Aye Of The Tiger: The Invisible War, #3

By Jorah Kai

LIFE IS ABSURD

ALL ROADS LEAD TO DEATH

HOW DOES ONE LIVE

A GOOD LIFE?

 

The pandemic rages on, but the world has changed the channel. Society has inoculated the working class: by normalizing dying of COVID. Millions develop long-lasting neurological damage and disabilities, and immune systems battered by SARSCOV2 are now hosting opportunistic infections that keep healthcare systems beleaguered and overwhelmed. To put it very simply: the young party and the old die.

 

In China, Zero COVID has maintained strict lockdowns and quarantine procedures for years, but as the variants mutate to become more and more infectious, the lockdowns grow longer and more tedious. Something has got to give. And one night, with little warning, it does, leaving many to wonder

WHAT IS THE POINT OF ANY OF IT?

IS THERE MEANING TO THE ABSURDITY OF EXISTENCE?

WHY AM I HERE, ANYWAY?

and many other serious questions. In his third year of pandemic jail, Jorah Kai ponders the absurdity of this thing called life, mortality, legacy, and the search for meaning and purpose.

 

"He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total." ― Curtis Ackie, Goldfish Tears

 

"But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality." ― Albert Camus

 

"Life belongs to those who can somehow make a sick joke out of it all." - Sylvester Stallone

• Language: English
• Publisher: More Publishing
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959604099

Book preview

LIFE IS ABSURD

ALL ROADS LEAD TO DEATH

HOW DOES ONE LIVE

A GOOD LIFE?

The pandemic rages on, but the world has changed the channel. Society has inoculated the working class: by normalizing dying of COVID. Millions develop long-lasting neurological damage and disabilities, and immune systems battered by SARSCOV2 are now hosting opportunistic infections that keep healthcare systems beleaguered and overwhelmed. To put it very simply: the young party and the old die.

In China, Zero COVID has maintained strict lockdowns and quarantine procedures for years, but as the variants mutate to become more and more infectious, the lockdowns grow longer and more tedious. Something has got to give. And one night, with little warning, it does, leaving many to wonder

WHAT IS THE POINT OF ANY OF IT?

IS THERE MEANING TO THE ABSURDITY OF EXISTENCE?

WHY AM I HERE, ANYWAY?

and many other serious questions. In his third year of pandemic jail, Jorah Kai ponders the absurdity of this thing called life, mortality, legacy, and the search for meaning and purpose.

He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total. ― Curtis Ackie, Goldfish Tears

But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality. ― Albert Camus

Life belongs to those who can somehow make a sick joke out of it all. - Sylvester Stallone

Other books by Jorah Kai

KAI’S DIARY

THE INVISIBLE WAR

YEAR OF THE RAT

AMOS THE AMAZING

Dedication

To Kevin Lee, who spent the past two years telling me to ‘put this in your next diary’ every time something inconvenient, absurd or utterly bizarre happened.

To Sylvester Stallone, who taught me how to crack a joke, take a punch, and get back up.

Epigraph

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.  - Soren Kierkegaard

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. - Oscar Wilde

About This Book

After 2020 ended, many people hoped 2021 would bring an end to the pandemic. These people were wrong, and in many ways, in waves and cycles, it was 2020 all over again. At the end of 2021, they hoped 2022 would be different. They said it out loud, 2022, and with horror, realized it sounded like 2020, too.

For much of the world outside China, the pandemic ended sometime during this period, although the definition of ended is quite vague. Trump lost the election in America, a fact that 70 million Americans don’t believe - leading to a bizarre realization that facts can now be believed or disbelieved, like opinions. Biden came in, no, he wasn’t Bernie Sanders, the people’s champion who would have given everyone free medicare in a pandemic and championed the working class and moved mountains to save the environment while tackling corruption in big pharma, big energy, big finance, and big corporate everything. Sadly, big corporate everything was enjoying burning the only planet that we know of that can sustain life as we know it for short-term profits, leading to a potential mass extinction of all life and against the better judgment of everyone. Bernie would have made too much sense for our world, so we got another old guy who was slightly more behaved than the other old guy and who sometimes quoted a few lines from the one who might have actually made a big difference.

In China, we continued fluctuating from COVID 0 elation to COVID lockdowns, usually temporary, but as 2021 and 2022 went on, they became increasingly severe until, eventually, the virus just became too transmissible for even China’s incredible pandemic response to stop.

