#and they deliberately give me Covid and every other disease they catch

[niccirobertson]

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made a concerted effort to distance myself from just about every news feed and platform that has nothing better to do than report the latest covid statistics. The reason for this is quite honestly, like many people I have had enough. Despite my best efforts, the media bombardment is so pervasive that an update got through, and instead of deleting it, I did the math.

In South Africa at the time of receiving that update there were supposedly 1 039 161 positive cases counted, with 20 033 deaths. I am no maths genius but it wasn’t a stretch to figure out that this was around 2%. I then looked for the data for the United States which is also around 2% and the UK which is around 3%. On average this virus has a mortality rate of 2.5% with the majority of those deaths affecting the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, otherwise known as co-morbidities. Except that the data reflected is questionable. 


When you sift through the conspiracy theories and start talking to credible professionals in the medical industry you begin to see a pattern emerging. Looking at the data of years gone by, pneumonia and flu viruses year on year have also resulted in between a 1% and 2% death rate. So why the hysteria? 


According to the WHO: A pandemic is defined as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”. The classical definition includes nothing about population immunity, virology or disease severity. By this definition, pandemics can be said to occur annually in each of the temperate southern and northern hemispheres, given that seasonal epidemics cross international boundaries and affect a large number of people. This happens every year but the world doesn’t come to a grinding halt because of it. 


According to the British Medical Journal the PCR test is inaccurate, picking up dead and ineffective virus particles that may be found on most people, most of the time. It states that the PCR test, never designed for this kind of testing has an error margin of 97%. That’s insanity no matter how you want to spin it. If the widely accepted method for determining whether or not a person is infected is fundamentally flawed, the resulting data is completely inaccurate. 

Added to which, the death statistics are also questionable. They do not define who died because of the virus or with the virus. For example, a colleague’s mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in July, yet the death certificate states covid19 as cause of death. This is not an isolated incident. 

The World Health Organisation guidelines state that “COVID-19 should be recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the disease, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death, i.e. COVID-19 is the underlying cause of death”. This means no one really knows how many have died directly from a covid infection.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has shown that one in thirteen (7.8%) deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate did not have the disease as the underlying cause of death, further distorting the data. 

The decisions directly related to our lives and livelihoods are based on inaccurate or distorted data and no one is doing anything about it. 

Enough about the deliberate distortion of the facts. The question is why is this happening?
There is a frenetic urgency to get the world vaccinated. Bill Gates began pushing the vaccination agenda way back in 2013 if not earlier. And naturally people, at least people who can still think for themselves are extremely wary of this vaccine. At the time of writing this, the vaccine has only been available for a couple of weeks, and in this short window the significant adverse effects in those already having received the vaccination is 3% based on recent published information. Higher than the death rate of the virus. If you were to go by statistics alone, the vaccine will kill more people than the virus. 

The pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders are naturally elated that the powers that be are enforcing and coercing people into having to accept this vaccine, creating the illusion that their freedom lies on the other side of a needle. And further perpetuating the myth that drugs are going to save you. Bearing in mind that the manufacturers of this technology are free of any kind of liability arising from death or damage caused by a substance that is being trialed simultaneously on millions of people. In simple terms, if the vaccine harms you or renders you infertile you have no recourse. 

Recently a second strain of the virus has emerged, This is nothing new - viruses mutate. This is why there is a different flu strain each season. It has been a year since the first strain emerged and as viruses seem to be excellent timekeepers, its right on schedule for an upgrade. This is further going to throw a spanner into the vaccine works. Will the current vaccine work with the new strain or create other complications? If people have indeed contracted the original virus, will taking the vaccine have immune suppressing effects rendering them more vulnerable to other strains? Pregnant women and women of “child bearing age” have been warned by the NHS  not to take the vaccine because it may render them sterile or have deleterious effects on the foetus. But its ok to give this unknown quantity to the elderly or your child? I think not. 

