Rancho Tarzanadu: "Unemployment"

   

     Miss Linda was the government’s worst nightmare. She had been “furloughed” from her job of seven years due to the pandemic, and about six weeks in she was starting to realize that getting paid twice what she had been making while working, plus the Federal government’s stimulus check of $1,200.00 on top of that for doing absolutely nothing was not such a bad deal .

     Overlord L’Orange had been droning on and on about “getting back to work”, while Miss Linda was wondering what the big rush was? After all, it was dangerous out there! She felt much safer at home, thank you very much!

     One of the states – Georgia was opening back up now, and Texas was set to open up in a couple of days. There were more than 60,000 deaths in the United States at this particular juncture, and opening back up seemed like a horrible idea! Everyone had their eyes on Georgia to see what was going to happen. The Overlord encouraged everyone to “get back to work!” as soon as humanly possible, to boost the economy and make him appear not so desperately rotten. Literally, the only thing he cared about were his “numbers” in the upcoming November election; he felt that opening up the country would inspire people to vote him in for a second term.

     The people most susceptible to the Coronavirus were people of color, poor people, the elderly, and people with pre-existing conditions, with random young and “healthy” people dying here and there to raise the stakes even higher, like a spinning Roulette-Wheel-of-Death to keep everyone on their toes. Overlord L’Orange wanted everyone in the “service” industry to get back out there and earn their living, God-damn-it!

     Miss Linda had been sleeping in until 10:00 AM, instead of racing to her job as a Swedish Massage Instructor at a mid-size school bright and early before she’d even had time for her morning coffee to teach an overcrowded classroom of forty-plus people in a room built to hold twenty, max. The air was clear now, due to all the people working from home, and she had time to breathe and reflect, and had created a new routine of wandering around her backyard, stretching and picking the ripest oranges off the trees, and taking her own sweet time. She stayed up until 3:00 AM, no longer from pandemic-related stress, but due to her bottled-up creative juices which were now flowing again – she was writing again (what she went to school for, for God(s)’s sake!) and making jewelry and art pieces and music. She applied for a Master’s program in Humanities. The high-stress world of massage therapy was falling away like a shed skin, behind her. She had the “Seven-year-job-itch”.

     Miss Linda was trying to devise ways to make this last forever; not the pandemic, of course, but this whole getting-paid-to-stay-at-home-and-be-creative thing. She wasn’t even adverse to working, just working for someone else had started to lose the tiny bit of luster it had remaining. The asking for raises once a year and being given $1.00 more per hour. The whole no-medical-benefits thing. The extra hours put in with no overtime pay offered, and barely even a thank you when coming to work with some sort of flu bug and working a ten-hour day at the last minute because no one else was available. The forty-five minute drive to get there. The forty-five minute drive to get back home. The twenty-minute “lunch break”. All of these things were making her reevaluate how she spent her valuable time.

     And she was not the only one feeling this way.

     The entire country was reevaluating.

     The Overlord had opened up a sticky can of worms, which were now squiggling and wriggling all over the place, feeding on the corpse of the United States.

Rancho Tarzanadu: "Disinfectant"

     Miss Linda was at her wit’s end. She was horribly depressed. The Existential Void towered over her, widening its jowls and beating on its chest. She had been trying to distract herself by wearing different perfume oils from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab around her house, pretending her suddenly defunct massage room at Rancho Tarzanadu was a little Parisian café with a table for one, and making vision boards from images snipped from Enchanted Living magazine. But everything felt hollow and gas-lit. There had been a heat-wave in Los Angeles the last few days, and smallish (relatively speaking) sporadic earthquakes lately. Kim Jong-un was rumored to be dead…or was dead…it was unclear. It felt like there was no stable ground left to stand on, let alone a “stable genius” running the country.

     Three days ago Overlord L’Orange asked Dr. Deborah Birx at his White House press briefing: “And then I see the disinfectant…where it knocks it out in a minute…one minute…and is there a way we can do something like that? By injection inside? Or almost  a cleaning. ‘Cause you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs…so it would be interesting to check that…so that you’re gonna have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me” (his exact words).

