Prospects for an HIV vaccine

Unfortunately, they're extremely poor. Even if they produce one, it's unlikely to be of any use. But to explain why I'm going to have to introduce a lot of background, because you have to understand how viruses work, how our bodies defend against them, what a vaccine does. Then I'll have to talk about how HIV works and how it is unusual.

Whenever anyone tries to define "life", the virus always straddles the dividing line between living and unliving. Looking at its behavior without knowing what it is, it seems to act as if it were living. But in actuality it's little more than a protein coat surrounding some nucleic acids. It doesn't have the ability to do anything we would refer to as "live" on its own; it's completely static when it's outside a cell. The protein coat defends the nucleic acids inside, and also facilitate entry through the wall of a cell which it will try to infect. Once inside, the coat bursts and releases the nucleic acids. These then take over the cell's normal processes and use them to create new viruses. Eventually this kills the cell but only after thousands of new viruses have been created. The cell bursts, spilling the viruses back into the blood to infect other cells. Some of the viruses will be shed into the environment in any of a number of ways, to infect other creatures.

Our bodies contain elaborate defenses against this kind of thing. First, there are cells whose job is to detect that an invasion is in process. When one of them discovers this, it uses a genetic toolbox of about a thousand DNA fragments, and through mechanisms which are not yet well understood it will figure out the genetic description of an appropriate antibody. This is really a custom protein which has a section on one side which is exactly the right shape to connect to something on the invader, which is called an antigen. Once the white cell gets it right, it will start reproducing like mad, creating and releasing antibodies and also creating certain signal hormones to alert the rest of the body that an attack is in progress.

Then there's a pitched battle. Antibodies connect to the invaders, which not only deactivates them if they're viruses but also tags them so that other white cells can engulf them and destroy them with enzymes.

The recognition process is slow. From initial infection it typically takes three days for one or more white cells to get the combination right. After that, they reproduce over a period of a few hours and then battle is joined.

During that initial period, the invading virus is free and clear to do what it will. So it reproduces and its numbers grow exponentially. By the time the immune system is ready for battle, there are a lot of viruses. So eradicating them takes a while. How long it takes depends on the virus in question.

Now it's important to understand the underlying design philosophy behind all this: it all assumes that there's a threshold viral load which is not dangerous, and it only girds for a fight when the load exceeds that amount. When you "get over" a cold, it's not the case that you have no viruses left. Rather, you have so few that they no longer represent a danger to you. The body can't remain in full-scale battle mobilization over long periods; it would seriously harm other things and could kill you. So it gears up when an invasion starts, but stands down once most of the battle is won.

But not totally. After the battle ends, some of the T4 cells, the ones which recognize an invader and create antibodies, remain behind. The immune system has a kind of memory about this, embodied in T4 cells which have already adapted to recognize invaders.

If you are ever infected again with a virus you've already had, the immune system is ready to go. Instead of taking three days to recognize the invasion, the T4 cells already knowing about it start reproducing immediately, producing antibodies. It cuts a process which ordinarily takes maybe three days to less than six hours. And since the number of viruses grows exponentially, it means that the peak viral load in your blood will only be a fraction of a percent of what it would otherwise have been. Indeed, this response is so fast and so efficient that you won't even realize that you've gotten sick again.

But with some viruses, there is substantial damage done before the immune system gets ready for the fight, and in some cases the victim can die. In some cases it takes a lot longer to recognize the invader, for instance. The most fatal disease known in humans is rabies. Everyone who gets rabies and isn't treated for it will die from it; fatality rate is 100%. This is greater than Ebola, which has a fatality rate of about 95%, or Marburg, about 70%.

That's where vaccines come in. The first vaccine was developed nearly three hundred years ago, to fight smallpox. But it wasn't until late in the 19th century that they began to even get an idea how they worked, and they didn't really become practical until early in the 20th century.

A vaccine is, in essence, a benign disease. Its purpose is to introduce antigens into your body which are close to those on a real disease you haven't had. By doing this, your body goes through that three day recognition-and-create-antibody process, only to find that there's nothing to fight. Still, primed T4 cells remain afterwards, and if you then get infected for the first time with the disease, your body reacts as if it had already had it. The response is rapid and effective and the viral load never gets great. In most cases, again, you won't even realize you've been infected.

But you are infected. That's the critical point. A vaccine doesn't keep you from getting a disease. What it does do is make it so that your body responds to the disease far more rapidly so that the peak viral load is vastly lower, which means that the virus has far less opportunity to do permanent harm.

HIV is a ferocious disease with truly pernicious strategies. Viruses do all sorts of weird things, and HIV is one of the worst. It's actually not very infections; unlike adenoviruses it is killed by exposure to oxygen, for instance. So it can only pass from one person to another in body fluids, primarily blood. It cannot be passed by casual contact.

But it can be passed by a number of other activities, like sex and sharing hypodermic needles.

When you get HIV, it initially acts like any other virus and starts to reproduce by entering cells, taking over their systems, making lots of viruses, killing the cells and bursting back out into the blood.

Your body recognizes this and mounts an immune response just as it would against a cold and flu. In a few days T4 cells have recognized the disease and started creating antibodies against it, and you have a battle which the immune system wins. You get over the disease!

But...

But, during that time, HIV plays its trump card. HIV is a "retrovirus" which means that in addition to its normal life cycle, it has the ability to transcribe its genetic information into the cell it infects. In some cases this happens without the cell reproducing viruses, and such an infected cell is a timebomb. There are no viruses in it, but if in future that genetic information gets activated then the cell will start creating HIV. And most insidiously of all, it does this preferentially to the T4 cells, the point men of the immune system.