What happened to freedom of choice? What happened to autonomy? What happened to informed consent? What happened to common sense? 
For me personally, the most disturbing part of this experience is how people I thought of as free thinking, intelligent individuals are simply kowtowing, going with the flow because they don’t want to be seen as outliers. It baffles me how so many people are afraid of voicing an opinion. It wasn’t so long ago that the Nazis used this kind of brainwashing and propaganda to commit genocide. And we are going down this path again with our eyes wide open. 


Back in early 2020 governments the world over were advised by the WHO to impose widespread lockdown measures in order to curb the spread of the virus. The media were so distracted with whether or not the virus came from a bat or a pangolin that no one thought to ask if these counter measures at controlling people was the best option for the economies of the world in the first place. No one gave any thought to the destruction that would ensue. How many people would lose their jobs, livelihoods and minds in the process. Because we trusted the people we vote for to do what is in our best interest.


The second-largest funder of the WHO is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides 9.8% of the WHO’s funds, effectively calling the shots! After Trump pulled funding, The World Health Organisation is now effectively owned by Microsoft and China. Bloody terrifying thought that is!


It is now too late to put the genie back in the bottle. For governments to admit that they acted without a full understanding of the facts or unable to foresee the chaos and destruction that would ensue, going back and admitting they were wrong will result in chaos, crippling class actions and people in power being forced to step down. There will be anarchy. Confidence in governments the world over has been severely compromised not to mention the unstable public option of giant pharmaceutical companies. 

The puppet masters at the WHO (Gates) is also a major shareholder in Pfizer. Incidentally the Gates foundation funded the development of the Pfizer owned sterilisation contraceptive Sayana, targeting specifically third world countries. At the risk of joining the ranks of the conspiracy theorists, it seems that the company who gave birth to computer viruses has also given birth to a means of enforced sterilisation. 

Getting rid of the elderly and ill, controlling those who are young and able though fear and ensuring that those who can have children are stopped in their tracks. The facts really do speak for themselves, but you can connect the dots?

Perhaps people do nothing and say nothing because they feel that their opinions don’t count? They they won’t be heard amongst the noise created by the media and the hysteria? People don’t speak up because they are afraid of what there peers may think of them. And this is why the greatest tragedies throughout human history happen. People who do nothing. People who say nothing. In the face of glaring evidence that the emperor is wearing no clothes, the average person waits for someone else to take action.  We are in a mess and in the hands of people who do not have anyones best interest at heart except for themselves and their own agendas. 


So what good can possibly come from this situation? Thankfully some have realised that their health is in their own hands and no one can save them except for themselves. If you take the steps to stay healthy - eat real food, get decent sleep, surround yourself with positive people and exercise - preferably in the sunlight, chances are you won’t even know if you catch a virus because your body is innately geared towards protecting you from getting seriously ill.


It has hopefully brought to light the logical realisation that if you aren’t feeling well, stay at home. Wash your hands and don’t sneeze on people.


With luck, more of us will wake up and realise that no vaccine or drug can save you from bad decisions. Giant corporations are not creating vaccines because they care about you, they care about their profits. If they engineered medicine for altruistic purposes they would be non-profits not multibillion dollar organisations. And perhaps more people will realise that governments and government institutions are controlled by the private sector who are the giants they are, because we, the public created them. 

We buy their products, whether the product is software, insurance, junk food or drugs. We created these organisations who are controlling the governments who are controlling us - with fear.  With hope more people we will start to see the self perpetuating, destructive cycle that we have come to think of as normal, or maybe not.


My greatest wish for you in 2021 who ever you are, wherever you are, is to wake up and take responsibility for you own health, your own choices and your own autonomy. Speak up when something doesn’t add up and stop feeding the fear.


https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4916

https://www.icd10monitor.com/false-positives-in-pcr-tests-for-covid-19

https://www.chiropractic.org/informed-consent-and-freedom-of-choice-on-vaccination-issues/
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/death-certificate-data-covid-19-as-the-underlying-cause-of-death/

https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/investments/pfizer/

https://www.devex.com/news/big-concerns-over-gates-foundation-s-potential-to-become-largest-who-donor-97377

[eyesonworldcultures]

Do you speak corona? A guide to covid-19 slang Around the world, coronavirus is changing how we speak. Don’t be a “covidiot” - make sure your pandemic parlance is up to scratch.

