One of Those Mornings

I am continually fascinated by the top of our coffee press. It's just so shiny and it reflects an interesting perspective on the kitchen, including our "spice parade." I've played this game before.

I am already so late this morning. For one thing, Olga stymied my sleep for about half the night by hogging a pile of blankets and then squeezing herself up against me, leaving me immobilized on the edge of the bed with scraps of covers for myself. That dog morphs into a rhinoceros during the night -- her body expands, her weight increases a thousandfold, her breathing and snoring amplify. I slept fitfully until I finally succeeded in moving her at about 3 a.m., and then I overslept until 7!

Then, this morning, she made things exciting by hopping off the bed, walking into the newly carpeted dining room and vomiting up last night's remarkably undigested kibble. So that sent me into carpet-rescue mode, which seems to have succeeded.

It's just as well, though, because I have nothing else to blog about today. We had our first mission statement committee meeting at school, but that's going to be a slow process and it's not blogworthy. Lucky you!

A Heath Walk and a Bad Movie

I finally had a chance to take Olga back to the Heath yesterday. It felt so good to get out and walk, even though we got lightly rained on and the forest has definitely entered its muddy winter phase.

Remember those beautiful purple asters that Olga was rolling in just a few months ago? They're a sad brown clump now. Overall, the colors of autumn have mostly given way to bare branches and the wet browns and blacks of winter.

None of that mattered to Olga. She was as energetic and crazy as ever.

Here are the day's finds, a couple of interesting (at least to me) pottery shards. When we got home, I added them to my little collection on the dining room windowsill.

Olga went almost immediately to sleep and I watched "Seven Alone," an old Western I remember seeing at the theater as a child. It popped into my mind while I was reading my book about prospectors in Alaska -- even though the movie takes place on the Oregon Trail -- and lo and behold, the whole thing is on YouTube. I remember loving it as a kid, but lord, it's tedious and the acting is about as wooden as possible. Revisiting it was interesting, but I definitely don't recommend it -- unless you're in elementary school.

Ants

Thanks to those of you who commented on my post yesterday. I tried to really put it all out there, and I wrestled with whether it was TMI so I appreciate the warm reception. I was touched by your personal stories and the Fran Lebowitz quote that Sabine left, regarding the generation decimated by AIDS:

"You know who got AIDS first? The brilliant, witty, hot people. The people, quite frankly, who were getting laid a lot. That's the real tragedy of AIDS – it wiped out a generation of those people. If those people could come back now, they wouldn't believe who'd become stars in their stead."

Isn't that the truth.

Anyway, I've been hitting you with some pretty heavy stuff in the last few days, so let's talk about something lighter, shall we?

Yesterday I was walking Olga on the "trash path" along the railroad tracks and we came upon a plywood wall surrounding an unoccupied house under construction. The plywood had a hole in it, and this was the view inside. (I'm pretty sure this is the back garden of the house that collapsed several months ago, which is still under scaffolding on the street side.)

Not very exciting, right? Some rebar and old appliances. But then I looked at that big refrigerator, or whatever it is, and saw a green sticker attached to it:

It seems to be a little hand-painted image -- whimsical ants and a spot of jam, maybe? It was very hard to photograph, because I had to stick my arm through that rebar while trying not to drop my phone, Olga pulling on me all the while. There appears to be a signature at the bottom: www.seraphina. I couldn't find a web site that leads to a likely artist. Seraphina.com leads to a landscape photographer (whose work is amazing, BTW) and Seraphina.co.uk doesn't go anywhere.

So who knows. A mystery!

Yesterday was a bit of a whirlwind here. Errands in the morning, like dog-walking and laundry, and then Dave and I went to meet some friends in a pub in Notting Hill. We had a leisurely lunch and then came home to get ready for last night's staff/faculty holiday party and trustees' reception, which was held in a posh space off Trafalgar Square. I got to wear the jacket!

What That Red Ribbon Means to Me

With today being World AIDS Day, I thought I'd write a bit about my complicated relationship with HIV.

I don't have HIV, and I have been incredibly lucky as a 52-year-old gay man to have not lost any close friends to AIDS (though I do have friends with the virus). By telling my own tale, I don't mean to minimize the experience of people actually living with it. But HIV has transformed my experience as a gay man -- how could it not?

I first remember hearing about AIDS when I was in high school. I regularly watched TV news with my family, and when the reports began to emerge in the early '80s and no one knew what caused it or how it spread, I remember my mom saying, "This is going to be bad."

I wasn't out yet, but I felt a visceral fear, knowing that it affected gay men and that might mean me. By the time I finally did come out as a college student, in 1984-85, the virus had been identified but there were no effective treatments. It was essentially a death sentence. I was involved from the very beginning in our campus AIDS Education Project, which worked with the local public health department to advocate for "safe sex."

