A Slower Form of Death

So which dystopian post-apocalyptic movie do we choose as we all sit gazing out longingly as another beautiful sunny Spring day passes? One that we are on our best honor to remain inside and not make any attempt to enjoy? The view from on high stretching for miles far beyond the growing mental dinginess that we try to ignore within the diminutive confines of now intolerably little personal spaces. How much longer can this go on? In the long tradition of Chordata Amphibia Salienta slow boiling to perfect tenderness, each week passing beset by another official invocation that firmly demands compliance to another sacrifice from what was once recalled as a normal existence. The triviality of yet another element essential to our own lives now semi-permanently to be forestalled.

The accumulation of stern requests crossing over reason-ability to inhibit the basic requirements of one’s life. Is this some Hollywood epic where a post-WWII aircrew finds themselves now stranded in the desert after a miracle crash landing? One that has waylaid them all beyond any hope of rescue? Only their own belief in self-reliance aided by some boy genius hatched from a defeated enemy providing a one in a hundred long shot lifesaving solution that that expedience forces all to believe in? Hope dashed by the fact of his qualifications measuring up only in theoretical unproven truths foreign to the real world. How far is one willing to do without? Until, like the withholding of breath from one’s lungs in the ocean’s depths we are forced to the surface to fully fill our spirit’s up once again with all that we have been asked to abandon?

How beautiful that far off diaphanous veil of clinging haze lingering all day enveloping a dream-like landscape replete with a myrrh of tall towers at the center of town. It’s persistence almost like a celestial projection of fading memory. One that we wait for the Sun above to work its magic and dispel. Evaporating this mist and bringing back that same rugged view that in the past we have so blissfully ignorantly passed by without ever recognizing. We merely sit here at attention like dogs at the master’s table eyeing the roasts. The conclusion of the month sporting the extra restrictions of extra weeks of delay. All news being bad and taking a dim view of the paucity of youthful aire’s ready to defy them all.

A workmate of mine is reluctant to go and meet with us while visiting a COVID beset areas to inspect the distribution of food. A big debate ensues about different modes of distribution then being held between us. And of course, the best being method being an ‘in person’ distribution of resources which will eventually became the gold standard of how things should really be done.

In this final decade, past a decade or two of robust health, it is amazing how a thought, a simple desire, or an inclination, just immediately goes ‘poof’! And then disappears halfway through in the first few steps you have taken to enact it. And you wonder, “What the Hell did I come over here for?” Or, alternately having gone on to transact some form of promised fulfillment of that wish, you find yourself oblivious to its conclusion having walked back empty handed to your initial starting place where the notion needed to be completed had been initially issued. Realizing that you had simply lost that original thought somewhere along the way? How foolish you feel. An malade!

You contemplate several possibilities in terms of your current level of mental fitness. One being the onset of incremental but inevitable dissolution of your facilities. The physical embodiment of same way ahead of schedule. Two, an external causation set forth into motion by some unseen pernicious influence. One that has been brought into play to nag you like a gadfly. A form of scapegoat that now alleviates your fear in some way of the former possibility. A pat explanation that lets your body off the hook. Not on the verge of fast becoming a mindless, helpless, victim of a brain stem that no longer functions.

How we struggle on behalf of maintaining our own survival? Regular and dutiful additional measure incrementally added to our daily routine. And all the while ruing that point in the future when those routines will be cut short and never be enjoyed ever again. When all the joys and sorrows will be instantly erased and the physical remnants of your material being will be added to the temporal store of rotting lard to be rapidly consumed by the earth’s darkest least noticed creatures. And your dissipating personality will be commended without further ceremony to the nothingness of unavoidable oblivion.

The daily journey past mirror offering a Frankenstein’s monster modern Prometheus visage revealing a congealing of my father’s genes with those of my mother. Excluding, of course, the years of growing dissipation that I myself have added to this composite increasingly misshapen form. Where I gone wrong in this equation? That naive youthful innocent face that once seemed to be both eternal and uniquely my own now thoroughly erased. The same one once flatteringly mistaken for a popular actor of that long ago era. That same actor now inhabiting a furrow that I am also so soon to enjoy. My youth? Who knows where it has trailed off to?

