three notes
In the middle of the afternoon, I hit a point where my body was like, I don't care whether you take a nap or not now, but we're turning your brain off. So I put the iBook to sleep and the bite guard in my mouth and closed my eyes, and was treated to a couple of hours of really bizarre dreams. The one I remember, because it was the one that woke me up, was a dream in which I was riding horses with someone (maybe Lilly?) and we were communicating with them. (I say "communicating" because I don't think we were talking out loud. It was weird.) There were a dozen or so horses at this farm, and we were exercising them, and one of them was galloping for us. (Even though Lilly had her own horse, we were only communicating with the one I was riding.) Anyway, we were trying to guess his name.
"Julius? Come on, do I look like a fucking Julius to you? I mean, Jesus. I should throw you off for that one."
That's kind of how the conversation went. Thing is, Lilly had this list, and we were picking names off it, and it became apparent after a while that the horse didn't know his own name, and nobody else had ever actually talked to him.
And then I woke up, because my bladder was full. Oddly enough, I noticed I needed to pee (in real life) when my horse took a leap, and he landed kind of hard, and it put pressure on my bladder. Weird, no? Anyway, damn. I really wanted to know where that one was going. And there's probably all kinds of stuff that could be made from the imagery (we were riding through a forest, and I believe there were no saddles involved, yet we weren't sliding around at all) but most of the dream faded by the time I was flushing the toilet within a minute or so of waking up.
So before I passed out, I was reading HIV plus, and the cover story was about yet another support organization for HIV+ gay men. I kind of like the name (SIN, or Strength In Numbers) and the guy who founded it is kind of cute, and has a nice tattoo (you can see it best here) but still... there is something that's nagging me about the whole thing. I'm probably going to get yelled at for this, but it seems like there's already a lot of support out there for HIV+ gay men. It seems like every time I turn around there's something else popping up somewhere. I'm probably in one of the most supported minority groups on the face of the planet.
And it really bothers me that there's not a lot of support for HIV- gay men.
Maybe there's no need for it. Maybe it would be kind of like support groups for heterosexual white men who make $100k+ a year; they already get lots of support amongst themselves, and their environment already caters to them in so many ways that they have whatever support they need. IOW maybe HIV- gay men are the majority, within the subgroup of Gay Men (in spite of the lingering perception that HIV+ = gay), and they don't need support in the same way that HIV+ gay men do. Maybe there have been attempts to get HIV- gay men together who support each other in staying HIV- and either the attempts went nowhere for lack of interest, or I just don't know about them because I kind of had my head in the sand about HIV until I got sick, or something else.
But it's easy for me to see, perhaps because I'm so immersed in HIV, that there's a lot of support available to poz guys, especially the gay ones. And if we really want to stop the spread of HIV, there needs to be some support for gay men before they get infected. I mean, I'm not saying that the support networks are necessarily an incentive for gay men to get infected, but it can be dreadfully lonely being gay when your only social network is the bar. For a lot of gay men, that's really all there is, until they get HIV and then boom! there's support groups and services and programs and networks all over the place. And while I do believe that HIV+ folks need support, the stuff that's out there for men who are gay and poz makes it almost seem like a exclusive club to belong to, and I don't see anything like that sense of community and support for HIV- gay men, and something about that whole setup makes me a little twitchy.
Like I said, maybe there is stuff out there and I just don't know about it, because it doesn't apply to me.
Funny how things work.
Last week, I was bemoaning my lack of time and energy for writing. As soon as I did that, I got all kinds of nudging, from the Universe and people and my own psyche, that writing isn't going away for me. Today's life coach session zoomed in on that, among other things, and it looks like I'm making some room for writing. There are going to be times, I'm sure, where it gets squeezed out, but I'm not going to stop with it. Blogging is not going to be the end-all of my writing efforts.
I have no idea whether or not it's going anywhere, but it's still in the picture. And I initially wrote a big long thing in here about how this all fits into the grand scheme of things, and the gut feeling I have about where my writing "career" might go and why, but it's enough to say that I'm making writing a priority for myself, and leave it at that.
I'll save the storytelling for the actual story. Heh.
Bear McCreary, Flesh and Bone
"Julius? Come on, do I look like a fucking Julius to you? I mean, Jesus. I should throw you off for that one."
That's kind of how the conversation went. Thing is, Lilly had this list, and we were picking names off it, and it became apparent after a while that the horse didn't know his own name, and nobody else had ever actually talked to him.
And then I woke up, because my bladder was full. Oddly enough, I noticed I needed to pee (in real life) when my horse took a leap, and he landed kind of hard, and it put pressure on my bladder. Weird, no? Anyway, damn. I really wanted to know where that one was going. And there's probably all kinds of stuff that could be made from the imagery (we were riding through a forest, and I believe there were no saddles involved, yet we weren't sliding around at all) but most of the dream faded by the time I was flushing the toilet within a minute or so of waking up.
So before I passed out, I was reading HIV plus, and the cover story was about yet another support organization for HIV+ gay men. I kind of like the name (SIN, or Strength In Numbers) and the guy who founded it is kind of cute, and has a nice tattoo (you can see it best here) but still... there is something that's nagging me about the whole thing. I'm probably going to get yelled at for this, but it seems like there's already a lot of support out there for HIV+ gay men. It seems like every time I turn around there's something else popping up somewhere. I'm probably in one of the most supported minority groups on the face of the planet.
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And it really bothers me that there's not a lot of support for HIV- gay men.
Maybe there's no need for it. Maybe it would be kind of like support groups for heterosexual white men who make $100k+ a year; they already get lots of support amongst themselves, and their environment already caters to them in so many ways that they have whatever support they need. IOW maybe HIV- gay men are the majority, within the subgroup of Gay Men (in spite of the lingering perception that HIV+ = gay), and they don't need support in the same way that HIV+ gay men do. Maybe there have been attempts to get HIV- gay men together who support each other in staying HIV- and either the attempts went nowhere for lack of interest, or I just don't know about them because I kind of had my head in the sand about HIV until I got sick, or something else.
But it's easy for me to see, perhaps because I'm so immersed in HIV, that there's a lot of support available to poz guys, especially the gay ones. And if we really want to stop the spread of HIV, there needs to be some support for gay men before they get infected. I mean, I'm not saying that the support networks are necessarily an incentive for gay men to get infected, but it can be dreadfully lonely being gay when your only social network is the bar. For a lot of gay men, that's really all there is, until they get HIV and then boom! there's support groups and services and programs and networks all over the place. And while I do believe that HIV+ folks need support, the stuff that's out there for men who are gay and poz makes it almost seem like a exclusive club to belong to, and I don't see anything like that sense of community and support for HIV- gay men, and something about that whole setup makes me a little twitchy.
Like I said, maybe there is stuff out there and I just don't know about it, because it doesn't apply to me.
Funny how things work.
Last week, I was bemoaning my lack of time and energy for writing. As soon as I did that, I got all kinds of nudging, from the Universe and people and my own psyche, that writing isn't going away for me. Today's life coach session zoomed in on that, among other things, and it looks like I'm making some room for writing. There are going to be times, I'm sure, where it gets squeezed out, but I'm not going to stop with it. Blogging is not going to be the end-all of my writing efforts.
I have no idea whether or not it's going anywhere, but it's still in the picture. And I initially wrote a big long thing in here about how this all fits into the grand scheme of things, and the gut feeling I have about where my writing "career" might go and why, but it's enough to say that I'm making writing a priority for myself, and leave it at that.
I'll save the storytelling for the actual story. Heh.
Bear McCreary, Flesh and Bone