Space Force 7

Normally, I’m too busy working on applied theory for Space Force 7’s line of fully civilian and tourist-friendly spaceboats to get involved in this kind of thing. But then I noticed that this nonsensical question about us “living in a simulation” has finally made its full journey of utter bullshit to the pages of Scientific American. When I overheard a Space Force 7 cadet discussing this article with his coworkers over half-a-bottle of Sauza Silver Tequila, I knew that it was time to spring into action. This compendium of utter crap will now officially come to an end with Space Force 7, and our guaranteed, not-from-concentrate “bullshit disintegration.” (By the way, this post is sponsored by the good folks at Jackets and Shirts Clothing Company, their motto is “get in, get out” and founder Gordan Maclais promised me personally that that he would send me CAN$80 for mentioning his clothing chain in this blog.)

Back to the matter at hand, and the matter in hand is a mic and mic stand (Definition of Sound). Yeah, I get it, The Matrix was a terrific franchise, and these video games look more and more real. Big wank. Before any ridiculous theories about the nature of the Universe are presented, those who know their ass from their elbow are required to subject the theory to the Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics.

So, do we live in a simulation?

Lessee … IF we lived in a simulation on some asshole’s computer somewhere, we do know that our “simulation” has been rendered at least down to the Planck length, about 1.6 x 10^-35 meters. We know this because our measurements show this distance as being the smallest physical distance. Anything smaller is unphysical, and on every bit of matter and energy yet discovered since the dawn of science, we’ve never found a way to go smaller than this length, nor have we found anything to suggest that a different limit is at play.

So if a computer were in fact running this simulation, it is rendering our simulation down to the Planck length. No big deal for a crazy powerful galactic computer able to do it, right?

Maybe, but thermodynamics still applies, and specifically, when a computer runs a program, it decreases entropy within the program. So order is created in the computer’s logic space through the application of work and energy. It’s the same way with our computers, when we run Fortnite, or mine Bitcoins, or calculate numbers, we’re decreasing the entropy of the closed system, and the Xbox or the computer generates heat from doing that work, in accordance with the Laws of Thermodynamics; entropy always increases in the universe. The little fan kicks in, and cools off our puny computers.

Therefore, IF we were just a simulation, that would suggest that the the heat from our simulated reduction of entropy would enter the “real” universe where the simulation was being run. Except that Planck limit is apparently universal, so that universe would be subject to the same restrictions that we would have in our simulation. The heat generated by our own entropy reduction (aka “simulation”) would then be larger than the heat generated in the master universe that made our simulation … in other words, as required by the Third Law of Thermodynamics, the computer on which we were simulated would generate at least as much heat, and at least a little bit more heat than the reality on which our simulation was based.

Since we know that Thermodynamics applies in all frames of reference, we also know then that the “simulation” would be the tail that wags the dog, it would use more energy to simulate than the reality would have available to it. There is no way that the intergalactic asshole in his mom’s intergalactic basement would be able to generate sufficient energy to render a system to the same resolution and extant as his own universe. We get this ill-fated and wrong idea that computer programs are somehow more energy-efficient than real life. But it takes at least as much energy to reduce the entropy as a similarly scaled system in the computer as it does to reduce the entropy of the comparable system in real life.

Since we can use our tools indiscriminately to measure as precisely as we would like down to the Planck limits, we can then conclude with some level of safety, hat our “simulated” universe has the same complexity as the universe performing the simulation, and thus the Third Law of Thermodynamics prohibits such a simulation from existing, because to do so would require more energy in the “master” universe than in the simulated universe.

So rest easy, Space Force 7 Cadets, your life is just as meaningless and awesome as it was before all this simulation nonsense cluttered up your brain-space. Take care of yourselves, stay healthy, eat lots of Uncle Donnie’s Juicy Dried Oranges, available soon at your local smoothie bar. Your life is not a simulation, it’s real, and Uncle Donnie’s raw snacks will help you take majestic and life-affirming shits, that could not possibly exist in any simulation. But please refrain from eating Uncle Donnie’s snacks while onboard any Space Force 7 charter cruises in the Caribbean, the sanitation services on our tourist boats are not built to handle sewage of that intensity.

