Covid 19 – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Fear Stalks the Woods

Red deer in Richmond Park, London. — **Richmond Park, London… Central Park, eat your heart out!**

London has many wonderful parks; some so large they are home to herds of cattle and deer! The parks in my ‘hood were royal hunting grounds in medieval London and are still surprisingly woodsy. For many years, I’ve used them for occasional long walks but, during lockdown, I’ve made them my daily haunts.

English medieval hunting tapestry. — **My ‘hood in days of olde.**

“Haunts” is the perfect word because, as the lockdown continues and my boredom and anxiety deepen, I am not so much walking as haunting the same well-trodden paths day after day. And, I encounter familiar masked faces doing the same. We are so many woodland ghosts sharing glances of grim determination and forced friendliness as we carefully pass each other. Actually, I let them carefully pass me. I plow ahead as in normal times – refusing to make flamboyant gestures of “giving way” or to take drastic action to avoid breaking the two-meter social-distancing rule.

Plague doctor with scythe. — I shudder as my fellow citizens scurry into thick brambles
to avoid coming anywhere near me.

The Grim Reaper over a skeleton. — **I shudder as parents grab their children out of the path of the approaching leper – me!**

Plague doctor with beaked mask. — I shudder as women grab their dogs into their arms
lest the animal approach the gloveless scofflaw.

Illustration: The Masque of the Red Death — I shudder as masked and gloved couples hide behind a tree
until the crazy, maskless man passes.

Clayton Moore as The Land Ranger. — **Who *was* that *maskless* man?**

It’s the terror in their eyes that makes me shudder and makes me furious. They are my enemies – members of the 84% of the British public that want this insane lockdown to continue.

George Carlin quote on stupid people in groups.

Of course, there are many in that number easily dismissed as low I.Q. slugs quite happy to lay about with the state bracing them up. (Uh… better make that the taxpayer doing the bracing-up.) And, hey, there might be some otherwise intelligent folk in the 84% who are enjoying the forced curtailment of their liberty. (Maybe they hated going into the office. Or, love playing with their kids.)

But, I can see in the eyes of my fellow woodland ghosts that they are just gutless wonders who fear. Fear the state. Fear their neighbors. Fear the future. Fear death. Fear life.

They are the obedient wage slaves, consumers and pawns coveted by technocratic dictators who plot our dystopian future on their desktops and slide rules.

It’s the timid couples I pass in the woods who make me angriest. I imagine their hushed, fervent pillow-talk plans to clap even louder next Thursday night for the NHS and start a collection for the rape-ugees who land daily on Britain’s beaches from the Calais jungle in France. Invariably, these couples are not only masked but masked to the max. No cheap paper masks or basic medical face coverings for them. No. They wear space-age contraptions with multiple fail-safe straps and vents. In the middle of the woods!

Vintage deep sea diver in bell hood. — **My neighbors gone A-Maying,**

I guess they missed the memo that no two “experts” can agree if masks are even worthwhile. And, the “experts” to whom they grovel have admitted that they invented the two-meter rule with no scientific backing. And, those same “experts” say that Covid-19 droplets don’t travel or live in air for as long as they had claimed. And, the virus doesn’t survive on surfaces for as long as they had warned either.

Remember all those medical horror-hype stories of Covid-19 droplets traveling 22 feet and living longer than Methuselah? Well, you can forget that. Oh, this just in, now the “experts” say that you don’t have to wipe down your groceries after all.

Dr. Ted - Head of the WHO — **I’m tellin’ ya, the virus was this big, No foolin.**

In 1961, the late, great baseball manager Casey Stengel was fired by the mighty New York Yankees and immediately hired by the lowly New York Mets. One day he looked down the Mets dugout bench and asked, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

I’d like to ask that question of all the “experts” who have clogged the airwaves and newspaper columns for months – all those fusty-musty eggheads carefully cultivating their images and soundbites as they salivate over a book deal and regular pundit spot on MSNBC.

Doctor wearing light reflector. — **Hey, who owns the media, anyway? Would they have a stake in promoting and prolonging the panic-demic? Just a thought.**

But, I’m glad to say that some genuine scientists are asking (as I have) whether the astonishingly wrong predictions made by the “experts” could have been by accident. And, if the mistakes were deliberate, what is their agenda?

Cartoon man scratching head with question marks.

Maybe they felt that to get the attention of a dumbed-down population (Dumbed-down by them) they had to push the worst-case scenario.