     The Overlord was referring to injecting disinfectant into the body to get rid of the Coronavirus. He actually asked this doctor this question on national television in real life. This was the same man that conspiracy theorists were saying was going to lead us into a “New Awakening”, that he was leading us into a “world of peace”. And come to think of it, Miss Linda realized, if we all were dead from ingesting chemicals, that would be true, so maybe they were onto something after all?

     The day after he said this, he told everyone that he was just being “sarcastic”, and was asking a reporter a “sarcastic question”, even though there is video footage (Miss Linda had literally just watched it) of him looking directly at Dr. Deborah Birx and asking her if injecting disinfectant into the body would kill the virus. There was no reporter. He was not being sarcastic. He was very earnest in appearance. This was the same man who said in the past to the American people: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

     This is why Miss Linda felt so horribly depressed. Not only did she feel like her head was going to explode, she felt like her soul was going to implode. And she was also out of chocolate, vodka, and Amy’s frozen vegetarian broccoli-and-cheddar gluten-free bowls, which meant she would have to take her life into her own hands by venturing out to the grocery store soon.

     This is her stream-of-consciousness exercise from her writing group Zoom meeting last night: “I’ve been having the craziest dreams lately…messages from…somewhere. My psyche? From the aliens? Last week I made the mistake of watching too many conspiracy-theory movies, based on the recommendation of a ‘friend’ (Pool Guy). In retrospect, I think it was a mistake. They all start out reasonably enough, but then about a third of the way in end up promoting Christianity and the Overlord as the leader of the ‘New Awakening’, where he leads the world into peace. Meanwhile, on planet Earth, he is encouraging people to drink bleach to kill the Coronavirus. The President of the United States told us to drink or inject bleach into our veins. What kind of Hellish nightmare are we actually living in? Lots of military helicopters flying by lately. The conspiracy theorists would say it’s a Deep-State sign. Did you know that the Overlord does not make ‘mistakes’? Every spelling error, every mispronounced word, every piece of horrible advice is in ‘reality’ coded messages for the QAnon to de-code, leading us into the ‘New Era’, where the Overlord is King (as in Jesus Christ). Apparently he is rising as I write this.”

     After her writing meeting had ended, Miss Linda stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, because her sleep cycle was completely thrown out of whack. She had yet another stress dream, which she jotted down as soon as she woke up, then posted it in the “Dream Work” section of her Witches group’s Mighty Networks page: “I dreamt that there were piles of un-used toilet-paper rolls dragged into my cats’ sandbox…about thirty rolls. Some were individual rolls, and some were still in their plastic packaging, stacked up haphazardly amidst the cat poops.

     “In the dream, I knew immediately that a ghost had done this, and got very upset, and started reprimanding the ghost as I removed each roll of toilet paper, wiping them off to re-use them since toilet paper is hard to come by right now and some of them weren’t that dirty.

     “My sister came in the room to see what I was doing; I explained to her what happened, and she started to gather up all the objects in the room, claiming that my thrift-shopping habit had brought a ghost home in one of the objects, and since it wasn’t clear which one, she was going to get rid of everything.

     “I was irritated with her for scooping up all my thrift-shop treasures, but left her to do that since I felt determined to find the ghost and confront it immediately.

     “I looked all over the house, and came to a room I didn’t recognize, which had secret entrances built into the rafters. I heard some strange noises and rustling around, but it turned out to be one of my cats. Then I woke up.”

     Miss Linda honestly didn’t expect any clarification or answers regarding this dream, but it felt relieving to place it somewhere else, somewhere outside of her own head.

Rancho Tarzanadu: "Pool Guy and the End of the World"

     Miss Linda was meandering around her backyard in the early afternoon Spring sunlight, listening to the birds chirp while she picked some oranges for her breakfast, when Pool Guy (he called himself that) came galumphing through the back gate with his cleaning supplies.

     He saw her.

     For a moment she froze, motionless, hoping maybe she could will herself into invisibility, but no – he was fast approaching.

     Pool Guy was referred to Miss Linda in a time of desperation by one of her co-workers at a health magazine in Topanga Canyon. This co-worker also happened to be a crack addict (as well as the magazine’s bookkeeper), and even she admitted that Pool Guy had one screw loose, but “I’ve heard he’s really good at his job” she told Miss Linda, who had just lost her last Pool Guy due to relocation, and her pool was unfortunately starting to turn a greenish color, so she felt the situation needed urgent attention. She took his number and set up an appointment. His price was reasonable, and he did an okay job, but he never stopped talking, ever.

