Nothing appeared out of the ordinary when Ricky got out of bed. He showered, dressed, had a piece of toast and cup of coffee before heading to work.

It was while walking from the parking lot to the employee entrance that he sensed something about himself had changed. He quickly looked at his hands and arms, which were fine.

It was the lack of feet and his quickly fading legs that brought him panic. He could actually see his thighs disappearing and his hips begin to fade.

By the time he reached the door handle, only his fingertips remained.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Praise is simply raising ‘pee’ to a whole new level.”

The Confederate Captain stood at the base of the steps, enjoying his smoke, the winter-afternoon feeling more like a springtime morning. He was waiting.

He paced back and forth, small quick steps, as his bride came out onto the veranda. Stately and perfect in every aspect, he offered his hand to help her down the steps, looking more out of 1861 than 2021.

Once again, side-by-side, they stood patiently as a woman, a tourist, paused with her manual Canon camera for that better puff of smoke to come from his Swisher Sweet cigar. ‘Click’ sounded the antique camera and the woman smiled, content that she’d captured the perfect frame.

“I didn’t think she’d ever take the picture,” he complained.

His wife smiled, “Why?”

“I gotta go pee, in the worst way,” he answered.

“All the way in the back, last door on the left,” she said, as he hurried up the steps.

During the first two pandemics only clothe and paper masks were employed against the virus. But after the third, the central government issued a state-of-the-art mask that covered one’s entire head in a bubble.

It came with a built-in re-breather, an adapter to watch Internet-streams, interact on social media, text and it was lightweight and wouldn’t fog up.

“Kinda reminds me of the helmet Mr. Freeze, from the old Batman cartoon series, used to wear,” my six-year-old brother said one afternoon.

He spent five-weeks in ‘Reeducation’ for the disparaging remark and I was glad that I hadn’t laughed.

She was a bitter old woman, but Jimmy did his best to be nice to Granny Turner because she was one of the last of her kind on the block.

“Let them eat cake,” she’d say to anything she found disagreeable.

Jimmy didn’t understand what she meant, he simply knew she was upset again and it was always again. Then he witnessed her in the back ally of the complex feeding a Monster a large German Chocolate cake, an act that was forbidden.

Two days later, Granny Turner was forced to keep her appointment, like the perfect citizen she wasn’t.

We were separated by at least 10 feet as I try never to get in the way of the operator. I was at the backside of the fighting hole.

His selected rate of fire was ‘three-at-a-time.’ His part of the mission was to force the enemy to take cover.

This grunt suddenly stopped firing, rose up, and turned sharply as if to run. The look on his face said, “Too fucking late!”

He was there — until he wasn’t there. I woke up with one hell of a headache and nothing more than a concussion, his body having absorbed the blast.

“Mr. Rutledge,” the concierge called, “I have a package for you.”

“Thank you,” Rutledge said, quickly opening the box, “Dropped my device in the toilet last night and had to get them to send me another one.”

“I see,” the man behind the desk said as he lifted his left arm to check the time.

“Wow!” Rutledge said, “Haven’t seen one of those in ages.”

The concierge replied, “Was my fathers. They don’t make them anymore.”

In the elevator, Rutledge smiled, suddenly aware that he missed having a real conversation. He then looked at the device in his hand.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Nancy Pelosi hides the odor of alcohol on her breath with impeachments.”

“Don’t buy those Monsters food,” the store manager yelled, “You’ll only encourage them.”

John did it anyway. Monsters or not, he decided, no one should go hungry.

Over time, though they looked like nothing he’d ever seen before, he came to understand their stoic ways. This he learned, was why polite society called them ‘Monsters,’ as they didn’t show emotion and rarely spoke a word.

Then it happened, polite society fell apart and what had been commonplace and taken for granted, was lost. But  John found himself accepted, while others, like the manager, were left to fend for themselves.

After the Nevada State Primary Election in June 2020, a Special Session of the State Legislature was called by Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak to change the state’s voting procedures. Assembly Bill 4 (AB4) is a measure modifying election procedures during periods of declared emergency as currently exists due to COVID-19.

“It is important to point out here that much of what the Democrats did was legal; but some of what they did at times also bent, and arguably sometimes broke, the rules or the law,” Peter Navarro wrote in ‘Art of the Steal.’

