THE AMERICAN METH WEST

(Something I wrote long ago -- before Fentanyl and recently found.)

Some studies suggest that the drug of choice in the Eastern US is cocaine, the trendy nose candy.  The drug of choice in the Midwest is pot, good old steady weed.  And the drug of choice in the American West is meth.  Why is this?

Meth is the power drug.  it makes the guy who is flat broke, homeless, friendless, car-less and ugly feel like a winner.  Winner, hell!  Feel like a God.  Feel like Davy Crockett and Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan all rolled up together.  The kind of man a Western man is SUPPOSED to be, invincible, omnicompetent, irresistible.

Until he comes down again.  Then he's picking at bugs under his skin, aching with rotten stubs of teeth, so depressed he can only slump in the corner.  Only one cure for that -- more meth.

Meth is the poor man's drug.  Any high school kid can make it with coffee filters and iodine and cold meds and . . . look it up on the internet.  There are plenty of decrepit sheds where a guy could set up a lab.  If the cooking starts a fire, who cares?  Maybe a wrecked house trailer or an abandoned rusted-out old school bus.  Even one of them run-down motels that was on the highway until the Internet went through.  They don't ask no questions.  Rent by the hour.

The American West came out of the Civil War, which prepared the country for the Prairie Clearances (first the bison, then the Indians) so the government could offer free land to white people who would pay taxes and travel by railroad.  The Indians weren't using their land anyway -- where were their fields, their fences, their houses?  Their flags?  if you couldn't make it on a homestead, you could hire on as a cowboy.  If you got to drinking, so did everyone else, and so did everyone else get taken to the cleaners by the bank.  Wasn't the fault of the rancher.  It was the drought.  Times are hard.  Life is short.

The big myths took hold easily, dominating every television set and silver screen in the nation with tough guys in Stetsons.  Guys who smoked Marlboros until they found meth.  If the women nag you, hit 'em.  Why don't they get a job?  If the kids bug you, hit them, too.  Throw 'em against the wall.  Throw 'em out.  if authorities come around, just don't answer the door.  Make 'em get a warrant.  Get hold of a gun.

Make 'em shoot you and put you out of your misery.  That's the Meth West.  Not your fault.  On meth you're invisible.  You'll never feel the bullet.

TROPIC HORMONE LOOPS

When trying to get a more informed understanding of molecular feedback loops in the body, the first thing I had to learn was not to call them “feedback loops.”  It took a while to discover that the information I was looking for was indexed under “axis.”  That’s what they call what I call “feedback loops.”  They are key to the homeostasis self-regulation and self-development that guide survival, keep the body alive.

And it was confusing to read about “tropic hormones” when I was trying to find out which molecule did what, not where the warm climates are.  The specialized medical jargon means “tropic hormones” are those that impact other endocrine glands by secreting molecules into the blood and interstitial spaces.  Here’s a list with links:

 • Hypothalamus and Pituitary Gland

 • Thyroid and Parathyroid Glands

 • Adrenal Glands

 • Endocrine Pancreas

 • Gastrointestinal Hormones

 • Gonadal Hormone

 • Placental Hormones

 • Other Endocrine Tissues and Hormones

And two diagrams as examples:

Why would I care?

1.  I discover that my (mild) psoriasis/arthritis symptoms are probably affected by these loops.  (Eyes, hands)  I’m trying to understand inflammation which seems so central to current research.  Also, auto-immunity.

2.  So many lay people thinking about neurology are considering connections among neurons, which relates to muscle responses and designated sensory code in organs, while ignoring the unconscious saturations of molecules that govern organs and the autonomic nerve/endocrine connections that underlie our emotions.  

The arts reach into people, activating all sorts of axises.  (The literature seems to only consider one axis at a time.  But I’ve only begun to search.)  And, of course, people wrestling with diabetes know how much impact both glucose and insulin have on our systems.  Ignorance and denial can kill you.

3.  Drug use (ingesting of molecules, manmade, some as meds and sometimes for the sake of the physical senses and brain integration:  “feeling”, consciousness) is jumping off a bridge, not knowing how the deep the water is or even whether you can swim.  The doctors are often guessing.