     Pool Guy wore big black oversized sunglasses, like the kind you get after an eye exam when your eyes have been dilated. He wore a cap with flaps on all sides (called an Ushanka), with a long-sleeved shirt over a white tee-shirt, jeans and sneakers. He played guitar in a Heavy Metal band and was always inviting Miss Linda to attend one of his shows in Reseda (she would politely decline). His politics veered towards the far right; she knew this because she had seen the Mime arguing once with him in the backyard (the Mime’s politics, as with all the residents at Rancho Tarzanadu, veered heavily to the far left…actually a requirement of living there).

     All of the household members scattered and fled inside whenever Pool Guy came around, because he would engage them in a one-way conversation that never ended. Additionally, Pool Guy talked at a very loud decibel, like he wanted all the neighbors to hear him, too. He barely took a breath when he spoke and would rattle on and on and on. Miss Linda decided once to just listen and see how long he would go. About forty-five minutes later, she finally excused herself, claiming the phone was inaudibly ringing. She didn’t want to fire him because his price was so fair (and Miss Linda was a little on the cheap side), so she would just run and hide instead, whenever he came around, leaving his paycheck on the patio table. One of her friends – a marriage and family therapist with a PhD – distantly diagnosed him as having Asperger Syndrome, although this was a casual diagnosis since she had never actually met Pool Guy, and was only going by what Miss Linda shared about him over Mai Tai’s and grilled salmon at the local Kabuki restaurant.

     This particular day, Miss Linda was still in her pajamas (it was the Quarantine, after all), Birkenstock sandals, and black cat-eye sunglasses, her hair in a messy bun, her arms full of oranges. She hadn’t heard him coming, distracted by her morning dose of THC/CBD oil, and the beautiful birdsong and dappled sunlight and orange-blossom scent. Pool Guy spotted her immediately.

      “Oh, hey!” he shouted from across the yard.

     “Oh…hi…” Miss Linda responded reluctantly, attempting to flutter by him and into the house.

     “I just watched a documentary film last night…did you know that the CIA has worked its way into Hollywood and they’re controlling our minds?”

     “I…” Miss Linda attempted to answer.

     “Hollywood is a total illusion, filled with dark spirits, Satanists, and the Illuminati.”

     Miss Linda didn’t have time to respond, but felt slightly more intrigued.

     “The Occult world is real,” Pool Guy went on (Miss Linda would have to agree with him on this). “The mainstream media is brainwashing us; Motion pictures are being used as psychological warfare. Have you ever heard of ‘The Big Six’?”

     Miss Linda started to respond, but Pool Guy went on. “Have you ever heard of ‘Mockingbird’? The CIA pays journalists to write about and print what they want them to. Did you know that the CIA has an office in Hollywood? And that they bought property in Florida for Disney? Have you ever heard of ‘Operation Paperclip’? Did you know that the CIA invented the term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ to throw people with questioning minds off their trail? And that the CIA brought German ex-Nazi scientists to the United States after World War II to conduct human experiments on unwitting participants?”

     Miss Linda took a breath to speak, but Pool Guy continued: “Have you ever heard of ‘MK Ultra’? They would perform experiments on random people using LSD and mind-manipulation techniques. Have you ever heard of ‘Psychic Driving’? It’s brainwashing! They’re also poisoning our water supply!” (Miss Linda found this ironic as Pool Guy poured some hefty chemicals in her pool as he said this. She just stared at him with wide eyes, knowing it was fruitless to say anything.)

     “They’re desensitizing us! Have you ever seen ‘Zoolander’? Do you know what ‘entertain’ means? It means to bind or to hold, to control. Do you know where the word ‘Hollywood’ came from? The Holly tree! Ancient Druids would concoct wine to cast spells…they would confer with the Mediums to help ‘channel’ their spells to the unwitting public. Tel-e-vision…’Tell-a-vision’. There are channels…there is programming.”

     Miss Linda inched her way closer to the porch and the sliding-glass door to safety.

