If only I had some kind of Bluetooth app for my brain when I'm in the shower or driving along a deserted back-country road, it wouldn't take me six weeks to write a single chapter of the Work in Progress!
I was in such deep reverie when I took off from the gym yesterday that I missed the turn and found myself in an unfamiliar place I'd never seen before. GPS didn't work here; we were too far from the towers.
Of course, I could have turned around, retraced my steps, found the right road.
But that would have added another 15 minutes to the trip, and darkness was rapidly falling.
How hard can it be? I wondered.
Up is the Shawangunk mountains; down is the Wallkill River Valley.And in another 10 minutes found my way back to familiar territory.
But oh, what a wild 10 minutes! The back country around here is very wild indeed. So many abandoned homesteads.
###
I did not do useful work at all yesterday. Instead, I finished reading
The Great Believers for plot. I will now
reread it for subtext & structure.
It's a very, very good novel. Alternating chapters; one set starts in 1985, the other in 2015. The chapter sets could almost stand alone as separate novels except the 2015 chapters assume a certain familiarity with & affection for the characters in the 1985 chapters.
The novel is about the AIDS crisis, a historical moment that few remember anymore.
I remember it quite vividly: The AIDS crisis played a major role in my decision to get out of nursing.
Before the AIDS crisis, you could draw blood without wearing gloves; afterwards, you had to sheath up in heavy latex, and I had a helluva time feeling veins. (I always poked on feel, not touch.) Also, I'm pretty clumsy. The third time I poked myself with a needle that had been used to deliver an injection to a patient, HIV status unknown, and was forced to go on protocol (HIV tests at regular intervals plus the option to take prophylactic AIDS drugs), I thought,
No, no, no, girl! Do something else for money.###
Gay was sassy & fun for 15 years after Stonewall.
Then came AIDS.
Was AIDS the first time that Big Pharma realized they had a captive audience, could monetize despair and fear, and jack up the price of life-saving drugs???? I honestly don't know.
Anyway, post-AIDS, gay—repurposed as LGBTQ—seems like just another lifestyle marketing category to me. Which is very politically incorrect of me, no doubt, and another one of the reasons why my kids might describe my political sensibilities as slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun. This is ironic since as a B, I am a member of the tribe.
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