Village, and started a private clinic for treating
sexually transmitted infections. When gay men in his practice began to get
sick, he was among the first clinicians in the U.S. to recognize the emerging
AIDS epidemic.
Sonnabend was widely respected as an unusually compassionate
clinician and researcher, willing to see any patient regardless of ability to
pay, never giving up on a patient and always providing hope. In return, he
earned an unusually devoted appreciation and admiration from his patients.
Simon Watney, a writer, activist and close friend of
Sonnabend’s, said, “One of Joe’s most important contributions was his
belief—that he conveyed to his patients—that AIDS would not be 100% fatal, that
no matter how bleak the prognosis, some people would ultimately survive. That
provided powerful hope at a time when hope was in short supply.”
Sean Strub, POZ magazine’s founder and a former patient, wrote
in a 1998 profile of Sonnabend, “The environment (in his office) was such that
patients in the waiting room sometimes rearranged the order of seeing Joe,
based on our collective assessment of who needed to see him first, or who had
other doctors’ appointments to get to. Joe’s patients are protective of him.
Those of us with insurance remind him to send out bills; those without often
helped in his office, cooked him dinner or volunteered with the organizations
Joe started. Over the years, his patients have redecorated, filed, cleaned and
helped in the management of his practice.”
David Kirschenbaum, an AIDS activist and close friend, said
“When thinking of all his accomplishments and contributions to saving lives
during the AIDS crisis, one cannot separate Joe the scientist/physician from
Joe the man. His compassion for humanity was the driving force behind all that
he was able to achieve in medical research. This is why he eschewed the spotlight
which he so rightly deserves.”
Godspeed.
There seems to be snow.
“…
just a spec inside a giant’s eye,” sings Kimya.