All I am left to do is ruminate in the fashion that all old men are wont to do. An irritating nexus of what should be’s and dried up once was in terms of intractable hopes and impossible dreams. A glimmer of which, that had in the end, only seemingly come to pass. The challenge at this late date being to be content with what one still has rather than become obsessed with those things that one never could hope to possess. A tightrope, a high wire act, a balance increasingly unsteady and failing erring on one side or the other. The legacy of emptiness ceded to an empty room to the care less chaotic universe.

The accumulation of objects that accretes over time a warm overcoat covering the emotions. Items that to another eye seeming immediately useless and cumbersome. But to their owner afford a degree of sharpness to old recovered memories over a bridge of easy familiarity with past actions. Their placement in proximity around the room with each other weaving a biographic portrait by way of a roadmap to navigate the significant byways in a life’s history. Innocuous elements recalling definitions of one’s character perhaps as it once was or perhaps cumulatively in the form of a progression to where it finally ran out of gas. A silent journal that allows instantaneous reference to recall one’s self. A monument in part to the absence of those others past on, past away, or simply ceased to be of any mortal significance.

One is bound by nature to plot their existence within patterns set forth in proscribed repetitive cycles shared by the species at large. To initially rise up from helplessness to crawl forth to soon gain one’s footing and then climb high up higher and higher eventually up to the pinnacle of one’s abilities. But then from their stumble and descend down the other side of possibility till one lays crippled by the ultimate failure of their own mortality. A tortuous progression towards reaching the goal of a horizon that increasingly seems to recede slowly away before them. Old souls hopelessly pedantic in their endlessly repetitive self-narratives recounting their journey up to the peak. A contradictory knowledge to the times now fully in force.

Spouting their advice to the next generation being the worse gift that one can give? The young on a journey of their own and oblivious to any of it. A lonely gap over which only prolonged silence can travel. It is only after the accumulation of two many decades does their own persistent folly become crystal clear. The weighty irony of having known so much at the start but realizing at journey’s end how little that anyone is able to know. A causal connection with playing the fool, thus inescapable.

So, Here I Am . . .

There is an obvious lag in the average modern citizen’s limited level of comprehension that is not up to speed in time with the onslaught of quickly moving world events. In light of the last two decades of a setup before the pitch. For us brain dead Americans (Obama presidency) and the pitch (Trump), a Globalist based agenda has been put into action. One that no longer welcomes journalists, writers and independent thinkers outside the system.

If you haven’t noticed as of late, most modern thinking women, and those otherwise gender challenged as passing for same, are not concerned a wit about politics. This ‘new’ world comes as a shock to both them and the lost generation of once possible regular males that they sired and left all alone at the day care center while they pursued their careers in favor of child rearing. All the popular entertainment scenarios of recent decades past congealed together with a marked degree of predictive programming.

The banker based network of corporate supported government showing up, time and again, to be engaged within an interlocking sequence of Byzantine agendas busily solidify a new international based singular rule redistributing national assetsv siphoned up from grassroots wealth. Two plus generations instittutionally coopted by their top down ideology of a faux Democratic Socialism functionally equivalent to a robotic technological serfdom.

A herd mentality emphasizing bovine characteristics of always going along with popular convention offered after prolonged periods of indefinite but continual crisis. “Never let a good crisis go to waste!” sayeth their soothsayers! The long lost episode of that faraway September when the laws of physics and logic gave out. And the ‘inside job’ canonized as a strictly ‘Arab’ event became the cause of everything. A ‘fact’ no longer contracted by an embedded press.

All those offering rationality based on those former principles of archaic science a next to impossible task these days as the Internet has been shown to be a potent Calisto in being able to eradicate all conventional means of publishing and news distribution counter to its siren song. The ‘We’ all reduced to the status of gerbils locked in a cage spinning our wheels in the Zen-like proposition of ‘making a difference’. The fork in the road of that road no longer able to be taken?

Where does it go from there, down the road, worldwide going to a not so pleasant viral overload diminish all the lowly status of thralls serving the demands of a duplicitous system of governing. That sort of perpetual condition of checkmate where you would be dammed if you could get rid of it and dammed if dare to try! Life from this point becomes drop by drop tincture medicating one’s psyche with the bullshit trivialities of a Netflix reorganized past. And toughening up to face the new realities of conserving every resource, placing self-survival on the top of the list for everything contemplated.

