Friday, 6 August 2021

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.

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