Maybe they felt that to get the attention of polyglot, multi-racial countries (Made so by them) they had to push the worst-case scenario.

Maybe, however disastrous the result of their strategy, they had our best interests at heart. (What was that about good intentions?)

But, how ’bout this?

Maybe this pandemic:

born in a wet market or not
created and released from a lab or not
on purpose or not
a bio-attack on China and Iran that backfired or not

is now being manipulated by the technocratic elites to their own ends.

It’s anyone’s guess what their end game is but when Warren “Billionaire” Buffett drops his airline stocks, this “anyone” suspects that restrictions on international travel will be one outcome.

And, as the UK starts testing its new Covid-19 tracking App, restrictions on domestic travel will be another outcome.

Chew on this… if you refuse to comply with the tracking App you could be denied travel, health care, pension, education, housing and every other aspect of life controlled by the “benevolent” state. Last time I checked, Big Brother can give with one hand…

Welp… this is one ghost who plans to resist all technocratic incursions into his life. But, I’ll betcha my woodland friends comply in a heartbeat. And, I expect a knock on the door after one of those not-so friendly ghosts “drops a dime” on my ass.

So, the next time you visit the woods in my ‘hood don’t be surprised if you find me hanging around.

_______________________

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder-memoir by Jack Antonio — Available as an eBook here
and as an eBook and paperback from
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk

Covid-19 THIS!

Silhouette of male skull filled with three question marks.

I’ve got some questions. You do, too. We all do.

How the fuck did we get here?
How have we allowed a pack of third-rate politicians and unelected eggheads, bureaucrats, careerists and apparatchiks take control of our world?
Our lives?
Our future?

A pile of typed question marks on textured white paper.

Who died and left them boss?

Welp… as of today 218,000 have died from Covid 19. Possibly. Maybe. We’re pretty sure. That’s our guesstimate.

Ballpark figure.

Some with. Some suspected.

But, yeah, 218K. That’s the body count.

There or thereabouts.

Now, if you ask us about diarrhea… 1.5 million die annually from that. No foolin’. 1.5 million. Annually. From diarrhea. You can take that to the bank.

As long as we’re talkin’ numbers here…

The Flu pandemic of 1918-19 killed 20 – 100 million.

More than died in WW1
More than died from the Black Death

The Flu of 1957 killed 1.1 million

The Flu of 1968 killed 1 million

In an average year the flu kills 300 – 650,000

In the 1918-19 flu pandemic the sick were quarantined. Otherwise, life went on. And, there were no lockdowns in any of these earlier pandemics. In fact, aside from this corona-panic, at no time in history have the healthy been quarantined.

Before you argue that social-distancing and lockdown have kept the Covid-19 deaths down consider that the official modellers included those mitigating factors when concocting their original vastly exaggerated infection and death rates.

Those geniuses got it so dead wrong that a suspicious person might think they did so on purpose.

Could they have been that stupid? After all, from the git-go there were modellers who got it dead right.

Large black ad white hollowed out question mark — **What’s worse? They are Incompetent or duplicitous?**

Any dispassionate observer who examined the history of the UN, WHO, CDC, NIH, NHS (or any other member of the alphabet soup of so-called public health agencies) would conclude that the inmates had taken over the asylum. Their record of wrong projections, lethal injections and spectacularly inept responses are beyond dispute and beyond belief.

Three large cartoonish question marks — **Duplicitous or doofus? You decide.**

And, yet. And, yet. They are lording it over us. Calling the shots.

And, we are allowing them to do so.

Coming soon to an economic zone near you, the motion-picture entertainment of the ages!

Pen and ink sketch of Depression Era breadline — **Cast of billions! Cost of trillions!**

“1984 meets Brave New World”

Large paranoid eye with red surround — **Featuring elements of every dystopian movie you’ve ever seen!**

Plus, you’ll thrill to the spectacular second feature –

“Big Mommy vs. the Big Bad Bugs That Might Give You a Boo-boo”

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra enters Rome.

SEE – the masses fight to be first in line for vaccine shots!
THRILL – while morons demand more government surveillance!
MARVEL – as cretins beg for chip implants!
GASP – to see suckers accept a devalued, cashless currency.

Black and white sketch of paranoid, hypnotised eyes

I feel it in my waters. You do, too. We all do. We all feel it but dare not speak it. We know what’s really going on here. But, we also know that terrible truths must be spoken aloud to be made real. We are terrified of speaking into life the horrible future we foresee.