Hamsteren 

1. To stuff one’s cheeks (verb)

2. Hoarding

Panic buying for beginners

Sign-language interpreters rarely get noticed, let alone upstage the person they're signing for. But during the early stages of the coronavirus epidemic in Europe, a Dutch signer went viral when she translated a government minister’s warning not to hoard food with a pinched nose and rodent-like clawing with her hands. She was signing the word “hamsteren”, which means stuffing food into your cheeks like a hamster, or, as it’s more commonly used, to hoard.

The Netherlands prides itself on frugality and household thrift. So until recently the verb mostly had jolly connotations: annual supermarket promotional events (“de hamsterweken”) rewarded star hamsters who were stocking up on supplies. Germans use a similar word, “Hamsterkauf”. Whereas the English word “hoarding” refers to something secretive, which happens when nobody is watching, “hamsteren” is clearly visible and speaks to the much-celebrated Dutch openness.

Openness has turned to shame as the outbreak advanced. In the Netherlands, as elsewhere, people have “hamstered” in supermarkets as they worried about disruptions to supply chains and being isolated indoors. “Hamsteren is not nice,” Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, said in a press conference; later he called it “retarded”. Shops are calling on people to stop the practice too, and social-media memes ridicule the hoarders. Albert Heijn, a supermarket chain that organises annual hamster weeks, called off the yearly promotion that was supposed to start in April. The Dutch had already filled their cheeks. Sacha Nauta Geisterspiel 1. ghost game (noun)   A football match needs more than 22 players   March 11th was an odd milestone for German football: it was the first ever Geisterspiel, or ghost game in the Bundesliga, German football's top-flight division. As coronavirus was spreading across the country, the city of Mönchengladbach in west Germany decreed that the match against FC Cologne, a Rhineland derby, would now take place without fans. Inside the deserted 54,000-seater stadium the announcer rattled through his usual script: team line-ups, league standings, and then, finally, spectator numbers: “Today, there are none.” The hosts won 2-1, but the victory felt hollow. "It is sport without a heart," wrote Die Zeit, a weekly.Geisterspiele have a long history in football. The word once referred to games so obscured by winter fog that players were reduced to spectres and the ball had to be imagined. The modern usage arose in the 1980s, when footballing authorities banned supporters of lower-league teams from attending specific matches as a punishment for hooliganism. This year, fans barely had time to get used to the coronavirus-induced Geisterspiele before the German football season, like most in Europe, was suddenly suspended.  With no end in sight to Germany's restrictions on mass gatherings Christian Seifert, head of the German Football League, says that Geisterspiele might be the only way to conclude the season. Much is at stake: Germany’s is the world's third most valuable league, and some teams fear that they will go bankrupt if the season is voided. Yet Geisterspiele bring their own problems; during their team’s game against Cologne, hundreds of Mönchengladbach fans defied the club’s appeals and assembled outside, hoping that their cheers would penetrate the empty stadium. In a novel turn of events, the ghost game was haunted by humans. Tom Nuttall

Covidiot

1. Someone who ignores public health advice (noun)   Where there are rules, there are those who break them   Even in a pandemic, many of us are prone to judge others and find them wanting: the term “covidiot” describes any and every person behaving stupidly or irresponsibly as the epidemic spreads. Sometime in early March the word was born, and, almost as fast as the virus spread, so did instances of covidiotic behavior.   The panic-buyers who left supermarket shelves bare of toilet paper and pasta were among the first to earn the title covidiot in Britain, America and elsewhere. Soon, as government lockdowns were put in place, they were followed by those who ignored public health warnings to stay home. These new covidiots held barbecues on beaches, sunbathed in parks and, in one particularly extreme instance, a covidiot wiped his own saliva on goods at a British supermarket. In Florida bull-headed youths on spring break flooded bars and beaches; one shirtless partygoer told news reporters, “If I get corona, I get corona. At the end of the day, I’m not going to let it stop me from partying.” The label has also been used to describe those expounding conspiracy theories about the origins of covid-19, and others warning not to get any eventual coronavirus vaccine as being “from the pit of hell”.   At least the term is a democratic one. The label has been applied from the highest office to the lowest. Like the virus itself, no one is immune. Alia Shoaib

