Dear James,
I shouldn’t bother you with this and if you don’t reply it’s OK but what is your view about the quarantine?
James: It’s OK. I’ve resisted talking about it more or less but here’s my quarantine story.
Sundari sent me a link to a short interesting article by Jeffery Tucker writing for the American Institute for Economic Research which said the “H3N2 pandemic in 1968 killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”
Just prior to this phenomenon, which is news to me, I initiated a self quarantine from The American Dream, based on an epiphany that came to me in an Hawaiian public toilet in 1967, a quarantine that is happily in its 53rd year. I Initiated it because The Great Satan, to borrow Ayatollah Khomeini’s moniker for America, had been extremely kind to me in terms of its main metric, which old-timey Bible thumpers called filthy lucre and my father pejoratively referred to as “The Almighty Dollar.” I can recall taking home one or two large shopping bags of money every evening to my flat in an exclusive celebrity plagued Diamondhead neighborhood for a period of several years. The collateral damage induced by the libertine extravaganza brought on by “success”, which I will not chronicle, was well deserved.
I walked away from that life of suffering without rancor because the joke was on me; it never occurred to me until the gentle light of awareness opened my eyes to the fact that the pursuit of material success is an unwinnable zero sum game. To keep it simple, at the tender age of 26 I understood life’s irrefutable binary paradox: for every loss there is a gain. And conversely, for every gain there is a loss. It isn’t that there is anything wrong with success—or failure. There’s nothing right about them either. At the end of the day, if you believe that laying up goods here on earth “where moth and dust doth corrupt” is a viable game plan, you are not a winner. And conversely, you’re not a loser. You’re a nowhere man. You don’t know what you’re missing. And you can’t be blamed because nobody sets out to be unaware.
So what’s the difference if you are running around in the world doing willy nilly what you want or you sit at home all alone? If you want to run around without a mask you won’t actually die because you weren’t actually born and if you want to sit in splendid isolation for all eternity you won’t be bored because you aren’t a doer.
What’s the difference between a now-here man and a no-where man?
