One Thing Leads to Another, Always

16 years ago, I was a month off from finishing a 9-month sentence for a various series of felonies including sales of narcotics and fraud, most notably, forging my own death certificate. This was the culmination of an inch-by-inch progression over the course of over a decade that would never have occurred except in the context of an AIDS crisis which upended all of my bearings and infused my choices with fear, grief and and the…