John's Dura Mater Blog

The Road to New Orleans The hospice—the word itself carried a clean, clinical finality. In Birmingham, my work was a volunteer role in private homes, a relentless, solitary march against the inevitable. But I had seen the structure of necessity take hold in other cities: the group home. These weren't mere medical facilities; they were built as a direct answer to injustice. Too often, the residents were men who had been abandoned—rejected by partners, cast out by family . They were there because they had nowhere else to fall. It was this heartbreaking, yet righteous, resistance that fueled us. The development of AIDS hospices seemed almost coincidental across various U.S. metro areas, but the first with which I became directly involved was  Lazarus House  in the Faubourg Marigny. The name itself—Lazarus—carried a terrible irony. The biblical figure was raised from the dead, restored to life. We, on the other hand, were building homes for men who were already marked for death. B...

The flowers arrived on a Tuesday. A dozen roses. They sat on my desk, bright red , an offense to the neutral institutional palette of my office. My colleagues, my friends, were as shocked as I was. I had never, in my life, received flowers. Not for anything. From anyone. For years, I was the sort of man other men simply re-noticed. One hundred and thirty-five pounds, still torturing that same mouse-colored hair that defied all attempts at discipline. Not a compelling package. I was a year into my studies—MBA and Public Health—and had already survived four on-again, off-again years with my first significant other.  So, I knew the mechanics of love and relationships, but I had never been pursued. Certainly not by anyone like Charlie. Charlie was the live embodiment of Prince Eric from Disney’s Little Mermaid - any many ways, the gay ideal. I start my description with this, because Charlie was a statement. Striking. Everyone immediately loved and adored him.  Who could resist tha...

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot, of course. A tidy little package for a complicated journey. 1982. The move. I arrived in Birmingham for UAB, attempting the tentative role of ‘young gay man,’ and by the gravitational pull of the inevitable, settled into The Clairidge in what was then simply Southside. The building had once been grand; by the time I took up residence, it was merely old—a comfortable, aging repository for retired women, but also a rising tide of gay men and artists. A fitting stage, perhaps, for that first, dizzying exploration. Now, at 63, I am back. Diagonal across the street from that first perch, a full life's circle drawn. The district now prefers the grander title of Highland Park, better reflecting its historic roots. The avenue itself, Highland Avenue, built to endure, wears its history with a crumbling dignity. Its canopy of trees—prou...

Here I sit - nursing a scotch, looking out at the pink and orange reflection of the sunset on the mountain—pondering my solitary act of civil disobedience. At lunch, I asked a friend, "Do you believe there's a link between what's been described as The Great Acceleration and the current state of western societal discourse?"  So we pondered and pontificated. But you can see it, can't you? The hideous, sweeping line. Not just the hockey stick curve of the Great Acceleration—the GDP, the progress - and costs - the sheer, staggering, insane climb of every measurable metric since 1950. That part is the easy science. That’s the graph one hangs in the university hall to impress the new arrivals with the scope of our own, magnificent, self-destruction. No. I’m speaking of the parallel line. The ghost twin. The terrifying ascent of contempt. They told us the internet would shrink the world, make us all villagers, quaintly linked. That was the lie. It was a lie spun in the ...

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that had jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra. "The ...

“When an old man dies, a library burns” - Amadou Hampâté Bâ