Fear and Loathing in Coronaville Volume 1: Dispatches From a Terrified Heartland

Being a certifiable agoraphobic basket case, you would think someone like me would be almost preternaturally suited for the stone blind isolation of fever fucked pandamania. And you would be completely fucking wrong. I spent six years in self imposed isolation as a twenty-something shut in. I spent another six desperately clawing my way out of that hole and slowly building what has only just begun to resemble a life, and in less than six days, covid-19 has torn this intricately constructed matrix of groups, volunteer jobs and therapy down to the ground and reduced me to the shambled debris of ground zero. I'm a little bit pissed, but mostly I'm just fucking scared. If I'm going to write about something like this, I'm going to write about it with the naked ferocity that defines my writing. A strange, vaguely haunted cobweb of Gonzo muckraking and navel gazing confessionals that I've come to refer to as Emo-Gonzo. I am the genderfucked bastard bitch of Hunter Thompson and Sylvia Plath, humped together in the dizzy oven of some bored press junket cafeteria, and today, this is my story. George Romero eat your heart out.

Blasting out of the toxic armpit of Chinese sweatshop country like a fart from hell, this strange toxic beast called coronavirus has violently rampaged across the globe with an evil ferocity that makes Godzilla look like Gumby. It has crippled virtually every continent on the planet and reduced places as far-flung as Tuscany and Ohio to scenes straight out of an Edvard Munch painting. No one appears to be safe. Even in my quietly suburban spider hole in central Pennsylvanian Amish country, this fucker is circling, taking county by county, waiting to pounce. I may be only thirty-one years young, but me and my mother have both suffered from the ravages of a much less publicized plague called chronic Lyme disease for just over half my life. This means that I'm among the few lucky millennials who could actually fucking die from this thing. So I don't have the luxury of taking chances with the very real possibility that this monster is just another tabloid gagoo of a news cycle that feeds on panic. I have to take these fuckers at their word because my life quite literally depends on it, and I have far too many normies left to upset to drop dead now.

The only thing I can be absolutely certain of is that this coronavirus pandemic is a plague designed by globalism. It's existence, at least in current form, would be unthinkable without this colossal multinational architecture designed by the Faustian marriage of world government and crony capitalism to allow profit at the speed of light from one piss-reeking sweatshop to another. This manufactured "free market" is anything but. It is a Byzantine-esque empire, so colossal that only the super-rich and their bureaucratic counterparts in the halls of power can possibly afford to traverse it. It's the ultimate colonialist hoax. World domination cleverly disguised as a border evaporating, Kumbaya baying, global village love-in. And now it is literally making us sick. Truth be told, there is nothing particularly novel about the novel coronavirus. This pandemic is just the latest symptom of that plague most epic called progress. Other symptoms may include climate change, global terrorism, forever wars, and naturally, the loss of liberty.

That is the other, quite possibly greater, threat posed by this capitalist plague. Across the globe, desperate measures are being undertaken by heavy-handed governments empowered by fear. Entire cottage industries are being shut down, populations quarantined and streets emptied of all life not wrapped in a NATO tank, as traumatized sheep gleefully applaud them from the open windows of their domestic prison cells. We must remember that, in times like these more than any other, fascism is the panic button plutocracies hammer when they begin to loose control. This virus is the invention of massive factories, goosestepping armies and carefully coordinated global finance. We would be fatally foolish upon the brink of insanity to believe that these very toxic institutions could save us from the hell they created, even if they wanted to.

After 9/11, another cataclysmic ritual made possible by the perversions of globalism, our Constitution was rendered  largely symbolic by the man-eating wood-chipper known as the Patriot Act. All acts of tyranny were made virtually legal if they met the vague standards of a "national security threat." The only thing that kept the Bush Junta (and the Obama one) from flipping the switch to full-tilt Luftwaffen uber alles was the specter of one more Reichstag Fire. I look out my window and see nothing but smoke as far as the eye can see. Black plumes drifting from every village across the farmlands. We live in very dangerous times indeed. Perhaps in 2020, it only follows that Anne Frank would be a thirty-something genderqueer trans-woman living with her parents, with a blog instead of a diary.

The only thing I have left to ask is, are you scared yet? Good. Welcome to my world. It's a weird fucking place but someone has to live there. Stay tuned, dearest motherfuckers. Something haunting tells me this wont be the last melodramatic dispatch from Coronaville. In Kali's name we pray, amen.



Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs to hyperventilate too.

*  Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones
*  Nausea by Beck
*  Touch Me I'm Sick by Mudhoney
*  Shut-In by Strand of Oaks
*  School by Nirvana
*  The National Anthem by Radiohead
*  Asshole & Gretel by Babes In Toyland
*  Eighties by Killing Joke
*  All Tomorrows Parties by the Velvet Underground
*  I've Been Tired by the Pixies