living in hell. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. To be locked up in your house, ordered never to leave, told not to see friends, told not to make love without a mask (thank you Theresa Tam!), told not to hug or kiss — universities, concerts, galleries, theatres, restaurants closed? All of the above are not ‘luxuries,’ they are what make us human. We are living in hell, and if someone tries to tell you otherwise, I give you permission to slap them -- good and hard. Joe Orton used to talk about Morocco (he would go with Kenneth Williams — that gorgeous comedian from the 'Carry On' movies — and with Kenneth Halliwell who eventually killed him) and he would say that the boys in Morocco would just come up and ask him if he wanted to have sex -- whereas in London it was a lot more work to get laid. He would say ‘Morocco is human, unlike England’ and (putting aside all the colonialist associations of his remark) I think his point is well taken. I was born in New England, USA, and my parents were Congregationalist Protestants, so I know about man’s inhumanity to man. I know a culture that views hugs, kisses, sex, music and art as godless. So I give you permission — since we are living in hell — to find the satisfaction you need. You are now completely under government control (I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and it isn’t a rhetorical device me saying that) and to be under anyone’s control is intolerable for most people unless they are masochists who have turned their life into one big sex party, or they have Stockholm Syndrome. No life is now intolerable for most people, and the worst part is there is no ‘timeline.’ Make no mistake about it, we are now being told that the much anticipated vaccination may not help -- will certainly not allow us to ‘hit the streets’ any day soon-- and that it may not even stop people from getting infected. And even if this vaccine ‘works,’ there will inevitably be another pandemic. The powers that be have been hinting for a long time that from now on life will consist of one pandemic after another. I worry not so much about the people in the middle — but the very old, like me, and the young. I don’t have much time left, so it would be nice to actually live the remaining years — not just sit in my room feeling guilty that I am not wearing a mask in my own home. But imagine if you were young? Imagine if you are 18 years old? This is the time of your life -- when you must start loving and screwing; you are horny as hell and/or as romantic as hell and you want it now, because you will never be young again. So what are you doing to do? Well I say, run, don’t walk to the nearest porn site; they were made for you, that’s why they are there, after all, what other alternative do you have? Human contact is dangerous, porn is not. Sure it’ll screw up your sex life, it will screw up your expectations of what is and isn’t good sex -- no one has sex like that in real life — and it will completely wreck your idea of what the human body is (the body fascism in porn is beyond belief). Porn is a wildly unrealistic fantasy, sure, and it will deeply mess you up. But what else are you going to do? The natural urges you have, to love and to make love, are human ones. And you must somehow satisfy them. The same thing goes for drugs. Take them. Now is the time. They are readily available at every Cannabis store, and the government seems to encourage it, so go ahead — after all, it'll keep the economy going. Now is the time to indulge your vices! Because if you don’t you will simply die of boredom or slash your wrists. You are and will continue to be human and have human needs, but that is no longer recognised. So what you must do is figure out a way to live vicariously -- by consuming drugs and porn, and whatever else this little silver or black or white box in front of you has to offer (there's always Netflix, I guess!). Cuz that’s all there is. You can and will learn to live this way, and make no mistake about it; this little machine that I’m typing on — and that you’re reading this on — is a drug, and it was made exactly for this, to allow us to imagine that there is an escape from the world’s inhumanity. Someone told me something very interesting and terrifying about China the other day. This is not hearsay; he has relatives in China and is Chinese. Okay, so this is what’s going on in China — and why they are apparently now the world’s greatest power. After the pandemic hit China eventually managed to contain it quite neatly because they utilised big data to control their population. This means that they put digital data collection to practical use beyond just discovering the specific algorithm that helps your computer figure out what you will want to buy next. In China, apparently, the powers that be can keep track of your every move digitally — they know where you are going and what you are doing, and ergo, they can restrict your behaviour, if you are an ‘at risk’ person, accordingly. This makes terrifying sense and I assure you it is real. I’m no saying this to depress you. I’m saying this so that you can understand what life will be like in the future. Yes of course, you can find others like you, who will want to hug and kiss and have sex, and sing and dance, etc, but it will be hard to find them, and you will have to make sure not to tell Theresa Tam. Ultimately it’s best to do what Big Pharma — and Dr. Fauci — tell us — wear a mask and go online for the pleasures you have been denied in real life. You will not be able to completely replace those real life pleasures; and you will still miss them. Maybe, as in Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 you will join a secret society where people are allowed still, to be human? Maybe? So there is a kind of hope. But what you may need for the next little while at least, as the Beatles say, is a little help from your friends.
