It’s more than likely that one day I will be rotten than recycled. That I will end up inside an urn while not earning.
It’s OK. All spent. No new lease on life. Just joining those gone before me.
Unmarked grave and unknown soldier. So far, during covid-19, that number has grown to twice the size of the Vietnam Memorial.
So far, it doesn’t feel like “a fight” with the “invisible enemy”. Just a virus without a vaccine. Just quarantine and cabin fever.
Part of a nomad tribe, I had to get out of the house like other scavengers to find foods. Staying put on the “reservation” and checking one’s direct deposit is not my thing.
But for the sake of myself and others. For public health. For the future.
Covid-19 first and foremost is a threat and slowly revealing itself by gorging almost all in its path. Fight or flight? Moralists and socialists both are having their field days with their pre-existing pre-conceived bias. Meanwhile, death tolls continue to rise, reminds me of Ted Koppel and Nightline ( keeping tally of the 444 days during the Iranian hostage crisis).
The difference today is the ubiquitous presence of social and mobile media.
At your finger tips are infection rates and death rates, fines and fire-arm sales.
Those with guns in hands, everything looks like a target. Well, go ahead and mow down the virus. Or conveniently, your nearest Chinatown or Chinese restaurant. If only it were that easy.
Easter comes and gone. Podcast and web-cast urge the faithfuls to stay vigilant, and victorious.
No where in the good Book can one find the recipe for this disaster. We learned to stay indoor until the Threat ( Angel of Death) “pass-over” once it checked and saw your posting an ADT-equivalent at the door (tested negative).
Science comes head-to-head with Religion, lockdown with tomb raiders.
I know I will be rotten more than resurrected. Part of life is death. I got that.
Now, how should I then live? Giving away my books? donate my time? (been there, done that).
Meanwhile, keep checking your direct deposit. Keep your heads down, and wait for the Man to say “Go”, so you can once again, be all you can be: scavengers and avengers.
Find the nearest buffet and chow down.
Modernity and consumerism. Try to be a contrarian, by not being seen at Costco, you’ll only end up at Walmart.
No escape. No way out. No travel. No showing of your face. No resurrection.
You don’t expect to rise again if you don’t first lay down.
The price of Easter is Good Friday. The punishment and expulsion from the Garden is curiosity and succumbing to serpent seduction. Greed led to betrayal (Judas) . It trumps security gained from a stable vocation: fishery, carpentry and communication. In the end, those same tools that make you break you i.e. hammer, wood and nails make for an excruciating execution (with thorn corona on your head).
More than 100,000 of us have died in the past weeks. Where are they now except to remain in loved ones’ memories.
When it’s my turn, it will not be any different: building up and curving self-delusion, a by-product of inert ego, however bruised and battered by materialism, pseudo-intellectualism, communism and consumerism.
Soon they will start the “rat race” at the turn of a switch, then each stove pipe will lit at max. Friends in Vietnam will once again be unable to cross the street.
And the Costco merchansdise and Coke machines will be full of people, with pent-up energy and stimulus checks. The machinery starts again, with cruises and planes, the death and the dying. The curve is flattened (sorry to those who continue to die on the other side of the bell-shaped curve) since the “Pause” button can only hold for so long before it times itself out.
Who then wants to think about anything, except to catch up and get ahead. Stop thinking about tomorrow. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Just roll when the light turns green. That’s how we have been conditioned to act. That’s how for millennia, the human body and society have been used to. Some are moralists, others socialists, but not all get justice before time is out.
For now, those virus rule. And I feel helpless watching bodies buried in bags, ironically, on this Easter morning, whose embedded message is about the Resurrection and the Life. For fear of being rotten, I have an expressed wish to be cremated, with “Dust in the Wind” faded out as background music.
All that fleeing and flying – at last, subside and scattered to the four winds. Someday, I might find myself scattered and perhaps helped fertilize the very food you eat. That’s the day I feel happy seeing even my spent self not rotten but recycled.
Thang Nguyen 555 