So what happens is that after the first infection, when HIV hit a high blood load and then collapsed, it becomes chronic. Most of the immune response to it goes away, and it achieves a low but continuous level in the blood. Good enough, by the standards of the immune system; that's the goal. There are a small number of viruses and a low level of activity against it, and the viral load is low and stays low. Every once in a while, one of the transcribed T4 cells activates and starts producing HIV; this kills the T4 cell, which burst and spills a small pulse of HIV into the blood stream. The immune system kills most of them, but a few manage to find and infect other T4 cells, transcribing their information into the chromosomes.

So over a long period of time, the number of T4 cells declines because they're slowly being destroyed by HIV. Eventually there are too few to make any difference. Without T4 cells, the rest of the immune system is useless; they never see a signal indicating that there's an infection, so they never respond to it. The patient has AIDS, and there's no hope.

The problem is that the fundamental assumption of the immune system is wrong for HIV: there is no safe level of the virus. Any level will eventually kill you.

So what if we have a vaccine? Well, the immune system would be preprogrammed to recognize HIV which would speed a response up from three days to six hours. But during that six hours the virus would still be reproducing, and at least some T4 cells would get infected. Then the immune system would stomp on the others. The patient would not notice an infection -- but an infection would take place nonetheless. So all that happens is that the patient skips the initial big pulse of viruses and goes directly into the second stage of chronic low-level infection which slowly destroys the immune system. How is this really better?

The vaccine would not prevent AIDS, because a vaccine doesn't prevent infection. It keeps the viruses from getting above a dangerous threshold -- except that for HIV, there appears to be no safe level of the virus.

So why are they working on one? Because there isn't anything else they can do. Modern medicine is very impressive, but it's largely based on a relatively small number of basic discovery. Really very few, and of those only one is effective against viruses. Antibiotics, for instance, are useless against viruses. Antibiotics are selective poisons which interfere with certain cell functions, and they happen to be functions present in bacteria but not in us. So if you've got syphilis and you take penicillin, it doesn't affect you but it kills the bacteria which have infected you. That's because the bacteria really are alive, and penicillin interferes with essential life functions.

But a virus really isn't quite alive; when it's not in a cell it doesn't have any life function. It's just information; the life comes from the cell it infects and takes over. So chemical poisons have no effect on it; there isn't anything to poison.

Only vaccines work, and they've performed miracles. Indeed, the granddaddy of them all, vaccinia, was used to completely eradicate for the very first time in history a disease which has afflicted humans all through recorded history. It's a modern miracle: for at least ten years there hasn't been a single case of smallpox anywhere on earth, and there won't ever be again.

But for nearly all known diseases, there is a threshold of infection which is not dangerous. What a vaccine does is to keep the disease below that threshold.

If a vaccine doesn't work against HIV, then nothing will. Antiviral drugs aren't quite like antibiotics and there's strong evidence that they don't cure. A victim has to take them forever and even then eventually the disease will kill them. Antiviral drugs are also expensive and have to be taken several times per day. If a vaccine works, it will be a one-time treatment which could be administered even before infection to prevent it.

If it works -- only it won't. But the researchers don't want to surrender without a fight, so they're trying it anyway in hopes that there will be a miracle. I don't think there will be.

The only solution for HIV is prevention, and that's unlikely. This plague is with us for the long haul; it's going to be, in the long run, one of the great killers of humans. The history of the 21st century will be changed by it, just as the history of the 14th century was changed by Bubonic Plague (the "Black Death"). And it will take a breakthrough in theory to do anything about it. Right now no-one knows what that might be.

I don't like this answer, but the universe didn't promise to please me.

Sickle Cell Anemia: a case study in evolution

Summary: Sickle cell anemia, while a horrible disease, is a product of evolution. Sickle cell in general prevents the majority of carriers from dying of malaria, but renders some excruciatingly and fatally ill.

Actually, we're not going to be talking about sickle cell anemia here for quite a while, because we've got a lot to cover first. Sickle Cell Anemia is far more complicated than most people realize. For instance, most people don't realize that it's an advantage to the vast majority of people who carry the gene. But explaining why takes a lot of background. So let's get started.

For a moment, I want you to stop thinking of yourself as a businessman or poet or mother or football star or potential model or angel in training or whatever and start thinking of yourself as a whole bunch of meat. Because to a disease that how you look: you're lunch.

Diseases, including parasites, have existed for hundreds of millions of years, and the reason we have an immune system is to protect ourselves against all the very tiny creatures who want to eat us.

By analogy our defenses are in two levels, a passive one and an active one. Think of a medieval castle filled with soldiers armed with spears. (Sorry, no crossbows.) The first defense is the castle wall, in this case our skin. And it is extremely effective, which is why burn patients who lose large parts of their skin are in such danger.

However, the castle wall has several entrances which are not well guarded. By far the best from the point of view of diseases is our respiratory systems, where the lining of the nose and the lung are thin and easily invaded. The second best one is our digestive tract, but that one's harder because the disease has to run a fairly stiff gauntlet in the stomach before it can reach the small intestine and finally reach a thin part of the wall.

Once inside, however, there are all those soldiers with spears; white T-cells and B-cells and antibodies which do not like invaders and are ready to fight to the death to destroy them. It does however take a couple of days before the immune system recognizes a new disease and gears up to fight it. What happens is that one kind of white blood cell recognizes the invader, learns how to make appropriate antibodies, and the reproduces like mad so that there are millions of them pouring out antibodies.The antibodies attach themselves to the invaders, and that becomes a signal for other white blood cells to attack, engulf and destroy the invader. And with most diseases what then happens is a pitched battle between the disease and the immune system, which the immune system ultimately wins over the course of a few days, and you get over the disease (but usually not until you've given it to a couple of friends).

