AFTER THE ILLNESS, the mind sputters back to life like a greasy old engine. You are not your thoughts, but your thoughts try to make themselves you. Little geysers, little cascades of ideas, fragments, obligations, ejaculating into the air. Your mind tells you to get out of bed and make coffee, when your body wants no such thing. I don’t think it’s a wise thing to trust the mind. Don’t trust your mind. Don’t let it tell you that tomorrow is Sunday, and the day after Sunday is Monday, which is a working day. The body is wiser, let it direct you. The body has no use for days. As my little eyes, my tiny windows reopen on the world, all I see is incomprehensible. A mass demonstration today against vaccinations and masks and other restrictions in Tallinn, Estonia. With the amount of Estonian flags on display, you would think that Konstantin Päts himself had risen from the safety of his mossy plot out in the Forest Cemetery and proclaimed again independence. After that, some health official assuaging the public that if you are vaccinated, and you get ill, your illness will be mild. “For a vaccinated person, the disease does not quite qualify as a common cold, but it is significantly safer and does not cause severe illness.” I guess this all boils down to how you rank severe. Watching these arguments, I begin to think about what an argument even is. An argument is a string of connected thoughts in your waking, functional mind. But when you are occupied by the sickness, the ability to process these kinds of linked thoughts crumbles. You can’t have an argument when you do not know who you are. Your life, your consciousness — because they are more or less the same thing — they exist outside of thoughts and arguments. Just as a virus is a biological entity, we too are rather curious biological entities. Thanks to a cozy relationship between my mother and father some cold winter night in the middle years of the Carter Administration, my own entity was launched, shot straight across the moonscape of existence. It’s hard for me to communicate in words at this point, but after waking up from a blurry tiring mess, watching people shout at each other about masks while waving national flags, or having an official tell me how my sickness is, just seems irrelevant. I am going to watch the rest of Casino Royale. It’s a good film. Wish me luck.
north! 