–

So here I am in a cocoon. A perfect chrysalis of my own making enclosing my life’s existence within a prison containing the detritus of all past hopes going nowhere now for the last three weeks. Three more weeks to go I am told. My psyche in an unattended baby buggy heading towards a cliff as I relax supine within. Where did my job go? I’ve got food, soap, DVD’s and toilet paper enough to survive at least until then. But then what?

There was a popular artist in the nineteen-seventies that used to paint pictures of solitary individuals sitting by themselves within vast landscapes of cubicles. Was he somehow dreaming of what the entire world of civilized countries has now become? We all sit together numbed out by our electronic devices garnering our full attention for the sake of diversion unable to avoid them fully saturated by their hypnotic effect upon our bird brain cage covered consciousness.

The world without is a ghost town bereft of the presence of the species that has fashioned it. Phantom presences sheltered in place, un-seeable, and unknowable, tiny text driven distant voices haunting the late night when the over-abundant commodity of sleep drives one awake. Where has that normal blindness of everyday life that shields us all from the nagging fact of ourselves flown off to?

Here instead is a haggard face that one can no longer recognize. A poorly shaved shaggy hair ridden beast pacing interminably within the cell that those who are in charge of providing their waking fantasies now demands they inhabit without leaving on the chuck-a-luck possibility of incurring a disastrously fatal end due to some invisible menace wrought by a culture half way around the globe.

What proof there is being offered beyond closed places of business, tents cloistering hospital grounds, and occasional new versions of repetitive anonymous imagery of faceless individuals dropping dead in the street. And yes, body bags piling up as we all silently check the daily lotto of numbers infected to the denominator of numbers dead to figure our personal odds of possible survival. And of course, the then what of potentially picking up our lives again, But not as they once were!

How long can the ache of insecurity be staved off when an entire species is thrown off its pins into grave insecurity be restrained before it goes mad and destroys itself? The once plentiful avenues of goods and services and shiny toys once expected now supplanted by quickly moving clerks beholding to an arachnid-like entity that ships them direct to your door leaving congealed corrugated wrapped items from its warehouse based spinets. Total dependency upon it.

Exchange and all face to face activities strangely abhorrent to even contemplate now. That demonic paper that was carried about in leather lined back pocket and purse radioactive with some unknown personage’s lingering touch. The hand of death possibly leaving its fingerprints on our soul sending it on to limbo or the next world if we carelessly take it in our own. What has happened to the world that just last month seemed like it would never end? Well, it has.

The Best In Life

My best and hopeful wish of wishes was to do something the the best in life. To find out something worth knowing. Something universal that could be appreciated in terms of understanding as well as in terms of doing. Since the nature of the universe is that nothing lasts. That all great efforts are met by great destruction and are summarily erased as if they had never ever existed. I come to find this viewpoint a sort of pet folly, an indulgence. Something that when you sit back at the end of the day your realize is an impossible dream. Something that you must be mad to take up to begin with. But you must be equally obsessed to never want to give up. One thing that I got from being my father’s son is that no matter what, you don’t quit! There were plenty of times when I did quit when I was younger. But I got out of the habit as I reached maturity in my latter years. Maybe you run out of steam, that’s true. But you never lose the thread somehow. You always are looking forward to the next day. Which in truth, may be no different than the day you went through today? But occasionally you find something that makes it all worthwhile.

What else can you ask for?

As terrible as it is to lose that heavy shadow of your own father as a beacon to fight against or attempt to crawl out from under. There is no better person in the world to spend hard times with when everything seems lost than with your mother. I sometimes think that in so many ways one gets more of their courage from their mother? More than you can ever find within those bits and pieces that your father leaves in his wake at a distance. That distance that is irredeemable due to circumstance beyond the control of the both of you. During all those old times in hindsight, when you might have been able to arrange a parley to sit down with your father and get to know him as a man. It always turns out to be that one fond wish that you would have had the presence of mind to take the opportunity to fulfill.

Your mother however being always there, ready and available out of a matter of biology. Even in her latter years. A quality that never seems to wane but seems to grow ever stronger and refine itself. You become her recreation in the way as an object retaining an untarnishable aura being the ultimate life’s work of her pride and joy. There is no one else in those times of unbearable crisis better to be sequestered with. No one better than your mother to take care of in those waning times. To sit with and recount all those past tense misadventures and follies of your father as a fellow audience member recounting all the moments of your shared unwritten legacy. Who, though by now is long gone by,still seems always with you in the room.

