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2007 July 2nd Monday 01:35PDT
But beautiful!
I believe Celia Green writes some of the wisest and most pithy observations about humanity:
Basic moral principle, short form:
It is immoral to impose your interpretations and evaluations on anyone else.
[View a collection of some of my favorite aphorisms, quotations and quips]
During the week before the solstice when the twilight and dawn were extremely long and the darkness was at its shortest, we saw the Moon slip gradually below Venus. On June 16th and 17th the sun set beyond the Lummi peninsula, and was chased by the thin crescent of the new moon, which in turn was chased by the phenomenally bright gibbous Venus:
On the 18th, the Moon had drifted behind Venus, so the sun set, then Venus chased the sun, then the Moon chased our bright neighboring planet. On the subsequent nights at the time of the solstice, the moon grew larger and hung back ever farther after Venus had set in the twilight. On the longest day of the year (June 21st, Thursday) i photographed the usual late-afternoon gathering of sailboats. I also snapped some pictures of the glacial mountain peaks and scenery glimmering in the mists beyond the seas and above Bellingham, then added them to my Flickr set of bay views.
On June 30th and July 1st we watched at dusk each evening as Venus passed just below Saturn. Over the weekend we saw many fireworks after dark, mostly along the shores of the Lummi Indian Reservation but also in various places around the city of Bellingham near the harbors and waterways. They heralded the upcoming big explosion holiday (ironically called "Independence Day"), which is one of the two we have in Bellingham every year. The other week (more or less) of festive explosions is at the time of the New Year. I am not amused by pyrotechnics, and i quietly find myself wishing for the people who insist on blowing things up loudly to lose various fingers, hands, eyeballs, and especially testicles. I'm so disdainful.
There were many wonderful songs played by MixMaster Morris during the Nubient @Big Chill, May 2007, session which i downloaded a couple months ago. I found myself enjoying them again this weekend, particularly the song "Latitudes" by the French lounge-jazzy-modpop group Ollana. [Ollano - MySpace Music] Searching around online, i found the YouTube Video of that song was available on their MySpace website:
Ollano - Latitudes [YouTube Video]
The lyrics are a lovely, light, sweet little poem in French which has a very catchy meter when sung by the delightful vocalist Helena Noguerra:
Au début c'était une envie
Claire et précise, l'instinct de survie
D'envoyer sous, d'autres latitudes
Mon encore habitée, par trop d'habitudes
Mais tous les parfums, et toutes les couleurs
Ne suffiront pas à combler mon coeur
Je veux l'attraction, sans la gravité
Sans le poids des corps, ni l'apesanteur
À la fin, tout ce qu'on obtient
Tient dans des malles de photos de jaunies
Des souvenirs, aussi éphémères
Que les journées d'un coléoptère
Mais tous les parfums, et toutes les couleurs
Ne suffiront pas à combler mon coeur
Je veux l'attraction, sans la gravité
Sans le poids des corps, ni l'apesanteur
Although my command of the French language is dreadfully rusty, i can do my best to provide a clumsy translation here. My choice of English words fails to give the equivalent poetic phrasing, but hopefully suggests the meaning of the lyrics:
In the beginning it was a Clear and specific wish,
the instinct to survive
To send down, to other latitudes
to which I was too accustomed to be inhabiting
But all the smells, and all the colors
Won't be sufficient to fill my heart
I wish for the attraction, without the gravity
Without the weight of bodies, nor weightlessness
In the end, all we acquire
Hold in trunks of yellowing photos
Some souvenirs, as ephemeral
As the days of the coleopter
But all the smells, and all the colors
Won't be sufficient to fill my heart
I wish for the attraction, without the gravity
Without the weight of bodies, nor weightlessness
Tony and i cooked some delicious meals during the recent weeks, taking advantage of the seasonal abundance of fresh produce. We had some pork sausage which went into a really spicy curry with broccoli, radishes, and other nutritious vegetables, galangal, salty fish sauce, garlic, ginger, fennel, white peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, star anise (i enjoyed bashing the seeds and pods in our marble mortar and pestle), and was served on buttery rice. Tony used some leftover sausage to make a thick tomato sauce with various herbs and minced vegetables in olive oil, and we utilized that sauce on a later day to create a giant pizza from scratch. He made a marvelous crust with white and whole wheat flours, as well as some corn flour and corn meal, and enough yeast to make it rise but it wasn't too puffy. The sauce was topped with artichokes, black olives, pepperoni, red bell peppers, parsley, mozzarella, cheddar, and parmesan, as well as various spices. We had some fantastic garden salads in which our usual lettuces were fancied up with some beet greens and the nicest tops of the radish greens, plus whatever carrots, celery, scallions, and other vegetables we had in the fridge. I made dressing with sour cream, oil, rice vinegar and balsamic vinegar, chives, other herbs and seasonings, and for extra vitamin C i squeezed lots of fresh lemon juice into the mélange while balancing the tartness with some honey.
