It is the worst of times and it is the worst of times. (Apologies to Charles Dickens — there is no best.)
These are just rotten times all around. Everybody’s in it. The virus keeps advancing like a freaking alien army, the Dreaded Spikes from the Land of Covid, mutating, rotating, gyrating, contorting, morphing into variants and deviants and aberrant preversions, the Delta variant and the United variant and the Qantas variant and the Air China variant, screwing with the heads of stinking rich Big Pharma snake oil hucksters who trot out untested poisonous cocktails that Doctor Tiny Faustus, chief medical liar to the prez, sez will save your life even though people are dying from them, be a good little sheep, get jabbed, get spiked, live a short painful life, I am your shepherd, the good doctor, Follow Me, and I’ll make you wish you were dead, don’t listen to the horror stories of the bad vax reactionaries, they live in a fantasy world of reality, their blood clots are mere bumps on the road to hell, their seizures are illusions, their hallucinations are delusions, their paralysis is a phantasy.
What’s a body to do? Forget the body, focus on the soul. The soul is the essence of the human being, the essential you, who you really are, what makes you tick but not tock, a hardwired part of the mind but not the body, forget the body, go deep into your mind, sit here quietly, smoke some weed, drink gin and tonic, the tonic contains quinine, an ingredient in hydroxychloroquine that treats lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and malaria and, wouldn’t you know it! Covidfckng19, yeah, yeah, yeah, just sit here and get stoned and mellow and wait for a giant meteor to crash into the earth.
O, happy day!
Header art Ralph Steadman