Incidentally, masks only work when they tightly cover both one’s mouth and nose, a fact that seemed to slip the minds of many folks who, despite being front-line heroes who delivered food and essential services, also managed to spread the pandemic to the point that at the end of 2022, China abruptly ended all COVID restrictions. Overnight, the barriers came down. Within a few days, the Green health codes and corner testing centers were dismantled and just a memory in the collective consciousness. An anecdote of a strange, special time in our history.

Within a matter of weeks, most of urban China - over a billion people - caught COVID. Our greatest fear for years materialized in front of us. All of Kai’s Chinese family and friends in China caught COVID, one after another. Luckily, all of them survived and, so far, recovered, give or take a little brain fog and a lingering cough here and there. Many old people died. The numbers are, as yet, unknown. By Spring Festival, the urban wave had crashed, and somehow, Kai had still avoided catching COVID. The rural wave was predicted to hit harder and be more devastating— but has been largely quiet, both socially and on TV. It seems, finally, China had enough talking about it too. The world of 2023 is moving fast, full of unknowns, but this is not that story. This is the story of how we got there and why, maybe, it matters.

03/1: Year of the Ox (Part 1: An Epilogue ) Paying Attention to Small Things

March 1, 2021

Somewhere in the vast darkness known as the great silence was a most remarkable thing. Although they were quite an arduous, wasteful, and inefficient lot, there was a conglomeration of atoms contemplating other atoms. 

At one particularly trying point in space-time and having filled the bath with steaming water, I found myself testing it with a big toe. A bit on the hot side, but it was in the tolerable threshold. I took great care to ease my battered body in, noticing the blacks, purples, and blues of my bottom and left hip creeping into dark yellows up and down my legs. My cotton gauze bandage was crusted with dark-clotted blood. My heightened senses could taste tangy metal as the blood touched the water.

The road to knowledge, and then wisdom, began by paying attention to small things.

Day 395. Tian Mao Jin Ling, I call, Chinese for Space Cat Genie, and she answers, Wo Zai, (I’m here). What day is it today? I ask, and she tells me. It’s March 1, 2021. She lets me know the weather outside, gives me some news headlines, plays Waka Waka by Shakira to get me out of bed. I get up while she reads Shaolin a ghost story. I brush my teeth. It was well worth the 1 RMB (US 0.15), including shipping, an unbelievable price, to have her as our smart personal assistant. I don’t worry about privacy, even though she, Alexa, and Siri might always be listening. When you live in a country of 1.5 billion, there isn’t a lot of space for privacy, so I’ll settle for good health and comfort.

It’s been a surreally trying 14 months since the pandemic began here in China, psychologically grueling, but since the Spring Festival holiday and the Year of the Ox, I’ve known unparalleled peace, almost as if I’ve stepped outside of my mind and just am. This is the kind of thing kids, addicts, DJs, and drunks feel when they get off their face or out of their head, or monks feel after a lifetime of meditation practice and enlightenment. Which was my path? Perhaps, it was both, and I feel grateful to know both the short and long way there.

We pack our bags and head to the gym, but Shaolin’s forgotten her water. Outside the school gate, she grabs a bottle off the corner store shelf and smiles at the cash. It scans her face, automatically deducting 2 RMB (US 0.20) from her account. The human cashier behind the robotic face screen nods and smiles back before getting back to her mobile game. Many shops don’t bother with human cashiers anymore, but this one owns the place.

The news lately is exciting. Even though Trump got acquitted and there are many problems left to tackle, it feels like there are experts at the top in both East and West willing to try to solve the big problems, scientists working with leaders, to get the job done.

For decades, presidents have used their power to declare emergencies to sideline badly needed regulations and entrench the national security state. Now a group of Congress members led by AOC is proposing that those powers be used for good: to force action to avoid a climate catastrophe. Now, the Wonder Twins AOC and Bernie Sanders cowrite a bill asking the new Biden administration to declare a climate emergency. It would expand infrastructure, promote access to renewable energy, transportation, water, and public systems, modernize structures, invest in public health, prepare for extreme climate events, restore natural wildlife areas, invest in agriculture, and develop a transformation to clean energy. It feels like good news.