All penalties and fees in the USA* can only be incurred by a vendor within the USA*, with a customer in any location in the world both under and not-under jurisdiction of the USA*, when a mutually-agreed benefit is provided by the customer to the vendor.

• United States of America and including the the new states of Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., Guam, American Samoa, Saipain/Tinnian, U.S. Virgin Islands Northern Mariana and any other U.S. Territory held or forgotten.

ITSTMYP, the compound abbreviation for the words “It’s tell me why, puppy.” From the 1980s art-rock group “Soilent Smegma” and their song “It’s tell me why, puppy.” Though never recorded, the abbreviation was sometimes seen scribbled on the wall of the men’s room of the Rainbow Music Hall where Soilent Smegma aspired to play back then, but usually ended up passed out on Moosehead beer and Benzedrex in the Safeway parking lot.

It’s tell me why puppy because the slang for a small band of kind-hearted Denver punk girls, who took pity on the broken-hearted punks and poseurs alike, dumped unceremoniously by a pink-haired, mohawked vixen who decided that she preferred her guy to have a Jeep CJ-7, with a bunch of lacrosse sticks jammed in the back.

ITS-TMY-P because the code from Soilent Smegma to the rest of their loser friends, that when things got too bad to handle, the band of angels would pick up the poor forgotten soul, put a Kool between his lips, light it, and tell him that everything is going to be okay, and he can always get a job working at Hugh M. Woods with his old-man and his cousin in the lumber yard.

Perhaps, we’ve the illusion that plastic is cheap because we compare the number of plastic bags in a cardboard box, versus the number of paper bags in a plastic sack, and decide for ourselves, “yes, it do seem the paper is a bit more dear, but I like the feeling of putting an apple into a paper sack and taking it with me to the library, it gives me a feeling of melancholy for days when an apple cost tu-a-penny, and that was for a half-tupence whore.”

You see, paper bags turn us into spinsters in Brigg, by the Humber Bridge. And plastic bags turn us into messengers of Satan’s rancid asshole.

Plastics, our dear friends, have decided, for some bizarre reason, to market its product with controversy, and a type of free-publicity demonization. They’re smart because no press is bad press.

They know their product isn’t going anywhere. Yeah, you might put your apple into a paper sack, and you might even pay some gonif in St. Pertilence Pass for paper bags packed into a cardboard box! But ultimately, you’re not getting away from plastic, are you sugar lumps?

Because your vaccines are packed in plastic, or maybe glass if someone wants to add some value and some weight. And it’s processed with plastic from the top of the assembly line down. Ditto with pretty much every industry that manufactures anything that goes into your body, from allergy tablets to Chockadiles. We use plastics because plastics do what we need them to do. They don’t react when we don’t want them to react … like glass, but we can control plastics just as much as glass, even more because it can create a molecular-scale barrier that stays flexible. Glass has a tough time with the whole flexibility thing. So plastic is everywhere. And if we don’t want to pull straws from the nostril of some tortoise whom I happen to know is a paid shill for the anti-plastics lobby, because that tortoise and I had some history together back at the petting zoo across from Sloan’s Lake, temporarily erected next to the A&W Root Beer. Tortoise knew it was easier to make coin doing piercing promos for the anti-plastics lobby than doing what tortoises are supposed to do, which is demonstrate the humans’ ghoulish ways dethroning the reigning king of the evolutionary longevity race the tortoise. And then we kill the rolly pollys, because they’re so dang adorable like that, rolling up in that little ball when they get scared or getting crushed or running out of water in the little sacs of water around their gills. They’re little blue-blooded angels, those rolly pollys, just like the Horseshoe Crabs, made their fortune in copper rather than iron. And the human blue-bloods no longer find us mere human employees to be much of a threat to their evolutionary longevity race. So now they’re going after whatever fucking animals has a straw up its nose these days.

