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2005-07-08 - 7:26 a.m.

I�m going to see N. in Denver on Monday. I�m taking a wheelchair so we can do more stuff. We�re planning on going to the Denver Art Museum and dining out a lot and hosting a party at her house. On Friday, she suggested we go to a �Jam Against MS� show coming through town. But I�ve realized that I really don�t want to go.

Aside from the fact that �country music sensation� Hal Ketchum is of highly doubtful interest to me, well. I hate being with other people with MS. Okay, really I hate being lumped together in some identity group with people with whom I may have nothing in common besides our illness.

See, me and Montel and Richard Pryor and Terri Garr and Annette Funicello, we don�t really hang out. We don�t all get a cap and jacket with our name for being in the club. I don�t know, maybe we�d actually like each other if we met. But we�re each of us complex individuals who aren�t like cosmically bonded in some way.

I hate getting chemotherapy for the same reason. I mean, there are more obvious reasons to hate chemotherapy; getting poison dripped into you all day just isn�t fun. But sitting in a room for hours with a neat cross-section of society, the dumb and the smart, the good, the bad, and the ugly, nobody would ever voluntarily choose to do this.

I�ve found the knuckleheads are most likely to prattle all day. Any time you have a bell curve, half the subjects are on the left side. It always makes me wonder: did they get this idiotic because of MS or were they just born that way? I try to keep my head down and read a book, but they sometimes try to engage me in conversation anyway. In any event, you can�t help overhearing their inanities.

No wonder there�s not a strong disability-rights �bloc�. What the hell do people with disabilities have in common? We�re not really a unified group. We�re more like a �bunch�. I�m more concerned with physical building access and curb cuts now because I have mobility problems. But is this as visceral for someone who�s deaf? Or Deaf?

I think most people just want to live their life. Maybe �identity politics� was stronger back in the Age of Aquarius or something. But few people now want �disabled� as their primary identity. What�s your master status? Yankees fan, painter, moneybags, rocker girl, violinist, Spanish-speaker, crip? What�s most important to you?

So, I don�t think I want N. even subconsciously aligning me with the people at this show. Plus y�know, country music. I�m just not feeling it. Oh, I�ll donate to the Montel Williams Foundation. It�s probably my favorite charity anyway (along with the Boston Cure Project), with all donations going to MS research. But there�s no reason to go to a show I�m not into.

� 2005 Geoff Gladstone

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