It’s a beautiful day here in New Orleans. The sun’s bright, my house is warm. If I were the kinda guy who liked sleeping ’till noon, I could easily crawl back into bed and do so.
Eight years ago to the hour, things were exactly the same: beautiful, bright, and warm. And then everything changed. As a gay man, December 1 should have particular resonance for me. And it does. But unfortunately, it doesn’t get my full attention.
And so today, while I should be feeling hope or anger or some other productive emotion, I’m caught up in dead-end reflection. And, not to get all heavy or anything, but it seems to me that death is ultimately the result of giving up. Some folks don’t have much to live for, so it’s easier for them to let go. Others are more tenacious and hang on till the bitter end. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.
If that’s the case, then it would seem theoretically possible to survive almost anything, even serious bodily injury, through sheer force of will, but so few people do…. Which means that even for the toughest, orneriest of us, there eventually comes a point of such pain or weakness or something else so extreme that, even though we know we could go on, we could live if we had the will, we choose not to. We decide there and then, in a hundredth of a second, a thousandth of a second, that we have to let go, and in that impossibly brief span of time, we say a mental goodbye to everyone we know or knew and everyone we love or loved and will never see again. It’s liberating, but like all liberations, it’s overwhelming and terrifying.
As for World AIDS Day, I’ll say this much: Randall Tobias is perhaps the most bumbling, mumbling, unmotivating speaker I’ve ever seen. How on earth Bush expected him to be an effective “Global AIDS Coordinator,” I don’t know. Maybe he should resign, too.
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