Off-Roading With Covid-19

Have we veered somewhere magical and formless?

A picture of a black hole that I identify with

Good morning and Merry Christmas.

As someone interested in how ideologies spread and morph throughout media and culture, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a damn near treasure trove of fascinating dynamics.

I first realized this at the way beginning of the pandemic. I noticed how everyone was at different levels of concern and therefore different levels of proactiveness. Those who were high risk donned masks first. They were followed by those who dabble with hypochondria and germaphobia, and then the general public followed. Then it was anyone still holding out but who happened to know someone personally who got very sick. Finally, some Republicans started wearing masks.

It really felt like everyone was on a different timeline of realization, different levels of denial, different levels of acceptance, different levels of anxiety. It stills feels this way, but it was very stark at the beginning.

I’m going to do two things in this post. First, I’ll just rapid-fire review all the dumb shit I have heard anti-vaxxers say; their greatest hits. There were so many dumb milestones and climaxes in America’s journey with Covid and I’m honestly kind of nostalgic about it. Second, you’ll watch as I transform into the present-day Joshua who feels like a more than insignificant percentage of the anti-vaxxer and plandemic claims were kind of true. Notwithstanding the mental health of the people espousing these claims, it turns out they were partially right: I was acting like a sheeple. I have woken up now, but unfortunately for them, I have not woken up to be one of them. I have woken up feeling like no one at all.

Okay, Part 1:

Dumb Things I Can’t Believe I Even Spent 1 Calorie Thinking About Over the Past Year.

Before Covid, I think everyone would have agreed that surgeons should wear masks when doing surgery to prevent the spread of germs. Suddenly, Covid hits and there is all this “evidence” that “masks do nothing.” I watched numerous well-meaning humans argue that quite literally strapping a cloth over your mouth does not stop your spit from coming out of your mouth. I know life is truly a tragic comedy because I’m alive during a time when people need to actually be convinced that covering your mouth stops shit from coming out of it.

“Comorbidities mean that Covid doesn’t really kill.” People were arguing that there was a conspiracy to put Covid on death certificates even if someone died a different way—to inflate the numbers. This one was great because it was one of the many signs that science education in the US is paltry. Nearly every death has comorbidity except car crashes. When you die of cardiac arrest after doing fifteen lines of cocaine, your cause of death is a heart attack but the co-morbidity is cocaine overdose. Would it be wrong to say cocaine killed you? No. Similarly, if you have a lung problem and then get Covid and it kills you, just because there is comorbidity doesn’t mean that Covid didn’t kill you.

“Covid caused 5G” or vice versa, or they work together to turn you into an antenna, or whatever. I dunno. I can barely touch this one it’s so dumb, but for funsies here is a news article from just a few days ago from a popular “alternative” news site still pushing this hilarity.

Finally, “Blah blah blah, Bill Gates is behind this.” You nimrods, Bill Gates is the largest purchaser of vaccines in the world, not producer.

I’m honestly feeling myself get dumber just rebutting these but I’m sure I missed some. If you want to join the nostalgia party, leave your favorite Covid conspiracy in the comments.

Okay, Part 2:

Now for the Big Flipperoni.

And then, after me and many of my friends spent the better part of two years thinking that anti-vaxxers were complete bullshit idiot wastes of time who couldn’t think their way out of a grocery bag, something bizarre happened: some of their most vehement claims started to seem kind of true.

Suddenly Covid started to feel a bit more like the flu. Suddenly it actually felt like Covid was being used as an excuse to control people and create more of a surveillance state. Suddenly it seemed totally plausible that Covid leaked out of a lab in Wuhan and that Fauci wasn’t being forthright. And so I’ve landed in this weird world where anti-vaxxers are actually standing up for important truths, and the royal we really are seeming sheeple-like.

Is Covid like the flu? No, but for me, a healthy 30 something-year-old, it probably would have been like the flu. Now that I’m vaxxed, it will be like the flu. Will it suck and maybe have long terms effects on me? Maybe. Does that fact make me want to change the way I live my life? Not really. I’m going to get it eventually, I’d rather get it over with. And if it happens at a dinner party or during a yoga class, okay then, at least I was living life. For those lucky anti-vax anti-mask anti-quarantiners who were lucky enough to survive this far and not change the way they live their lives, well fuck, they kind of won.