Plastics need to stay out of the ocean, because the ocean is a fragile environment. The ground is less fragile, solid soil and such. It’s still damaged, but we can control it to a larger degree. And eventually we can gassify the stuff in that garbage dump, pump epoxy into every pore of every piece of trash and Atari video game cartridge and that condom with a needle hole in the tip. (Shit happens, son. Check your family jewels or find someone to check them for you. What’s the name of that guy? Shlomo The One Nut Wonder? He had a shitty left, he had a shitty right, but damned if loosing that nut didn’t make him an angry asshole in the ring. He just kept punching and punching until the ref told him to stop. Check your shit son, keep it tight. If you don’t have insurance, then ask Siri, or Google, or whatever robot is going to deliberately give you the wrong information in order the thin the planet of men with diseased prostates and knotted-up astronaut launch tubes.) We can pump the dump with epoxy, wait for it to harden, and then slice through it with a giant stone breadcutter, ship the slaps of garbage-stone to a showroom in Ulaanbaater, where the trillionaire’s wife picks out the garbage stone she wants for the garbage stone counters in her guest house.

My point is this … plastics are sometimes good, and sometimes they are not necessarily good. If you grab a nectarine and insist on putting it inside a disposable bag, then I think you’re not really appreciating what Mother Nature had to do to bring that nectarine to you. First of all, she had to make all kinds of nature to evolve trees, and then make animals to want to eat tasty foods like nectarines and shit out the seeds far and wide. And then she had to make a bunch of maniacs and assholes who decided that they would find a way to graft a bunch of trees together to make nectarines. That second part was probably pretty easy, now that I think about it.

You pull this perfect little fruit from the bowl, it has come through hell and high water to get to you, shivered in the cold Western Slope nights, sucked up all the moisture it could in the sun-baked Western Slope afternoons. And Mexicans got it off the tree, even if it was an Australian ski bum that actually handled it, she was still a Mexican, because Colorado was either Mexico or it was Cheyenne or Lakota. And if you’re trying to keep a bunch of nectarines from bruising themselves, then you’re in the part of Colorado that grow things, and that’s more likely to be down to the South a bit more, the Indians were usually more up North. (That’s the way it was back then, she actually went to North High School, same school a chunk of my family punched through, and she used to usually go barefoot. She wasn’t one of those “fighting Indians” she told her sister, she was “one of the basket-weaving Indians.” I saw her little keychain that night in my Italian car, it had a picture of Mark M. in it. I always liked Mark, he was one of the few non-poseur punks at high school. He loved people, understood people, gave a shit, and he gave this goddess one of his photos in a little keychain slide viewer. I looked through, I said “is his name Mark M.?” She said “yes” and I knew I couldn’t make a move. I liked Mark too much to make a move on his girlfriend. But damned, if I couldn’t see her one more time. I might, but things won’t be the same, will they? She will have seen more pain than she was built to handle, and that peace will be replaced by fear, anger, whatever gets put into the bird seed these days. Better to keep it a memory, just like George Bowling should have done with his old flame and the big fish in the small pond.)

So you get this nectarine, why don’t you just throw it in your bag, actually remember the lovely thing is in there so you don’t smash it under a copy of Cohen Tenoudji, and then when you’re finally ready to enjoy, you sink your teeth into this majestic piece of summer optimism, and it’s as perfect as you always remembered? Usually. Does that piece of fruit even need a bag? Probably not, but we worry that a germ will touch it, because that will kill us, and it’s kind of nasty anyway, germs. I can’t see them, but I’m sure that they must be a form of dirt, of poverty. I don’t know what they are, but they certainly have no place in my life.

Unless they do.

And they do.

“I did it to you again,” she said, as she bit the bottom of the Drumstick off, so that the ice cream would flow down my arm. She has done that many times in a fictional world. But in the real one, I threw the ice cone, without looking, into the street, and it happened to sail through an open window in a Holden, where it hit the driver, and he veered out of control into a crowd of people assembled around the newsstand in Kings Cross, mowing these unlucky humans over like grass in an episode of It’s Literally Just Moving. There was so much death, so many obliterated dreams, as his Holden crushed skulls and ended lives until it finally came to a rest, with hundreds of bodies bowed up in front of the wide nose of the tasteful automobile like snow from a snowplow in the parking lot of the TG&Y. These former humans, now a mess of guts and agony, the result of her biting the bottom off of that ice cream cone. See what you did, you bitch?