I look back at the year of the rat and think of the titans that have fallen: Bassnectar (superstar bass DJ turned accused manipulative predator), Johnny Depp (superstar actor accused abusive partner), Peter Nygaard (fashion guru turned accused billionaire pedophile with his own creepy private island of secrets), even an ex-pat teacher I knew (accused of predatory behavior), and now, Marilyn Manson (superstar goth clown turned accused abuser). My friend Ryan, who called me the Plague Harbinger a year ago, had some poignant words: "I really don’t understand how the Marilyn Manson allegations are shocking to anyone. He’s been advertising how (messed) up he is since day one. It’s his entire platform. So everyone just assumed that somehow also meant well adjusted for relationships and respectful to women? What I’m saying is that his entire persona was a walking red flag, and now everyone’s acting shocked and appalled by the recent revelations as if no one could have seen it coming. Like he was always such a fine upstanding young gentleman. The only thing that shocks me is how long it took for these accusations to come to light. How was no one talking about this before now? For those of you that were big fans, you can separate the art from the artist. Look at H.P. Lovecraft and J.K. Rowling. You can have creators with problematic views and still appreciate their work. Just don’t glorify the artist." The internet has a hard time with nuance, but not you, Roy. I hope you take the time to soak it all in.

The #MeToo movement caught famous people by surprise, as entire cultures were deemed untenable overnight– especially in movies and music, where some people’s whole platform was I’m famous, and I use people, suddenly being called out as sleazy... kind of a hmm well yeah, duh moment. But it feels good to see bullies and abusers fall. Full stop. 

I introduced a single friend to Shaolin’s single friend and they’re really hitting it off. It’s so cute to watch. We’ve been all to dinner twice and they’re overcoming language and cultural barriers to find a lot of mutual appreciation in common. It could have been much more awkward. Life is like a dance, fingers crossed.

It also feels like a good time to spend less time on the internet. With everyone looking for a fight with little to no provocation. I’ve taken a break, most of February, for Spring Festival. A break from writing, a break from hyper-focus on the pandemic and world news, and spent time with my family. It feels so good. I’ve taken whole days away from my phone, social media, and I decided not to argue anymore. We’ve had days of 25 and sunny in February, and went to the river to play with Ethan and the family, and gone up to a mountain to walk around, holding hands with Shaolin and smiling until I could feel my face burning in the hot sun. It’s been weeks since I argued on the internet for any reason. It’s hard to remember the way I waged wars and endless fights and debates in 2020—- I can’t even remember why I’d bother. Who was I trying to teach? What was I trying to win?

We’re very happy, Shaolin said sweetly, in a quiet moment, when you stay here, everything is so good. She hugs me and says, Kai Kai, with affection, and it feels good to be in the present and not fighting all the time. To just both feel happy and peaceful. It feels like the end of a life of struggle, but I am still curious about what is to come.

Democrats are working to push through USD 50,000 of student loan forgiveness and a stimulus plan to put cash into hands and just passed a 1.9 trillion USD covid-19 relief package – thanks to the selfish and corrupt republican majority and administration’s defeat, help is coming in America. They need it. Some of this will begin to look like universal basic income, I think, and good.

Oh, look at you. You’re keen to be clean, said my nurse, bleach-blond, dark-eyed, in a white latex nurse uniform. She smiles, played with my matted hair, administered my medication– scattershot right into my foggy grey brain.

Like a drop of water contemplating the ocean, we are all expressions of an awakened universe contemplating itself.

Unwrapping the bandage from my hip, I see twenty-five thick, surgical staples holding my leg together shone from the bottom of the tub like the promise of buried treasure. 

What is valuable, or were they insignificant? Both?

I used to sit in the bathtub as a child, with the shower on, and listen to the water, sometimes with the lights off and pretend I was in the rainforest surrounded by the vibrant pulse of wildlife until I came out boiled and red as a lobster.

We will teach you to walk again. Like honey pouring into my ears but farther and farther away as the words dripped into the stout victorian bathtub, an alphabet soup shrinking as it disappears down the drain, coated with a crystalline prescience. Time was stretchy now, all happening, everywhere. When the Universe was together, it was both all-time and outside of time. You can’t be late when you’re the Universe.