4.  Sex is such a preoccupation of today’s culture, so twisted and exalted and generally misunderstood — as well as being entwined with violence and torture (kink) — that the relationships among what is hormonal, what is nervous, and what is beliefs or habits, keep imploding and exploding people’s lives.  It’s impossible to account for some of this without knowing about these “axes.”  And how do we tell sex from love?

8 years old

5.  Another subject that absorbs me is the transitions in development that define the adrenarche, the years from 8 or 9 until the adrenals kick off the pubertal, possibly steep, onset of sexuality.  See sex above.  Children of this age are often abused, maybe because of separation from nurturers and the ability to defy authority, and maybe because they somehow trigger sexual desire in some people, which is easier to understand when they become adolescent, semi-adult.  Interference with children during adrenarche really messes up their physical and emotional systems.  These are the years of identity formation, but the sexual component is not there yet.  The body is not ready yet.

I have questions about spanking as discipline and how it becomes so erotic for British and German schoolboys who have been caned.

6.  Soft-heartedness (feeding) has earned me a colony of feral cats.  They’re more fun than lab white mice, even when I can’t tame them.  The feral/domestic “axis” is a phenomenon that has interested me a long time.  It has become relevant in human terms.  Research on voles reveals a genetic connection determining sexual faithfulness vs. hit-and-run mating, so the feral/domesticated contrast seems to me relevant to the formation of families.

My Sister, My Womb-mate.

I have one pair of tame cats who were "wombmates" in an old mother cat.  Both are altered females, over a dozen years old now.  One is the color of chicken gravy and has about the same personality.  The other is tortoiseshell and spicy as a Senorita on Saturday night.  Is this an axis result?  Temperament in cats seems to be linked to coat color.

Today I ran across an article about the endocrine levels of cortisol and oxytocin in bummer lambs.  The little creatures attach intensely to caregivers which means they fight to be in proximity.  If they're loose, they can drive you crazy by constant bleating and crowding.  The two hormones (cortisol indicating stress and oxytocin relating to nurturing) rise when the lambs are penned.  Dunno what it means, but it’s intriguing that anyone would study it.  $40 to get the results.

Prince.

7.  Exceptional individuals — much on our minds with the death of Prince — raise a lot of questions about what I suppose I could call the “individual vs. community” axis, though it's not directly about hormones.  How much did we create Prince and how much did he create us?  Is it all just spontaneous and experiential or is there a genetic dimension?  (Both parents were musicians).  Usually the answer is “both.”  

8.  And, of course, it goes back to sex again.  How could a person so androgenous be so intensely sexual?  There are more than a few like him who are successful in sexwork — even without music.  What is “fluid sexuality”?   What does it mean to leave behind the binaries of male-and-female that have been so confining, but also give structure to a world where manmade polymer molecules intended for plastic packaging can interfere with human metabolism and destroy the digestive systems of whales who never enter supermarkets?

The Hypothalamus.

“All vertebrate brains contain a hypothalamus. In humans, it is the size of an almond.”  It’s the area just under the thalamus if that tells you anything except how it got its name.  All vertebrates have a hypothalamus, so it’s part of that unconscious-but-vital homeostasis limbic system that controls our emotions no matter how many grad degrees we have.  It links the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland.

“The hypothalamus is responsible for certain metabolic processes and other activities of the autonomic nervous system. It synthesizes and secretes certain neurohormones, called releasing hormones or hypothalamic hormones, and these in turn stimulate or inhibit the secretion of pituitary hormones. The hypothalamus controls body temperature, hunger, important aspects of parenting and attachment behaviors, thirst, fatigue, sleep, and circadian rhythms.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamus#Nuclei   This links to a chart of all the hypothalamic nuclei.  They're like a keyboard for composing a body narrative.  (It’s not the same as the working platform of concepts that neurologists talk about, which can only handle a half-dozen projects at once.) Most of the information is descriptive, including descriptions of what can go wrong if one of the nuclei doesn’t work properly.  

In addition to all these nuclei pumping away, there are neural connections leading to specific other areas.  We’re told most of these neurons are two-way so they must be interpreting the code they get in order to respond with secretion and electrochemical impulse. 

The anonymous source in Wikipedia says:

"Several hypothalamic nuclei are sexually dimorphic; i.e., there are clear differences in both structure and function between males and females.