As we were enjoying some of this pizza and salad on Sunday evening, July 1st, we listened to an old vinyl double album which Tony has treasured for three decades: What a Little Moonlight Can Do by Betty Carter (©1976 ABC Records). She is one of my favorite vocalists of all time, with an incredible range, a distinctive way of shaping her sounds, and a truly playful touch which amplifies the emotions and lightness in her songs. Her rendition of the title track is ridiculously cheerful and always makes us smile happily. Then when we were listening to the tender song "But Beautiful", Tony and i looked at each other across the dinner table and shared a gentle laugh.
Love is funny or it's sad
Or it's quiet or it's mad
It's a good thing or it's bad
But beautiful!
Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall, you fall
And I'm thinking I wouldn't mind at all.
Love is tearful or it's gay
It's a problem or it's play
It's a heartache either way
But beautiful!
And I'm thinking if you were mine
I'd never let you go
And that would be but beautiful I know.
Due to a convergence of various rhythms in my (ordinarily rather unscheduled) days, weeks, and months, many healthcare activities were taking place at the end of June and beginning of July. In addition to my usual trips to the pharmacy, Respiratory Therapy at the hospital, and my HIV specialist, i also needed to meet with my primary care physician for a check-up and renewal of some referrals, and my visit to the outpatient laboratory to see the phlebotomist came at about the same time. On the weekend i was counting out the allocations of various tablets and capsules of prescription medications into the compartments of my weekly planner, and i was swallowing one of my usual handfuls of drugs when the thought suddenly crossed my mind: "At this particular moment i have no idea how many pills i've taken today!" Standing there slightly flabbergasted, i pondered how absent-minded i'd become as certain habits developed over the years. It was necessary for me to count on my fingers for a minute in order to arrive at the correct tally.
"Let's see... one Nexium... two Lamivudine, two Nevirapine, one Tenofovir... two Dronabinol... two Diphenhydramine and one Suphedrine... two Lonox.... So that makes ten on prescription and three over-the-counter. Then i had my nebulized Pentamadine this week at the hospital... and when i visit doctors Beiser and Bloom i will mention that i've been able to stay off the Mupirocin, Clotrimazole, and Triamcinolone lately." (It sometimes feels like a fucking Skittles commercial: "Taste the rainbow of flavors!") After eighteen years of being infected with HIV, i've almost become completely blasé about these practises of tossing heaps of drugs down my throat several times per day. Lately i don't even give this too much consideration unless i'm actually sitting in the Pulmonary department at Saint Joseph's Hospital sucking on the aerosolized prophylaxis against pneumocystis, or when i'm feeling some uncomfortable side-effect from one drug or another. I hardly even notice when the antihistamines for my run-of-the-mill allergies knock me unconscious, because i'm accustomed to being chronically fatigued by so many years with AIDS. Thank goodness i love taking naps!
So i sort of laughed/ sort of sighed/ sort of shrugged and continued with the pill-popping. But it has made me wonder a bit recently: how much does my whole life revolve around drugs-- and to a certain extent literally depend upon pharmaceuticals for continued existence? Am i really comfortable being a pill-eating machine? Do i put enough conscientious consideration into the way i've come to depend on the bottles of capsules and tablets as much as the salads and pizzas?
And i keep asking myself, entertaining the notion: what if i just decided one day to stop? What if i said, "i'm not thrilled about swallowing these thirteen pills, and i want to quit"? How soon would i feel a difference in my life? Hours? Days?
How long would it take until i succumbed to the syndrome of immunodeficiency? Months? Weeks? Would it be drastic, like jumping off a cliff?
I've experienced different phases during the past two decades when i was taking many drugs (mostly prescribed by doctors; occasionally self-administered such as marijuana), and when i was taking none at all. But during the past nine years i've only had between sixty and one hundred twenty T-cells, so the pneumonia, cryptosporidiosis, staphylococcus, blastocystosis, and other attackers have barely been held at bay by the bevy of remedies. When i was healthier, there were occasions when i survived despite taking no drugs for several months. But now that i've almost no immune system left, there have been occasions when i wound up in the hospital despite my best attempts to avoid disease. Would it be suicidal if i simply said, "I'm not going to take any drugs this month"?