你别来我无恙 (nǐbiélái wǒwúyàng)

1. If you don’t come, I won’t come to any harm   Catching an old Chinese expression   People in China often use an old pleasantry, 别来无恙 (biéláiwúyàng), to greet each other after a long time apart. The literal translation is “I hope nothing bad has happened since we last said farewell”. In common parlance the phrase essentially means, “I hope you’ve been well”. It’s respectful, but conveys warmth and care too.   But the term’s ancient origins have new bearing in the time of covid-19. According to “I Ching”, the “Book of Changes”, a book on divination and wisdom from the ninth century BC, the final character of the expression, 恙 (yàng), originally referred to a highly contagious bug that caused acute fever and a rash. In its early usage, then, people used this phrase to ask someone if they have become infected since they’d last met – the expression was uttered partly to wish someone well, partly as a warning to stay away if they were contagious.   This meaning had long passed out of the popular consciousness, but as the outbreak of coronavirus spread, the original use made an unexpected comeback. A new phrase, 你别来我无恙 (nǐbiélái wǒwúyàng) means “if you don’t come, I won’t come to any harm”. This reconfiguring of the old idiom was bandied around as the epidemic moved across China, a means to promote social distancing between friends and family. It was a playful nod to history, with a serious message: if you wish me well, stay away. Frankie Huang

Quatorzaine

1. 14-day isolation period (noun) The French almost make isolation sound romantic The French language helped to give the English-speaking world the term “quarantine”, which derives from quarantaine, meaning a period of 40 days. There are references to its use in French, presumed to be of biblical origin, as early as the 12th century. It was during the plague in the 14th century that Italy used the word quarantena to refer specifically to isolation for reasons of disease. Venetians employed the term to describe the period of time a ship had to wait in port as a sanitary precaution before its crew could disembark. In short, the English language borrowed the word from French and the definition from Italian.

Now the French have dug up another word, quatorzaine, to refer to the 14-day self-isolation period recommended during the covid-19 crisis. “How many pupils are en quatorzaine?” a French radio host asked the education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, shortly before he closed down schools in March. “Two doctors en quatorzaine” runs a typical newspaper headline.

The French language lends itself to such linguistic formations: a dizaine, derived from the number dix, means ten of something; a douzaine, derived from douze, means 12. So talking about somebody being en quatorzaine rolls easily off the French tongue. Its anglicised version, on the other hand, would involve referring to somebody being “in quatorzine”. That may appeal for reasons of brevity, but, with time less at a premium these days, it seems unlikely to replace the more long-winded English phrase “in 14-day isolation”. Sophie Pedder

Untore 

1. Plague spreader (noun)    What Italians have learned from plague-themed literary classics   As the world adjusts to life under quarantine, many have sought refuge in the pages of plague-themed literature. Sales of Albert Camus’ “The Plague”, about a disease-infested Algerian town in the 1940s, have soared; one publisher has struggled to keep up with orders.     Italians have also re-embraced two national literary classics.  Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed”, a classroom staple published in 1827, is set partly in Milan during the plague of 1630.  In it, outsiders suspected of deliberately spreading the disease are labelled untori.  The allegation was previously directed at Jews accused of propagating the plague in 1348.  With the current coronavirus onslaught the word has crept back into use.

The noun untore comes from the verb ungere, meaning “to grease”; unto means “oily”.  In “The Betrothed” the untori supposedly sought to infect as many people as possible with their unguento, “ointment”. The word has now resurfaced in reference to Chinese people accused of bringing covid-19 to Italy, and to lambast the way that many Italians were treated by countries with fewer cases. When China sent medical equipment one headline ran “From untore to samaritan”.  The usage develops as the outbreak spread. The latest untori are the runners who pound the pavement despite the lockdown , and three Red Cross medics who returned from Lombardy, Italy’s worst-hit region, to Puglia in the south only to be harassed by neighbours.  

