Just out of bed.  Slept poorly.  Have to write, something. 

There is no life here.  In the movie The Andromeda Strain, a machine is reviewing thousands of Petri dishes, looking for the one condition in which the lethal bug won't grow.  After examining hundreds of the little round dishes, the machine's display finally starts flashing, "No Growth," "No Growth," "No Growth."  This is a desirable condition, depending on your perspective.  If the thing that kills you can be deprived of life, then you survive and it does not. 

If the thing that kills you is you, then you must find a way to survive without living. 

Life means openess to new things, and receptiveness to opportunity and possibility.  In my case, my survival is antithetical to life.  I don't want it this way, I never have.  But it is like waking up from surgery; unconsciousness was painless, and waking up hurts like hell.  So why do it?  The coma is easy compared to agony.  And as my sister once said when describing my life, I always take the easy way.  You bet. 

Most people go through pain because there are other parts of consciousness that are worthwhile.  So why do I not feel the same?  Why do I choose to create a survival in which there is no life?  I imagine I have resigned myself to the belief—which must be erroneous—that the worthwhile parts of living are somehow inaccessible to me.  These questions have all lately become pertinent because I am depressed and thinking about death.  Death is the moment when we must all leave the grand mansion of life, and knowing that moment is coming, I begin to question why I have spent forty years in the basement.  I know that I must know the reason.  But that reason must be annihilatory; I know that it will quash my entire existence if I ever confront it. 

The party is raging everywhere else in the mansion, but there is no life here.  Please send a plate to the basement. 

Dentist says I have excellent clotting.  She did some minor surgery last week as part of the never-ending root canal, which began about six months ago.  But she complemented my clotting right at the beginning of today's appointment, almost as if she had just read some bulletin regarding my platelets.  This is possible.  I had a reaction to the pennicillin she put me on last week, and ended up in the emergency room.  She may well have received some lab report from them in the interim. 

I am glad my clotting is good—remarkably so.  But my concern is with the progress of this disease I am supposed to have.  To recap, I am HIV positive.  Though I have gone on record that I believe HIV does not by itself cause AIDS, I have, in a kind of fait accompli, concluded that I most likely do have whatever it is that does cause AIDS.  More than that, I was raised in a rich tradition of hypochondria.  So from the first day that an unprotected phallus came my way I have deeply indulged my despondency and angst. 

I have not been feeling all that well.  Though this is the hypochondriac's motto, I was actually out of work all last week with real and tangible symptoms, like vomit spraying from between my fingers as I lunged from bed with hand on mouth toward the bathroom.  When I am genuinely sick, my mind becomes filled with thoughts of death. 

And regrets of life not lived. 

Perhaps it is a kind of self-abuse, but at the height of my fatalistic reminiscence I rented the DVD version of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, a beautifully rendered memoire of the late Seventies gay scene in San Francisco.  As if remembering the late Seventies was not bad enough—I was just graduating from high school and discarding precious opportunities all over the place—the last time I felt any hope in my life was when I first saw the mini-series in 1994.  My favorite character is Michael Tolliver (played by Marcus D'Amico), the sweetly vulnerable, desperately cute, and fairly innocent gay twenty-something man looking for true love in the city of steep hills by the bay. 

I think I want to be Armistead Maupin, I want to live his life, and suffer his agonies.  I want to relish the thrills and terror of his coming-out in the early Seventies, when he was near thirty years old.  To flash and spark and to ignite ever a new life and a new story under the flint of his experience; to be the writer that he was, and is; to have been the reporter, the journalist, the columnist, and to become finally the novelist he became—these things from his life would not have been outside the realm of possibility for me in my own life, had I persued his course, which now is safely impossible. 

But his course could not, and cannot be, my course.  My life, whatever it may have been, however much I may lament and regret it, is up until this point already said and done.  By the same token the course I take from this point on is yet unspoken and undone.  In wanting to be him, in wanting to live an intensely burning life brightly arcing across the sky, am I simply wanting some lonely, despairing, soul like I am now to someday write these same sentiments about me?  Certainly there is a value in inspiring another, no matter who it might be.  But what is the inspiration I get from this writer fourteen years older than me?  Is it only regret that I did not try as hard, and succeed as well, as he?  Or, more selfishly, am I inspired by Armistead and his characters only to a melancholy lament that I did not enjoy pre-AIDS promiscuity?  Or am I inspired by this indefatigible optimist, a Southerner turned San Franciscan, to escalate the way I live and to take a more optimistic view of life from one of the higher vantages nearby?  Because really life is not nearly so bad as I desperately try to make it out to be. 

One cannot inspire in another something that is not already there.  If I finally wake up sometime before I die, and discover what it is I really want, then I will get it.  If I don't wake up, and never know what I want, I'll get that, too. 