Elephant sea lions

Some differences are apparent even in gross neuroanatomy: most notable is the sexually dimorphic nucleus within the preoptic area. However most of the differences are subtle changes in the connectivity and chemical sensitivity of particular sets of neurons.

The importance of these changes can be recognised by functional differences between males and females. For instance, males of most species prefer the odor and appearance of females over males, which is instrumental in stimulating male sexual behavior. If the sexually dimorphic nucleus is lesioned, this preference for females by males diminishes. Also, the pattern of secretion of growth hormone is sexually dimorphic, and this is one reason why in many species, adult males are much larger than females.^”

^{If you want to know more about this dimorphic subject, be careful.  It lost the president of Harvard his job because some feminists were offended by him saying there was a difference between men and women.  In fact, much of all this information is "hot" and emotion-ridden, which is probably why people know so little about it.  We're still back at the taxonomy of anatomy in many ways, afraid of what we mind find out.}

EMBRACING THE OCTOPUS

Recently I’ve accumulated a little stash of quotes about identity, consciousness, reality, and our drive to understand what goes on in minds.  Some will be quite disconcerted by these suggestions and others will sigh with recognition.

This is a quote from Timothy J. O’Neill who posts on “Medium” which is an author venue, something like “Blogger.”  It’s a pretty good summary of a breakthrough in how we understand identity that might be summed up by the phrase, “Compose yourself.”  This comes from considering the atypical minds of persons around us.  It will offend those who define human thought as unified, consciously intelligent, produced by learning and interaction with a physical environment, demonstrated by language, and demanded by culture.

Doctor: “Our minds shape every aspect of our reality and, in turn, every aspect of our reality has the potential to influence and shape our minds. And not just our minds, but our brains, our material physiology. But the brain even has the amazing capacity to somehow alter itself. Neuroscience has proven your thoughts can physically restructure the organic matter of your brain. It’s as if a hologram could turn around and start tinkering with the projector producing it in order to change the color or clarity of its own image. Think about that for a moment, and then open yourself up to the idea that the power of past events to shape your present identity PALES in comparison to the power of your present thoughts. So what do you really want to focus on now?”

Another more radical effort to understand minds that are not necessarily human (aside from aliens in outer space) comes from the study of octopuses.  As it happens, there’s recently been a flurry of thought about octopuses because of the release of the complete genome that has taken several years to complete at the U of Chicago.  It appears that our brain are more like the the brain of an octopus than we might guess, but also radically different: the brain of an octopus is partly in its tentacles, whose suckers are both able to taste and to feel.

This article by Sy Montgomery in Orion magazine is called “Deep Intellect.”   https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/   It’s an attempt to understand an octopus from the outside, actively interacting with several, but also noting the information we have about them.  Octopus eyes are seemingly just like ours in terms of anatomy, but what do their nerves in their retinas pick up?  And what do their main brain configure the information?  They are sensitive enough to mimic other animals or just a piece of coral, but is that conscious thinking? There’s a wide variation in temperament from one animal to the next. 

This is from a piece in New Scientist.  “THERE is no denying the reality of consciousness. For most of us, it is so self-evident that it requires no explanation. Your conscious self is the owner of your private reality, and your actions stem from conscious choice.

However, the more that is discovered about consciousness, the less obvious its role appears to be. For example, measurements of brain activity reveal that muscles and brain areas prepare for an action, such as a reaching out for an object, before we are even aware of our intention to make that movement. As noted by the psychologist Jeffrey Grey and others, consciousness simply occurs too late to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it.”

How much of ourselves is the result of our body structure?  (What a relief it would be to those who suffer from extremely painful avascular necrosis, bone death, to manage a body with no bones!  But how does one de-centralize a brain trapped in a skull?)  How do people become “unhinged?”

How much is learned?  How much is voluntary?  The answers are radically different depending on the method used to define and sort the problem.  This is one of the central issues of the U of Chicago Divinity School, because it is so relevant to comparative religion.  The confrontive, dominating, logic-dependent practice of Christian theology, its method, is a key element in the Pauline version of Catholicism.  Many have pointed out it is quite different from Jesus’ message of tolerance.

