IT IS already the month of August and over a year and a half had passed since Covid-19 pandemic hit us like no other. Of course, there have been pandemics before but like anything bad the one that you are suffering now, you feel is like the baddest that has ever hit you in the guts.
What is now the latest updates on the number of infections, deaths, recoveries that daily keep on adding up and never letting up is numbing and even desensitizing. At the early phase of the scourge that has originated in the Wuhan city of China, so you have been told, and when it finally reached the country and the series of lockdowns had begun, the surreality of the whole thing is almost cinematic and the daily images of mass infections and deaths almost beat you down like a jackhammer.
Now, even with the presence of vaccines that are supposed to gradually stop the deadly scourge, what do you know, it surges on and it mutates with more deadly accuracy on any random victims and the very possibility that anytime, anywhere it would be you – you! - is simply, numbingly, devastating.
But, of course, life in the meantime, goes on, even with the sword of Damocles like the Covid-19, life goes on along with the hopes and the occasional laughter in between. That’s the beauty and power of humanity, of what at the core is to be ultimately human: It knows how to laugh in the midst of calamity, in the face of doom. And so you laugh, laugh like your very own life depends on it. And, of course, it does not stop you from doing what you are doing in your most ordinary day – wake up feeling refreshed for a new day, stretch your body, get up from bed, walk towards the kitchen, and as if like an instinct, a reflex action, you get your usual mug and fix yourself, what else, your favorite poison of the day - coffee.
You then take up position in your favorite nook in the house, sit comfortably by your study table and start to sip the black, bittersweet taste while taking in the, you like to imagine, heavenly aroma that seems to trigger sexual arousal that energizes your whole physical makeup, and you feel, you just feel, like you are one with the good rhythm of the universe, and there is nothing the matter really as you take your favorite sip of the day.
Without you knowing it, your foggy writing consciousness is now live-streaming about coffee like you have been dragged into this, drugged into obsessing what comes naturally to you. Coz coffee is coffee and nothing beats the sipping of it except more sipping down and slurping up and contemplating on the day’s passage, the politics of the day, the day’s dynamics.
(To be concluded)