Bereft of both now for half a decade, laying here, right now, I must say that though one can easily be struck by the grief of their loss, somehow one never feels alone. Perhaps because you acquire a greater faith in the continuum of life itself being assured that it will go on somehow without your minor interruption. Yet, thank God for all the years lived! And it is hard to have sorrow if at this point all the rest left should all go away.

Randolph And The Virus

When Randolph saw the old movie wend its way from the list of initial credits and pass into the dark streets of Dublin to arrive at the doorstep of the party and enter he was aghast at a demonstrations of those long accustomed that for the available person that he had come to miss. Each of the party that had de-trained from a short line of carriage touching hands and cheeks most frivolously in a manner that was currently taboo some sixties years later. How strange it seemed to find people so at ease with each other. And to find a table so well set with savories that for a variety of reasons now simply ceased to exist. Even more fantastic were the scenes of archaic nineteenth century dancing where as part of the ritual of that form the entire ensemble exchanged partners with an equal degree of relaxed formality.

Now of course, no one touched nor even risked the possibility of contact. The rule being to space one’s self at lease two meters hence from any other human being. The virus that was now a yearly scourge passing through the masked throng by way of these gaps choosing only an occasional dance partner of its own to perform it remarkably quick step momento mouri. The social life that one enjoyed was part fragment of the memories of one’s age group in consort with an extended text exchange. Who would have ever guessed that such a situation could have ever come to pass even considering what in hindsight was an amazingly linear logical progression of steps by way of what had in that time earlier seemed as mere happenstance. Now it was clear to everyone and all that existence was at the largess of the world global state and one had to watch their step or risk being instantly disinherited from the hegemony that had displaced that nasty notion of a Democratic based Republic. “Roger, Wilko and out!”, for those two hundred plus years of Populist folly!

The minuscule generation that had fragmentarily survived knew. Or at least could draw upon an inky of fragmentary sensations nested somewhere deep in their dreams. The preeminent generation that had pulled through despite massive losses of course being celibate. Their most practical memories being in prophylactis suits of the latest Latex compound that provided some degree of intimate sensation but seemed equally blunted by a lack of that certain tactile intimacy that they had been told about. The sexual fury of the generation one decade their elder was something completely unknown to them. The safety of being cocooned in one way or another from infancy a more familiar state of being.

Randolph’s E-Pal lady friend like almost everyone revealed hr face only to her intimates on Skype. Otherwise in public like everyone else she wore a fifteenth generation M95 and goggles. The entire population of the planet seemed to have more in common to the now extinct species of amphibian known as frogs. How strange that natural selection had played such a pivotal role? That and the conspiracy theory of a genetically managed super virus that some cranks had tried to advance over the government’s research that it has after all been a tainted portion of bat soup in a Asian market. Thank god that social credit control had erased all the fringe with their screwball theories. Now of course, the gold plated standard was to be part of those that had originally been serologically confirmed as having had the virus and therefore had hereditary immunity. They rise to the top positions of society as being the most bullet proof against any of the successive waves of epidemic that each Spring seemed to rise up from nowhere and cull the herd even further. The world population down to three hundred and fifty million from the most desirable figure of half a billion. How odd that the small group of eighties billionaires had had the foresight to plan contingencies envisioning the loss of the other six and a half billion? Clusters of the remnants of bodies were still being discovered in remote areas of the planet.

In a land where nothing seemed amazing anymore as it was quickly explained away by perpetually smiling happy face computer avatars it was impossible to imagine the former sense of perpetual angst that epitomized former existence? Or so such topics were run for the benefit of the few if any that were still interested in the past. The future as everyone knew was simply a continuous replay of the present. So that left only the secure feeling that ones existence was vouchsafed for an ongoing eternity. Oh sure there were always new simulations concocted for the E-Pad, but contrary to any texted intercourse, things were unremittingly dull. It was rare that human voices were heard outside of streamed media of classic situational remakes currently on their twentieth or so generation. The constant isolation of individual cubicle life left most grievously rotund, even though the portions of the standard starchy GMO gruel were daily monitored remotely. The dispenser automatically refilled as needed by robot device.