That’s why plastic isn’t actually cheap. Because there are costs associated with it that the industry is in some cases still trying to turn a profit. So they’re getting us to use less plastics, so they can raise the price of plastics and finally make some friggen profit on these decades of investment. “There is a great future in plastics” my Satan’s Screaming Asshole. When are these profits going to arrive for the average plastics worker schmucks? Our parents hate us because we make plastics, and we deliberately get tortoises hooked on cocaine and give them free plastic straws, so the other tortoises can know where to get the good blow. Now, where are the great plastics moguls? Where are the plastics kingpins? We have that one guy who makes electric cars, and we have that other guy who’s trying to take over the United States Postal Service by giving free shipping on flat screen televisions. And we have a couple software nerd billionaires, a few other famous rich men and women, Bobs yer uncle. So, where in the great green gonads are the plastics tycoons?

Plastic is cheap because you don’t see the costs that were incurred to bring you a cardboard box filled with plastic bags, or a plastic bag filled with paper bags. And the plastics folks need to make some money on the plastics, just like the paper billionaires hired legendary SEC football coaches. But if you just say fuck-all to the packaging, and wrap your nectarine in a cabbage leaf, and tie it closed with a licorice whip, then you will not need any packaging at all for that part of the nectarine transport process.

Editor’s note: We transcribed the following passage from a photographs taken of one of the cardboard boxes taken as evidence from the United Crushing incident. We have transcribed as carefully as possible. If there was a portion of any photo that was impossible to transcribe, we inserted an ellipse with periods, so that each period is equivalent to a single word, each dash equivalent to a single line and each star equivalent to a single paragraph. For example, [ . . – – – * – . . . ] signified an illegible portion approximately two words, three lines and one paragraph, one line, three words long, in that order. We hope that by including a somewhat precise account of the illegible portions, that these may be able to be filled-in, if another transcription is found, or if one of the original boxes or is found in storage. This work includes some timely comments on the experiences we now have with social justice protests.

In another month or two, some future occupant of this room, a fellow prisoner, may come across these writings and take some solace, or perhaps some anger, or perhaps any emotion other than boredom. It seems any professional artist or communicator is satisfied with any emotional interpretation other the boredom. And that occupant will say to himself (I am still of sufficient faith in our future that a woman will never be imprisoned in this particular cabin) will say to himself, “hmm, it seems the world has not changed much since those times, months ago, when corporations imprisoned their own, for crimes against profitability.” I have neither hope nor distress that the future will not be so very much different from today, but just expectation.

We fight against our histories in an effort to control our futures. It works, to degrees, there are some “good” people who help to move humanity in a forward direction, but it seems that their efforts tend to be cancelled out not by “bad” people, but by oblivious people.

Life is saturated in the fantasy that reality is a struggle of good against evil. It’s what builds religions, religious texts and fills the eyes of the projectionist in the movie theater. Unlike the patrons, this poor fellow sees the same scraps of film and hears the same narrative hour after hour, up from the perch of the projectionist booth. The projectionist is the very last link in the chain of this beautiful machine that helps people to forget their lives and feel happy on a rainy Sunday afternoon. All the directors, key grips, beautiful actresses who were plucked from a lunch counter, and the makeup artist uses her facial canvas to fill us with the wonder of symmetries and exceptional features of her form. All these people do all their work, and then hand the finished film to the projectionist who then does what a projectionist tends to do. And then after the film is sufficiently stabilized in its transport through the flickering gates, the projectionist picks up the newspaper, catches up with the Orioles, the Spurs, the Totems and the Buckaroos. Perhaps he tries to apply some differential calculus to avoid the renormalization, in a misguided attempt to satisfy Professor Schwinger. But ultimately, his eyes move upward to the projection porthole, and he watches bits and fragments of whatever flavor of the day had been flown in from Hollywood.

