I've picked up a virus (I hope not Corona) probably from being back at work. I'm hallucinating detectives from the wall-to-wall reading as I work down the trashy novels pile, as I sit unable to move due to fatigue, and nursing a throat that feels as though it's trying to swallow a hedgehog.
The plots blur into each other, female and male detectives transitioning into one ultra-detective that solves everything on the last two pages. The simple act of imbibing soluble aspirin is undertaken in faux-policing vocabulary, and the hypernosmia (I could smell the pages of the books from my bed, probably because of a bout of Covid last year) has vanished to be replaced by deafening tinnitus that jangles along as an irritating soundtrack to my woozy worldview.
Go with it, go with it, it will pass. Don't worry about all the pending things that you simply can't do. Pick up another novel, prop up your elbows, and peer into the grey type littered on the thick corky yellow pages. There you will find the USA, all laid out in all its poverty, unfairness, danger and corruption, all appearing imminently on our own horizons. I am forewarned about people with dementia being kept alive with heart-drugs just so the chains of care homes can continue to fleece their families; people beaten up having to pay their own medical fees, and then having to sue the perpetrators for the money; the oil industry destroying entire Appalachian mountains and polluting the land, water and air just because making money is more important than anything else. People with guns shooting innocent people and then living with it for the rest of their lives, because they carry guns and that's seen as a sign of freedom.
Corruption too in the UK, taken for granted as something we always will have to live with, perpetrated by people who apparently live in an entirely different astral sphere to normal people.
This swamp! Somehow it chimes with how I feel. More books to go before I get better.....
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