To say that it cast a pall over my dating life would be putting it mildly. All the talk of risk made dating or sleeping with anyone seem like walking a knife edge. Very early on, I experimented with another guy in ways that were patently unsafe -- fortunately he wasn't infected. But after that, I was scrupulously careful.

I was so careful, in fact, that I subconsciously walled myself off. I was openly gay, I had gay friends, I went out to nightclubs and participated in gay life. But I rarely made myself personally, emotionally or sexually available.

Some people criticized "safe sex" at the time -- so-called "sex positive" activists -- because you had to be so conscientious about your activities. You could never really let yourself go, get into the animal act. And that's true -- even when I did sleep with someone, I was always thinking about the rules and what would or wouldn't expose me to danger. It was, to put it mildly, a drag, and I had guys laugh at me because I was so super-careful.

Even then, my infrequent encounters led me down dark scary paths. I'd wake up two days later with a sore throat or a swollen lymph node and think I was going to die. I would put myself through weeks and months of fear, even though I'd been careful and done everything "right." Doctors would tell me there was basically no way I could be infected, but I wouldn't believe it -- and I'd get tested multiple times during the ensuing six months until I finally convinced myself I was fine.

And then I'd meet someone else, and the cycle of fear would begin again.

I'm sure a psychologist could have a field day with this behavior, exploring my unresolved internalized homophobia or whatever, but I assure you I am not the only gay man who felt this way. I've heard enough stories to know. Ultimately, while I told myself I wanted romance, I subconsciously put myself in places where I didn't believe it was an option (Peace Corps in a Muslim country) or distracted myself with impossible romantic attachments (a best friend who was the object of a long-term unrequited crush).

Even as effective (but harsh) HIV treatments became available my personal life remained somewhat paralyzed. I did meet and sleep with people, but formed no meaningful romantic attachments through the 1990s, and I can't tell you how much time, money and emotional energy I wasted on fear of HIV during those years.

Finally, after I moved to New York in 2000, as treatments were becoming less arduous, I began to loosen up. I still wasn't a libertine, not by any means. But I met more people, had more stable relationships, became a bit wiser and became more comfortable with the idea that I could have sex responsibly and not be afraid.

I don't mean to make it sound like those were the "bad old days" and it's all over now. As we all know, HIV is still no picnic and contracting it is serious business. As I said, ultimately, I am so lucky -- and not just because I never lost any friends or contracted it myself. I'm just barely too young to be of the generation that got slammed most heavily by AIDS. On the other hand, my youth, when I should have been meeting people and going on dates and having fun, was consumed by it.

I often think how it could have been different. I could have been born a few years earlier and been infected before anyone realized there was a danger. I could have been born several years later, and matured into a world where HIV was more manageable and preventable. Either option might have changed my life, for better or for much, much worse.

(Photo: A pub near London Bridge.)

Mining for Fractions

I've been getting deluged with sweet baked goods, as often happens around this time of year. People brought several desserts to Thanksgiving, like cupcakes (which Dave informs me were actually "Victoria sponge sandwiches" and not cupcakes at all) and pecan pie. And then my boss brought me pumpkin pie from her Thanksgiving dinner, and a box of macaroons that her houseguests gave her. And then we had "staff appreciation day" at work, when the parents bring in baked goods for the school employees -- which led to me walking away with chocolate chip cookies, brownies, blondies and some other goodies.

Of course it's all meant well and I am not complaining, exactly. I just need to pace myself! I'm trying to eat just a few sweet things per day as well as walk to (and sometimes from) work. I don't have a weight problem but I'm 52 and at this stage in life it creeps up on us!

Yesterday at school a fifth-grader kept coming to me for help with his math homework. Lord! There is literally not a single thing I am worse at than math. He's a funny kid, very earnest and friendly, and I wanted to be of some assistance but I also didn't want to steer him the wrong way. He's done this to me before, asking about long division. Who remembers how to do long division?! Get a calculator, kid!

Well, yesterday he wanted to know how to turn a fraction into a percentage. When he showed me his pencilled, scribbled calculations I felt that same old sense of panic that I used to get in math class. I could not tell him from memory how to solve his problem (see what I mean?), but I resorted to Google and got him an answer.

I also told him, "Nicholas, when it comes to math, you'd be better off talking to virtually any other adult in this building than me."

Maybe I shouldn't let on that I can't even do fifth grade math. They might fire me.

(In all honesty, if it were just me, I could probably do it. But when I'm giving advice to someone else there's an added layer of uncertainty, a responsibility, that makes me second-guess virtually everything I think I remember. Know what I mean?)