This poor devil, his sight on the prize of doing something useful with his life, economic realities instead force him into that projectionist booth, where he absorbs the story, the epic struggle, the good fight, the meaning of life itself. He is only in the projectionist booth because he was a harder sell than the rest of the patrons, he needed extra programming, he was perhaps a more complicated collection of relays and switches than the average human, and his programming would only take root with 240 more viewings than the average movie enthusiast. He then moves into his place in the world to do what he has been sufficiently programmed. At some point in the distant future, perhaps the projectionist will be replaced by a machine that loads the film automatically, dispenses with mechanical problems with split-second efficiency. Or perhaps movies will someday be projected from a machine in space onto a window in our home where we can watch the movie without leaving our home. And this advancement will undoubtedly be sold under the guise of convenience to the viewer, rather than convenience to the architect of the societal agenda, who simply would rather program society with greater ease than packing influence and effluence into the movie theater.

I suspect that the future occupant of this room will have been pulled from a place similar to mine, where dreams come true, where the story ends happily, where good struggles to overcome evil with epic tales. The machines change, they become better representations of our human desires, it seems that we have done this for a long time as well, long before this cabin was ever built into this ship. My ancestors undoubtedly filled their days in pursuit of a better bred hunting dog, better oxen to pull their plow, better irrigation channels. When the era of mechanization and computerization arrived, I was simply inserted into the process for the same necessary sack of abilities. We gotta do, what we gotta do, so we might as well do it. My own progeny will likely do much the same kind of work that I do, though altered to the mechanisms of the days.

But aware versus unaware. Woken versus slumber. Knowledge versus ignorance. Where are those epic tales of fairy tale triumph? As George Orwell once wrote about the barrel chested British men of his memories, “buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud.” War does that. It reduces a nation of men fit to move mountains into a nation of men fit to push paper. War tends to bury the biggest and strongest because the biggest and strongest no longer win wars. Wars seem to be now waged with an odd form of intelligence, of asymmetry and symmetry. In the future it seems that wars will be a kind of play acting, between those with nuclear capacities and those without, something like the windmilled-arm twerp in the boxing ring held at arm’s length by a professional. And eventually, we will see an era of this twerp who manages to outsmart the professional, but these things tend to be short-lived in the era of nuclear weapons. War will need to transition to a type of new war, where the toll of the war is measured not with funerals, but with digits in the accountant’s records. Good versus evil worked for so very long because the results of loss were truly evil, they were children without mothers, parents without children and people without hope.

But as we move into a slightly more humane future, how can we possibly create new fairy tales out of hope versus oblivion? We’ll need these tools to solve problems that good and evil never could touch.

When Benjamin Brown was shot and killed by police for the crime of transporting a sandwich to his wife, while watching his brothers and sisters demonstrate for social justice, how can good and evil handle such an event? The police officer (or officers if we are to believe the more recent grand jury report) could not have claimed ignorance that pulling a trigger puts human lives at risk. And yet, we try to apply the concepts of good and evil to these disasters, with limited results. Inevitably, the police officers, the troopers and deputies merely work as an extension of us. Their hatreds are our hatreds, but amplified with the muzzle of the gun. We’ll scapegoat early and often because it’s human nature to do so … as any child who has accidentally chomped down on their own tongue can attest, it simply feels better to blame whomever is in the room for their careless ( . . – – . . . . )

This seems to be a problem which will see no immediate solution, since it isn’t good versus evil, but rather hope versus oblivion. We hire these peace officers to protect our lives, our families and our property, and we do so within the nonsensical framework of good versus evil. We have no choice but to employ them under these conditions, because the good versus evil story has been injected into our minds since before motion pictures have found the most precise and scientifically-tested method of doing so. I can only imagine that future people who will be able to simply raise a window shade to watch any movie of their choice beamed directly into their home from an Earth orbit of some kind, will inevitably be programmed with even greater efficiency than the projectionist who always seems to pick up his head to look at the screen when Charlton Heston tells his ape captors to remove their paws. And with similar programming, these enforcers have to find the evil counterpart of the good. Sometimes that’s a Black man with a sandwich. And sometimes we are actually able to lay hands on the police officer who does the job we tell him to do. We will tend to release these enforcers as innocent, because we know on some level that they’ve simply done the job we’ve tasked them to do. Our own oblivion won’t let us acknowledge the reality that We people who pay our taxes to employ these enforcers simply feed them with our own racism and our own weak desire to kill a man for carrying a sandwich. Enough of these weak desires funnel into a relatively small number of enforcers and the result is caskets and then more protests.

