Around here, we call shingles the S word. It is the devil that we dare not say his name.

Long lines of kids and pop in a sugar cube with a pink dot on it. Later LSD would look like that.

If you go to places on the Web like the Glazier Foundation, and it’s focus on Pediatric AIDS, you will find adolescents and preadolescents discussing how HIV does not define their lives. Adults looking on approvingly because no one speaks about suffering.

It is forbidden to speak of suffering.

We want BRAVE kids who speak to winning some kind of war. They trudge bravely on.

Fuck me.

I know kids who want to die. They do not want to trudge. Bravely or otherwise.

I assume they make the reader uncomfortable. Never make the reader uncomfortable.

Jerry Lewis set this standard. All those sweet urchins in wheelchairs are dead.

Suicide is always just kinda there waiting for some kid to take the brass ring and run with it. The kids I know are mainly all shut down. Why. Because they know for a fact no one, no one, wants to hear what they have to say.

About parents.

About sex.

About running away and how that, too, is a survival mechanism. About living on the street.

It’s okay to live in the street but don’t talk about it. Don’t write about it. Don’t tell the story of living on the street with HIV.

You will be told in no uncertain terms to go back into your cave. They know.

Pill fatigue is doctor fatigue as well. It’s hard to tell them that you don’t want his finger up your asshole when they’re all yelling at you that it’s for your own good. Modern medicine is a crock of shit.

Tristan used to say: If people want to touch me they have to pay for it. It’s not the other way around.

Abacavir was an antiretroviral that many people were so allergic to, it killed them.

I want to know the kids who are suspicious. Adults, too, for that matter. I hate the AIDS orgs. I hate the doctors. I hate the clinics. I hate walking down the hall with a cup of hot piss. I hate these people and these places because I hate them. No one can make it better. The only way any of them are going to put their finger up my hole is over my dead body.

Why do I hate this so-called health care system.

Because they pretend that suffering is irrelevant. They are wrong. The cop with the gun at the door to the AIDS clinic is an affront. The people who need arresting work there.

Tell me. What is wrong with someone articulating that they are suffering. And they don’t want it to keep going on and on and on.

I don’t have answers. Only questions.

I also have this: I know the way to the pizza place and I’m buying.

I do NOT know what it is about pizza and boys.

But it works for me.