Miskatonic University PressI got my second vaccination shot today, this time with the Pfizer-BioNTech. The doctor who gave me the injection asked if I was allergic to PEG, which I’d never heard of. It appears I’m not. After all the familiar questions and the brief review about mixing the Oxford-Astra Zeneca with this, she asked if I had any questions.
“No,” I said. “I’m just very happy to be here.”
“So am I.”
In the waiting room I got out Virtual Light by William Gibson. I was up to chapter twenty-nine, which includes this (in tight third person on Berry Rydell, who fell asleep in the back of an RV):
He’d been dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster’s class, fifth grade at Oliver North Elementary. They were about to be let out because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep the kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. they were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs. Armbruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic. Poppy Markoff, who sat next to him and already had tits out to here, had told Mrs. Armbruster that her daddy said the KC flu could kill you in the time it took to walk out to the bus. Mrs. Armbruster, wearing her own mask, the micropore kind from the drugstore, started in about the word panic, tying that in to pandemic because of the root, but that was where Rydell woke up.
He sat up. He had a headache and the start of a cold. Kansas City flu. Maybe Mokola fever.
“Don’t panic,” he said, under his breath.
Virtual Light was published in 1993.
Today in 2021, because I gave up on Twitter, I use a free and open source anonymizing browser to route my traffic through a series of encrypting and decrypting servers so I can maintain my anonymity while I check on what William Gibson says there as @greatdismal. I can do this on a powerful handheld computer that runs an operating system made by one of the biggest and most privacy-invading corporations in the world, while wearing a mask to protect me from a global pandemic, while the western side of my country is coming out from under a climate change-provoked record-breaking heat wave that shows us what day-to-day life will be like in a few decades.