But there are other ways in. Mosquitos have the ability to burrow through our skin to reach the blood which they suck. But if they immediately started to suck, the blood would clot in their proboscis, clogging it, which would do them no good at all. So after they've finally penetrated the skin, the first thing they do is inject some saliva. The saliva contains a very powerful anticoagulant. Then as the mosquito sucks out blood, the blood it gets contains some of this saliva, and thus does not clot and clog the proboscis.

But if the mosquito were to suck all the saliva out then it would be sucking blood without the anticoagulant and it would clot. So the mosquito stops before then, and as a result leaves some of the saliva behind. And that's why a mosquito bite is annoying; because it leaves behind some things which cause a local immune reaction; so you get a lump and it itches for a couple of days.

Some diseases have gotten a comensal relationship with the mosquito: when the mosquito sucks blood from a victim who is infected with that disease, the disease travels through the mosquito's blood system from its stomach to its saliva glands, and there it waits. And when the mosquito bites someone else, the disease pathogen hitches a ride on the saliva which gets injected. A lot of it gets sucked back out, but as mentioned some is left behind and thus some of the disease pathogens remain, right there in the blood, on the inside side of the wall, in the yummy juicy part of you.

But there are still all those soldiers. The second trick is to figure out how to fool them, and various diseases and parasites have found interesting ways of doing that. There's a rather large parasite called a fluke; one version lives in your liver, another in your lungs, another in your heart, and they can be there for years and the immune system ignores them completely. That's because they coat themselves in a layer of your own cells. So when the immune system takes a look at one of these monsters, it sees "self" not "invader". It's as if the fluke is wearing a stolen a uniform from one of your own soldiers.

Another trick is to hide where the immune system cannot go; the favorite being to cross the "blood-brain barrier" which despite the name actually applies to the entire nervous system everywhere. Herpes does this. When you get herpes, it reproduces in your blood, and your immune system fights back and wins. But before it's done so, some herpes viruses have crossed the blood-brain barrier and gone dormant in nerve cells and the immune system cannot follow them there, because it does not cross the blood-brain barrier. Every once in a while, for no reason anyone has ever determined conclusively (though a weakening of the immune system through, say, a cold, is the most likely cause, thus the term 'cold sore'), the herpes viruses decide to come out for a rematch and again they battle the immune system, and again the immune system wins. But in the mean time the supply of viruses in the nerves has been replenished, and this keeps happening all your life, which is why Herpes has no permanent cure, and why a person infected with it will suffer many attacks. Herpes is not the only virus which does this; there are many. The one which causes warts does exactly the same thing.

But the disease I'm most interested in for this discussion is malaria. You get it by being bitten by a mosquito who had previously bitten someone else who was infected; malaria does that trick of moving from the mosquito stomach to the mosquito saliva gland. (However, it's very specific; it has to be the Anopheles mosquito. No other will do. The Anopheles mosquito is a friendly beast and loves to share; it also spreads yellow fever.)

The malarial parasite is extremely small, and inside you its life cycle consists primarily of invading red blood cells (which are huge by comparison) and eating out the insides and using that material to make more malarial parasites. Eventually you have a loose bag filled with parasites, and it bursts.

While the parasites are out in the blood plasma, the immune system is capable of recognizing and attacking them. But they don't have to search far to find a new red blood cell to invade, and while they're inside the red blood cell they've vanished as far as the immune system is concerned.

Malaria is a vicious disease and while it often doesn't directly kill its victim it so seriously weakens him that he's liable to die from many other things which ordinarily would not be fatal.

Now the malarial parasite has a normal metabolism just like any other living thing; it utilizes oxygen and generates carbon dioxide as a waste. This is critical.

I'm afraid I need to define some technical terms because we'll be using them extensively. The first two words we need are homozygous and heterozygous. Everyone knows that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and except for the sex pair, each pair is essentially identical in gross. But they are not neccesarily identical in detail. A given chromosome may contain the formula for hair color at a certain location, and if so, its compatriot will also contain the formula for hair color at that same location. But they may contain the same formula or different ones.

If the two chromosomes contain exactly the same formula at that point, then the individual is referred to as being homozygous for that gene, which means that the zygote (the person) only has one ("homo") formula. If the two chromosomes are different at that location then the individual is referred to as being heterozygous which means the zygote (the person) has multiple ("hetero") kinds of gene. (Just to clarify, the words have nothing whatever to do with sexual preference.)

Now genes like that are sometimes dominant or recessive or co-dominant.

The eye-color gene is the classic example of dominance and recessiveness. If a person is homozygous with the blue-eyed gene, then they will have blue eyes. If the person is homozygous with the brown eyed gene they will have brown eyes. But if the person is heterozygous, with one of each, he will still have brown eyes because the brown eye gene is dominant and the blue-eyed gene is recessive.

Yet two more odd words: genotype and phenotype. The genotype is the genes the person carries. The phenotype is what the resulting individual looks like.

A person whose genotype for eye color is homozygous brown and the person who is heterozygous for eye color both have the same phenotype: brown eyes. There is no external way to tell them apart.

Finally, one last word to define and perhaps the most important of all: co-dominant means that if the person is heterozygous, he will express in his phenotype both genes, and thus will be different than a homozygous individual with either of the genes. The reason this is important is that the sickle gene is codominant with the normal gene at that location.

