There was a fly in my room today. I don’t know how it got in there, I just know it was there. There have never been any flies in my room before.
My room is my own. There are two beds in my room, but I share it with no one. My old roommate was arrested a few months ago. I’ve heard it was fraud. I’ve looked it up on the internet, and confirmed it was fraud. Kind of crazy, he was pretending to be a lawyer, apparently. Everyone does weird shit when they are using, but he did it somewhat successfully.
But he isn’t here. Which brings my back to the fly. The fly was only here because he wasn’t here. Because I can only function as a normal human being when another human observes me. If there is no human to observe me, the quantum wave function collapses, and I become human and inhuman at the same time.
There is a reason for this fly, and I promise to you, the fly only lives because of Thanksgiving. So let us gives thanks, for the fly’s sake. And let’s go back, to 2021…
I don’t know if you remember 2021 clearly. Early 2020 - late 2022 all blur together in my mind, even though there were so many different things that happened during those years.
I think one of the reasons those years blur together is because of the lack of punctuation by holidays. So many years are always marked by familiar festivals, the friendly barbecues of memorial and labor day, the spooky pageantry of Halloween, followed by a familial Thanksgiving, a joyful Christmas, and a Bacchanalian New Year. Those years lacked punctuation.
Those years were run-on sentences.
Nearly everyone I knew was driven insane, but for different reasons.
Some were driven insane by fear of the virus.
Others were driven insane by how easily some were driven insane by fear of the virus.
I think a very small few were driven gleefully insane by how easy it is to make money off of driving other people insane. And I think we should give very serious thought to hanging those people.
But that is besides the point. I still have to talk about Thanksgiving.
It all gets so mixed up, with family. I had been working with my brother, at his company, for awhile. I had quit my job bar-tending, because bar-tending because gay, meaningless faggotry during the pandemic. I did not want to be a bartender serving to go batched cocktails while pretending to slip on a mask every time some dip-shit walks in to use the bathroom, because there were no other public bathrooms to use in a six block radius.
My brother offered me more money and a job that was actually useful during the pandemic. And it was fine, and actually pretty fun, until the great “Vaccination” campaign came out.
I didn’t want to get vaccinated, and I thought I had a few simple, understandable reasons, that pretty much anyone could understand, even if they didn’t agree.
I think we all know how insanely tribalistic people became.
If you doubted the power of their God Fauci, you deserved the putrid death that would soon make a corpse of you. The only bad part was you wouldn’t die soon enough in their view, you would probably take a few Grandma’s down with you to Hell.
My brother, and his business partner, began to have one on one meetings with the staff about vaccination. The business was not large enough to be covered under the Biden administrations proposed OSHA ruling, so they would have to apply individual pressure. Part of the pressure was a lucrative contract we had with several nursing homes, and a promise that those who were not vaccinated would not be allowed to work with the at-risk.
Because back then, we all knew that vaccination prevented transmission. Except for those who didn’t.
To my eternal regret, I was scarred shitless at the time. I could not bring myself to stand up for my coworkers. I watched them, as my brother and his partner brought them, one by one, into the operations office, and sat them down to pressure them into taking the shot. And I didn’t do a fucking thing.
All the while, I was preparing to leave. I didn’t know where the madness was heading, or how vitriolic it would become. I knew I wasn’t allowing into bars or restaurants, and people in the mainstream media, like Jimmy Kimmel, were saying I shouldn’t be allowed access to healthcare, either. A few of my former friends on Facebook said that I shouldn’t be allowed to buy food in the grocery store.
Forgive me for thinking it was plausible that they would put me in a camp next.
So my brother came to talk to me about it. And I did what I thought was the most reasonable thing to do at the time.
I told him that I didn’t think it was a reasonable use of work time to discuss it during office hours, and that I was busy. I kind of shouted it to him. I told him that if he wanted to fire me over it, he should do it, and left it at that.
It worked, and it only worked because I sounded so stubborn. He either took it as a thinly veiled legal threat, or he was unwilling to fire his own brother. I hope it was the latter, but who knows, people were crazy back then.
Regardless, most of my friends had left me by then. I wasn’t loud about my refusal to take the vaccine, but I was honest with anyone who asked.
I know what you are thinking.
If my friends left me over my refusal to get the vaccine, then they weren’t my real friends.
Well fuck, looks like I don’t got any real friends and I never had them to begin with.
Which finally brings me to Thanksgiving, 2021…
So it was Thanksgiving, 2022.
And it was, ironically, the first day I got out of my first stint in rehab. One month. Alcoholism. Severe.
The amount of whisky I had been drinking on a daily basis was incredible. Nearly inhuman.
But I had done a detox and tried in the most sincere way to get better at rehab. I went to every class and took studious notes and tried to share even though I never felt like talking about anything at all.
It was a suicide by cop situation that put me in there in the first place, but that is beside the point.
The point is, on Thanksgiving Day, 2022, I got a text from my father, inviting me to Thanksgiving…
Thanksgiving dinner at 3:30. Creamed spinach, etc. Hope to soer you soon..
