THE BAD NEWS

 

Slime mold going from plasmodium to sporulation

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Tests show that the fungus has invaded every part of your body, even crossing the blood/brain barrier. Frankly, we’re surprised you’re still lucid and ambulatory. Most people in your condition are already on life support.

Maybe your fungus is a more benign variety than the ones we’ve seen in the past. You also seem to lack to characteristic odor of bitter lemon that was so evident in the others who suffered from your condition. Fortunately, most of the time their period of suffering was brief. In one case, death followed diagnosis within hours!

But again, my goal is not to alarm you or make light of your plight. If there were a proven treatment, we would try it, no matter how slim the chances of success. But there is no such treatment. The fungus always wins. We can only urge you to get your affairs in order while you still have the strength to do so.

The fungus is intelligent. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you can outsmart it, for it has resisted all treatments and man-made remedies for eons. Like slime mold, it is more than a single organism. It is a community. There is a single slime mold in British Columbia that is almost one thousand square miles in size. We’re not sure about the scope of this fungus yet, but there are signs that it communicates with its own kind, planning and creating strategies that cannot easily be understood or countered. It is one cunning fungus.

Resistance is futile. Acceptance is the answer. If the fungus knocks, let it in. Its clammy embrace may ensure you a better future.

Nobody Said It Would Be Easy

You just need a little guidance. Your youth and inexperience are holding you back. I can help. Within a few hours this world of ours will begin to disintegrate. You have a choice. You can stay here and turn into a vampire, a werewolf, or a zombie or some kind of weirdo that nobody wants to have around, or you can simply go with the flow. You can fall into that lake of molten fire. The one over there. It’s actually liquid sulfur. That’s why it smells so bad.

Don’t let the smell upset you. You won’t be alive long enough to smell much because sulfur melts at two hundred forty degrees. Your blood will boil, your brain will fry inside your skull and all the meat on your bones will be “well done” within minutes.

So it’s up to you. You can change or you can cease to exist. Neither will be as easy as you would like, but then nobody asked your opinion about the severity of the choice. This is the nature of the world we’ve inherited.

Images of a loving God providing guidance and refuge have long since fallen out of favor. Now, if people worship anything, they worship health and longevity. After most people died of Covid-22, the mutation that kept on mutating, nobody expected things to ever improve. Nobody even dared hope for things to return to the way they were.

The fact is that everybody has problems. Nobody has it easy. If you’re a zombie, you’ve got to find brains to eat. A vampire has to drink blood. A werewolf…well, he has more options than the other two, but they mostly involve ripping people to shreds and howling at the moon.

The main hurdle most of us face is finding someone with whom we have enough in common to build a life together. Of course, most of us can do this for a short while and then become bored and tear the life out my the roots and throw it by the side of the road. If we can refrain from doing this we’re soon ahead of the game. We can realize opportunities, we can know relative freedom and partial contentment.

Until we decide that’s not enough. It would be easier to simply acknowledge our part in this instead of blaming circumstances and others, but that doesn’t come easily to most people. We think “if only I had married that other person…” Or “look at his house, his car…why does he have it so good?” And so we build a tangled web of confusion, and find ourselves trapped inside it. Our frustration and self-pity skyrocket.