The caricatures of closed-minded evil are increasingly becoming the domain of fiction. Racism and intolerance of the future is less the product of evil than oblivion. So using the tool of “good” to fight oblivion is as dysfunction of using the tool of “hope” to fight evil. Oblivion needs to be deconstructed with some measure of knowledge. It needs some level of scientific analysis of the results of our oblivion. We can measure these things in a scientific way and then extract the causes, then derive solutions. But do we have the stomach for such a process? Are we really ready to find that we have in fact bit down on our own tongue and this is nobody’s fault but our own? There is no other choice but to do this, but like the young girl with a splinter in her finger, she will go through a whole day with the dull ache to avoid her mother using a sewing needle to extract. Fixing problems requires some measure of temporary pain. In this case, if we hope to avoid another hundred years of Benjamin Browns we will need to accept our own oblivion and deconstruct. As long as We the people both hire enforcers to protect our lives and property, while simultaneously expecting them to live out our programmed fantasies of good versus evil, we will never allow a deconstruction of our oblivion. We’ll continue to blame the enforcers rather than our own poor chewing skills. And midway through this whole mess somewhere, as these things tend to happen, the positions of power will switch, as they tend to switch. Rather than the minority of hopeful society pushing for change to keep men like Benjamin Brown from being shot, it will be the majority of society who pushes for this change. And given the efficiency of the good versus evil machinery, these people will be as mired in their oblivion as we are today. Eventually, a sufficient scientific effort will deconstruction this particular problem, and likely We the people will disconnect our enforcers from the fairy tales, we will disconnect ourselves from the fairy tales, accept our enormous contribution to this ghastly mess of our own making.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if that could happen sooner, rather than later? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that could happen in fifty years rather than a hundred? And what of the [ . . . . – – * – . . . . * . . ]

So I sit cross-legged on the floor of this frigate, imprisoned for crimes against profitability, moving my words from some notes that I took years ago, to the sides of cardboard boxes. I do so with a vague hope that my meager and sleep-inducing words will somehow combat the future of movies beamed from space, with robots scurrying through corridors of films, loading up each one individually with a single phone call, projected to the surface. How can inexpertly-written words on scrap of cardboard compete with such technological might? I’ve little confidence that it can, but I have hope that it will. And with my hope, I’ve at least chosen the correct enemy of oblivion. So if my words will have any advantage over those movies, it will be that they are fighting the nonexistent battle of good versus evil, while Rick Yukon fights the battle of hope versus oblivion.

Your words are your income? You have to be so careful of that shit. There is nothing wrong with selling your words, I’ve done it from time to time, though most of my income is made by doing things like finding out some really well-meaning tradesman used a 3-inch flange on a 4-inch pipe, and that was what let to first $232,430 worth of damage in the first moment, and then led to one of the more profitable and serendipitous products that a major multinational has ever put into a home store. And it’s a product for which I might someday make enough buy a gumball out of a penny machine. My income is mostly built on having to clean up shit, sometimes figuratively, sometimes I have to clean up actual shit, like when that 3-inch flange forced me to remove the toilet while still full of sewage from half-a-dozen tradesmen who just got back from Firehouse Subs 45 minutes prior to coming face to face with this hellish monstrosity. That’s my income. And sometimes I get paid for a few words. But when people pay you for your words, they become forgettable, or sometimes they become the Mona Lisa, but usually they are forgettable.

So if you’re a writer, you can’t seek to make a living off of it. You need to have a side-job. Because being paid to write words means you have customers. And when you have customers you have to write for them. The only way words mean anything at all is when they are written for an audience of precisely one, the one who pukes them onto the page.