Sorry about all the jargon, but we need it to talk precisely about what happens with malaria.

Hemoglobin is the critical compound in our red blood cells, which carries iron atoms and gives the red cells the ability to carry oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. This is necessary because oxygen does not dissolve very well in water, and the plasma alone is not capable of carrying enough oxygen to the tissues to keep you alive. Hemoglobin is horrendously complicated, consisting of two each of two different large proteins which wind together so as to hold a few iron atoms into certain very precise positions. There are hundreds of amino acids in Hemoglobin.

Another function of the blood is to carry back the CO2 to the lungs so it can be exhaled. But unlike oxygen, CO2 is readily soluble in water. It forms carbonic acid (H2C03) by combining with a water molecule. At the lungs it just as readily returns to its normal gaseous form and can be exhaled. So unlike oxygen, no special mechanism is needed to carry CO2 to the lungs. But while dissolved, it is an acid and actually a fairly potent one.

The sickle gene turns out to be a single change, the alteration of a single amino acid, in the formula for one of the two protein chains which makes up hemoglobin. It has no effect at all on the ability of the modified hemoglobin to carry oxygen.

And the sickle gene is co-dominant. So a person who is heterozygous with the sickle gene will have half their hemoglobin in the normal form and half with the modification.

The modification has one critical effect: it make the hemoglobin sensitive to high levels of acid. In the presence of high quantities of acid, the modified hemoglobin molecules stack up like poker chips and form long chains, and as a result the shape of the red blood cell changes fom the normal platelet shape to something more like a banana. This is called sickling.

And when this happens, the immune system labels the cell as aberrant, and a white blood cell will engulf and destroy it.

For a person who is heterozygous with the sickle gene, almost the only thing which can make this happen is the presence of malarial parasites inside the red blood cell. They are excreting CO2 and it is dissolving in the water inside the red blood cell and being converted to carbonic acid, and when the concentration reaches a certain point, the half of the hemoglobin which is modified forms its long chains, causes the cell to sickle, and makes the immune system engulf and destroy the cell.

Before the parasites get out. This is a Good Thing.

Not every single time, but most of the time, and the result is that the disease never gets out of control. It's a chronic infection which never really affects the health of the heterozygous individual.

That's the point: the sickle gene protects its heterozygous carriers against malaria. They're not immune to the disease, but it can't kill them because it doesn't reach sufficient quantity in their blood to do so.

But it's an imperfect solution because it protects the heterozygous individuals at the expense of everyone else. They're doing fine, but everyone else suffers because they exist.

First there is the disease we call "sickle cell anemia". That happens when both parents of a child are heterozygous, and the child gets the sickle gene from both of them, approximately one chance in four, thus becoming homozygous with the modified gene. The effect of this is to dramatically lower the amount of acid which is needed to set off a sickling attack.

In a person who is homozygous with the sickle gene, their own normal CO2 (in the form of carbonic acid in their blood plasma) can be sufficient to cause their red blood cells to sickle, and when it happens it happens to many if not most of the red cells all at once. At which point the immune system goes hog wild and starts destroying nearly every red cell it can find (which has sickled). And that's why it is called "anemia", because in fairly short order there aren't many red blood cells left. Modern medical treatment for such an attack is to put the person into a nearly pure oxygen atmosphere to permit them to utilize such oxygen carrying capacity as they have left, and once things have calmed down a bit, to treat with transfusion of normal red blood cells.

But in an impoverished community in Somalia in some obscure village out in the bush, for instance, that's simply out of the question. So all you can do is watch the child and feel bad because of the pain and hope it doesn't die. Few survive past age 12. Now because heterozygous individuals make up a minority of the population and even when they do marry each other, only a quarter on average of their children are homozygous with the sickle gene, it doesn't actually kill a very large proportion of the population. On the other hand, all those heterozygous individuals have been saved from malaria by the gene -- so it saves more lives than it costs in areas where malaria is endemic.

What's less obvious is that the heterozygous community also represent a serious health threat to the people who are homozygous with the normal gene for hemoglobin.

The heterozygous individuals are not immune to malaria. They get it. They don't get over it. It just doesn't severely affect them. So they represent a pool of infected individuals that the mosquitos can bite which causes the mosquitos themselves to become infected, which raises the chance that the mosquito which bites a homozygous normals will carry malaria and give it to him. So the presence in the population of a significant number of heretozygous individuals will raise the chance of the homozygous normals getting and dying from the disease.

Now it is mathematically impossible for every individual in the population to be heterozygous. Even if they began that way, the next generation would not be.

And that's why this is such an interesting case study in evolution. For any given gene, all that natural selection is interested in is whether it saves more lives than it costs, and this one does. Far more people are saved from malaria by this gene than are killed by sickle-cell anemia, and since natural selection is simply a statistical process, that's all it takes to select in favor of it. Natural selection doesn't care what effect it has on those who do not carry the gene.

Consider when the original mutation took place. Now since it is a single amino acid change, it is completely plausible; unlikely, but plausible. (Why Africa? Gold is where you find it. It just happened to be there. Rewind the tape and run it forward again, and it might have happened in Malaysia, or in Central America, or Sweden, or it might not have happened at all. But it did happen in Africa. Unlike natural selection, which is stochastic, mutation is random.)

The first individual to get the mutation was heterozygous! She (?) got all the advantages and none of the disadvantages. She marries and has children and on average half of them get the gene and they are all heterozygous (and the rest are homozygous normal). And again, the carriers get all the advantages but none of the disadvantages. So the gene wil spread for a long time; and you won't get a homozygous individual with the sickle gene until two people marry who are sufficiently distantly related so that they don't think they are violating the incest taboo but are both descended from the person who had the original mutation. And even then only one quarter of their children die a horrible death; half are heterozygous, and one quarter are homozygous normal.