Is Covid being used to create a surveillance state? I don’t know, but if history is any insight: probably. Whether or not you believe 9/11 was an inside job, we all watched as it was used as an excuse to create a massive citizen surveillance apparatus. Considering similar corporations and government organizations probably saw an Overton window during the pandemic, it’s not out of the question. All I know is I was not allowed to seek refuge from the rain with my toddler at a cafe in Los Angeles because I left my ID at home and they wouldn’t accept my vaccination card without it. That made me reconsider what the Plandemic people had been guffawing about. Now that I might be required to get the 3rd dose, it’s especially feeling weird. I’m all for protecting my fellow citizens by wearing a mask, isolating, and getting a shot, but honestly, that’s about it. I wish we could all agree on where the line in the sand is so we know when we have crossed it because standing in the rain with my crying son kind of felt like a line had been crossed. The same probably goes for people who weren’t able to see and touch their dying relatives even with safety precautions, or those who weren’t able to be beside their birthing partners.¹

Finally, did Covid come from a lab in Wuhan? It’s now confirmed they were studying Coronaviruses in Wuhan. Much like the Anthrax attacks of 2001 were from a guy simply taking some powder home from the lab and mailing it around the country, it’s not absurd to think something similar happened by accident or on purpose at Wuhan. And since the US funds part of the lab (Obama create the overall fund, Trump approved the $700k to the lab), there is a clear reason for the US and China to really suppress that story to the best of their abilities. They did the same with Anthrax, Dr. Fauci was involved then too. It’s not like pedophile-ring-pizza-kabal status, but it could certainly be called a Confederacy of Dunces.

The Idiocy is Transparent and Ubiquitous

Do you ever get the feeling nobody knows what they are doing? I was partly inspired to write this post because of this photo I saw on my favorite apocalyptic news source, Fox News:

This is the courthouse where our country’s most recent school shooter will be tried. Note the plexiglass dividers at the defendant’s table, in front of the judge, and at the clerk’s booth. Did anyone think, for even a fucking millisecond, about how spit and air actually move around a room? If I stand at the defendant’s table and spray Febreeze for ten minutes, do you think there is a chance other people in the room will smell it?

For me, the plexiglass divider has been the single most ubiquitous sign of idiocy throughout this whole pandemic, and the fact that it continues to be utilized—even though it’s too stupid to even study scientifically—baffles the mind. Don’t forget its idiotic cousin: the face shield. The fact that it is being used in courthouses—where we are taught to believe reason and justice thrive—really calls the whole charade of our civilization into question.

It is Hygiene Theater in the way the TSA is Security Theater. To call it a charade is not even a metaphor, it is an actual charade. You know it, I know it, the judge behind the plexiglass knows it. We are living in a fever dream of government bureaucrats and their counterparts at large corporations.

Okay, enough reminiscing. What’s my point?

My point is, nobody knows what they are doing, and they definitely don’t know why they are doing what they are doing. Thoughts I had vehemently just a few months ago have flitted up into thin air and I find myself agreeing, in part, with people I considered lost causes, and still do consider them lost causes. Does that make me a lost cause? I don’t think so. I don’t know. I used to think we were all on the road together but Covid has really made me realize we are probably, as a people, officially off-roading.

It turns out that the ones for me are the ambiguous ones, the ones who don’t identify with their lives or their words or personalities, the ones who don’t long to be saved or be correct, the ones who desire everything and nothing at the same time, the ones who are always yawning and saying commonplace things, the ones who are doing nothing in particular and just sputtering around this existence as if they are telling a joke during a eulogy, unsure and uncaring about what they say like unadulterated children who implode into themselves like inward avalanches until they are black holes of what they once were and everyone is watching and staring at the dark, dark darkness at the center of it all and then it becomes even darker and everyone just goes 🤔.

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A picture of my son:

A picture of my breakfast.

1. On a side note, lots of the idiocy around Covid is discomfort with death. What would the world look like if we just accepted that this thing happened on Earth and the same people were going to die at its hands (spikes) no matter what we do? What if we stopped “fighting it.” We’d probably spend more time grieving the deaths as a community, we’d probably question the way we spend our lives, envision a better future, question the way our economy works, and question our relationship with health. Many of us have been doing this, but I’m not confident it has been in meaningful enough numbers to make a dent in the Matrix.