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together to figure out how to stop the landlord from illegally tearing the roofs off our apartments.  The buildings dept. had already shut the construction crew down twice and yet they have started work again.  The recent rains have been slowing destroying my western wall.  This landlord some time ago allowed me to stay in my apartment without a lease only after signing an agreement that if there were a cure for AIDS I would have to leave within 30 days.  A guy visiting the upstairs neighbor learned that I had this virus and said he believed that although the government probably introduced the virus into the homosexual community, that homosexuals were dying en masse as a reaction to centuries of society's hatred and repression of homosexuality.  All I could think of when he said this was an image of hundreds of whales that beach themselves on the coastlines in supposed protest of the ocean's being polluted.  He continued:  "People don't die - they choose death.  Homosexuals are dying of this disease because they have internalized society's hate..."  I felt like smacking him in the head, but held off momentarily, saying, "As far as your theory of homosexuals dying of AIDS as a protest against society's hatred, what about the statistics that those people contracting the disease are intravenous drug users or heterosexually inclined, and that this seems to be increasingly the case.  Just look at the statistics for this area of the Lower East Side."  "Oh," he said, "They're hated too..."  "Look," I said, "After witnessing the deaths of dozens of friends and a handful of lovers, among them some of the most authentically spiritual people I have ever known, I simply can't accept mystical answers or excuses for why so many people are dying from this disease - really it's on the shoulders of a bunch of bigoted creeps who at this point in time are in the positions of power that determine where and when and for whom government funds are spent for research and medical care."

I found that, after witnessing Peter Hujar's death on November 26, 1987 and after my recent diagnosis, I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical words or concepts designed to make sense of the external world or designed to give momentary comfort.  It's like stripping the body of flesh in order to see the skeleton, the structure.  I want to know what the structure of all this is in the way only I can know it.  All my notions of the machinations of the world have been built throughout my life on odd cannibalizations of different lost cultures and on intuitive mythologies.  I gained comfort from the idea that people could spontaneously self-combust and from surreal excursions into nightly dream landscapes.  But all that is breaking down or being severely eroded by my own brain;  it's like tipping a bottle over on its side and watching the liquid contents drain out in slow motion.  I suddenly resist comfort, from myself and especially from others.  There is something I want to see clearly, something I want to witness in its raw state.  And this need comes from my sense of mortality.  There is a relief in having this sense of mortality.  At least I won't arrive one day at my 80th birthday and at the eve of my possible death and only then realize my whole life was supposed to be somewhat a preparation for the event of death and suddenly fill up with rage because instead of preparation all I had was a lifetime of adaptation to the pre-invented world -- do you understand what I'm saying here?  I am busying myself with a process of distancing myself from you and others and my environment in order to know what I feel and what I can find.  I'm trying to lift off the weight of the pre-invented world so I can see what's underneath it all.  I'm hungry and the pre-invented world won't satisfy my hunger.  I'm a prisoner
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of language that doesn't have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I'm sensing.  Rage may be one of the few things that binds or connects me to you, to our pre-invented world.  My friend across the table says, "I don't know how much longer I can go on...Maybe I should just kill myself."  I looked up from the Frankenstein doll, stopped trying to twist its yellow head off and looked at him.  He was looking out the window at a sexy Puerto Rican guy standing on the street below.  I asked him, "If tomorrow you could take a pill that would let you die quickly and quietly, would you do it?"

"No," he said, "Not yet."  "There's too much work to do," I said.  "That's right," he said.  "There's still a lot of work to do..."

I am a bundle of contradictions that shift constantly.  This is a comfort to me because to contradict myself dismantles the mental/physical chains of the verbal code.  I abstract this disease I have in the same way you abstract death.  Sometimes I don't think about this disease for hours.  This process lets me get work done, and work gives me life, or at least makes sense of living for short periods of time.  But because I abstract this disease, it periodically knocks me on my ass with its relentlessness.  With almost any other illness you take for granted that within a week or month the illness will end and the wonderful part of the human body called the mind will go about its job erasing evidence of the pain and discomfort previously experienced.  But with AIDS or HIV infections one never gets that luxury and I find myself after a while responding to it for a fractured moment with my pre-AIDS thought processes:  "Alright this is enough already; it should just go away."  But each day's dose of medicine, or the intermittent aerosol pentamidine treatments, or the sexy stranger nodding to you on the street corner or across the room at a party, reminds you in a clearer than clear way that at this point in history the virus' activity is forever.  Outside my windows there are thousands of people without homes who are trying to deal with having AIDS.  If I think my life at times has a nightmare quality about it because of the society in which I live and that society's almost total inability to deal with this disease in anything other than a conservative agenda, think for a moment what it would be to be facing winter winds and shit menus at the limited shelters, and the rampant T.B. and the rapes, muggings, stabbings in those shelters, and the overwhelmed clinics and sometimes indifferent clinic doctors, and the fact that drug trials are not open to people of color or the poor unless they have a private physician who can monitor the experimental drugs they would need to take, and they don't have those kinds of doctors in clinics because doctors in clinics are constantly rotated and intravenous drug users have to be clean of drugs for two years before they'll be considered for drug trials, and yet there are nine-month waiting periods just to get assigned to a treatment program, so picture yourself with a couple of the 350 opportunistic infections and unable to respond to a few drugs released by the foot-dragging FDA and having to maintain a junk habit;  or even having to try and kick that habit without any clinical help and also keep yourself alive two years to get a drug that you need immediately -- thank you Ed Koch;  thank you Stephen Josephs;  thank you Frank Young;  thank you AMA.

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I scratch my head at the hysteria surrounding the actions of the repulsive senator from zombieland who has been trying to dismantle the NEA for supporting the work of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.  Although the

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