the actually true Covid-19 theory they don’t want you to know about …

We live in a world of innuendo and internet theories: figurative, digital rabbit holes spiralling into unlikely burrows occupied by shadowy and nefarious government figures, clumsy scientists at the beck and call of big pharma, tech monsters with 5G in a syringe, and cabals of paedophiles with their fingers on the nuclear button.

            Of course, we all know these to be unfounded trash. They are the products of bored, easily influenced minds which lack basic critical faculties or skills and are only nourished by their fervent search for confirmation bias. They lurk in online forums, social media, comment sections, ready to pounce with their uniting call to arms, ‘do the research,’ completely unaware of the irony of them wielding this simple sentence. ‘Research’ is not scrolling your Facebook feed for an alarmist, agreeable headline. Research is a rigorous, expansive process of not just taking in any bit of information you see, but vetting the source of this information, asking yourself who the stakeholders are, whether there is any evidence of peer review. All this is to say that ‘research’ is not the video diary of social media semi-celebrity – themselves often guilty of cherry picking, decontextualising, or downright misreading (imaginatively, at times, sure) information – but, rather, the systematic process of verifying your source, engaging entirely with it in full, and actively challenging your own assumptions.

            The systematic devaluing of a wide-ranging education (one that isn’t obsessed with so-called ‘employable skills,’ but encourages critical and creative engagement with, I dunno, existence) and scientific process by conservative politicians and their media goon squad has effectively established a disproportionate population of lost, gullible morons. Throw in the fallacy of equal opinion – that your opinion is as true and deserving of respect as anyone’s, irrespective of expertise – and you have a bunch of people who are confidently incorrect.

            Well, I’m here to say, that you’re all wrong. Covid-19 was not a terrible accident that escaped from a complacent, secretive, overly image conscious China. Oh, no. It goes so much deeper than that. And you can trust me. I’m a Doctor of Literature.

             Let’s start at the beginning.

If you jumble the letters of Sars Covid Nineteen, you get the word ‘antirecession’ with the letters E and N leftover. Switch E and N around, though, and you get ‘Ne,’ the atomic sign for the chemical element of Neon.

We then need to ask ourselves what kind of people are ‘antirecession’? Conservative politicians, of course. And what happens when you expose someone to raw Neon … frostbite. Considering that conservative politicians are so keen to trim government expenditure and overreach, it would make perfect sense to assume that a conservative politician afflicted with frostbite would choose to amputate the damaged limb. They’re always cutting, see?

This leaves us with amputees. A lot of amputees are amputees because of gangrene.

Stay with me, now. It’s about to get a lot more hectic.

Gangrene, gang green, Green Gang – that’s right, the famous Chinese secret society and criminal organization![1]

Obviously, you may think this all leads back to some global Chinese conspiracy, but this is merely a feint; what they want you to believe. The clue is in the idea of a ‘secret society,’ which are formed initially as kinds of ‘coteries’ (note the rhyme!), in which people get together because of their shared interests and tastes.

If look closely at the word, ‘coteries,’ now, we find that its letters also spell ‘esoteric’ – an ‘adjective’ that means: ‘understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest’.[2] You know what is famously ‘esoteric’?

Exactly. The supernatural practices and fascinations of the occult.

And do you know what people interested in the occult are often called?

Pagans.

These heretics, by any measure, would seem a likely type to blame for a global pandemic. A ritual gone wrong. A prayer to the wrong demon. Some horrific scheme to bring an end to western Judeo-Christian thought.

But, my friends, it doesn’t stop there.

It goes on, though we near the endgame.

Pagans. There are many pagans in the world, but there is one prominent Pagan.

Denis Pagan the famed Australian Rules Football coach.

Football. Football is a type of sport.

So is basketball. Basketball is a global sport that is played on a court.

Courts of law are often featured in movies. Movies about contentious issues. Conflicts. Questions of integrity. Of basic rights.

Movies … courts … basketball ... rights.

A movie about playing basketball, though it must be contentious; a matter of perhaps bending the rules, but also giving a broad message of inclusion, of the right to play. That basketball is for anyone…

Oh, lord. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Air Bud.

Air Bud is a golden retriever dog.

            What do dogs want more than anything?

For us to be home with them all the time.

It was the dogs.

Dogs wanting us to stay home caused this.

It makes sense.

Do the research.

 

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Gang

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/esoteric

thoughts on another day in lockdown

 

I am not within lockdown. I am Lockdown. 

I am, in fact, the dulcet tones of another announcement. 

Call me Daily Update.

I have become bed and trackies and a steady consumption of alcohol sloshing out of the glass and

onto my wrist and I no longer care about the stains. Give me my television binge. Give me another

bottle.

To not live in perpetual awareness of that horrific mathematical object: numbers. To be free of these

figures and records and once again relish a world absenst of their implacable upward ticking. 

A nightmare of a bespectacled Northface jacket in front of a crowd of microphones, intoning … always

intoning.

My Mental Health is whittling away at something.  I am sure what, but it looks like my brain stem.

My Mental Health keeps winking at me and calling me names like: Sport, Tiger, or Champ. I hate these

names.

Muse now on performing another half-hearted HIIT. Settle, instead, on eating more chocolate and

putting it off until tomorrow. 

Lather (if you can be fucked). Rinse (or don’t, we can shower in a day or so - let the crust off your skin

scent your mattress cover). Repeat.

Hallucinations of Scott Morrison in floaties and a Hawaiian shirt, listlessly drinking Pina Coladas out of

a coconut while some peon of the Murdoch press gently fans him down with a thick stack of paper

orders for Pfizer and whispers, ‘you are doing ok, master.’