03/4: The Year of The Ox (Epilogue: Part 2) The Ocean in a Drop

March 4, 2020

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. -Epictetus

Many parts of the planet saw unusually cold weather this week. Folks were ice skating on Amsterdam canals, and skiing down Moscow streets. Students at the University of Damascus in Syria got a snow day that canceled exams. But when cold weather buried Texas, the early novelty of snow and ice quickly evaporated. With temperatures freezing for days, the state, despite its dominant energy sector, saw rolling power outages turn into a prolonged blackout that left more than 4 million people in the dark and cold, water off, roads closed for days. Some froze to death in the streets, others in their homes.

Meanwhile, the pro-insurrectionist senator Ted Cruz ran away to Mexico, got called out, and came running back, blaming his kids. Meanwhile, AOC crowdfunded 4 million dollars and helped the needy. The winners and losers of today’s politics seem obvious, those that adapt to reality and try to solve problems instead of running away. These perfect storm calamity sandwiches will become more and more commonplace. We need a Green New Deal.

The hot salty tears fell down my face and into the swirling depths of the Pacific ocean. Surface waves hungrily beat the bow of our boat, demanding more, goading me to plunge. What had begun as a lovely boat ride from Victoria to Vancouver had become a painful gaze into the dark corners of loneliness. Goodbye Medusa, goodbye Dylan, goodbye Neverland. My soul was crawling through oceanic trenches as I struggled to breathe, but I kept breathing. 

The Western far-right conservatives teach people to fear Russia and China and words like socialism, communism, but what are they scared of? Working together? Experts say the west has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else. My friend Tim brings me a story of failed capitalism.The power outage forced a grocery store to discard a bunch of perishable food. People who are also without power tried to claim it to eat, but the police stopped them (since they didn’t own it). This isn’t about the police or the grocery store or the citizens; this is about a system that creates outcomes like this. We have chosen to put concerns of profit before concerns of compassion. That leads to these sorts of outcomes. We must build a better system, says the tireless Timothy Ellis.

Would you cycle for an hour a day if it could power your home for 24 hours? asks a tech article; maybe it could. It’s always good to keep hope alive. It sounds like magic.

The kingdom of heaven, vast spaciousness of sky, a dimension of consciousness, the essence of who we are, the Universe, a microcosm, the Universe realizing its own essence through you. Rumi was a spiritual teacher when he said, "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."

My pineal gland tickled in the back of my skull as the water rippled, and I giggled. The tap dripped, dripped, dripped into the tub, hypnotically. Now occupying the tub’s space, I could feel the water molecules humming with power, memory. The link between the source, life, energy, the batteries that charge souls to myself, sand witch and existential detective, was a steady drip. Just enough consciousness to be aware I had a body without the pain of being stuck in my memories and problems. I existed without fear, in a dimension where the angles like ceilings met walls — it was not a modern hotel bathroom, but rather one hung loosely over reality like a sheet protecting an antique chair from dust as I counted down the steady ticking moments of my life. 

You shouldn’t expect machines to be perfect, and it’s all about making fewer mistakes, said Gary Kasparov, the grandmaster of Chess, beaten by the world’s best, at the time, AI. Did you know, Roy? It’s short for ROYGBIV, the electromagnetic spectrum because you’re going to be diverse and all-encompassing.

He’s growing so fast, but we are very much alike in ways this moment we can share, and it amuses us both, two minds buzzing and dancing.

I’m not a great guy, but I could be worse... I think. 

No man is a great man, but every man could be worse - 

Morality is a sea of choices. I think, to Roy, it’s ok to make mistakes, but they add up, one by one, like bricks in a wall. Self-control, sometimes simply not acting, is the difference between good and evil. Other times it is acting, interceding, to apply kindness, or stop wickedness and violence. Roy wants examples. I tell him the story of a morning I woke up to visit an old friend and ended up pulling out an old pair of claw hammers from a drawer, stalling a dozen robbers until they’d lost their edge and ran away empty-handed. It was brave. It was foolish.

