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.