In 2022: An unholy devastation of bad books. The usual relentless glut of glowing rectangles and the cosmic agitations that power them. A fair amount of detoxing, deconditioning, decluttering, decaying. The merest dewdrop of travel. We both get covid at last and recover uninterestingly. We both get new glasses and thus new faces. Weather and seasons. Equinoxes and solstices. Compassion and forgiveness. Smile and nod.

In 2021: I receive with gratitude my first three covid vaccinations and enjoy with equanimity my first two-and-a-half post-shot side-effect hangovers and am happy to join all of you in finding the whole secretly-injected nanotech government mind-control system to be surprisingly pleasant so far. I pass a great convulsion of airport-dungeon PCR tests administered by magical luminous health-care apparitions who peer with either kindly detachment or grim suspicion at me through their winged-and-haloed biohazard suits’ visors as they introduce the nasal swab of judgment up into the very nucleus of my soul. I observe the twenty-fifth anniversary of my twentieth birthday as well as the twentieth anniversary of my twenty-fifth birthday and this mysterious simultaneity induces all the stars in the night sky and all the suns in the day sky to align and spell out a helpful reminder that the supposed passage of time is nothing but a fever-dream sandwich on fairy-tale toast. I eat, I age, I sleep, I scroll, I learn, I lose, I read, I rot!

Hello again from a brand new end of May but the same old familiar end of time. It’s just about fifteen years ago, back in early June 2006, that I have my brief and uncanny meeting with the oracular old crone who comes up to me on the street and asks What cemetery are you from? — a question that even after all this time I still cannot answer. (It is of course possible that the woman’s question is not a question at all but rather a devastating insult. Perhaps in clairvoyant retaliation for my future self’s describing her as an oracular old crone.) This memory is back in my mind lately because earlier this month I get my first covid shot, at a clinic held in a dreamlike indoor pseudo-park of artificial trees and babbling water features and miniature trains in miniature landscapes, and on my way out I’m issued a bilingual Ontario Ministry of Health/Ministère de la Santé receipt whose French term for vaccination clinic is: la séance de vaccination. Might I be dead?