     “Have you ever heard of Plato’s Cave Theory? After World War I and World War II, Hollywood was chock full of Army veterans; they were experimenting on children via ‘MK Ultra’. Occult ideas are being planted inside children’s heads through cartoons!”

     Miss Linda dropped a couple of her oranges and went running after them as they bounced and rolled near the pool.

     Pool Guy droned on: “The Church of Satan is mixed-up in Hollywood…they think that Satan is as powerful as God! They are utilizing Mind War…controlling the people through Satanic instruments…Have you ever heard of the ‘Hall of the Dead’?”

     Miss Linda scooped up the fallen oranges and made her way back towards the patio door…so close, and yet so far away.

     Pool Guy’s voice rose even louder: “They create psychological torment and feelings of impending doom utilizing psychotronic and electromagnetic weapons that hypnotize the mind with low-frequency signals through TV, radio, or microwaves in order to manipulate and control the citizens. It’s currently being used to destabilize the United States and the industrialized world.”

     Miss Linda was almost to the door, walking backwards slowly, as if she was escaping a wild animal in the woods, smiling and nodding.

     “Did you know the CIA helped usher in the ‘Age of Aquarius’ with their LSD experiments?” Pool Guy asked. “Did you know that Frank Zappa’s dad was in the ‘Edgewood Arsenal’? Did you know that Jim Morrison’s dad was in the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’? Have you ever heard of the Lookout Mountain U.S. Airforce Base at the top of Laurel Canyon? Have you ever heard of ‘Honeypots’? What about Epstein’s plane and ‘Orgy Island’? The Illuminati Elite control the politicians and the CEO’s! Did you know that to control the population, you have to control the people messaging the population? The celebrities have to be controlled to maintain their power. The celebrities are like Demi-Gods. There is an elite pedophile ring…Have you ever heard of ‘Pizzagate’? Do you know about ‘Pizza’ and ‘Handkerchiefs’?”

     Miss Linda had one hand on the door handle.

     Pool Guy noticed that she was close to escaping him, and raised his voice even louder: “Have you ever heard of ‘Spirit-Cooking’ dinners? Did you know that the media is tied-up and involved in crimes against children? Have you ever heard of NXIVM? Seagram’s? The Senate and Congress are all in on it, too! And celebrities are only allowed a certain amount of success unless they are willing to join the club, their ‘secret society’. They won’t let someone have immense fame and power if they can’t control them.”

     Miss Linda waved goodbye, dropping a couple more oranges and letting them roll away across the porch, and slipped through the sliding glass door and into the house. She could still hear Pool Guy ranting outside: “Hollywood uses occult images in its films…the pyramid symbol, the evil one-eye…the ‘okay’ hand symbol is actually the symbol of the Devil…the swirl symbol and triangle symbols are used by pedophiles…”

     Miss Linda stood at the kitchen sink, heaved a great sigh of relief, and started to peel her remaining oranges.

     When she peeked through the living room window to see if Pool Guy was gone, she noticed that he had taken his check and picked up her fallen oranges and placed them on the table.

Rancho Tarzanadu: "Writer's Emporium Club"

     Miss Linda was one of four founding members of a writing club that met once a month, or once every three months, or once a year, depending on a variety of things which are unnecessary to go into right now. The club was formed in 1995…which seemed to Miss Linda another world ago. That was a world full of not only pens and notebooks, but red wine and various kinds of exotic cheeses, and fresh fruit, and chocolate, sometimes whiskey, usually marijuana and occasionally sexual trysts; not much had changed since then, really, except now there were no people. Well, there were people, but you couldn’t actually see them or touch them in “real life” now; you could only communicate with them via screens (per the governor’s order) due to the recent pandemic, which wasn’t so recent considering that Overlord L’Orange had known about it for two months before he let on that it was actually something serious.