Using consciousness-altering drugs has not taught us much about method, though it IS one, but their exploration of inner space has certainly confirmed that the molecular alternatives in cell tissues can profoundly alter the way we see the world.  We already knew that from experience as far back as pre-hominids, but we’ve changed the way we think ABOUT them.  In this age of control some see using them as stepping away from the intolerable burden of being oneself in a world that despises who you are, and others who locate themselves by controlling whomever is different, and becoming lethal.

The octopus is a pluralistic animal in the sense that each tentacle has its own perceptions and decisions.  If a tentacle is severed and then offered a fish that its original task would have beem to convey to its mouth, it will try to convey the fish to where it thinks the mouth should be.  In our pluralistic policy we call democracy, many tentacles have been separated from the central mouth.  It’s an interesting and possibly useful metaphor.

The other startling thing octopuses do is cram themselves into impossibly small spaces.  Consider this quote from a paper in “Synapse,” (Volume 69, Issue 8, August 2015).  Unless you have the vocabulary, you will find it hard going, but the point of it is that what seems to be as personal as withdrawal to their room, like an octopus looking for a defensible space, can be associated with certain brain molecules, and might be predictive of trouble.

“Adolescent social isolation (SI) results in numerous behavioral alterations associated with increased risk of alcoholism. Notably, many of these changes involve the basolateral amygdala (BLA), including increased alcohol seeking. The BLA sends a strong glutamatergic projection to the nucleus accumbens and activation of this pathway potentiates reward-seeking behavior. Dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE) exert powerful excitatory and inhibitory effects on BLA activity and chronic stress can disrupt the excitation-inhibition balance maintained by these catecholamines.” 

Some people will deduce that technical chemical diagnosis should be applied to all “withdrawn” adolescents and Big Pharma will set about inventing a med that affects BLA activity.  Others will try to eliminate all stress, assuming that emotional “gliding” is healthy.  They try to create a “no-trouble bubble.” A few will want to sit down and talk.  And nowadays, with the fortification of genealogy, some will want to investigate the ancestral stories of the individual to look for patterns.  For a person who has been convincingly told that any disclosure will result in punishment amounting to death, this is nearly impossible.

We keep seeing stories about teens being held in solitary confinement, framing the adolescent in terms of radical social isolation, his own head trip which can end in suicide. [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/nyregion/kalief-browder-held-at-rikers-island-for-3-years-without-trial-commits-suicide.html]

But some will think about what a supporting social setting will do and what kind of tribe would welcome and understand the individual.  One could call it “embracing the octopus.”  To get an idea what that might be like, try the Orion article.

AIDS, STIGMA & OMAR

Yesterday was World AIDS Day but I didn’t write about it for several reasons. By now there are so many causes and so many official World Days that the ribbon colors are re-cycling: now red ribbon is supposed to mean you’re against violence. But what IS new is that the Great Falls Tribune ran the story on page one and the continuation inside on page three showed members of the Metropolitan Community Church of Montana in a formal church setting. WITH personal photos and WITH names. Two AIDS activists, Steven Barrios in Browning and Trisha Gardner from Great Falls were interviewed because the governor gave both of them awards for their work. I had never heard of either of them until now.

There is no color of ribbon loop for stigma, but this time around both the Governor and the recipients defied stigma by being public. Stigma is what gives permission for the persecution and punishment that is no color, no day, but every color, every day. Human nature wants things labeled, put on the calendar, separated out so as to keep up with the causes. Let’s be frank: so as to know whom it is safe to ignore or attack as opposed to those whose feet had better be kissed. Stigma is often transparent, hardly noticed.

I’m on a number of environmental listservs for academics, usually mainly students and therefore young and often at least half of the commentors are female. Because of that there is stigma attached to two demographic groups more than others: the wealthy and white males. A recent discussion hit both on grounds that the wealthy are powerful people who control and abuse other people’s lives. I got the impression that they thought all the most powerful people were white males and that they were all wealthy and surely they didn’t have any diseases. Someone suggested they were never subject to domestic violence or police brutality or any other troubles or worries. They are describing unicorns and centaurs, nonexistent creatures.

What I see is that -- worldwide -- people of color are also despots, mega-million income CEO’s, controllers of armies, master minds of the underworld. Some of them might even be female. One of the things Bob Scriver and I learned when Bob’s work began to sell into the higher income groups was that the main thing money buys you is the ability to be cloaked -- NOT to find yourself on the front page of the newspaper.