I feel like i've had a very full and satisfying life, although i'm not quite thirty-seven years old yet. If something caused me to die tomorrow, next week, or next month, i don't think it would be so terrible. I think i would honestly say, "It was fun while it lasted, but nothing lasts forever." Although i do not wish to die soon, and i think it would be wonderful if i could survive a few more years, i just don't have a problem any more with the thought of impending mortality. I'm happy to have all the experiences, the time and love which i've been afforded. But it wouldn't break my heart if there were no more.
This attitude seems to be seeping into the corners of my mind, and i'm not sure whether it's a good, bad, or neutral infusion in my outlook. A positive aspect might be that i am relieved of most feelings of anxiety nowadays. A negative possibility might be a gradual erosion of my innate sense of self-preservation. Will i become careless, if i don't put a lot of concern on mortality? Will i lose some of my sense of proportion, some of my perspective? Will my judgements about anything of value or importance be skewed in an unhealthy way?
Will i become less happy, or more happy, as a result of my partial emotional detachment from considerations for life and death? Is this just a natural phase of growth, something which i'm traversing in middle age because of the circumstances of my health, but which anybody would come to eventually and inevitably if they lived long enough?
Can i be happy if i simply continue to swallow these heaps of drugs which are sold to me as the only approved means of life preservation?
Maybe i'm not brave enough-- and not healthy enough, given my current lack of immune response to the weakest common germs-- to experiment with abstinence from all my prescriptions. Probably i will continue taking the medications as prescribed, and continue dealing with the side-effects in order to 'benefit' from the supposed sustenance. I toy with various ideas, but i'm probably not very adventurous. I sometimes feel a fascination with various ways of dancing along the edge of life-threatening actions; but i prefer not to risk too much, not to try anything too outrageously dangerous.
At least, that's what i tell myself. But my boundaries and the limitations of comfort have become more flexible over the years. Hanging around Death's Door probably does that to some people. I'm not desensitized, i'm just feeling varying amounts of circumspection.
Fortunately, i'm generally quite happy, content, and peaceful most of the time, even when there are frequent difficulties related to AIDS, drugs, and whatever is going on in my life. None of this is too worrisome to me, and i am sincerely pleased to spend most of my days enjoying music, food, dildos, naps, casual relaxation, and good company of people like Tony. So i don't get worked up about any of this too much lately. I just think about it, especially when all the appointments and trips to the pharmacy and hospital and laboratories are reminding me of these issues.
During conversations with some of my acquaintances about the topic of suicide, particularly among the personal friends we've known who killed themselves, it appears there is an observable trend for self-inflicted death to occur under what i call "polar" circumstances. What i mean is:
Some people kill themselves when their lives seem extremely unhappy. Some people kill themselves when their lives seem extremely happy. Rarely has anyone ever been known to intentionally end their life when they are not at one extreme or the other.
Personally, although i firmly support the libertarian notion that all people should be free to do as they wish with their own lives, even if they wish to commit suicide, i don't have any desire of my own to ever end my life on purpose. The only way i could theoretically envision sincerely attempting to kill myself would be in circumstances where i'd be suffering terminally with no genuine hope for any end to dreadful agony. If that were the case, then i think a humane society should allow me the right to euthanasia. But because it seems very unlikely that i would ever find myself in such terrible circumstances, i don't usually give it much thought. After all, the things which are most likely to end my life are related to AIDS complications such as PCP, CMV, lymphoma, septicemia, et cetera, and those kinds of diseases often kill quite quickly so i doubt i would suffer too long. The chances of my ever being in a prolonged agony are slim to nil, so i don't think i'll ever have to deal with self-termination. At least, that's what i hope. I've drawn up a Living Will, and Durable Power of Attorney for healthcare designating Tony who understands my wishes, just in case. But AIDS often kills rapidly-- whether i madly decide to quit my drug regimens, or to continue being a model of good patient behavior and adherence. So i guess i won't even worry about it.
I hope my friends have the foresight to make the necessary arrangements and declarations in advance, to avoid Terry Schiavo-esque fiascos, even if they don't have AIDS or some such problem. When i was young, it was very hard for me to watch a few of my elderly relatives dying slowly and painfully, and i resented the religious nut-jobs in my family who allowed the whole process of suffering to be drawn out unnecessarily. I vowed i would not go through a similar process if it could be at all avoided, and i hope nobody i know will ever be in such circumstances again.
So. It's time now for me to take another couple of pills before i go to bed, Lamivudine and Nevirapine. I'd rather have a piece of pizza, but that's life. Sometimes it's crazy and absurd and indecisive, but i rather like being alive.
Love is tearful or it's gay
It's a problem or it's play
It's a heartache either way
But beautiful!
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