It’s been a somber past couple of weeks

The old H1N1 vaccine/cold combo obliterated my productivity last week. When they say don’t get with a cold, there is a very good reason for it.

Over the course of the past few weeks, it seems like there has been this onslaught of people I know getting sick, or worse dying.

Yesterday I heard news of yet someone else whose last message on Facebook was something to the effect of having either a cold or flu and was going to take some over the counter meds and sleep it off.

It was a sleep he never woke up from.

My sponsor has been in the hospital struggling, but thankfully getting better. Friends close ones have been dying, and it just goes on and on.

A while back a friend and I were having a chat, and we both thought we were going to see another wave of deaths. And here we are, but not the ones we have been anticipating. We were speaking of those of use who actually made it through the 80s and 90s when there were no drugs and won the second runner up grand prize for staying alive: premature aging, and the long term effects of taking all these drugs, i.e. lipodystrophy, organ transplants and the list goes on.

Perhaps what has recently been happening is the life just being life as one gets older? I don’t know.

But Asher, in Winnipeg came as a complete surprise and shock to many. I cannot lay claim that we were close once I had moved out to Winnipeg, but he was one of very few people out there who took a place in my past who I felt would always be there.

I’m brought back to all those years ago when I found out my status in Winnipeg in the 80s. My death, so I thought, was not going to be that far away. I remember feeling sad at the time because I wasn’t going to see the year 2000.

Today, I sit back and I wonder how that it could be that in the end, the die was cast in such a manner that I’d see so many go before me. Even the friends of mine who weren’t positive, somehow, I’ve managed.

This brings new meaning to my “She’s Still Here Tour 2009″ which happens for every World AIDS Day, as it’s really the only time I ever seem to do interviews. It’s that once a year confirmation that I’m still managing to keep that up.