Category: random

My Cousin Elmo says, “Soon we’ll have the COVID-19 Manero variant. It will give you a fever only on Saturday nights.”

The second-longest corridor in the VA hospital led to the mental health clinic. For Tom, it had always felt like a walk of shame.

This time he stopped dead in his tracks as he came around the corner. On his right was a long line of black and white photographs of happy, smiling female veterans. Tom read the words embossed on the first picture.

“I am not invisible,” the words read. They all read the same.

Tom stepped back from the wall and looked up and down the hall. There was no one was around.

Tom suddenly felt perfectly invisible.

A friend of mine, Valery Lyman, is on assignment and shared some prose that moved me to write a haiku and create this haibun.

the traveling nurse
must smoke, drink, tell bad jokes
no mask is required

this hotel is full of traveling nurses. they drink heavily at night and smoke cigarettes. ever so human in the morning. we’re all in a little lifeboat. such good company, i’ve never lived with so many hotel dwellers.

The red sandstone rested nowhere near a hillside or rocks of the same material. Sam picked it up and looked it over.

The surface had a petroglyph of the humped back flute player, Kokopelli, in black and not the usual dark red pigment. Sam slipped it in his pack.

Once home, he placed it on his front porch. Shortly after midnight, Sam awoke to the sound of distant music.

He stepped out onto his front porch to listen. An unfamiliar blackness overcame him.

Once conscious, Sam found himself pressed into the stone and the flute player dancing around a fire.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Don’t let anyone take your temperature by pointing that thing at your forehead. It erases your memory. I went to the grocery store for beer and came home with tampons.”

My Cousin Elmo says, “Can a person get drunk on Fire Ball? Asking for a friend.”

U.S. citizens left behind in Afghanistan, so let’s hold a press conference on why we need a COVID-19 booster shot.

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” — Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia and Confession of Nat Turner.

James Froude, an English historian, and novelist gave a different twist: “Toleration is a good thing in its place, but you cannot tolerate what will not tolerate you and is trying to cut your throat.”

Either way, if you want to get the COVID-19 vaccine, that is your business. The same goes for masks.

Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Since I’ve no family on Mars, been unable to befriend anyone, and bored inside my isolation chamber, I have begun writing.

A week into isolation and a week to go. It solves two things, the return of “space sickness,” this time akin to getting one’s balance back after being at sea for too long. The other is to keep any bacteria or virus from spreading to the rest of the colony.

The word “colony” sounds so quaint and old-fashioned. But don’t be fooled — I am told this colony is anything but quaint. However, it is old-fashioned in the sense that it is like a roaring 1800s boomtown.

Before I forget, I am using paper created here, on Mars, from a ponic process that takes plant material and pulps and presses it to form. It is a grayish-brown, rougher, and slightly thicker than the 20lbs stock I have been used to writing on.

As for a writing instrument, it is a remarkable invention. It is solid like pencil lead but flows like ink and housed a synthetic composite material that is refillable.

It took me less than two hours to pack everything I owned and have it at the Express Depot for a flight that was leaving three days ahead of mine. I was able to watch as the rocket lifted into space and disappeared.

It did not enter my mind to be concerned for myself until I strapped into a hard-framed seat and the rumble of the engine beneath me. My stomach turned, and my vision blurred as the ship lifted away from the pad.

I thought that we were all going to die.

My journey was only beginning, but already I wished for the three months it would take to be over. I cannot imagine how anyone could keep from going mad when such travel took over 200 days to complete.

Fortunately, I had found an inexpensive way to travel, a working-class vessel. It was a frigate where I would earn my passage as assistant to the medical doctor.

Illness quickly gripped me. Called “space sickness,” it is a loss of gravity, motion sickness, and a lack of navigational bearing brought on by not seeing sky, land, or water.

A new medicine patch every day and constant hydration helped me battle through it. But it took near two weeks before I was over the symptoms enough to leave my berth.

Four thousand people or more gathered for events in Nevada must prove they have received their COVID-19 vaccinations, to avoid mask mandates.

“This is cutting edge,” Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak said. “There [are] no other venues in the country that are doing this. I think it is going to get people, more people, wanting to go to an event because they know that when they walk in that arena or that stadium, everybody is vaccinated.”

No, Mr. Governor, this is not cutting edge — it is still Communism as in, “Let me see your papers.” And it fails every time instituted.