Blog Number 2

The Constant Gardener was written by Bernard Cooper and featured in Los Angeles magazine. The essay is about two men who have been together for 20 years but one of them has been HIV positive for seventeen of that 20 years. The essay basically tells about Bernard learning how to operate his partner, Brian’s, PICC line. The only reason I summarized this story is because m senior year of high school I worked at Smoothie King. There was this one guy who would come in every morning and get two smoothies that are specially designed for build up, they had weight gain and ice cream and all kinds of proteins in them and so many calories it is insane. Normally the people that get them are football players trying to bulk up, that type of person. He eventually started to become very close to some of our staff members and open up to us since he came in every morning when we aren’t that busy. It turned out that the man that came in was gay and that his partner, who always stayed in the car when he came to get the smoothies, was HIV positive. This situation reminds me a lot of the story because its based on the same thing. Except the couple in Oxford hasn’t had to take the drastic measures like Bernard and Brian did. They are trying to get his weight up by drinking the calorie packed smoothies. So that’s all I could picture in my head when we were reading this story, those two men were what I immediately envisioned Bernard and Brian looking like. One thing we discussed in class about this essay was what type of essay this was and who the target audience was. I think the essay is a personal essay, because he is writing about his partner’s personal struggle with HIV. It doesn’t get much more personal than that. The target audience is who ever reads Los Angeles Magazine. The magazine is all about LA, everything from store openings, to store ratings, restaurant ratings, where to go on vacations in California, and feature stories like the Constant Gardener.