I was lying in bed one night, wondering why they didn’t have a vaccine for AIDS. I’d just seen a story on Facebook, in September 2020, “Most Americans to be vaccinated for COVID by July,” meaning 2021. It was even a couple of months ahead of schedule.
And I didn’t get into discussion of who was going to get the first access to the vaccine. It seems across the board it’s agreed that it should go to the elderly and higher risk.
But I did get thinking about AIDS. This is a disease that’s been around for 30 years and has a 100-minus-Magic-Johnson mortality rate, more or less, to COVID’s 5%, or whatever.
I had to get tested a couple of times. I’d been raped while drunk by cops more than once. It’s a fu**ed-up world we live in. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
Just looking over to my desk I found this pamphlet I’d procured my last time into AIDS Assist — “PREP,” or “Pre-Exposure Prophlaxis.” It’s a pill that you can take continually to help prevent HIV infection, as opposed, of course, to a vaccine, which is only a one-time deal and sometimes can last your whole life as an immunity-granting agent.
Now, I’m not a scientist, but I couldn’t help but lie there in my bed and wonder if the differences between the two diseases, how one can accompany a vaccine and the other not, were purely anatomical, or perhaps political, as well. And I got to thinking about evil, both cellular and corporeal. I thought of this dude I work with who survived cancer. He’s got a real good attitude — every young, attractive girl he sees in work he goes, “Hi, sweetheart!” He’s homophobic but that’s just ‘cause he’s old and he likes talking to me about baseball and sometimes music. And I really don’t think The Cars were “a bunch of queers.” But I guess that’s beside the point.
But I wondered about his bedroom cogitation, as mine. I wondered what really pictorially manifested in his mind, when he lay there envisioning the world, this chasm, this abyss, this unrelenting arbiter of the unexpected and potentially deadly. And I wondered about his demarcation of the self and the world. You’ve gotta assign one thing to one and another to the other, or so it seems. The animal strives to put food into his belly. The self strives to reach an overarching truth. The human strives to be ready for anything, hence showing his pointedly delusional ambition. The messiah strives to save. The final is ficticious, so death stares us in the face, like a flooding, black lagoon that is finally almost as inviting as it is menacing, that final messiah at the end of that long ant’s tunnel, back there, grinning and mouthing the words, “I told you so.”