“Don’t get killed by some bioweapon run amok after surviving Dindu-17 all these years, huh?”

-Mescaline Franklin

I was lying in bed at 2:00 PM when I got this message from my longtime friend, after having eaten my blue berries in ginger extract, my massive dosses of vitamin-C and D, smelling like the bulb of garlic I ate yesterday, snorting saline and wondering if this would be my first month in five not coughing up blood and puss?

Then I realized that I was hiding from a Deep State bio-weapon and decided to get to work, to get to this bar, just in time to see a Korean trying to keep his drunk Caucasian friend from fighting a lone Bantu warrior over some drunken perception of slight. Then, when a Caucasian hipster offered to buy them both drinks, the Korean managed to get his friend outside. Then the Bantu starting wolfing from inside the bar, saying, “Don’t sleep on me—I ain’t no cop!”

Then, the Korean stopped at the door and took up the challenge, suggesting the alley out back for he and the Bantu.

Then, the BIG FUCKING Hawaiian who owns the bar, who seems to be friends with the Korean, walked him outside, then stood within, praying to some long extinct volcano god that the Bantu would stop running his mouth long enough to not get beat up in front of his bar.

The storm passed and here I am—at work.

Thanks for waking me up during the apocalypse.

Oh, shoot, I forget the immunity zinc and elderberry gummy my mother and sister mailed me…

Here I sit in the Shallows of Long-Deserved Civilized night thinking on slinking on and enjoying the office now empty of entertainers, the coffee hot and the secretary hotter.

PS: One thought, that other than the cancellation of basketball, the idea that the dirty bastards in this country are starting to learn the art of handwashing, strikes this old grocer, as a boon.

Oh yes, and it finally snowed in Portland!