“In the beginning was the word… and the word was made flesh.”

Meanwhile… Don’t kid yourself. There won’t be any big pushback. Oh, sure, a few horn-honking, flag-waving, Bible and constitution-clutching diehards. But, no widespread revolt.

No 1776, No Yellow Vests. No Antifa.

No alt-right. No nuthin’.

Acquiescence. That’s all there will be.

Acquiescence. Surrender. Compliance.

POLICING BY CONSENT

I wish I was wrong. I hope I am proven so. But…

Vintage WW1 poster "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?" — Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great Corona war?
Obey.

__________________

Ghosts of Covid 19

I looked across the street and there was Kirk sitting alone on a bench at a bus stop. I was surprised to see him because I had only moments before deleted him from my WhatsApp. I had deleted Kirk because he was dead.

I had spent several moments debating his deletion. It’s an act of frightening finality like scratching a dead friend from an address book or a family member from your Christmas card list. Now, I felt slightly affronted that, after causing me the upset of eliminating him from my social circle going forward, Kirk was back. Uninvited.

It was Kirk alright. Over there on the bench. Waiting for a bus. No play of the light. No doppelganger. No undigested bit of cheese. No. It was Kirk in full fleshy form. Dead but somehow alive. I considered hailing him, “Kirk, what the fuck?” But, decided that might frighten him. So, I used the nearby zebra crossing to get over to him. I checked for cars to my right but when I checked to my left, Kirk had vanished. He hadn’t boarded a bus because none had passed. The street was empty. No crowd to get lost in. No place to hide. No. Kirk had vanished.

I was sure that Kirk had died earlier that day of Covid 19. At least, that’s what they told me. Covid 19. That’s what they’d been telling everyone about anyone who had died. Covid 19. But, in Kirk’s case it made sense. He was a burly type but pushing seventy and deceptively weak inside. He’d been dealt a bad genetic hand. They turned Kirk’s respirator off on the eight day. But, I knew he was a goner when he stayed in the London hospital for more than two days.

Dead man's feet in morgue with toe tags.

English hospitals are lethally dirty places at the best of times. Kirk would have been safer in a men’s room stall in a tube station. But, Britain’s National Health Service is the state religion and otherwise intelligent folk are afraid to criticize it. They prefer to die. To take one for the team. (This misplaced stoicism is the only remnant of “stiff upper lip” still on display on this island.) The NHS manages to kill 40,000 a year with malpractice. And, that’s in normal years. How many of Britain’s Corona dead were foolishly trusting souls who fell not to the virus but to the inept ministrations of socialized medicine?

memento more of skull with wings. — **Mustn’t grumble, mate.**

The only other person I knew who died of Covid 19 was a New York actor of some note. I’d never met him. Yet, our lives were inextricably linked. Forty years ago, he inherited a girlfriend of mine who had just dumped me. He didn’t do this to hurt me. We’d never met. But, I never forgave him for poaching my quail.

Then, in a coincidence of startling cruelty, he starred in an off-Broadway play as a character that was based on me. And, he got the biggest laugh of the night with a monologue in which he recounted one of the most painful romantic disasters of my life. The play had been written by an old roommate of mine. I didn’t mind that he used my life as comic fodder. But, I never forgave the actor for playing me. And, worse, for getting such big laughs.

Pierrot stabbed daed on stage with other Commedia dell Arte characters. — **Laugh clown, laugh.**

So, when he died, I was glad. Not elated. But definitely a “gotcha” moment. It wasn’t schadenfreude – that’s the sweet pleasure one feels due to the failure and misfortunes of friends. This actor was never a friend. But, his death from Covid 19 gave me an undeniable twinge of sweet pleasure none the less. I am not completely without compassion. I hoped his death had been as painless as possible but I was glad the son of a bitch was dead. And, of course, I felt a hint of sorrow for his widow. A hint. I hadn’t thought of either of them for decades and then they burst into my life uninvited and haunted my Corona lockdown dreams.

As I sat typing this post, my cat walked between my legs as she often does, rubbing against them demanding attention and food. She’s been doing this more than ever in the lockdown. And, she’s taken to sitting on the stairs that lead up to my flat. She’s always waiting there for me when I come back from my daily sleepwalk through the local parks. And, many times during the day, I see her in her favorite spot in the back garden stretching her neck to see up to my third-floor windows and begging entrance. None of this would be unusual aside from the fact that my cat died two years ago.

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