If Manzoni offers insight into the human instinct to find scapegoats, an earlier classic has some practical advice. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron”, ten people isolate themselves in a villa outside Florence during the plague of 1348 and recount stories, some sexually explicit, to pass the time. Fiction continues to offer both inspiration and solace Alexandra Fattal 

Coronaspeck

1. Coronavirus fat (noun)

Some Germans are feeding their fear    German workers ordered to stay at home to help the government flatten one sort of curve have found themselves battling the emergence of another, just above the belt. Home workouts sound great, but the days are long and dull and your latest bout of Hamsterkäufe(panic-buying; lit. "hamster-purchase") has left the fridge gloriously well-stocked. There's always another variety of Ritter Sport to try, oder? Anyway, what's a few kilos between socially distanced friends?

Coronaspeck is the helpful German word for the fat deposited by weeks of stay-at-home grazing. Shoppers in Germany may know Speck as a bacon-like foodstuff, perhaps found on a crisp Flammkuchen or inside hearty Swabian Maultaschen. But its broader meaning corresponds to something like the English "flab". Babyspeck, for example, is the puppy fat that lingers into adolescence; Winterspeck a memento of excessive indulgence in cold months. Best known is Kummerspeck, or "sorrow-fat": think a tear-streaked Bridget Jones devouring tubs of ice-cream in the throes of a break-up.

How can Coronaspeck be combatted? Happily, Germany’s lockdown is a notch more tolerant than those of some neighbours. There is no limit on the number of excursions for exercise or other essential purposes. And if the neologism identifies one of the downsides of the corona-crisis, an older noun may inspire some to meet the challenge. Sitzfleisch (lit. "sitting-meat") can mean one’s bottom, but it is also the ability, much-prized in Germany, to endure or stick something out. The country’s restrictions will not expire until April 19th at the earliest. What better test of a nation’s ability to resist the temptations of the pantry? 

抄作业 (chāo zuò yè) 

1. To copy homework (verb) 2. To steal China’s ingenuity without giving credit 

Chinese social-media users think other countries are copying their homework

It used to be that, if you searched 抄作业 “chao zuoye” on Chinese social media, you’d see tales of students plagiarising or cheating on tests: the term means to copy someone’s homework. Chao means to copy, and zuoye means school assignments. But zuoye can also refer to work in a more general sense, which has allowed the phrase to take on a new meaning amid the coronavirus pandemic.

As the virus has spread around the world, the lockdown is slowly being lifted in China and life in some parts of the country appears to be slowly returning to a (new) normal. Many are now watching to see how other countries fight covid-19. “Streets in Malaysia are really copying homework,” says a user on Weibo, a Twitter-like service, alongside a slideshow of public-service posters across Malaysia. The pictures show red banners with public-health slogans printed in white – a stylistic format that Chinese propagandists have used since long before the current pandemic. One Chinese blogger wrote that the National Basketball Association in America was copying the Chinese Basketball Association’s homework, after ESPN reported that the NBA was studying the CBA’s tactics for hosting games during China’s lockdown.

To say another country is copying homework is to be patriotic, but with snark. When another country copies China’s homework, users mean that it’s deploying tactics pioneered by China, without giving credit. This sentiment was particularly prevalent among Chinese Weibo users when Donald Trump labelled covid-19 the “Chinese virus,” drawing attention – and blame – to the global pandemic’s source. As the virus spreads in the West, many commenters on Weibo have called the health crisis facing America an “open-book exam”. As ever, China is keen to be top of the class.  Noelle Mateer

[suiciderealestate]

3/19/2020 - 3/20/2020

Today is the first day of spring and the second day of my Saturn return. Last night I went on a hike in Mount Juliet with Annie, and though we both broke more promises to ourselves that we would remain in quarantine, the world felt so oddly at peace with our decision even amid this quiet panic. The sky was overcast, the trees emerging into a slow bloom and the ground alive with the first green of spring, baby grasses and flowers and mosses bursting in verdant jubilance as the world quietly boiled around us.