Some others like Randolph had done his bout in the Community Service Brigade searching out long abandoned rural habitations where the artifacts of the past might be found unsullied. The old I-Phone that he had pried out of the skeletal hand of a suburbanite the year before had contained that dated movie upon its mini-SD chip. This sort of thing was highly frowned upon by the administration but like everything else including the numerous illicit porn channels, a blind eye was cast in the other direction until and excuse was need to accuse and eliminate. One knew silently within that any regional administration official always felt more at was if they were dealing with someone socially corrupted that way. It made their daily tasks a matter of formality rather than one of tiresome sometimes fruitless investigation of an annoying “Goody Two Shoes” that their supervisors upstairs mandated should be got rid of. The best course of action was to keep as low and out of sight within the demographic based habitual behaviors of the greater herd. Keep your own errant thoughts under cover as best one could before sleep and the 7G configured mind plumber’s were set into operation to scan one’s unconscious dreams. The toilet more then all other places seemed the best place to escape detection as the physical strain of daily reliefs still created interference with the based line of one’s previously tracked pattern of daily thoughts. Five minute full rubber-coated sex being the other possible method of obtaining some private space for one’s own individual thoughts, however brief. But that was only aloud once a month an by filing for a coital permit a minimum of at least thirty days previous. One’s behavioral score for the previous work quarter a bug factor in receiving this perk.

The movie had been viewed in sections accompanied by overly dramatic grunts and groans theatrically offered in his own darkened water closet. The elegance of manners and table offered by its display not lost upon him despite the fact of the setting of its viewing. He might have supposed that this illicit pleasure that gave him momentary escape was duly noted from above, but as it appeared to have no discernible effect over his normal behavior in all the other periods of work and play it was, as was previously elaborated, most certainly tolerable.

The virus had by now mutated for so many successive generations that it had developed a capacity to interact as a singular super organism. A magnificent inorganic invention whose extended structure offered mass data storage far beyond any mechanical incarnation as well as an instantaneous precocious intellect that could be tapped to anticipate the concerns of its human host. Those patently invisible to the naked eye the proclivity of the species and the genetically modified path of its evolutionary development towards some degree of sentience suggested to Randolph that this species had over these generations of its own development tapped into those invisible higher echelons of his own phylum and functionally displaced them? Who was running the show at this point one had to wonder considering the main admirable trait that was continually pushed was to be unerringly persistent in ones mediocrity. Something that in a long forgotten former existence could have been likened to an agricultural bovine world of pens and stalls and the tenants of animal husbandry.

The plight of the horses harnessed to the carriages seen at both the beginning and late at it’s the movie’s conclusion remarkably akin in some way to the current social order. A broken record of continuous acquiescence never needing the bite of a buggy whip save for a slight tap now and then to signal the need to commence one’s function?. Dublin was simply a never never land where one found more to relate to in the mere physical appearance of the creatures that supported the strange long taboo practices that now seemed utterly shocking. Better to reorder one’s diversions back to less challenging material and ponder how to dispose of this ancient winged ‘wand of Mercury’ of the past that had brought this forgotten realm to his attention before some imminent purge found its way to his own door. The greater dilemma being how to expeditiously dispose of the device in the most innocuous manner possible without his own actions luring some form of discovery from either virus or man!

But, Gone!

awakening, but to what?
the same old,, same old dusty pen
another blank slate ready to be filled
but nothing worth the time taken to offer

hot weak willed water posing as coffee
gray creased wrinkled visage
contents left like a parcel unclaimed
one’s motivation advising to crawl back in

humanity is a shadow game
flickers of personalities firefly rising
the crickets chirp in restless harmony
and the rest of the world puts on its mittens

a shell game at best so no one cares
buy your clothes on sale
and keep your gas tank filled up
the humdrum chorus of nothingness

better to lie in state in a mausoleum
in the aura of respect and the smell of death
gravitas to another-wise empty existence
one that is shackled forever it seems

my mind goes fallow
no longer the sharp steel blade capable of furrows
I can only see the problems
and not the silver lining of a solution

content to be alone without hope of change
better what I have come to know then constant strife
I see no goals any longer to be had
it has all slid down the hill into a pile of horseshit just the same

what is the point of innocence if your coffin is tailor made
a hard and ready heart of burning bronze
the bull bellows below and the faggots scream out crackling in pain
the only thing left in life to provide that little smile

cruelty a bucket of puke that one daily expels
the plate in the morning rich with excuses
where did Godhood go that should have been
just a bunch of excuses collected for the next day

hard to speak rationally if there is nothing rational left to say
no news however flawed is good news
ignorance is the new normal of bliss
walking as a sleepwalker does the new dance hall craze

That Damn Plant!