     At this particular moment, there were 11,000 people dead in the United States and 75,000 deaths worldwide. The entire world was on lockdown mode now, except for some God-fearing states in the middle of the country, where people believed that their particular religious beliefs would save them from catching and/or spreading the plague. The Overlord said he would love to see everyone back at work by Easter Sunday (which was rapidly approaching), and was a really stupid day to pick anyway, because who would actually be working on Easter Sunday itself even if people did go back to work? He probably assumed that all the servants in the service industry would go back to work on that day, so they could serve him up some fattened mutton or pig. He’d love to see all the little people scurrying around again and waiting on him hand and foot (God, how he missed his rallies)! He had no scientific reasons for choosing Easter Sunday, other than he said it was a “beautiful time, a beautiful day”. He made Miss Linda want to vomit into her own hand, the way she did in the Target food court recently, because she had gotten sick with something (she may never know what), and coughed so hard she threw up into her own hand, right in front of Starbucks, while holding a Matcha Green Tea Latte in the other. She ran to the bathroom and continued to cough up phlegm for another half hour, sweating and shaking profusely. This was right before the “Stay-at-Home” order was issued, so there’s no telling who she spread what she had (whatever it was) to whom. The Overlord kept proclaiming that there was “nothing to worry about” and “it’s going to miraculously disappear” because he cared more about the Stock Market taking a nose-dive than he did about people living or dying. Miss Linda, however, now felt extremely guilty about being out and about in a public place and coughing so hard she threw up in her hand. It caught her off guard when it happened. There were no regulations in place at that time. She should have been at home.

     Now, being sequestered, her writing group “Writer’s Emporium Club” was meeting for the first time on Zoom, to express their pent-up feelings and to get a little socialization, like chimpanzees learning a new skill. It was an excuse to take a shower and put on some mascara, if nothing else. When all was said and done it was much more needed than she had initially anticipated, and she ended up spending over five hours with them, her long-lost friends. She could feel their spirits through the screen, and found them comforting. She ate goat cheese and fig butter on rosemary-raisin crackers, and had a vodka cocktail and a bite of a “special” candy bar. She laughed so hard she cried and clapped her hands and shouted things out. It was almost like being in person with humans. Almost. It was hard to let them go, to hang up the line, to say goodbye.

     This was Miss Linda’s stream-of-consciousness exercise from that night: “It has come to this…make-shift connection through a device. All these beautiful people make my soul ache, like a bruised melon. Some are not here…I hope they’re still alive. I feel like I’m living on the inside of a movie – not the movie itself, but inside the flat, sterile film roll that is wound-up tightly inside a cannister reel and shown only periodically, then re-wound and put back on the shelf to sit and sit and sit and wait and wait and wait…for what? The “End of Times”? For my life to start again? My “real” life? It’s all an illusion, but I still need to eat and still need toilet paper, which is running out, winding down…finite, like me.”

Rancho Tarzanadu: "House on Fire!"

     Miss Linda was having stress dreams. She had a very obvious one: she dreamed that Rancho Tarzanadu was on fire! She scrambled around, trying to put out the mounting flames, but they just kept growing larger and larger and more out-of-control by the minute. She tried throwing buckets of water on them, but that just agitated them to even more intensity, rising higher above her head like giant red, orange, and yellow ocean waves, roaring to crash down upon her. She felt terrified and panicked, and desperately alone, so dismally and sadly alone. In her dream, all her housemates were gone, enveloped by the flames, and she was fighting the raging fire with random and spur-of-the-moment actions that only seemed to make it all worse.

     Suddenly her father was there (even though he had died nineteen years previously). He knew exactly what to do, having been a fighter pilot in World War II, after all). He got the fire contained in no time flat, as Miss Linda looked on, frozen with fear. She hated to admit that she was afraid, but she was. Her fear fluctuated with various other emotions, like the dancing flames shooting up from the roof: anger, impending doom, peril, sadness, inexplicable giddiness, anxiety, grief, exhaustion. She pleaded with her father not to leave, but he implied (silently as the Mime in her kitchen) that he must go…he had other business to take care of. But he was available, if needed.

     She awoke, extremely relieved that Rancho Tarzanadu was not on fire, but also feeling more alone than ever before, and feeling overwhelmed for feeling so much of everything all at once. She wished she could go back in time, when everything was simple and she felt safe and protected. But time was forever marching forward, full of constant surprises; some good, some horrendous. She grabbed her stuffed rabbit (she’d had it since childhood) from her closet, turned her radio on low and fell back into fitful dreams while NPR played in the background, greeting the very early morning hours by announcing the new contagion and death rates, which were doubling, tripling, quadrupling by the day.