This is my next book. It's a yard sale purchase I made in Anna Maria Island, Florida, some time back. It was published in 1928 and I bought it solely because I loved the look of it. It's kind of fun to rediscover old books that have been completely forgotten.

According to the flyleaf, it's "a virile and swiftly moving tale of Alaskan mining life." Apparently Elby Wagner was a miner himself.

Hmmmm. I'll let you know how it goes.

(Photos: A garage on Morocco Street in Bermondsey. Not sure why the horses are there -- my guess is they relate to the earlier use of that building, possibly as a stable. And yes, the building really is that crooked.)

Debbie Downer Talks About Bugs

I just realized it's only 5:47, and I've been up drinking coffee and reading for a good half-hour already. Why am I up so early?!

I finished a devastating article yesterday in the New York Times magazine about the decline of insect life and its ramifications for the planet overall. It was so depressing that I hesitate to even mention it here. But it's well-written and I'm sure it's true, and if we don't talk about these issues, how will we ever change or reverse them?

I posted it to Facebook, and that led to an exchange with my old friend Kevin about how much less wildlife we see now in our hometown in Florida. "Remember when we were young that there were so many meadowlarks, quail, nightingales and red winged blackbirds in Land O' Lakes," he wrote. "I can't remember the last time I saw any of those in the area."

Granted, he visits but no longer lives there, and although I've visited Tampa and some areas nearby, I haven't been back to Land O' Lakes since my Mom sold our family home in 2015. Still, I was there long enough and often enough over the past several decades to see a definite decline. I often think of the quail, how common they were when I was a child and how rare now. I don't think I've seen a quail in the wild in Florida since the mid-'80s.

As for insects -- when I was a kid, each year at a certain time, hundreds of mayflies would land on my bedroom windows, which faced a lake. I think they were mating or molting or maybe even dying at the end of their life cycle. But at some point over the years that stopped happening, and I couldn't even say when. I just know I haven't seen those once-abundant mayflies in a long time, and whenever I asked my mom about them, she hadn't seen them either.

We saw fewer green tree frogs over the years, and fewer snakes. (My mom had a couple of cats, and I'm sure that didn't help.) I often just assumed I wasn't seeing these creatures because I no longer lived there, and wasn't visiting at the right times.

I have lived in cities for the last few decades, so my contact with wildlife has been much more limited. Dave and I always take pleasure in seeing the gnats and other little bugs flying around over our pesticide-free garden here in London on summer evenings, and as you know, I often blog our experiences with foxes, squirrels, ladybirds, butterflies and other critters.

But it turns out there really is a decline among almost every living creature in the natural world. We don't always notice because it's a relatively slow change, and highly variable by geographical location. But nothing on earth is prospering except humans -- and I'd say the clock is ticking even on that.

(Photo: A door in Bermondsey.)

Photography and Truth

I came across this building while in Bermondsey a few weekends ago. I've photographed it before, but I couldn't resist shooting it again with that gorgeous light spilling across the facade.

I read a terrifying article in The New Yorker (I promise I read other things too) about digital image manipulation -- how computers are getting so good at creating digital pictures and video that anyone will be able to do it. This goes way beyond Photoshop, although that was the first wave of the problem. It's more like CGI for the common man. It's terrifying because people have enough trouble sorting truth from myth with the written word -- imagine what will happen when some right-wing lunatic like Alex Jones or a propagandist like James O'Keefe develops the capability to create realistic CGI videos of the Obamas or other Democratic leaders, for example? We'll see them marching in pro-Communist rallies and giving Black Panther salutes and burning down churches and gleefully performing abortions, and people will believe it.

As a photographer, I get a little sick at the idea of computer-generated imagery. I still think of photos in a very old-school way -- that they are meant to capture fleeting moments realistically, as they really happened. "Seeing is believing," that kind of thing. "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words."

I fear the day when that won't be true -- when a picture won't be worth squat, or may only be destructive. Images are such powerful tools, and when used correctly and truthfully they're incredible storytellers. Stripping them of that power is heartbreaking to me. And yeah, you could say Photoshop has already made them unreliable, but not to the degree that they may become unreliable in the future. I guess it will all come down to where they're published, and learning to trust certain sources, just as we do now with news -- for better and for worse.

Lord! The world is so complicated.

Apropos of nothing, I found that little zebra on the sidewalk yesterday. Oh, and I finished my H. E. Bates book, "The Sleepless Moon." I like his writing, but man, I'm not sure I've ever read about so many uniformly unhappy people! (It was written long before Prozac.) Now I've just got to catch up on these New Yorkers!