The air in Nashville tastes fresher than I remember air ever tasting. My house feels like a redoubt against this plague, but I won’t know if coming here was really a good decision until the last of the virus is gone. By coming to Nashville I made a bet, that if I sequestered myself away from the pathogen and prevented myself from ever getting it then my life would come out for the better somehow. The only catch is that though my chances of contracting the virus are currently less than they would have been in NYC, my chances of contracting the virus and then spreading it to my parents when they probably would have never otherwise come into contact with it is exponentially higher. If this virus takes the lives of my parents because of me I do not know if I will ever be able to forgive myself.

Saturn is supposedly the planet of discipline, and so I have become constantly wary of my impending celestial castigation. Last night after our hike, Annie and I made the selfish decision to dine in at a Mexican restaurant one last time. We went to my old favorite, U.S. Border Cantina, a restaurant I’ve celebrated as my favorite since I was a child. The quality there has fallen off a little bit, but you can’t blame the owner, Mrs. Naranjo. I’m sure she’s doing the best she can after the death of her husband a few years ago.

We went into the restaurant and there was hardly anyone there, save for a decently filled table on one side and another booth near the front manned by a solitary geriatric. On the tables there were none of the usual menus with drink specials and other offerings, no salt or pepper, nothing save what was brought to the table after we sat down. I can only pray that means the table was properly sanitized because as I ate my mediocre beef chimichanga and drank what will probably be the last margarita I drink for some time, I couldn’t help but think that the risk wasn’t really worth it. There are still only 154 documented cases in Tennessee, but I can only imagine the actual count is ten times higher than that. Davidson County has seventy-five of the recorded cases, which is forty-five cases more than have been documented in Williamson County, the county with the second highest number of recorded cases that at one point had more documented cases than Davidson County.

America’s response has been slow. The ignorance of the nation echoes the ignorance of the people. Just as people who have not truly experienced tragedy think themselves immune to it, so, too, do relatively prosperous nations. The United States has known hardship, but with its quickly rotating cast of presidents and executive administrations, our democracy seems blighted by a sort of systematic amnesia. President Trump, who typically refutes reality in favor of his own blinkered phantasmagoria, has proven to be a particularly ill-equipped figurehead during this crisis, which has not been replicated in its nature and intensity for more than a century.

When the virus showed up in Wuhan, China, people, including myself, looked upon it with a sort of detached amusement. It was like standing on a beach and watching a fire erupt on a distant island, the smoke rising up to the sky with a promise that the mayhem could never cross the water. But a virus is not like a fire or a tornado or a hurricane, things you can see and theoretically run from, things you can confront and fight or deliberately hide from. This virus is dangerous, especially in the era of “fake news,” because no one can see it and it uses our friends and loved ones as vectors to enter our bodies and lives like so many tiny Trojan Horses.  

But I see how someone might see this as senseless hysteria. Spring is coming into bloom. The birds are chirping. The air is cool but refreshing. It feels like the world is so gentle right now, a mother to its newborn year, cradling the awakening life with a tenderness that belies the virulence of this pandemic. In Venice, where the intensity of the Italian lockdown has cleared the canals of boats and their attendant pollution, dolphins and swans have appeared in the elucidated waters for the first time in sixty years.

The world keeps spinning, even flourishes, in the face of this pandemic. While humans sequester in their quiet panic, Earth seems to rejoice in our temporary absence. And once our planet catches wind of a solution to its perennial blight, it may give recourse to these invisible antidotes once again. The Spanish Flu ebbed into human consciousness lightly when it appeared in January of 1918, around the same season COVID-19 appeared in China this year. Then it tapered off during the summer months when temperatures rose, but then when fall returned the flu came with it and with a vengeance. The Spanish Flu terrorized humanity for exactly two years before it finally disappeared in December of 1920. This illness isn’t going to go away any time soon. This is a cleansing. The virus is an immune response to the human contagion.

