I have no births anymore on the page. All that was motherly in pen erased by overuse. I ran out of things of my own to say. All of it having been satirized, deemed insufficient by those as ridiculable and insufficient, but most of all by myself, my very own internal Mr. Darcy, and I had lost the crux of the matter. 

The crux of the matter was this: my father was our richest living treasure in this moment, though it seemed he could not always remember that, much more than the rest of us in our family.

My father had a seed of logic in him that would however not be erased. He could watch the news all day and be obsessed with the rest of them, and yet it only took one small scrawled sign on the side of the road, written in a childish hand by someone completely unknown to me, seen when on a walk, watching over a skateboarding child or two of my own, not far behind him… and my recounting it to him later, cosy and warm again at his place, for him to laugh, when I brought out one of his old books from the basement stacks, when he’d asked, and perhaps, perhaps remembered then that all was okay. That there was balance, even in face of the “no good gnus” and the old electric acid tests, for at least one second, for at least one moment. 

“Don’t Drink the Plandemic Koolaid,” the handmade sign had said. 

I’d wanted to take a picture, but I didn’t carry my phone around, if I was with family, most days. I’d had to take it in my head. 

Not everyone was thrilled to be relieved of social and family obligations, not everyone was sold on melding with machines, not everyone was relieved to justify serving the monopolists of online shopping and pharmaceuticals and streaming TV, not everyone felt like a rebel for the cause while hiding behind an anarchy mask, not everyone was glad to have an excuse to remain in the “safety” of total introversion, with the occasional meeting via screens. 

Not everyone wanted to die on Mars.

But still we followed like sheep…