Loomings Special Edition: In Honor of World AIDS Day
What I'm doing to try to make a difference
Friends,
I come to you with a special edition of Loomings in honor of World AIDS Day. To provide a bit of history, courtesy of the National AIDS Trust:
World AIDS Day takes place on 1 December each year. It’s an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, to show support for people living with HIV, and to commemorate those who have died from an AIDS-related illness. Founded in 1988, World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day.
In recent years, significant advancements in medication and treatment have brightened the prognosis for many living with HIV/AIDS, but for every life-changing treatment available somewhere, the same is inaccessible or, heartbreakingly, simply unaffordable to others. People with HIV/AIDS still face stigma and discrimination and disproportionately experience homelessness and joblessness.
So what am I going to do? Hopefully, with your help, make a positive difference. In August 2023, I will take part in the Friends for Life Bike Rally and will ride 600 kilometers in six days, from Toronto to Montreal, to raise funds for people living with HIV/AIDS. Every dollar raised by the Bike Rally goes to providing medication, food assistance, transportation, and safe housing for people with HIV/AIDS and their families.
You can make a donation at my F4L Bike Rally page here.
I have written a fair amount about cycling in this newsletter, including sharing with you the report from my first century ride this October, thirteen months after getting on a bike properly in the first place. In what is surely the strangest turn of events in my life, cycling has brought me immense joy in the past year. I want to use that love to do something good. Hence this endeavor, which happens rain or shine and involves sleeping in tents on the way and is the only thing of its kind I have thus far attempted. The joyful irony is honestly a little comical—I know my sudden embrace of Lycra surely is.
I promise this newsletter isn’t going to be asking for donations fortnightly over the next eight months. I simply wanted to tell you about it, and today is a good day for it. If you feel inspired to support my Bike Rally participation and incentivize my training rides1 over the winter, I would be honored and grateful.
Or incentivize my suffering. There’s no way 600 km in 6 days in August is going to be a pleasure cruise. But that’s its own particular appeal, too. And, if you like that kind of thing, you can see my Strava profile on my donations page and watch the kilometers tick upward as the training rides accumulate. Maybe this is a particular novelist quirk, but I find it quite satisfying.