Yes, I’m jus’ being stupid. If you expected better from me, sorry. I’m bored shitless. It’s my new motto. Bored shitless.

I’m tired of drinking water only — and all day long, jus’ to have my pee remain yellow. Also tired of my wife yelling at me, telling me to quit eating the finger paints. I already ran out of the body paints. When all the paints are gone, I’m gonna start on the Elmer’s Glue.

My wife thinks I’m acting worse than a pre-teen me. And I have to agree with her on this one.

Hell, I don’t even care how this missive is received, jus’ as long as I’m doing something besides staring at the ceiling fan. Fan — short for fanatic and not fantastic!

I’m old enough to remember being on restriction for the entire summer, locked down in my bedroom with a radio and a set of encyclopedias. I read the entire effing set and was still bored shitless out of my mind. Not only did I read, but I also wrote as well as tried to teach myself to type on an old and broken typewriter my dad salvaged from the dump one day.

So yeah, with YouTube, Netflix and Amazon Prime viewing, either exhausted or found to be wanting, I’m out of options. Because of this, I’ve returned to my childhood ways: playing outside, running in and out of the house, leaving one or more doors open and complaining that I’m bored.

Now my wife his threatening to use her only wooden spoon on my ass if I don’t straighten up. And if she does end up using it, at least it’ll be something different from our generally TV/Internet laden day and evening.

Oh, and god-damn that refrigerator of ours and it’s continuous siren-song of fat-filled humming and buzzing. When the wife isn’t looking, I intend to drive a few metal screws into the doors and permanently seal its gaping maw shut.

The little bastard in me is on the loose, so get your son-of-a-bitchin’ spoon ready, hon!

Soon everybody will be hiring again and people will be returning to work, except Colin Kaepernick.

It was the
Sword he was
To fall upon.

After all, he
Had done it
Many times before.

We expected nothing
More from him.

So when he
Lifted it up,
Leaning the sword
Against his neck,
Hanging his arms,
Resting on it,
We were not
At all surprised.

He was though,
Having no idea
How sharp that
Blade really was.

His heads rests
Far afield and
Out of sight
While his sword
In memory, hangs.

Decided to wear a mask in the house from now on. Not because of the virus, but to prevent eating.

Life had been a series of cheap, rundown hotel and motel rooms. Befitting a predator; pedophile, sex trafficker, pornographer, abuser, who never saw his own ending coming, face down, midway between the toilet and bed.

Etiolated claws reach for him, ripped labrum stretching in a rictus of evil. The thing has his aspects, twisted into the visage that truly lies beneath his own dying skin.

“Come,” the cadaveric creature whispers hoarsely.

His blackened soul yells, screams, begs, but Death ignores his pleadings as it scoops him up, carrying him towards the hideous tear in the black-and-blue bruise of sky. As it rises, obliteration enlightens him, bringing its hideous aperture close to his decaying ormer.

There’s a putrid stench caressing his front-piece, stinking of gin, bologna and cheese and cigarillos. The breath of his own death.

Asked my wife that when this ‘self-isolation’ stuff is over, could I take her out on a date. She said, ‘Sure,’ and gave me a fake phone number.

Can’t go fishing because of ‘self-isolation,’ but can go to grocery store and buy Tilapia raised in China.

Where most husbands created a ‘man-cave,’ Jasper Clarke had a study. It’s here that he had been spending longer than normal hours, reading, writing, and in essence, studying everything he could about COVID-19.

He thought it a wise use of his ‘self-isolation’ time.

A self-directed courses in virology wasn’t his normal interest, as usually he’d be searching out something more specific, more understandable, more relatable to his chosen genre of horror-fiction. But at the moment, Jasper Clarke couldn’t find any greater horror than the one the country and the world faced at that moment.

If ever there was a Lovecraftian monster roaming the outer-edges of both imagination and reality, Clarke couldn’t find it, and yet he couldn’t tell from the majority of his Internet searches, whether the virus was as great or less a threat than being made out.

Abnormal, accursed, amorphous, antediluvian, blasphemous, cyclopean, daemonic, eldritch, fetid, gibbering, indescribable, iridescent, loathsome, squamous, unmentionable, unnameable, unutterable. This left Clarke more than worried, because here was a true monster that defied all description.

Not only was the threat otherworldly, in the form of unseen, but to the real world, his world, this could be a monster so great that it might never be able to put back in the shadows. Because of this, sleep refused to fill Clarke’s eyes or head as he sat at his desk into the darker hours of the early morning.

Questions abound: does hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin work? Certainly they can inhibit the ability of malaria to act, but malaria is a parasite and not a virus.

But further more, can any component within the COVID-19 virus be effected by these two common drugs? There seemed to be nothing but opinion over opinion, those for nay, those for yay, on the subject.

Plus, he couldn’t help but recall how his father had suffered from malaria over the years. And even with this first hand knowledge, he couldn’t tell if he were on the right path to a good horror story.

Next was the use of ventilators. Should they be used in only the most dire of circumstance and could they be the cause of lung damage as witnessed in x-ray after x-ray?

And could the problem actually be not a lack of oxygen but an inability to transfer oxygen, because there was a difference. But again, he was uncertain given the myriad of differing opinions he discovered.

He felt a chilled sweat coat his body as the idea, could this confusion of fact and opinion, be purposeful? He shuttered at the thought.

Then there were the numbers, numbers that failed to register to the level of pandemic, yet people were dying. This much Clarke knew and fully understood.

Further, Clarke could not get beyond the fact that he could see basic freedoms being shed and that with their shedding came a loss. But of what? Nefarious didn’t cover all of the bases in this situation, even for a seasoned horror-fiction writer.

Then he stumbled onto something called ‘Event 201,’ an exercise between the US and China, portrayed as a ‘doomsday scenario,’ with an ultimate outcome of “world wide vaccines and RFID chips.” This discovery tied into a real-life program called, ‘ID 2020,’ which has the same goal in mind, which Clarke read about earlier in the evening.

It was 3:13 am when Clarke decided to begin tapping at his keyboard:

“There are things outside the confines of my home, right outside this window,” Nate Olson wrote in his private journal, “Things seen and unseen and both as deadly to the body and soul as either.

Olson decided at that moment that he should remain hidden in his study, in his home, holed up, but prepared to repel and terminate any monster that came for him or his family. And if he couldn’t do that, he’d terminate his family.

“That is the fear of the thing,” he added, before turning off his desk lamp.

Jasper Clarke coughed hard, realizing he was too winded and exhausted to continue.