That damn plant, the only other thing in here that’s officially alive, besides me;
an artifact from a time far past when many were still alive
and a present of sorts in honor of just the same;
much smaller back then and in many respects much more well tended;
and now simply there forgotten by the window bereft of a watery attention that once signaled love.

what kind of man am I that only now can remember those former times;
when the smallest of simplest things had a deeper inner meaning beyond the daily routine;
that simple gift giving of something so fragile and still preciously living;
the thought now takes the place of everything that has since gone to dust.

the once aesthetic tiny little boughs extended into grotesque overgrowth;
pretty long past fair judgment as simple happiness is no longer conjured;
the damn thing existing in the dark despite the fact of my patent neglect;
how dare it assume the ability to live as I have long since surrendered to die a living death.

I would tear its black soul out by those potted roots in an unchecked rage;
I would do so if I could then forget my lingering shame of those too many times of forgetting long past;
of all those I harmed by my persistent ignorance of their immediate presence begging some of my life;
and all those, like this plant, that learned to live within sight of my darkness without any real need of me.

Boomer Remover

The middle nineteen-fifties

A little five year old boy dressed in a soldier suit plays with his steel Tonak army truck in the backyard of an old nineteen-thirties bungalow, He drives it along beside him on his hands and knees upon the path of the sidewalk from the small stoop stairs to the passageway next to the wood frame garage. The small yard area is colorfully abloom with all manner of tulips, gladiolas and petunias, the collection of which his jungle. Here and there along the path large polyethylene soldier figures wait on the periphery in ambush. One by one they fall to the presence of another similar army green plastic figure in the back of the army truck is loud given voice by the little boy. “Ratatatat!“, the boy exclaims as he reaches over to knocks them down as he scrambles past pushing the cab of the truck with his other hand. He is stopped by the sound of his mother’s voice, “Willie, its lunchtime!”

The initial twenty-first century twenties

A somewhat overused Ford F-150 pickup truck bumps over part of the curb into the parking lot of a Walmart. Its driver grimacing as his body jerk slightly on its bench seat from the shooting pain of being twisted by the impact. Slightly shaggy gray shaggy temples and a hound dog sagging pattern of wrinkles upon his face suggesting the obvious that he is a middle aged white male edging up just beneath the knife edge precipice of seventy years of age. An identity badge with the same face but in watch cap and heavy overcoat swings violently as the truck hits another pothole.

Willie enters into what seems one of the less prosperous members of the chain.The threshold of electronic detectors that forms the entrance to the left of a long row of checkout counters are crammed with traffic that would shame the average trailer park. He asks one of the greeters standing before same where he might find replacements for his Water Pic. The kindred spirit also in gray locks automatically waves the man past with his painted on smile. Willie enters the warren of aisles traveling in the general direction of an overhead sign half way into the store that says pharmacy. A short line of a couple of customers stands before an counter by a half door. No one is behind the counter. They stand oblivious of each other until Willie walks towards the front counter, then casting angry looks challenging his approach. The general attitude seems dismissive of his presence.

A low voice purposefully sharp above a whisper spitting out, “Those damn ‘boomer’ try to get away with everything!” Willie looks over the counter and sees some activity in the back between the shelves of drugs. His “Miss, miss!“, getting no response. “Miss, I just want to know where the dental product are?“, again getting no reaction. He looks around past the restless crowd and sees a young Hispanic stocking another aisle next to the pharmacy area. He walks over and asks the young man who as he sees him coming turns tail and walks over to another customer. He walks about trying to find the brushes but only finds a complete unit. He picks up a box and goes back to the line which is not two people longer and gets in behind. After fifteen minutes, his turn comes up and a very blase unaffected woman in a white lab coat tells him that they don’t sell refills. After forty minutes of futility he leaves without his prize. Trodding back to his vehicle in the cold feeling the particles stuck in his dental,s permanently taking up residence.