And even then, since the majority are homozygous normal, the heterozygous individuals are more likely on average to pick a homozygous normal individual for a mate, and their offspring will be on average half heterozygous and half homozygous normal. A homozygous sickle gene offspring is impossible in such a pairing.

So for a really long time, the sickle gene was an advantage and natural selection would have favored it and caused it to spread. And indeed in many parts of Africa it still is mostly an advantage.

At least, that's the evolutionary explanation. It turns out from an evolutionary standpoint to make perfect sense, because evolution isn't looking for "perfect" answers; just for things which are better than before.


[Since this was written I've learned more about sickle cell anemia. It turns out that each of us has a set of genes for haemoglobin which are active in the womb (g-globin), and a different set (b-globin) which activate shortly after birth (while the former are deactivated again). It is the second set which is changed in people carrying the sickle cell gene, and work is underway to see if there might be a way to reactivate the fetal gene. If this can be done, then people with sickle cell disease could conceivably be cured. This is an extremely exciting prospect.]

a thought

Right now, of the many problems facing the farming industry, land scarcity is low on the list. However, depending on the type of farm and location of the farm, this can be a huge problem. For example, a soy farmer produces a crop with hugely varying uses, but a soy farmer can only make from $20-50 dollars and acre. Gas alone costs ten times that. And even if gas wasn't a factor, it still doesn't net the farmer anything close to a profit.

My idea is simple (possibly too simple). Take the idea of the multilevel green house and expand on it. I give you the multilevel farm: Structurally it is not unlike a parking garage, with dirt and UV lights.










There are many variables I've yet to consider, like power and water sources, and math, but this is my idea thus far. Sorry for the crude mspaint drawings, I do not own CAD. The last two drawings depict a floor and ceiling plan. Basically rows of crops, and elevator for farm eqipment, and UV lights and sprinklers.

a jumble of tiny, stale thoughts

When I was small, probably four years old, I recall waking up really early one morning, just before sunrise, and looking out the front windows. I was living in Paris desert California, and I could see the sierra mountains and an open plain. The sky was amny shades of blue, but the sun that had not yet shown itself was still making its presence know by causing the blue hues to be especially vibrant this time of the morning. that sky, the early morning crisp all managed to make fill up my little four year old heart with love for the world as I knew it. It was the first time in my life I can remember looking at something and understanding that it was beautiful.

A second time in my life, I saw a sky like that, when I was working at the gas station on Spenard and Minnesota, I could see that same sky only now it was over the Chugach range. And for the first time I thought back on that morning so long ago so far away and I could barely contain my mirth. I'm not certain how I managed to do my menial job without quitting, and taking my newfound inspiration with me.

This morning when I woke, the light was similiar but the sky was not. A bit disappointing, yes, but if I were lucky enough to see my morning sky all the time, would it still hold the same magic and enigma?

Everyday this place feels more like home. I have found myself making seemingly small additions in the form of useful household items, like a nice tea pot and a decent set of kitchen knives. So much of my daily living stems from an amalgamation of the many friends with whom I have lived, and from whom I have learned so much, especially Micah. Micah taught me to appreciate every decision as important. He often said "If it is worth deciding, it is worth considering."

Am I an existentialist? I cherish freedom above all things, and yet I believe that I have an obligation not just to myself, but to others. I cannot articulate this well enough for any philosophy majors, but I can say that while I am certain I am not a nihilist, because while I love freedom I do not see all forms of a social contract as restricting of my freedoms, if it is understood that this obligation is one based upon a sort of humanism, and not on any type of value system, from which the do-gooder achieves points towards some ultimate goal (like heaven or karma). Because I do not believe in life after death, my persistent belief in God then negates any assumptions of selfish motivations where my altruism is conserned.

Miles is cleansing.

When I hear anything from John Mayer's "Room for Squares", I think of winter 2003, living with Danny, and how wonderful that was. So what will I think of years from now about Portland? Probably when I hear Third Eye Blind's Wake for Young Souls, anything from Bright Eye's album "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and Rufus Waignwright singing "Hallelujah", I will think of walking downtown, especially through Marquam Hill, and the one and only day of my life I thought that maybe I should consider going into the medical field. How i wanted to live in Marquam hill, in the apartments that sit right on the bend of the road that over looks the Max station and the rest of the city, and how I wanted to live there while I went to UO medical school. Another fantasy that will never be true.



I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the first time tonight. I really did not think I would care for it. I thought too many people I knew had loved it, and so I probably would find it formulaic at best.

It made me think. I mean really think. It's still making me and so it is best if I finish this when I have thought all the things I can about this movie, about what the subject represents for me.

I was just writing about memory yesterday morning.
Living at the Carlson's was one the worst experiences I have ever had, living with Danny was frustrating and incredibly difficult. Loving Kyle and Dalyn and Allison and Krista and Amanda and Micah and Izbit and losing them has been a pain so indescribable I believe i would have to know a dozen more languages to be able to find a sentence that would do the feeling any justice.

I would not trade those memories for fake ones that were happy, or trade them for nothing at all.

People I suppose often forget that in order to have good memories, you must have bad ones. How else would you know the difference?

Memory for me is a very tangible thing. It is like drinking cold water after a hard run. I need my memories to survive. There is a place that seems...