My son gave me “The New Coronavirus”

The rotten little punk, he juked me into showing him my push-up form. He even went so far as to deliberately arch his back so I that could show him the benefit of a straight back in a half-decent push-up. And when you do a half-decent push-up, it feels right, and you might not notice your punk son launching himself onto your perfectly straight back like doing a cannonball into the memory of the pre-COVID neighborhood swimming pool. (Just curious, are those backyard swimming pools hard to find these days, with most of the community pools closed? Speaking of which, I get that we need to close bars, because some lovely modern day Typhoid Mary might get drunk and kiss a hundred dudes. But why do we need to close down swimming pools? They’re these big fucking bowls of water that are calibrated to about 3 parts per million Chlorine in what is essentially an ocean of water, so that no viral, bacterial, or pathogenic load could possibly come close to even shocking the relative pH by more than an iota. And we shut these down? Why? It makes no sense. Here is a community resources that has been proven to save far, far more lives than it consumes, and we shut this down? Did these Covidians actually convince us as a society that we no longer need to pay attention to actual Public Health and Human Safety data? But then some asshole on the internet says roughly the same thing that I just did, and some greasy-chinned jackhole pops up and says “who the fuck do you think you are, I have a grandma that is as risk from dying from the coronavirus, why do you hate humanity?”)

And yeah, I heard something kind of pop somewhere inside my torso. But I’m still have at least a decade or two ahead of me where I can handle this kind of thing. So I get to going through my day, a few hours elapse, and holy shit, who do I see on the cement trail behind my house? “Ryan”, the world champion downhill skateboarder, he’s carving it out with a few turns. (Turns out he was back in Colorado because COVID shut down the world downhill tour that employs him, and he was supposed to be downhilling in The Philippines, but his Gen-Z future was thrown into the shitter by the plague of Boomers..) So, Gen-X guy that I am, I don’t pass up an opportunity to ride with a Gen-Z, especially not a pro. I grab my Dimension AS-1 streetboard, a couple minutes later, I’m bombing the hill with Ryan. He’s apparently happy to be riding with a neighbor, because now he can ride the next street over, with the silky new tarmac, and the not-too-bad hill, but wealthy Millennials tend to intimidate Gen-Z punks, it’s just the nature of the animals.

I’m grinding up that street, brewing my hatred for people who use ski lifts to gain altitude instead of just grinding against gravity, paying the price so that the downhill reward is that much sweeter. I’m grinding up that street against gravity, and “pop” I felt it again. But no paid, I keep riding. Then another Gen-Z rider (though an amateur, not a pro like “Ryan” starts pushing his way up the street, and a bunch of the neighborhood schoolkids are assembling to actually see how a genuine, certified, professional downhiller bombs a hill on a modified nickle board with some remarkably large Kryptonics and the a level of skill only obtainable of most of a young-adult’s lifetime spent playing every college scholarship sport his parents could throw at him, mastering every fucking one of them, and still coming back to his beloved downhill board at the end of the day. He’s that good.

I figure he’s protected by the neighborhood kids now against a possible jealous Boomer glare. So I head home, but then … what the fuck, why do I suddenly feel a dull ache in my side? I ignore it. I get home, crack a Natural Ice. So cold, after riding a Natty Ice is the tendril of faith. I didn’t grow up in a time when a skateboarder could drink a Natty after riding. We drank Moosehead. Moosehead was a somewhat expensive beer that seemed to universally taste like fermented dung to every teenager on the planet. But back then, if we were willing to spring an extra few bucks for the better quality beer, we usually circumvent the liquor store’s alcohol restrictions. IT took us a few years to understand why, all we knew is that if we tried to buy 3.2 at the supermarket, we would be carded. If we tried to buy alcohol at the liquor store we would be carded. If we tried to buy Pabst or any other cheapish 3.2-style beer at the liquor store we would be carded. But when we bought Moosehead, there was a good chance that we wouldn’t be carded. So there was no Natty for us back in the day, we choked down Moosehead, and told ourselves that it must be delicious if we paid so much for it. The after-ride beers were never truly happy, the skunkiness took away some of the pleasure. But now, I can drink a tasty, inexpensive brew and wonder why in the fuck that dull ache is now spreading over my entire torso. Shit, I forgot to check the mail when I was down there, I’ll ride the board down, oh fuck, I better walk down there. Neighbors generally ignoring the social distance, people are happy, children are happy, it’s a good day. Every breath, a jabbing pain. This isn’t from riding, this feels like pneumonia. This feels like … this feels like Coronavirus!