A TV announcing virus epidemic blaring nonstop with alacricy within his trailer. The announcer stressing the point that the virus seems to be fatal to the baby boomer generation. A mass panic ensues by toilet paper counters across the nation and after a couple of weeks after being raided the supermarket shelves are left bare. He managing to navigate the nervous throng and snag some foodstuffs just before the last of same disappear. The usual routines now absented by the disconnection of all in public that was not so long ago taken for granted. Things that made up the fabric cloaking his sense of self leaving him naked to the cold winds of chaos. Gangs of rotten kids now patrolling his neighborhood at night looking for adverse opportunity. All the worst circumstances formerly on record sneaking back from history past. One anonymous group conspiring to rock his trailer to and fro unexpectedly in the dead of night chanting ‘boomer remover’. No police available during the day to investigate. Just leave the details on our hotline and we will make a note of the incident and call you back. And, of course, no call back!

An old forty-five! Blunt cold steel instrument, heavy in his hand, yet compact. Seven reasons why the outside world should think twice about messing with him. Never fired in anger, at least by him. Comforting to know and much to the surprise of parties yet known that he will be taking a few of them with him if they continue their pursuit into the confines of his humble home. The tick of the wall clock in time with his aged heart passing the early morning shadowy darkness. The cold enveloping his bundled form and those same few thoughts within. What will one of his dwindling supply of tomorrows bring that will prove to be different that the long lost inventory of former today’s? The emptiness of streets of now day to the specification of night. Something to give pause as being remarkable as if the sun as he once knew it was a myth and a light switch just suddenly summoned the light of day and at some point recalled the night. The day maturing in the distance by itself no longer accompanied by visible humankind. The possibility of knowing another no longer alive.

A tap, tap, tap breaking the momentum of his thoughts hidden in the shadows betwixt the streetlights from outside through cotton curtains streaming in. No reason for it and no evidence the next morning found. Just something more to keep him on edge and rob him of more sleep. No rest for the wicked or comfort for the sane. Just that nagging soul of his furiously reminding him again that things would never be the same. The picture postcard style of reminiscences all scattered about to bring him an interlude of peace. Who had he loved? Cough. Where had they first met? Cough. An absent mind purposely unawares, Cough, cough, cough! Where does it go from here? The virus tickling the bad of his sore throat toying with him? His hand automatically to his forehead seeking an unsuspected storehouse of heat. Cough . . , cough . . , cough . . ., cough, cough! This physical exclamation coming in a distended Morse code. Can you believe it? He calls out into the dark. What in this solitary world could have stolen in when my mind was absent and bestowed such an unwanted gift. A momentary flash of the instant where the lights of his tiny realm suddenly go out and the entire world is pitch black dark. Followed at great length of a few palpable seconds with the dynamo hum of the refrigerator coming back on, The streetlamps without visible once again.

His heartbeat restored as he thinks back turning from the previous instant to recall a time when he last dared to spend money. To walk across a strange parking lot after securing services from some state compliant faceless entity to secure his health. His health might be better served had it been replaced in the fertile soil of simply a few years back. Oh how one takes for granted those times that somehow are forever now lost. Grim reminders in old movies from times before he was born that his parents once knew. What did the make of them in their own times he wondered? All those deep moments of hidden meaning inferred by their actions in life that he would never have an inkling of or come to know? Ahem! Another squelched cough-like exclamation. The response of his body in natural rejection of something unwanted plaguing his throat. “Tick tock!”, said the clock! Time is running short says his head. Where could it end up but in some unpresupposing, far from dramatic, less than impressive, clock spring unwinding! Cough, cough, cough! Silence. The short list of three different restaurants of recent years visited standing under the big top like high wire stations of trapeze. Cough, cough. Jumping to catch the swinging bar and fly over to the next reminisce and then the next. Turn and perch on that narrow parapet above an anonymous faceless crowd of untold numbers of strangers past met. And then jump forth again to swing back in the other direction. That burning dryness of throat and lungs expanding like Hitler’s tanks mercilessly across a once fertile future plain of undiscovered possibilities.