Monday January 11, 2021

A growing impatience. A thorn in the side of everything. The sheer idiocy of those days was hard to overcome. People walking out alone with their masks on; sweltering in the muggy summer heat. Drenched, drenched with stupidity, all of this. The Covid Captains, yet more of the uselessly employed, wore their Covid Captain t-shirts and stood around doing absolutely, precisely nothing. More men suicided each year as a result of the bastardry and misconduct of the nation's family courts and its despised Child Support Agency than had ever died of Covid in Australia, but no government ever lifted a finger to help them, much less to reform the dysfunctional and patently corrupt lawyer feast that separating couples represented. 

Lives matter, so the government kept saying.

While taxing the population into servitude, and running derelict homes for the aging which were nothing more than conveyor belts hosing people off into their graves at the end of their lives; in shocking, humiliating conditions. Another massively funded taxpayer rort benefiting the mates of the nation's conservative politicians. 

The whole thing was despicable. Just to watch the Covidian morons in the shopping centre, with their social distancing and their idiot masks; amazing how easily they had surrendered. 

Putrid. The whole bloody lot of it.

If there was a chance to make a difference, if there was a chance to move forward, if the grace that beckoned from the trees and around corners, the grace that moved between the leaves and the lives of others, the calling sirens which beckoned us to be relieved, we came, we kissed, we conquered. 

"He's in enemy territory," one of the Watchers on the Watch whispered as he walked the edge of the once sacred lake. 

He would have spat in their eye like a poisonous frog if he could have. 

How little you know. 

You've been conquered and you don't even know it. 

Not yet. 

Their ancient rhymes. There were calls from so many different places. There was a muffled hysteria and a feared awakening. 

The guilty were frightened. 

So they should be.

He was fed up with his circumstance, fed up with the slow pace of his mother's dying, with the low grade grub who unfortunately was one of his flat mates. 

"Is this an honest face?" the grub had asked him one evening around the table of jest. 

"No. Absolutely not."

No redeeming features. Not even good looks.   

Masks were once again out everywhere. A woman staff member sat in a jewelry shop behind a full motor bike helmet with perspex screen, a full shut off turn off to any impending customer.

Insanity had gripped the political class. 

And by default, that same madness was gripping the population, dumbed down as they were, hysterical, hysteria, the passing nights, the rhythms of loss, the tiny lives, the lack of spark, the total lack of ambition. 

That's what staggered him the most. 

There was no romance in here; just overweight dullards waddling through the shopping malls, Covidians darting furtively from shop to shop as if a virus might catch them, a bankrupted economy. 

And more to come. 

They were about to see forever; those glinting lights in the trees, the malignant and the maladroit, the sheer stupidity of the animals surrounding him. 

We would walk free. But they would not. 

Were they really getting the government they deserved? 

Were the gods really that cruel?   

THE HEADLINES


Coronavirus updates LIVE: Greater Brisbane lockdown to end, mask mandate to continue; NSW records three new local COVID-19 cases

Summary
Victoria has recorded its fifth consecutive day of no new locally acquired cases. NSW reported three locally acquired cases on Sunday, while Queensland recorded none.
The northern part of Sydney's northern beaches was released from its three weeks of misery when its lockdown order was lifted. Greater Brisbane endured its second day of lockdown following the discovery of a cleaner with the highly contagious UK variant of COVID-19 on Thursday.
The WA Premier, who closed his state's border to the sunshine state on Friday, indicated that Queensland will have to clock up 28 days of zero cases before they are allowed back. Victoria is also closed to people from Greater Brisbane.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian raised the hackles of her counterparts around the country again by claiming she was given no warning before the other states closed their borders to NSW. The emergency department at western Sydney's Mount Druitt Hospital has been closed for deep cleaning after a positive COVID-19 case attended while symptomatic.
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Coronavirus live news: Brisbane lockdown to end after third day of zero new cases, masks required indoors until January 22