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The number of days it took the Unites States to add one million cases of coronavirus to its total - 99 for the first million, 43 for the second, 28 for the third million, the fruits of heedlessly 're-opening'.
He stared at the numbers. 99-43-28. Not a football play. Not the combination of a safe. It was exponential, viral spread of the disease. And he understood that this is what viral' means, and that they could reasonably expect another million to accrue in the next two weeks or so.
The long-standing slogan of Portland, Oregon, at present ground zero in the new world of American Fascism.
"Be careful what you wish for", he thought, passing the downtown mural that said 'Keep Portland Weird'. Hours earlier, he had been grabbed by heavily-armed, camo-clad paramilitary, thrown into an unmarked van, blindfolded, sped away, dragged into a building, interrogated, and much later dumped back on the street. Portland was getting weird in ways that no one could have imagined.
Involuntary isolation for people not intelligent enough to protect their own and others' well-being.
He'd ignored every warning, had gone to the packed bar, the beach and the barber, was coughing and feverish, and now found himself in mandatory morontine.
The intelligence to keep your orifices - nostrils and mouth - covered during a pandemic. Those who deny that Covid exists may refer to it as scoffingly as OI as they wheeze their final breath.
Dismissing Orificial Intelligence, she was, for some reason, on a ventilator. "I mean, Marjorie ain't on no damn ventilator and she wears a mask. Around her neck. And she got real intelligence."
The intelligence to keep your orifices - nostrils and mouth - covered during a pandemic. Those who deny that Covid exists may refer to it scoffingly as OI as they wheeze their final breath.
Dismissing Orificial Intelligence, she was, for some reason, on a ventilator. "I mean, Marjorie ain't on no damn ventilator and she wears a mask. Around her neck. And she got real intelligence."
A story of compound misfortunes so unlikely that the listener responds with terminal skepticism.
He listened respectfully at first, filled with compassion, tears forming in his eyes as she narrated having been abandoned as an infant, left in a dumpster high in the Sierra-Nevadas, rescued by dumpster-diving circus riders who put her, untethered, on the back of a jumping stallion every night till she was sixteen. Years later, escaping one night off the coast of San Diego she waded into the ocean, hoping to end it all, only to be netted by Tijuana shrimp fishermen who forced her to peel shrimp for years in a rickety boat, the best life she's ever known, before falling overboard in a hurricane and washing ashore in San Francisco at the precise moment an 7.4 earthquake hit. How she got to the Greyhound station in Sparks she was still unclear, and could he spare a hundred bucks to help her find her rightful family, whom, she believed, might at this moment be remorsefully searching for her on the outskirts of Death Valley. By now dry-eyed and stone-hearted, he reached into his wallet for a five, which he slipped into the outer pocket of her spangled handbag and, not looking back, hopped quickly onto his bus while she prattled on with her Tale of Whoa!
A deal with the Devil, made by many Americans feeling deprived of their 'freedom', to mingle in public in the midst of a pandemic.
She'd been starved for fun, locked up at home. Knowing it was weighing Faust or Famine, she was going to the beach.