I have been playing with a new set of programs, Helmut Dersch's Panotools.  These tools are used to stitch together seperate photos—usually carefully made, with tripod and bubble level—into a large panoramic view.  The photographs that go into my panoramas are less carefully made, but I compensate for the recklessness with which I make them by the painstaking care and monk-like patience which I devote to their reassemblage. 

Re-assemblage is perhaps an imprecise term, since the photos are new and have never been a part of a single assembled view before—except in reality.  Though I do not pretend to reassemble reality itself, there is nonetheless an unmistakable resemblence when it is done right.  This accounts, in part, for my fascination with this process. 

The real world has always scared me.  Well, not always, but almost always, like for forty-two of my forty-five years.  I'm not going to lunge headlong into annoying whininess here, and so I'll stay with the pictures.  It is not that every picture I take is stunning.  Also, not every scene I see is entirely beautiful.  But there is some beauty within every scene I see.  And the beauty in the real world is enhanced by the fleeting nature of my relationship with it—not that reality ever takes flight from me, but I do from it.  There is beauty even in beauty's interplay with that which is vulgar and horrific.  Such an interplay, in my view, is the graphic representation of the dignity and grace with which life co-exists with death.  It is the image of joy and hope persisting despite agony and despair.  It reveals, though dimly through a digital camera, the belief I have that somehow, if seen with the right eyes, life—even this life—is beautiful. 

Such is faith.

As I reassemble these scenes, using the software to make perfect the errors of the medium, there is so much the sense of healing what is wrong.  When everything looks just about right, and everything is apparently lined-up and the seams between pictures are imperceptible, then just one tweak more and there comes a God-like moment when not only do all the pixels match, but it seems that all that was disfigured is restored.  I get the feeling that I have wanted since I was three; I have repaired reality. 

I know the difference.  I know that all the wrongs of the world are not corrected in even the most perfect panoramic image.  But I know the beauty that I see is slipping away from me, and it cannot be apprehended by any medium, no matter how accurate or amazing the reproduction.  This beauty that I know does not dwell only within sophisticated software, and is accessible not only through elaborate and arcane photographic techniques.  It exists sweetly, gently and fleetingly within my own awareness.  And should I care to cultivate my awareness, I may find that my need for fixing reality may abate, and that my appreciation of it as it is, just exactly as it is, will be complete. 

And, like the best things in life and all things transcendental, Panotools is available free.  Thank you Helmut. 

So there's been no book, no great accomplishment, no life-long lover, no fortune accumulated, no children sired, and all in all not much life lived.  I did once rescue a puppy from a burning building.  Ah, I didn't even do that—the fire was out already.  All I did was find it under a bed, hiding, shaking and scared, and I reunited it with the two little girls who were hysterical with worry. 

There's been no great travel.  Went to Canada, maybe twice.  Never went further west than Indiana, and then only once.  Mostly I've never been out of New England.  I've heard it attributed to the CIA Factbook that most people die within about thirty miles of where they were born.  It doesn't say anything about where they might go in between birth and death, just that when they die, they are near where they started.  Almost all of my movements for the last five years have been within the thirty mile radius of that 'terminal zone'. 

When I was 14 I went with four high school friends to Cape Cod.  Wearing backpacks we rode our bikes, which were laden with tents, sleeping bags, and other camping paraphernalia strapped on to every available non-moving structure of each bicycle.  It was utterly exillerating, and an astonishing personal accomplishment for me at that time. 

I have tried to live a benign life, without causing any injury or pain.  I lament even the killing of a bug, though lately I am much more apt to squash an insect than try to relocate it, or allow it to crawl back into hiding.  It is an illusion that I have avoided causing injury to any other people; the inadvertant injury of others is an inevitable part of living.  The best I have acclomplished is a practiced unawareness of any pain in others caused by me.  And I guess that really is all I have tried to do; to avoid feeling my own pain that comes from the knowledge that I have injured another. 

I delivered two babies in this lifetime.  One was simple, all I did was catch.  The other was difficult, a breech with one cyanotic leg fully out, and the other leg tangled in the umbilical.  I caused that mother some pain when I stuck my hand fully within her, reaching up into the birth canal beside her baby.  I did that twice before I could unhook the cord from the baby's leg, and twice that mother screamed a sound that I have never heard, before or since.  The baby was OK. 

Sometimes pain is a good thing to be the cause of.  I have failed, however, to work this truth into my philosophy of living.  And so I now avoid most of life. 

These are my recent accomplishments; a virtual reality representation of the cell in which I spend most of my time, and a partial panorama of the beach where I went on Sunday, a major excursion from the cell.  The day at the beach was better than it looks here.  This image was taken immediately after the lifeguards had cleared the beach in anticipation of a severe thunderstorm.  Earlier I had dozed in warm hazy sunshine.

I even got a little burned.