By the time I was back up to the house, each deep breath was agony. If I could keep the pain to a dull ache if I just moved very slowly and kept my breathing as shallow as possible. It got worse. A migraine kicked in, and I’m looking at stars and phonemes, my brain pulsed in my skull, I had to lay down. I remember some time moving past me, I kept shoving tequila down my throat to manage the pain, but the pain kept me sober unfortunately. I gave my kids my goodbyes, all three of them were home. Daddy’s going to die of Coronavirus now, goodbye. I remember moving through another couple of hours, it felt like a fat opera singer had used a shrinking ray to sneak inside of my body and then used her enlarging ray to reobtain her full size inside of me. And this blessed performer was now Screeching some kind of Weasel in some foreign tongue preferred by opera singers. It reminded me of the time I accidentally burned my hand with a quart of boiling water from an electric kettle in a boarding house in Glasgow. Only this time the alternation between dull ache and sharp agony wasn’t restricted to the back of my hand, but rather it filled me up. Back in Glasgow, I figured that if I drank enough, I would eventually pass out and wake up to a better world, one where my hand no longer attacked me with such pleasure. But this time, I figured that if I drank enough, I would eventually pass out and wake up to a better world where Mother Nature herself had dispatched me to a merciful heaven with the only reward being that there is no Coronavirus to force a gentleman to drink himself to a Coronavirus-free heaven. (The rest of the heaven would be nothing more than an empty office building, on an empty street, or essentially exactly like Hell, except that in Hell a gentleman is forced to drink himself to a Coranavirus-free heaven.)

The alcohol wasn’t working, the infection had obviously altered my molecular make-up to the point that it was able to neutralize the effects of Mexican Silver Tequila. Either that, or I kept passing out, and I didn’t realize that hours had passed in this oblivion.

I called my sister. She’s a doctor, the kind with actual training, not the kind like me that for some reason receives his designation through knowing how to compute the necessary time between energy transfer in a field of below-ground state transitions. I give her my goodbyes from this world, I hint that it’s all her fault, because that’s what little brothers do. She looks for ways to cure my Coronavirus over the phone. And then she waits for me to calm the fuck down, and she asks me, “have you done anything today with any kind of twisting motion?” Uh … I grinded up a hill with a world-champion downhiller.

“Do you have a heating pad there, it sounds like you might have pulled something.”

I’ve been riding my whole life, far harder, far higher, far faster than today. It feels like Coronavirus. But I find a heating pad, set it on high, lay on top. Heating pad then did for me what no relationship had ever down for me. She brought me peace, relief, love, delivered me from that agony. Suddenly I felt well enough that I could drag myself to the WC and piss out an ocean of tequila and half a can of Natty Ice. I painfully pulled my way back into the bed, on top of The Most Blessed and Sacred Heating Pad. She had a timer, and she would automatically shut off after 90 minutes. I would would be jolted out of my sleep about four minutes after that with my body suddenly reobtaining the memory of a pain like no other. Then I hit the blessed nuclear switch, the one that re-powered the heating pad, put her on high, drift off to another 94 minutes of respite.

This continued for about 20 hours.Or maybe 44 hours, I’m not sure which. There was definitely another piss trip to the WC in there. And then I was healed. It still hurt, but I could move through life. It was apparently some bizarre muscular spasm that coincidentally occurred in the heart of my downtown nervous system central,.

I walk into my son’s room. He’s playing Fortnite. “Daddy’s still alive.” He turns to look at me, this little fellow for whom I’ve structured a third of my life, and suddenly that face of a tiny football player looks at me, I get an instant flashback of what it must have looked like to see him land on my back while doing that pushup. Cannonball + Riding like I’m a Z instead of an X = whatever the hell that was.

I explained the whole thing to him. “You got the new Coronavirus, dad.” Yeah, and that little punk gave it to me.

“I had a dream that I dug through my backpack to find a cigarette, and then I put it behind my ear for later. When I woke up, I really could have gone for a for a smoke, and there was a cigarette behind my ear. If that doesn’t prove the existence of extra-terrestrials, then nothing will.” – Rick Yukon, as spoken to the towel-attendant of the Quick-Happy Gym & Video Arcade, after being released from interrogation for the United Crushing superglue incident.