AB4 passed along party lines in both the Assembly and Senate, with all Republicans voting against it.

Sisolak then bypassed the Legislature to issue rule changes for the counting of ballots. Additionally, Sisolak created rules that expanded absentee and mail-in ballots while reducing scrutiny of such ballots, a contradiction of State Election Codes.

Prior to this, ‘Democracy Docket,’ founded by Marc Elias, former General Counsel to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, intervened in Nevada court cases to push election law changes consistent with the Democrat Party’s Grand Strategy. Case in point: Elias and Democracy Docket supplied lawyers as ‘Intervener Defendants’ and filed motions to intercede in the ‘Election Integrity Project of Nevada v. Nevada’ case.

Elias is also the person who hired Fusion GPS to “compile the ‘Russia dossier,’” on then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The Democratic Party also used a public referendum to change election laws in Nevada. This referendum was financed in part by George Soros.

Shortly after the 2016 election, organizations such as iVote and the ACLU of Nevada, both with ties to Soros, spent tens of millions of dollars in Nevada collecting 55,000 signatures to submit a petition for ‘automatic voter registration’ law changes in Nevada. The legislation passed in 2018.

It mandated that individuals be automatically registered to vote when receiving services from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, such as obtaining a renewal or change of address for a license or identification card. In order to not be registered to vote, individuals would have to decline the registration by submitting a request in writing.

In April 2015, Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske called out the DMV for this very practice, pointing to how DMV employees were instructed to accept voter registration information from all customers and are a misinterpretation of the law, ordering the DMV to stop the practice.

“Please take appropriate corrective action, as we have reason to believe that non-citizens have unlawfully registered to vote in Nevada as a direct result of DMV’s practices, “Cegavske wrote. “The integrity of the entire election process, from voter registration to the casting of ballots, is always my number one concern.”

On Aug. 3, 2020, Sisolak signed AB4 into law, directing election officials to distribute mail-in ballots automatically to all active registered voters for the Nov. 3, 2020, General Election. This bill also gave Sisolak the authority to bypass the Secretary of State’s (SoS) office to adjust election procedures during the declared state of emergency.

Following AB4’s passage, Cegavske acknowledged in a statement, that it was her job to “enforce laws rather than make them.”

This led to roughly 15,000 mail-in or absentee ballots counted in Nevada from voters who had voted in other states. AB4 also legalized the practice of ballot harvesting which is the collecting of absentee voters’ ballots by an individual, who then is to drop them off at polling places or election offices.

Sisolak also pushed for lower voter identification standards, by relaxing signature match requirements, bringing into question hundreds of thousands of cast ballots. The new legislation also allowed voters over sixty-five and who have a disability or are unable to read or write to have someone assist them in physically marking signatures on their ballots.

These relaxed rules thereby have called into question at least some of the 400,000 ballots cast by Nevadans aged 65 and older. These ‘created rules’ also contributed to a questionable statewide absentee ballot rejection rate that dropped from 1.6 percent in 2016 to 0.58 percent in 2020.

Finally, Nevada election officials were given a ballot-curing extension for up to a week after Election Day, increasing the likelihood of fraud. If there is an issue with an absentee ballot, such as a signature-matching issue or a missing witness signature, Nevada allows the voter a chance to fix their ballot to help avoid their ballot not being counting.

But because of a newly designed envelope that automatically separated from the ballot, the envelope was often discarded during the counting process. This made it nearly impossible to ascertain which ballot came from what envelope.

Finally, the SoS’s office wrote in a ‘frequently asked questions’ memo for reporters the day following the election that voters who require a signature cure have until 5 p.m. on Nov. 12 to provide the required signature confirmation, and once that is done successfully by the deadline, the voter “will have their ballot counted.”

So far, no figure on the number of ballots not counted has been issued by the SoS’s office. The office has also stated that there has been ‘no widespread voter fraud’ found in Nevada.

“A single complaint or single investigation may include multiple allegations of fraud or multiple suspects. A focus simply on the number of complaints received or active investigations runs the risk of masking the true scope of a complaint or investigation,” a statement from the secretary of state’s office read. “Many voter fraud complaints lack any evidence and are more complaints about process or policy.”