This is totally irrelevant, but “Scriver” is derived from the word “shriver” which means a maker of cloaks. “To shrive someone, in old-fashioned English . . . is to hear his acknowledgement of his sins, to assure him of God's forgiveness, and to give him appropriate spiritual advice. The term survives today in ordinary usage in the expression "short shrift". To give someone short shrift is to pay very little attention to his excuses or problems.”

The subject on the listserv was not AIDS (they never mention AIDS) but rape and whether rape were too serious a crime to use it as a metaphor for the destruction of land, though they consider “destruction” of land to be the major crime of our times and though they consider “destruction” to be anything that they don’t want to happen. Some of them still believe that making the air unbreathable, running out of human food, cutting all the tropical forests and so on “destroys” the planet when in truth it destroys humans and the earth they must have in order to keep living. (The planet shrugs. It likes volcanoes and earthquakes.) Others have gone so far as to stigmatize all humans and consider only animals to be “innocent.” (Yes, yes, we’re all animals but not grad students, surely; what could be less animal-like? It’s the undergrads who rape, walk on the grass, get drunk, attend football games.) Any group can be stigmatized.

In the hunter/gatherer millenia stigma meant marking enemies or contagious people or people who were troublemakers, Excluding them, even by killing them, was practical in terms of protecting the group. Much of the business of the hunting band was making worthy children, so the stigmatized should be excluded from reproduction. Of course, they got frustrated and took what they weren’t supposed to have.

These deep assumptions are hard to challenge. In fact, I don’t think reasoning or parsing words or arguing history does much to change them. What DOES work is story and particularly filmed story, artfully presented. I’ve been enjoying the whole sixty-episode span of the series called “The Wire” and have just completed the first story span, three years long. It’s complex but the subject is society as illustrated by the city of Baltimore. The writers and producers call it “long form television” which has several meanings. First, it’s five years worth of hourly episodes; second, now on DVD one can sit down and watch all sixty episodes at home just as one might read, say, “War and Peace.” Third, those interested can rewatch many of the episodes with voice-over commentary from those involved, hearing what decisions were made and why, what real life sources were used, and a certain amount of philosophy which boils down to “I love Baltimore, warts and all.” I’m sure they have had a profound influence on the argument about legalizing marijuana. (They’re for it and you see why.)

It’s not a bitter show and resists the stigmatization of any group. It’s like the yin-yang sign that has a little black in the white and a little white in the black. It shrives most characters but cloaks no one in the sense of invisibility. In fact, what begins to develop -- though only in my eyes, so I may be projecting it -- is my bottom-line which is that situations are what make villains. If you don’t have starving people, if you don’t have a forest full of game “owned” by lords, if you don’t have an oppressive sheriff, you don’t have Robin Hood.

As it turns out, the Robin Hood in this series is Omar: black, gay, a killer but not violent. (The other version is Brother Mouzone, an equally potent gunslinger from a similarly mysterious source. Brother would defend academics.) Omar is outrageous. Finding himself out of “honey nut” breakfast cereal he puts on silk satin pajama bottoms with a flowing matched robe and walks out down the street to the corner store, picking up a drug stash on the way back. But he takes his grandmother in her splendid “crown” (designer hat) to church once a month, he does not kill on Sunday, and he and Brother Mouzone are the only ones who never use the “f” word. And Omar doesn’t worry about AIDS, though his heart is broken when his lover is killed by torture in order to punish him. Omar is a challenge to the concept of stigma. He don’t need to wear no ribbon. Should he be shriven?

"DRUGSTORE COWBOY:" a Review

I’m embarked on a Gus van Sant festival because we think “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs” would be a good match for van Sant. Last night I began with “Drugstore Cowboy” which I’ve always known about but have never seen. It’s shot in Portland, supposedly in 1971, which is about the time I was on the streets there as an animal control officer, but actually in 1988 which is just before the time I went back to Portland for the last stint working for the City of Portland in the Bureau of Buildings -- later, “Environmental Services.” So this is a place that I know -- not in a tourist way.

In Portland, to interest tourists, they call the catacombs under the city “Shanghai tunnels” because of the 19th century practice of kidnaping drunk sailors and impressing them into service on ships headed for China. Theoretically that doesn’t happen now. But in the Seventies someone in the Mayor’s Office told me that the “white slave trade” was still a major problem: mostly girls at that time. No need to smuggle them out unconscious -- just give them a plane ticket and promise they’ll star in a movie shot overseas.