1:21pm, November 24th, 2022.
The typo is intentional. I am transcribing it as he wrote it.
It felt like a bizarre slap in the face. We hadn’t spoken in well over a year.
So let us finally go back to right before Thanksgiving, 2021…
I was in the office with my brother. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I asked him what he was doing for it. He told me he was going over to Dad’s. Dad knew I wasn’t vaccinated. We had had a few polite, if tense, phone conversations about it.
I had tried calling Dad the day before. He hadn’t picked up.
I had tried calling Dad that day.
He hadn’t picked up.
I told my brother I would probably be there…
So I texted my Father, the day before Thanksgiving. I gave him a call too, left some messages, but you know what happened.
This is a transcript of our texts, the only communication we had that year…
Hey Dad, Just wanted to know if you had any Thanksgiving plans.
Love,
Theo
Nov. 24th, 2021
Hey Dad, I hope you and Rebecca have a happy Thanksgiving!
Nov. 25th, 2021
My Father responded…
Thanks Theo. There is much to be thankful for.
December 14th, 2021.
I responded later, I was pretty much in the depths of sorrow and alcoholism.
I hope we get to see each other again.
December 18th, 2021.
The next text he sent…
Happy Birthday, and many returns!
Early April, 2022…
And this all comes back to me whinging and moaning, but it is important, because the shit I am whinging and moaning about actually happened, and people are trying to pretend it didn’t.
I spent the Thanksgiving of 2021 alone in my house. I had a bottle of whiskey, and ramen, and I watched *Adventure Time* by myself. That began a long period of sorrow and lonesomeness, having been cut off by so many friends and family. Alcohol was the only comfy thing I had left.
I wrote this, posted it to a far-right wing message board, and titled it “No Thanks Given Today”
My Father never returned my calls about having dinner.
I never got too political with the guy, but when he asked me about my vaccination status, I was honest.
He taught me a lot, and I think I might be too much like him.
He taught me to question things. He taught me to ask questions. He taught me not to trust everyone, and not to jump off a cliff if everyone else does.
But in his Boomer wisdom, he always did trust newspapers, and he always did trust 'Modern Medicine'.
I guess he didn't want me to question everything, he just wanted me to question certain things.
Organized religion was always OK to question.
The Media was not. The media was above reproach. The New York Times was a factual record.
But he knows that I haven't taken a shot.
He didn't return any calls, or texts.
He has been double vaccinated and boosted.
And I am not sick.
My parents are divorced.
But my Mother sent me a message about how to get rapid Covid Testing.
Am I just going to be a transmission vector forever?
Maybe Thanksgiving is gone.
But I'm thankful you took the time to read this.
I'm Thankful I'm not alone in this mockery of sanity.
I'm Thankful you Exist.
And now it is November 19th, 2023.
And I am writing way too much, way too personally, and I am drunk in my sober house.
My Father invited me to his Thanksgiving dinner. And I asked him what happened back then, and he just says he forgot to text back, or he is old and isn’t good at using the cellphone, or that I hadn’t come a few years before so he didn’t bother inviting me.
He will tell me anything but he will never admit the truth.
He is gas-lighting me in the worst way possible, trying to make me think it never happened, like I am making a big deal out of nothing.
I gave him a chance to tell the truth, I apologized to him for being a shitty son, and an alcoholic. I did this last week. I was six months sober at the time. He accepted my apology. He refused to acknowledge why he didn’t talk to me all that time.
I just want to know what he was thinking that Thanksgiving. What he thought at that moment in time.
Did he think that by cutting me off, I would relent, like a coward, and be bullied into vaccination? And that we would be a happy family again after?
Did he think that I was a dangerous liability, to himself and the rest of his family, and I was to be shunned eternally for it?
Did he think that I would die of Covid-19, and was OK with not speaking to me because of it?
Personally, I think he wasn’t thinking. I think he was consuming MSNBC constantly when people were advocating, in a very serious manner, that the unvaccinated be completely cut off from society.
Remember what they said, because people act like I am insane when I bring it up nowadays. Video by Orf
I do know that I find this to be a constant source of pain, something that I will never get over, and have no possibility of resolving. Too many people that I liked and trusted all proved themselves willing to become monsters when given the chance.
But I do know that I am not alone in this pain. People don’t like to talk about what happened during the divisive days of the pandemic, it is so incredibly uncomfortable. But we have to talk about it. We can’t forget the people that we fired, bullied, ostracized, and worst of all, those who were coerced into taking the jab. I am grateful, and I am thankful, that I am lucky enough to have had enough fortitude to have stood my ground.
I am lucky to know, that when I was a child, and my father told me he would love me no matter what, he was a liar. And now I know he is a coward as well, for refusing to admit what he did.
And I keep telling myself that I am lucky, as I sit typing this, drunk in a sober house I will not escape, watching this fly buzz around the light on ceiling.
The fly is there because I eat alone in my room, often.
The fly is there because I have nobody to eat with.
Happy Thanksgiving.
-Theodore Kent
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Regards,
-Theo