But sometimes I forget too, and that is the worst thing. It took me so long to remember things about my childhood and even high school, because somehow my brain, without my permission, had repressed them, even good memories, and i do not know why. And yet otherwise I have an excellent memory. For example, I do not for the life of me know what Allison and I did on out first date, or rather, I have a memory of a date but I am unsure if that was our first date (was it Empire Records? Damn). Yet I remember so many little things, like the feel of her mother's couch on my back, and the music stand in her bedroom at her father's house. How contrasted those two rooms seemed to be. One a home, the other a hotel room. And yet she seemed to love her dad more than her mother, but I especially know how misleading day to day interactions can be to the ignorant observer. I remember butting my elbows on the wall playing pool.Oh god, I brought kyle there to play pool. And I admitted my interest to Allison, but I really did not think Kyle would have me. She was too perfect, and too educated, to sophisticated for me. Oh, Allison, you have no idea how much I learned from you. I had never heard of people making their own salad dressing, or anything remotely similiar to the life you lead. Your life was so very different from mine, your relationships so strange to me. Your mom and dad seemed to genuinely care for you, you were not something they cared for out of obligation, and I did not envy you, I admired them, and I felt genuinely unworthy of your affections. You must know I am a very self-defecating person. I for so long held little belief in my own worth. That is no excuse for my horrid behavior thus far, but it is the reason behind so many seemingly bizzare events. Like when we made love and i told you I thought I was insane. Well, I did, but I only said it because I was scared of making love to you that way, even more afraid of you making love to me. I always felt like I did not deserve affection, that loving you should be enough, and that I deserved no reciprocation. A very fucked up view point, but I still feel that sometimes to this day. I've gotten better about liking myself, and yet I am repulsed by so much of me it often takes me off guard. I almost cried today, in the middle of something that no one would cry during. I held it back, and I pushed it away but I feel it again. God I can be such an angry person, I can get so filled with rage over something ridculous, but I recognize the irrationality immediately and quell it. It scares me even so, and I worry if I will be a bad parent one day. Will i hit my kids? I would kill myself. I'm so afraid I turn out like my mother. Am I like her? I love her, but I pity her, I can't stand her because I remember all the unpeakable things, yet I remember the good things I forgive her. Am I a hypocrite? Please tell me, am I? Kyle was not pleased when I renewed ties with my mother after I moved out. She felt it was unhealthy and terrible for me. She was right, jesus I moved three thousand miles away. Was it really because of the weather, or am I trying to stay as far from her orbit as possible?

I have to return my books today. I wonder if Michael will help me. The library is not far, but I have almost thirty books. I bet he won't mind. The wind is blowing so hard now. the flapping of the flags sounds like fake thunder on a movie set. I love it when the trees are wet with new leaves, the dark bark makes them seem flourescent. I want to take the train downtown. It's early and there's nothing to do but I can't sleep. I can sit with my music and my notebooks and pretend she is sitting next to me, with her head on my shoulder, asking me to read to her because the ride is so long and she doesn't want to fall asleep on a train. I will kiss her forehead affectionately and tell her I love her smell. I will ask her if she wants a shoulder rub and she will look at me incredulous as if to ask 'Are you kidding?' and then she will wiggle sideways and lean into me as I massage her tense shoulders. I will ask her to hold the notebook and I will begin to read:

The best place to see the night sky was behind the dumpsters that lined the edge of his apartment building. It was here, amongst the filth and and stench of others that he felt most whole, and he knew his place in the universe.

There was a bird being blow by the wind as badly as the pages of my book. He made it to the tarnished copper roof of the old overhang, and began to tell me of his many complaints. Mostly he spoke of how much hotter it had seemed to him from last year's winter, and how he wished the wind would blow itself away. He asked me if I'd anything to eat, and I told him no, nothing but a bit of parchment and a half used pen. He sighed and told me that bread would have done nicely, but he would forgive me this time.

Then I stood and wrote on the old cement wall "I love you" in large cursive letters. I told the bird goodbye and promised a feast when next we met. He squawked in disbelief and began repeating his old complaints to the woman now stooping on her cane, readying herself to sit on the warm seat I had left her.

A yard or so away, I turned back quickly and sprinted to the overhang. The old woman seemed startled, the bird merely chirp unhappily. I leaned back down and in small, print letters next to my larger words I wrote, "I love you too."

And as I slow my rubbing, she will turn her head upwards and say "Kiss me will you, I feel awfully cold."
And I would. Oh how I would.

misc dreams

A while ago-
Dreamt I was in an airport and then on this weird jumbojet plane that seemed more like a big building. Plane crashed after take off, no one was hurt.

A month or two ago-
dreamt that I was flying in a city that was anchorage and new york at once, and in the process of flying I flew up to an apartment and Izbit was the occupier. She and I made love.

a month ago-
dreamt that I was in a business suit (very flattering and slick) and that I worked for the CIA (nothing 007-esque or fancy, just boring paperwork). I took a trip to Serbia to gather intel. After returning, I was on leave and I was walking down the streets of (New York?) when I ran into Erica Rothman. She was pleasant and amicable, and we talked and hung out a toy store. We talked about t-shirts for sme reason. She bought kids toys snd we walked back to her truck. Interestingly, she drove the same '84 brown F250 crewcab that my stepdad owns. We piled in and she asked me if I wanted to go to her and Kyle's place and meet Bear. I said sure, confused about who Bear was. Turned out Bear was Kyle and Erica's son (nickname for Bartholomew) We drove back to their apartment and Kyle hugged me and we played with Bear.

