DeathWatch Journal

– The Smash Street Boys –

We call Smash Street’s new project: DeathWatch Journal.

We are sick and tired of being treated like we are so utterly HARD TO REACH. We are choosing not to participate in our own humiliation.

The bunch of us flushed the fucking HIV pills. Enough is enough. Our entire lives were being spent in pursuit of simply keeping the medications coming as if it were a gravy train.

Some gravy. Enough is enough.

Enough with the constant and painful medical exams. Blood draws. Insurance claims denied. HIV pain. Did I mention pain. Let me mention it PAIN.

The kind of pain that is a train-wreck. The cultural costs, the social costs, the stigma, the hatred, the costs costs, and the marginalization are more than we can handle.

But most of all, most of you think that AIDS is over. We are exhausted with being blamed as the problem. Have I mentioned addiction and needles. Well, let me mention it. Addiction, opiates, and needles. IV drug use. One time playing with this toxic fire will do it to you.

• Feeling tired
• Exhaustion to the breaking point
• Skin Infections from Blood draws
• Nausea 
• Vomiting
• Diarrhea
• Headaches (usually disabling migraines)
• Fevers
• Muscle pain
• Loss of Orientation 
• Insomnia
• Cancers
• Diverticulitis
• Avascular Necrosis
• Bone Death (your bones are dying inside of you and the pain is a nonstop trainwreck)
• Pneumonias (our number one problem)
• Rashes
• Eye Infections
• Fungal infections that eat your flesh away
• Extraordinary poverty
• Homelessness
• Runaways
• Homeless shelters
• Sexual Abuse
• Prostitution
• Health insurance discrimination

None of these things have gone away just because you think so. ALL of these are side effects even if the mainstream does not see it that way. The list goes. Why bother. You’ve heard it all before which does not mean you have walked in our shoes.

That pills that were supposed to make us better are a pig in poke.

The boys of Smash Street are adolescent. They are not separate from the environments that shaped them. They are from everywhere. They know exactly what indifference means. The cost of living is too much to ask of them. The line between what are side effects and what is HIV blurs into a culture war of astigmatism. Some have lived with HIV long enough to question the definition of what is pediatric. How does it get defined. What are they. Who are they. And why are we here. Are we only here to suffer.

The answer can be a resounding YES.

Then, there’s retribution.

Medical providers do not believe there is retribution. As far as education is concerned, many of us are funneled to programs where teaching occurs only on the Internet. They call it inclusion for the medically fragile. It’s a slick way of keeping us in our place.

Schools with open arms do not exist. Mainly, we are tolerated here and there. Have you ever attended an IEP. DOCUMENTATION OF THE PROVISION OF SUPPLEMENTARY SUPPORTS. Four types of curriculum modifications:

(a) accommodation.

(b) adaptation.

(c) parallel curriculum outcomes.

(d) overlapping curricula on a continuum.

Parents and many professionals come away from these meetings feeling like they have been railroaded. This frustration gets transmitted to the kid and few know what to do with it. Exhaustion is not an abstraction or a diagnosis. It’s real. It’s stress. It will wear you down. Humiliation will do that, too.

Being kicked out of the family and the house is a frequently gay adolescent reward for becoming transparent. Not unlike sleeping on the subway.

Post Traumatic Stress is ubiquitous.

And it’s not just the meds. It’s the constant intrusion of public health and government into adolescent lives that are less than thrilled with the barrage of fingers up their assholes. It makes you question life itself. And what is worth it, and what is not. Life at all costs is not a concept we embrace.

We embrace death. No one wants to hear that. We could just do it, and say nothing. But we want you to know that life with HIV is not a piece of cake. Those images are lies. Nor does it have anything to do with healthful glowing barefoot people playing frisbee in the park with the dog.

At some point, we are rendered into statistics.

What is it we are supposed to be reaching for.

Most people who know about us perceive Tim Barrus as the leader of the group. I am not the leader of anything. I do not pretend to make choice for anyone. We are individual actors on this stage even when we make community decisions.

We are NOT a part of your community. We are OUR community. We live and breathe on our own. You can’t kick some kid out of the house, and then ask him to respect the code of conduct that is so ephemeral to the idea of family. Often, there is no family.

We have one another.

What keeps us hanging on has been art and photography. Two things not always practiced on the Internet. But these things can be a real part of real lives struggling just to be here. Sounds idiotic, but sometimes it’s the only thing out there we can grab ahold of.

Like grabbing hold of food inside a dumpster in the back of grocery stores. It can be nutritious and it can be rotten. Again, pigs and pokes.

We went of a field trip to a slaughterhouse once. I can’t tell you how we got in there. It changed us forever.

It solidified everything we assumed was about YOU. We saw what YOU do. We know who YOU really are, and what sustains YOU.

That trip shocked us to our core with the message we – ourselves – could be rounded up for the hooks that would pull us up, up, and away.

The meds just kept us on the edges of living.

We do not see it as a life. It is simply a long slow death like a slow tightening called strangulation. Death comes for everyone.

Don’t tell me what we SHOULD do. Don’t tell me to not flush the pills. That’s done. And so are we.

We are not you. We are not you.

We welcome death with open arms.

I am not obligated to answer any of your questions. All we want from you is to be left alone. Our lives have become a cross country race through a forest of illness that would get us one way or the other. What you think is no concern to us. 

To that end, we are not challenged too much in the quest to make ourselves invisible. We know how to disappear and how to rock and roll. We are in charge of our lives and how we live them. We always have been.

Or die trying.

We always hold tight to our decisions. DeathWatch Journal is ironically also a declaration of independence which is what adolescent boys are supposed to do. As they become young men. We do not choose to live with your fingers up our ass which is a metaphor for just about every humiliation we know.

DeathWatch Journal will be a record of our journeys to the end. Video. Music. Poetry. Essays. Photography. Art. Love amongst the ruins. A blog. A podcast. The telling of ourselves. Hate among the masses. Day to day. A record that says we were here.

https://tim-barrus.format.com/about