Observations

"Do you think magic is real?" asks my very anxious client on the phone while I am getting ready for work. "Because I pissed off this voodoo lady by calling her too many times." I have to think about that for a minute. Do I think magic is real? I think that if you believe something is going to happen it is more likely to happen. I also think there are a lot more coincidences in life than one would reasonably expect. "I think sometimes it is," I say carefully. "What if she fucks up my apartment?" he asks. This is just another version of a question he has been asking repeatedly all week, "am I really getting an apartment?" The inspection of the apartment is monday and he should sign the lease soon after that, so the answer, over and over, is "yes, you are getting an apartment." "I don’t think magic works that way," I say. I think it’s more of an essence, less tangible. "I don’t think it can go fuck up your paperw...

Late in the day Wednesday, as New Yorkers, including me, were going about their daily routines, we started seeing horrifying scenes from an ICE raid against the vendors of counterfeit goods that have long occupied Canal St. The folks selling these items for a livelihood used to be primarily Asian but now include a lot of young men Africa, especially Mauritius. These are just the street level people who without legal access to employment permits or benefits like food stamps, are trying to survive. The people doing the actual counterfeiting and masterminding the whole thing - and making the big money from it - are not out there on the fishy sidewalks of chinatown. The NYPD can and does arrest these vendors sometimes - I have been at Central booking after a protest, sitting in the big cell where they toss all the women they arrest throughout the night, when they have brought in women who were selling fake designer bags, etc. But leaving things to local authorities is not enough for ...

On my way to the very early marshal meet up I ran into my neighbor, a cab driver, who asked me where I was going. I told him about the No Kings protest not knowing what kind of response I might get, but he was happy to hear about it. "A cop stopped me while I was working," he told me. "He was young enough to be my son. He asked me if I had a green card. I told him, 'I have been a citizen since before you were born.'" He then went on to tell me that his son, who is studying mechanical engineering at a private college, has not received his federal financial aid for this semester. "The fee is $70,000 a year," he said. "I make $150 a day. How could I pay that?" We chatted for a few more minutes, and then he left me with the words, "Trump has pushed the hating between people. It should not be like that." When I got to the meet up point, several hundred people in neon green vests were milling around a public plaza, getting...

Yesterday I got tangled up in the idiocy of the American health care system. The orthopedist ordered an MRI of my shoulder to try to figure out what is floating loose in there, and also to look for a tear she suspects because of the weakness of that arm. That was Sept. 19th. We both knew that my insurance company was going to put up a fight, and she told me that she would handle the appeal. On Sept 30th came the expected denial. The next step is something called a peer-to-peer between my doctor and one working for the insurance company. They are not actually peers - doctors working for insurance companies don't have to have any actual experience taking care of patients, and they are also not specialists in the field being discussed. As my appointment on Oct 14th approached, my assistant began trying to find out if the peer-to-peer had happened and if I was approved to have the MRI but she could not reach anyone. Usually if you are scheduled for something and it is not appro...

I woke up yesterday after coughing all night to find my feed filled with National Coming Out Day posts and I found myself thinking about 1993. It was my first year at Hampshire College, and deep in the bad years of the AIDS epidemic, with people dying constantly. I was going back and forth from Western Mass. to NYC on the Peter Pan bus all the time for protests and memorial services, getting arrested and writing about it for class because you can do that at Hampshire. I was also organizing the AIDS Action Collective, a campus org that was dormant when I got there. We trained peer educators, lobbied for HIV testing on campus, got funding for an HIV resource center in the basement of one of the dorms. I was also organizing an annual international Youth Summit in my "free time." With all that going on my life was a whirlwind and I didn't really notice that this one girl kept showing up everywhere. She joined the AIDS Action Committee, rode the charter bus through the ni...

Yesterday was a marathon that started with a 5am sting when I tried to shoe away a flying insect in the dark, not expecting there to be a bee in my bedroom. We had a court date for the UN protest where once again some of us had simply not been entered into the computer, raising the question of whether the NYPD is even more spectacularly incompetent than they used to be or whether there's a secret solidarity happening. I was not in the syatem last time, but this time I was, so Ben and I settled on a bench halfway back, chatting while we waited for the judge to take the bench. The impression that the NYPD are incompetent was reinforced as case after case was called, and almost all of them were dismissed for "facial insuffiency" - the failure of the police to fill out the paperwork correctly. Our big group took up half the seating and we were conspicuously older and whiter than the other defendants, and when our lawyer, Ron Kuby, also fairly old and white, addressed our ...

On tuesday, feeling a little sick but trying to get to work, I got a call from my very sick client, J. "I have bacteria in my blood," he says "I'm on a good floor, they're nice here." We talk a little and then I hear a doctor come in, who tells him they need to draw blood. For someone who has his blood drawn often, he really resists it. I can tell this doctor who I'm picturing as young and asian for some reason has already encountered this, "I'm going to have this other doctor come do it, he's really good," he says. J. is unconvinced. "He's going to bring a special machine," the doctor says. "A vein finder," I tell J. before he can panic about the machine. These portable devices use near infrared light bouncing off your arm to show the exact configuration of the veins. I think back to 1992, my training in phlebotomy, how we were clumsily stabbing our classmates for practice and how I was a favorite target as...

On Saturday Z. texted me from Turkey. He is a gay migrant client who had to go back to Turkey to take care of his ill father. Last time I heard from him, he was looking for a way to get back here because Turkey's national health care relies on having a job, but they don't keep HIV status confidential, so HIV+ people can't get a job, and then can't get health care. I connected him with Aid for AIDS an organization that collects unused medications for HIV and related conditions and distributes them globally. This was before Trump took office, so they were able to help him. I can't imagine the demand they are facing since the US suddenly cut off access to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe, some of whom are now dead or dying, including children. "Remember this guy?" he texts me, naming a man we both know. "He forced me to have sex for a hotel room when I was homeless." "Yes, I know,you told me" I reply, "that's...

Last night was an event I've been helping with, with mixed success. I was able to reserve a space for the event, the sanctuary below our office, with no problem, but trying to get people to come turned out to be difficult. It was the NY portion of a national tour, a series of discussions about suicide attempt survivorship. Even language gets tricky here, because the phrase "suicide survivor" means suicide loss survivor to most people. Inviting people to an event like this is like coming out over and over - I overdosed on opiates more than 20 years ago, and didn't even know a lot of my current friends then. The ones I did know back then didn't know about this either. When I woke up sometime the next day I just stumbled across the tilting floor to get some water, and went back to work two days later after the holiday weekend and didn't say a word to anyone. For years after that doctors would comment on my elevated liver enzymes, and I would just shrug. So...