three nights ago-
Dreamt that Kyle and Erica approached me at a convention and praised me for my moderation of the LJ Machiavelli debate. When I denied that I was the moderator they smiled in disbelief and thought I was being modest. The handle of the moderator was ak_ac, so they assumed it was me as the rest of the info added up. Turns out it was Toni all along and we all hung out and had fun.

night before last-
dreamt that I was at Kyle's parent's house, hanging out with her mom. The house did not at all resemble the Miller residence. At one point, I apologized for my behavior when Kyle and I dated, and Rebecca seemed to accept this readily. Unbeknowst to me Kyle had retunred earlier from college and was unpacking in her room. When I walked down the hallway she spotted me and I stared at her for a few minutes before basically taking off as fast as I could. I ran out teh front door and was halfway down the driveway before I realized I didn't have shoes on. I crept back around the house and climbed over and old set of long wooden steps. Then I noticed a large black bug creeping towards me. I tried to manuever around it but it started to run towards me like it was going to attack me, so I lifted my foot and tried to get the cuff of my pants over my heel and then I stepped on the bug. The very realistic and shudder inducing crunch-pop woke me up. Went back to sleep.

Last night:
I dreamt I was hanging out with Mom, Toni and Michael at a Winco. At some point I both got a job at Winco and bought a ticket to California. Then I met some really nice people who drove me to the Goodwill to get a pair of green corduroy pants. Then they dropped me off at home, which was an apartment. The apartment was two building side by side with a path-laden alley in between. Not really an alley but two sideyards next to each other. I ran into Allison, who apparently had an apartment across from mine. We hung out and talked until I realized I need to get to the airport. She helped me finish packing in a panic, and drove me to the airport. I woke up before we got there.

This Week in God

"Religion is the opiate of the masses" once said Karl Marx.

Ecclesiastes 3:18-19
18. I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

Often growing up I wondered if religion wasn't a sham to keep us from realizing the truth; that mortality was finite and death the end of existence. It made perfect sense to my twelve year-old self, by believing that a God existed to take care of us, to keep us in eternal happiness so long as we followed His laws was way of controlling the working class. Literacy was discouraged by the Church for centuries, infact stained glass originated as a way of teaching through imagery the teachings of the church for those unable to read the word of God. God could be quoted as saying anything the priests wished and interpreted in any manner desired for who was able to contradict them? Ultimately, I believed that God and eternal life placated the masses and kept them from living each day as if it were there last or living life to its fullest, because there was supposedly no end to life.

Yet I have never wavered in my belief in a God of some sort, in some form. I rarely pray anymore, but certaintly I pray more than any other twenty-two year-old I know. I have a stronger faith than most preachers, precisely because my faith is not blind. It is born out of a long and arduous dissemination of religion and its nature.

My conclusion is this, there is a God, but there is no life after death. However, I do not believe that all morality and human rights stem from the existence of God or the Human Soul. I believe they are inherent in our existence divorced of any creator, real or imaginary.

I feel better, more secure, more safe and more collected after I pray. I believe this is probably due more to the truth in Marx's statement than in anything related to God. Yet, I continue to pray. I recognize that I am probably only doing it to feel better, and not out of faith or devotion. I don't care.I can never be a true existentialist because I cannot completely leech myself of the notion that there is a God, whose level of influence on my life I do not know. It is a nice thought, is it not, that someone is looking out for you? It's intoxicating and irrational, but there it is.

Thanks fo a Grateful Nation

Today on the Senate floor Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) proposed an emergency supplemental amendment to add 1.42 billion dollars to the Veteran Affairs budget.

Earlier this year she proposed a similar amendment and was shot down by Republicans who claimed the VA was more than adequately funded. Murray defended her amendment then, claiming she had done the math and it was obvious to her that the VA would be in dire need for more funding if they did not act immediately. The Republican opposition argument was that the VA itself claimed it did not need anymore money. So why the change of heart? Well it appears that some Devry-esque accountant used 2002 troops numbers to estimate how many vets would need care. Their maximum for 2005 was 25,000, and as of this month they have already processed over 103,000.

Who says republicans have sole claim to the mantle 'Defenders of the Military'? Clearly that should be amended to 'Active Military'. A veteran of the Senate who simply completed a term will recieve their salary and benefits for life. Surely we can provide even the most modicum of care for our men and women who have risked their lives (not merely their hands to paper cuts). But I digress.

Now the chair of Veteran Affairs, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tx) has come crawling back to Murray and asking to support her amendment, as are other Republican senators including Senators Craig (ID), Kyl (AZ) and Santorum (PA).

Speaking of Sen. Rick Santorum, the guy recently made a few waves in the political pond by hypothesizing that pedophilia is the product of increasing moral relativism. His specific example was Catholic priests, suggesting that it was no coincidence considering Massachusetts is one of the most liberal states. In his own words:

"It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

Rick, I hate to break to to you, but pedophilia is not anything new, especially in the Catholic church, and trying to make a correlation between it and the comparatively recent definition for cultural liberalism in society makes you come off as either defending the pedophiles (which I'm certain they appreciate) or just plain ignorant of any historical antecedents that pre-date Reagan.

This is the year 2005. Why the hell do we homos still have to defend ourselves against blanket accusations of pedophilia? Most pedophiles are heterosexual.

