I am the one who should be and is thanking you. I am not easy.

I appreciate your support.

Most folks are long gone by now.

I understand and advocate for medical folks to challenge themselves. Protease inhibitors did not happen because people challenged themselves. They happened because researchers pushed themselves and analyzed and had a focus and did not give up.

Am I mad at Western medicine. I would be crazy not to be because it is seen as the entire puzzle when, in fact, it’s important, but it is just one part of a puzzle as big as the human race. It’s a fragment. It’s important, nevertheless, medicine is us and the cultures we have built.

Diversity is an animal that we do not assimilate at our peril. It is the most fundamental question of our times, diversity, and we have not done well with it because we are always constructing walls of uniformity even when we know the wall itself is perfectly ridiculous.

Creativity is, often, chaos.

So much of this can be seen in the beyond merely symbolic hierarchies of how the human brain exists at all. We are in competition with everything else such as viral bugs to wilderness.

The evolution of the species has not kept up with those fortunate enough to be doing medicine in such creative ways. What I deplore is giving up my body and my bones to medicine that operates as an assembly line. That is my grievance.

Invasiveness is important to understand from the basic tenants of the so-called bigger picture, and there is one.

I was in Switzerland sitting on a park bench, staring at the vision of a lake. Slowly the vampires emerged. Darkness fell like the fog rolls in. Switzerland was taking the position it would go hand off to addiction and treat like it is a disease.

Suddenly, all the benches were filled with young people injecting drugs openly. Okay, fine, but then Afria happened, which it is apt to do because that is its history.

Africa is from the earth. I will admit I have a problem — having wandered around there, mostly with nice cameras, and starvation is digging graves and hospitals are burying bodies in open pits with the lifeless corpses of children just thrown in and the sight of it will cause your knees to bend.

They say that today is not so grim.

Perhaps.

I am wary of complacency. You can lose your balance staring at the trucks and the bulldozers and the pits. The the smell was beyond horrific. Thirty million people still have HIV.

I know young gay boys who complain AIDS AIDS AIDS: we want a more important focus.

Stupidity and selfishness are moral issues.

What I see you constructing with your work is tending to the science and tending to the writing of it where it connects with human beings.

This is not a one-sided story: Smallpox.

The ONE bug we rid the earth of. In the forty-thousand years we have been here as a species, we could finally do that.

What does AIDS-free generation mean.

The answer is very clear and just as frightening.

One bug in forty-thousand years. Evolution is a sorry business. Survival is about luck and odds. We will rid ourselves of poverty or we will not. Not. Not. To date Western medicine been the whole enchilada.

The writer. And the physician. A lot of history there, too.

I am forcing myself to follow the rules. It hurts. This month alone, many, many medication issues to deal with, new stuff, and necessary, no doubt, which means side-effects, and they are so real, especially when it comes to hard to reach boys who have crossed the line into full-blown AIDS.

Reconstructing an immunity is a very difficult task. It works or it doesn’t. It’s triage. We’ve been fighting the bug and living with it longer that we really know. The only way I can deal with it is to make death poetry. Or art.

They say art is healing. Honestly, I don’t know. There is something else pushing and pushing me around, and art is many things. You either do it or you are not doing it.

You know.

I have seen young boys openly sold in beachfronts where the white resort is conveniently just down the beach a little ways.

It is a moral issue. It is a cultural issue. It is a religious issue. It is a political issue. It is an economic issue.

Let us go get them and turn them on to art. Why the fuck not.

Any writer has a moral obligation to stretch his capacity to work in painting a picture as it really is and to stop suggesting that we will soon begin moving in a particular direction when, in fact, no one really knows.

You are in the unique position of connecting all right nows into all right nows. We need more writers, and more physicians to bridge that gap. People will stretch themselves or they won’t. Looking at reality right in the face versus hiding in our niches is obviously what you have been doing for some time.

You did not abandon either medicine or art.

For what is medicine but an art.

How do we treat the individual if we cannot treat the society he lives in.

The video below stretches. You will see.

Thank you for what you do.