The world of the aimless drug-surfer, an expression of existentialism whether they know it or not since “knowing” anything at all becomes problematic for someone whose brain on drugs is less like a fried egg than a wildly twitching frog, anchored only by society’s determination to get everything under control through confrontation. Well, everything that makes trouble. If anyone wants to go off and slump in a corner and starve, that’s fine.

As an animal control officer I was in and out of their environments all the time. These were not meth people or even street drug people -- they were prescription drug people, the ones that Eric Newhouse is writing about in a series in the Great Falls Tribune as of major concern on Montana Indian reservations. On reservations this seems to have been triggered by the practice of delaying treatment for serious illness by simply providing palliative care: pain killers. The problem is, as usual, once hooked, one gets the substance of choice by stealing it or anything that can be sold to buy it. Since many of the patients are old or otherwise frail, it’s pretty easy to just take it away from them. A lot of people live in a world of hurt around here.

Back in the Seventies there was an explosion of uppers, downers, new pain killers, and other psychotropics and at the same time a cynical despair about life and authority figures that could be used to justify just taking pills and dropping out. It was evidently easy to knock over small pharmacies. The druggies in this film are not violent, just inventive. Deaths are a byproduct. Violence is enacted on them, not by them except that they're hard on property. Law enforcement doesn’t have a grip. But pretty soon the leader, who manages to think through the haze, realizes that they aren’t getting anyplace and that their angst is only growing. He decides to stop.

The counter-message, and one that makes this film far more interesting, is the presence of William Burroughs, who -- in a low key and dignified way -- defends the right to take drugs. He plays a priest, emaciated but coherent, who has been marginalized by his drug use His very survival is some kind of assurance. He would not be alive if he’d been taking meth. Still, he advises us to avoid “drug hysteria or any other kind of hysteria, for that matter.” Right. Good advice.

What makes life so hard to bear for young good-looking people with brains and a little “assembled” family? Why would they need drugs normally prescribed for those dying of cancer when their worst actual suffering is . . . what? Boredom. Fatique. They are “grayed out,” no goals, no excitement, flat-lined. So -- reservation life, life in low-income rainy Portland, life in the early 1970’s when there was another one of those “unpredicted” recessions, life on a planet that we were only beginning to understand was seriously corroding, and no countervaling forces of religion, patriotism, idealism, education or even aesthetics.

Actually, they had -- but the media hadn’t realized it yet. It was still sort of underground: hippies, granolas, gays, communes, all that experimental stuff. And they didn’t have anything against pills either, though they tended to use pot and LSD. They wanted bigger consciousnesses rather than oblivion, participation in the cosmos.

I guess. How do I know? I just read about it, mostly, but I DID know these parts of town and I did go into those kinds of households. “Panda,” the dear little dog, was not an anomaly.

Blacks are entirely excluded except for the social worker and the therapy group, which is a choice on the part of van Sant, since the Union Avenue motel where some of the action takes place is so Black that Union Ave is now MLK Jr. Drive. Race politics are pretty much excluded from the movie. Van Sant’s part of town is NW which is also where Ursula LeGuin lives and 23rd was about to become an extension of Rodeo Drive. This movie is not about greed or power, not about the big players, but about the aimless, the players of little scams and delusions trying to get by until they just, well, disappear.

But the story also makes a quiet pitch for an ordinary small life doing a repetitious job and living in a scruffy room, all alone. “It’s not so bad. It feels safe.” Simple existence.

To my mind this movie is probably more relevant now than it was then. At that time the little bunch of “cowboys” seemed sort of harmless deviants who did a lot of property damage but didn’t hurt much of anyone but themselves. The rage and craving that flame through this beginning century -- I wonder what Bill Burroughs would say about it. Now that the charred remains of so much is caving in on even the rich. It’s not the end of the world in any objective way, but we’re looking into a cratered dystopia that we knew was coming and couldn’t seem to oppose.

“Orpheus” doesn’t aim to save the world. It just suggests a pillow fight, some skate-boarding, and a community. Or, hey, let’s make a vid! But if you’re a boy dying of AIDS, you won’t die alone. And art is easier than crime.