On one final an all important note, Patty Murray looks not unlike Chloe Sullivan from Smallville.

nostalgia ad nauseum

Last night Michael jokingly locked me out of the apartment when I stepped onto the back porch. He let me in when it looked like I was seriously contemplating jumping over the balcony (we're one story up). This sparked a conversation about the various times we'd been genuinely locked out in the past. When Daniel and I first got an apartment in 2002 neither of us had a car. I biked to work and he usually carpooled. The apartment had a front security door which required a 'do not duplicate' key, which we only had one of at the time. Daniel held onto it for reasons that escape me now. When I got off work the third night we had the place, Daniel wasn't home yet, so I biked down to his work, from 36th & Artic to 1st & Bragaw just to get the. It was worth it to spend an extra thirty minutes in the new apartment. The first time you have your own place, without any arbitrary administration to answer to, the sense of freedom is immense. It becomes your home, your sanctuary, regardless of whether you own the place or not.

Last night one of our neighbors had a rather large gathering and at some point they all began to spontaneously sing 'Lean on me'. I recalled one of my last parties at the Bering st. apartment when Carina and I began to sing the 'Star-Spangled Banner' and everyone joined in. A neighbor knocked on my door after we had finished. He asked "Did you guys just sing the National Anthem?" When I affirmed that indeed we had, he replied "Awesome!" We invited him in for beer but he declined.

I remember later that night Carina asked for a tour of my room and for no apparent reason she started kissing me. I assumed it was the alcohol, as she is well known for her excesses, but she whispered in my ear when we walked out into the hallway "I'm going to dare you to kiss me," referring of course to the game of Truth or Dare Phil and Daniel were organizing. After I completed my dare, Daniel asked her to decide which of us was the better kisser, having made out with her at a previous party. She studied us both and said "Definitely Aubrey." The hooting and hollering at that remark, as well as the multiple slaps to my back made me realize how lucky I was to have friends who were so eagerly accepting of my homosexuality. It might seem commonplace now, but I had experienced so much homophobia in the past that their loving encouragement had me in awe.

music, movies and some ass-kicking goodness

If you read the EU Constitution, you'd reject it too.

In other, less banal news, Batman Begins, Thirty Days, Stephen Malkamus and Guinness are all awesome.

Michael and I went to see 'Batman Begins' wednesday afternoon. It is in my opinion the best Batman movie ever made. It is the best movie I have seen in theaters this year, barely beating out 'Sin City' on my scale. Those two films also remain the only two I have enjoyed thus far. Star Wars and the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy were huge disappointments for me.

Batman Begins left me with only two minor complaints, one was a major continuity error in the story line, and the other was the similarity to one of the plot lines to the first Batman movie. Neither of these were deal breakers for me, and I doubt anyone else will notice them. Christian Bale growls at the shady and unsavory members of the underworld exactly as I always imagined Batman does in the comic book. The Scarecrow's straight-laced exterior was lined with a perfect balance of detached sociopathy and poorly hidden malice as his alter ego that his transformation is not only believable, but successfully creepy. The gadgets and weaponry Bruce Wayne affords himself are far more believable than rubber suits with molded surfer nipples could ever have been, an in comparison even the original Batman seems terribly hokey to me now.

I intend to see at least once more in theaters, I recommend that you do the same.

Wednesday night brought with it beer, pizza, and Thirty Days, a new reality show from Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me). The first episode featured Spurlock and his fiance Alex leaving New York city for Ohio and thirty days on minimum wage. They rent an apartment, get low paying jobs and try to make ends meet. I had a few complaints about this experiment, the first being that Heisenberg applied uberly. I guarantee you the presence of a camera crews was the only reason a landlord in a seedy neighborhood would agree to delay payment of a deposit, and the cameras most certainly had an influence on local business' willingness to higher the Spurlock's within an hour of applying. Later in the show, Morgan gets an convenient ache in his wrist after one day of landscaping, and this allows us to segue into the healthcare situation in America. He need not have done this, however, because fiance Alex endured a bladder infection the next day (which was far more realistic than Morgan's phantom pains). Still later, after meeting a 23 year old co-worker with four children (who did not actually state that his children lived with him), Morgan decided it would be fun to alter the experiment by inviting his niece and nephew to stay with him for a few days and see if he an Alex could afford them on minimum wage.

All in all, the experiment did not seem well thought out, and while I enjoyed it in terms of entertainment, because Morgan an Alex are nothing if not charismatic, the end product did not raise any truly compelling questions that are not already raised every day, and Spurlock did not offer any potential solution to the problems he encountered except to challenge us at home to try harder to live in someone else's shoes. I would only say to Morgan that many of us have tough shoes of our own to fill.

Last night, after a late lunch at Red Robin where I tossed back a few Guinness, Michael and I headed downtown to the Crystal Ballroom to see Stephen Malkamus and the Jicks. The two openers, Mary Wainwright and some death metal band were both mediocre, the death metal band more than Mary. They were essentially loud drums, loud electric bass and guitar with a frontman deepthroating the mic. Nothing special there, except the mic kept going out, but the dude kept pushing it into his mouth anyway, which was hilarious (for me). Mary Wainwright reminded me of the solo girl singer-guitarist that I avoid, such as Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco an Melissa Etheridge. Give me Dropkick Murphys, Black Sabbath, the Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, anything but that self-indulgent crap. The only time she sounded good was when the backup band featured prominently, which wasn't often. She has potential if she can lay off the solo acoustic sappy songs. She did have an interesting voice which reminded me of a cross between the Sundays and Splendid. Stephen Malkamus was brilliant, though the few intermittent jam sessions did get a bit tedious. They zoomed through their planned set, and took requests from the audience. Their rendition of the Pixies' Debaser was awesome, and really got the otherwise relatively passive crowd jumping.

Now I just have to work out the logistic of getting to the Warped Tour in Deer Island, so I can see Dropkick Murphys.