I watch him and his mates as they stare with the face of morons at the end of their intellectual, creative

capacity - blank, bland, without answer - as their citizens’ livelihoods continue to slip through the cracks

they let fester and burst.

I watch Gerry Harvey swim in a pool of money like Scrooge McDuck, but with significantly less charm

and a much shittier theme song.

Will there ever be enough toilet paper to go around? Should we descend on our supermarkets in a

panic? Is it worth investing in a bidet?

And under too many rocks and bridges - rocks and bridges I ignored - were trollish conspiracy theories

left to formulate and bubble: brews in a cauldron too willingly drunk by those who claim to have critical

faculties, but who don’t understand the irony of them saying, ‘do the research,’ when they don’t even

ask the source of the ingredients that they consume; whose algorithms feed them crap they mistake for

nourishing, but has all the benefits of a battered, deep-fried Mars Bar.

Just inject the 5G directly into my veins. 

We step free of our house and are immediately turned around, gently led back to our couch, as another

plane lands from Sydney.

I am another series of hobbies and lawn care and paint jobs. An unending trip to Bunnings and a slowly

wilting sourdough starter left too long in the cold.

I am the rhythmic patter of rainfall made human. A series of motions progressively emptied of

significance, left momentarily to stain the ground, then evaporate.

I am made of soft clothes and blankets. A reflection on a screen.

An Ode To Panic Buyers

You know what? Lockdowns suck. This is an almost irrefutably true and universally agreed upon fact. They are an unwelcome intrusion into the regular rhythms of our lives, relegating us to shame spirals of ‘working’ from home, Netflix binges, and comfy pants that - let’s be honest - needed a wash about a week ago, but they’ve become so warm and familiar and one with you that to cleanse their fabric would be akin to betraying your own being, like scrubbing your dirty filthy soul clean, while knowing that you don’t really deserve it - you only deserve your warm, softly stained pants, worn at the crotch and getting a little sandy at the cuffs. All the while, we are perfumed with the peculiar aroma that permeates your particular spot on the couch, consume a mountain of questionably nutritious food, inevitably washed down with cheap wine that often has the cruel, unforgivable, acidic scent of tropical/blackberry farts, and perpetually put off the next YouTube HIIT workout, cos, honestly, fuck it and fuck this disease.

Lockdowns turn us into caged creatures who often misplace our humanity for the sake of perhaps, if only for a moment, feeling something. Such is our desperation to pretend we are fine, to show how cool we are with this awesome downtime/free time, we overindulge in its surprising excess to communicate to life and its current misfortunes that, yeah, we don’t care. You can’t keep us down. Watch me FEEL! I will lounge, consume, guzzle, glue my eyes to a screen to forget the predicament and, therefore, forget my own persona. 

I am lockdown. We are all lockdown. We can do lockdown. 

But, do you know what I and - I feel fairly safe in assuming this - most of my immediate acquaintances will never do? Become fucking slaven to the mass hysteria of insufferable stupidity that leads people down the tiring, toilet paper walled path of mince meat and non-perishable pasta known as fucking panic buying.

You craven pieces of human excrement, void of anything beneath the floppy exterior of your disappointing, leathery skins, likely adorned with southern cross tattoos. The sheer volume of filth that you must produce to justify the purchase of so much dunny paper is, simply put, beyond mortal comprehension. Such mess can only be the domain of the gods and, trust me, they watch over you with eyebrows raised, muttering to themselves, ‘that’s a lot of shit,’ and I’m not sure they’re talking about what you stain your toilets with.

I see you, gathered in your little online conspiracy covens, muttering about shortages and rations and how the vaccine is designed to implant mind-controlling microchips as you share the latest Sky News dial-a-quote from that semi-sentiment, mouldy aubergine, Craig Kelly, on all your social medias, each electronically tuned into your specific locations. He’s talking wisdom, you say, as you munch into another bowl of boiled, low-grade beef, served over spaghetti as disappointedly overcooked, slippery, and flaccid as your sex drive. Done all the research for me, you burp as you slurp another noodle in between the loosely pinched arsehole of your lips, bizarrely crusted with hair, dandruff, and dehydrated milk.

If you only possessed an iota more rationality and critical capacity than the moistly plastered grime, manky dust, baked bean cans, and half eaten packets of weevil infested rigatoni that lie forgotten in your uninspiring pantries. Then, maybe - and I stress the qualifying nature of the adverb that in this case refuses to commit to any sense of certainty - maybe, you will be conscious of the weighty stupidity of your behaviour. The utter lack of foresight. The wide-eyed, slack-jawed, fluffy, fearful sheep-like nature of it. The bland idiocy of power purchasing toilet paper as though you are moments away from being stricken with a particularly serious case of infinite diarrhea; a case, I might add, that’s severity, based on your shopping habits, will most likely leave you permanently affixed to your grotesque receptacle, unable to rise and cleanse and actually use the hoarded mountain of toilet paper that makes your bathroom akin to the cave of a crippled, smirking, and disappointing dragon: the crappy third cousin of Smaug. And, truthfully, if only we could be so fucking lucky to see you forever roosted atop your shitty throne, unable to bother the rest of us, as you shit and shit and shit for all days.

I fucking detest you, you exhausting excuse of a homosapien, you utterly sad and ever predictable brute. Fuck off to the depraved dwelling from which you scampered and where you ever lurk, waiting for the next excuse to start screaming that the sky is falling, cos Mr Kelly and some Qanon agent - a barely conscious neckbeard, who is more inconsistent wifi and erased internet porn history than man - told you so.