I couldn’t have left New York at a better time. When Sami told me he didn’t want me to live with him anymore, it hurt at first but then I remembered the containment zone in New Rochelle. About forty-five minutes later I notified him I would be leaving in two days. I left in three. The night before I left, Eli expressed some semblance of disappointment in me for what must have seemed to him a waste of investment. When I left the next day there were just more than seventy documented cases in New York. Today, eight days later, there are more than 5,100.

I remember the morning it was decided that I would be leaving. I was in an Uber home and the sun was just rising, casting fiery reflections across the glass faces of office buildings in SoHo. I had spent the entire night with Rin, banking on a $100 payment for taking photos and video that ended up being only $60. She told me I hadn’t done as much work as last time when in reality the only difference between the two photo sessions was that this time she did more cocaine. I suppose I did more cocaine, too.

She had begged me all night not to move home to Nashville. She was to be my Candy Darling or my Edie Sedgwick or some other such downtown superstar, and I was to document everything — a more submissive, pay-as-you-go, mono-talented Andy Warhol. If anything, I was to be her Andy Warhol and she was simply to be a benefactor. But those last two weeks I discovered an authenticity and a sadness in Rin that stripped her of her mean girl facade and made her seem much more human. I left that morning knowing it would be the last time I would see her for awhile. But now, even being at home, I am constantly shrinking at the invisible threat that my time with anyone, and especially my parents, could be running out.

The day we left New York, I could feel something ominous in the air. It wasn’t a prescience. I knew the virus was there, even if I couldn’t see it, but something about that day felt different than the days before it. Face masks were becoming more common. More people than ever were walking around with them on when we passed through Manhattan. There was a palpable anxiety that made even the sunlight feel like an omen. I alternated driving for seven hours and drove the last seven hours to Nashville myself. I didn’t want to stay at a hotel. I wanted to minimize as much as possible my time in the radius of what would become the virus’ epicenter over the next week.

Two weeks have not yet passed. I still have the better part of a week before the fourteen-day incubation period ends. At that point I will know for sure that I didn’t contract the virus in New York, but in Nashville I’m still not safe. There are almost three-hundred confirmed coronavirus cases statewide. In Davidson County alone there are more than one-hundred confirmed cases, more confirmed cases than there were the day I left New York City, and just over a week later there are more than 5,600 confirmed cases in NYC and forty-three have died, more than half of the number of cases confirmed a week ago. In almost one week, the number of cases in New York City has increased one-hundred fold.

All my life I have been irreverent. I have used my irreverence to cope with the everyday traumas of existence, to make a joke out of the manifold circumstances that routinely render me despondent. If there were ever a time for reverence, it would be now. What is happening across the planet could be considered a very holy thing. It is in a way a rapture, a culling of life force that has overstayed or overstepped its intended cycle on this planet.

I have already been irreverent in the face of this disease. I have not respected its potency or reach in my actions, only in my words. Every choice I make is now unavoidably an active choice. For my family, the decision to get takeout from Taco Bell could be a life or death decision. The decision to dine in one last time at a mostly empty Mexican restaurant could be a life or death decision. Even the decision to see a friend and go with that friend to a park to unwind could be a life or death decision. I have already decided to do each of these things against my better judgement, and I will not know the consequences of any of these actions for up to two weeks, which means I will never know which decision I am being punished for if I am in fact punished, only that I am being punished for one of a host of decisions, each marked by the same sense of ignorant irreverence. And for our irreverence, the price is death; not necessarily ours, but probably someone literally and figuratively close to us.

People are cracking under the pressure of this forced tedium. For some, like my parents, this new “social distancing” protocol is hardly a deviation from their established way of life. But by merit of the simple fact that so many simple things in our lives have become potentially deadly and only will become more so in the coming months is or at least should be deeply unsettling. And if not unsettling, then maybe freeing, freeing in the sense that this invisible thing will wash over us and change everything. Events like this mark both endings and beginnings. We choose the way we manifest them.