It is 4:30 AM mountain time. In Santa Fe, NM now for a few days of snowboarding with some of the family. Small slopes here but good times. Getting away from everything. re-charging.

Today on the slopes I met the most amazing girl. Her name is Sonia. I am in her hotel room now. She is asleep and I am typing in her bed. She is from the Ukraine. She is going to school at university of phoenix in Albuquerque of all places because she has family here. We spent all day boarding and talking about world politics. especially that election craziness going on right now. She is all porcelain white skin and beautiful blond hair. We fell in love from the first minute we started speaking to each other. there is absolutely nothing like making love to regenerate you and make you feel alive again and glad all over, to coin a phrase. I am so high right now from it that I can’t sleep. Just will sit here and type for a while.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Taos for bigger slopes, so I will leave Sonia in the wee hours unfortunately. But I will try to hook up with her later in Albuquerque in a few days. She is precious. And her accent makes it sooooo much more exciting. What a way to end the year. After finally conquering the middle east this year, I manage to invade Eastern Europe just barely before the year is out. So I am very happy indeed.

Last screening: And the band played on, the HBO documentary about the AIDS epidemic and how the government didn't pay any attention to it till it had killed over 25,000 people because they thought it was a ‘gay disease.’ So they didn't take it seriously and tried to ignore it. even when straight people started dying from it due to blood transfusions, they kept trying to brush it under the carpet. I had met this professor of ethics at NYU just before I left and he gave me a list of documentaries to rent before we met again if we were going to do an interview. This was one of them. the primary question he deals with in his class with his students is what causes people to act the way they do when they are in obvious ethical error, as was the case with the American governments refusal to acknowledge or help the aids crisis. Great movie. Really blows you away. when aids first hits you have these guys at the CDC (center for disease control), a governmental agency that is supposed to protect us from life threatening diseases running around screaming to the Reagan administration that they need money for research and warning how bad the disease could be, and the government refused to give them any money to even research it. they just blew it off and called it ‘the gay cancer.’ The first case showed up in 1980 and they didn't get money for it till 1985. I swear to God you can’t believe it. Christian ministers were getting on TV and saying that it was gods punishment to gay people for disobeying gods laws and all that. crazy stuff. real backwoods. It was finally the private sector that pitched in and started trying to raise money to help fight the disease. People like Elton John and Liz Taylor and Madonna raised awareness and millions of dollars while the Reagan admin sat on their asses and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. Meanwhile we were losing thousands of people a week to the disease.