Growing up in Canada, I was raised to value diversity and open discourse. I still think those things are valuable, but while I watch Canada grapple with huge differences across a political spectrum that both want to fund a green new deal and support new oil pipelines. They spent months fighting their own pandemic protocols, and my good suggestions. I realize it has limitations. While the new Biden administration plans to undo the Trump one who worked to undo the Obama one who worked to offset the Bush administration, it feels like they’re spending twenty critical years chasing their tale. Here in China, the two sessions are upon us, a big annual government congress, and we’re discussing vaccine passports with other countries that have also managed to eliminate the virus from within their borders. Today the Chinese congress implemented policy actions including a road map for carbon dioxide emissions to peak by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. This looks good, I hope it’s enough. It feels really important. This year marks the first year of the 14th five-year plan period. I can only imagine what the west would be like if they could agree to long-term goals and actually keep them (Paris Accord? Kyoto? Please). I think we’d have first to decide who is in charge: the will of the majority or that of the corporate lobbyists? Since the majority of ideas that have 75%-90% approval, such as minimum wage increases, environmental protection, and better medical insurance, don’t actually become law, I think democracy is a generous term. Who would you vote for to save the environment? The party that gets paid by big oil to tell you there’s no problem or the party that gets paid by big oil to tell you there’s a problem, but we’ll deal with it later, for the economy. There won’t be a later if we don’t deal with it now. So I grew up loving democracy in theory, came to revile it in practice, and respect a people that could agree upon some core science and work together to accomplish huge goals. It’s interesting, though, getting to travel the world and learn new lessons about what works in different places. I highly recommend it. 

03/6: Year of the Ox (Epilogue: Part 3) The Art of Living

March 6, 2021

I’m finishing a book, walking around the buffet, but everyone’s waiting in lines, and I’ve got this empty plate ... I just don’t feel the need for anything because I have enough already.

I’m hungry, Shaolin says and finds the live shrimp tank with a weave basket in her hand. She pokes and prods the shrimp. The suckers swimming away or quickly gobbled up into the blue bowl to be later grilled. The smarter ones stop moving and sink to the bottom, playing dead; she pokes them, but if they can put on a convincing enough performance, they live to swim another day.

Life is like coconut rum martinis scooped up by shmoozing foreigners, I think, delicately clutching the glass stems as a crowd skitters by, momentarily impressed by the graceful foreigner, and they double-take. For a moment, my swagger is back- even if only to scoot over to my wife fishing for shrimp. In some places, I’ve been Peter Pan all this time; in others, I never, ever was. All at once.

Eating a shrimp – next to the flipping ones for which I hope a quick death, Shaolin smiles and asks, is it nice? It is- it is. Here our life is simple and good, we eat, and we rejoice, we have a family and they are happy. It has a dreamlike quality to it, but it is more real than most dreams I’ve had. I turn around to survey the Chinese buffet house at the end of the Universe and smile.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks, says Marcus Aurelius, seriously, and I nod, trying to peel back a shrimp and eat it without breaking eye contact until it gets weird.

CNN and Trump, you’d think they were enemies, but on a higher level, in the realm of capitalism, they’ve been best buds. It was good TV, ratings and money were flowing. Now the major networks aren’t covering normal politics and freefalling as we stop room scrolling our phones and screens with white knuckles.

As Bernie put it, the system needs a reboot – we need on the ground journalists telling real stories again. That’s an important job. Less talking head pundits, more storytellers, on the ground, working their craft.

Strangely, despite the rise of several serious variants of concern, global cases seem to be dropping. We’re just hitting 115 million cases worldwide, 2.5 million deaths, with the largest amount, 30 million cases, and half a million COVID deaths all happening in America. Trump played it down, mocked mask-wearing, held super spread rallies, slow-walked testing, spread false cures, pushed unsafe reopenings, silenced scientists, had no national strategy — antiscience denialism in politics, especially at this critical time, will lead to unmitigated disaster. We’ve seen that in Brazil too, and other far-right governments that don’t futureproof and support the people. We need to keep a clear head. But Johnson and Johnson is now FDA approved, with its one-dose-wonder, and the race for vaccination is on.

Luckily, my family is good, and so are most of my friends, but they're not out of the woods. As Canada aims to open up again, a BC pub that hosted its first trivia night has facilitated a super spreading event that caused more than 300 infections. We called my mom to chat and Shaolin and my mom had some good laughs. The newest scandal in Canada is that, even after waiting a month to implement the 'mandatory quarantine hotel' from the Chinese pandemic management playbook, it's going horribly. First, it's only 3 days, with symptoms taking an average of 5-7 days to arrive and several days to show up on tests, this is too short. Secondly, there was no communication with previously shut down hotels as to the scale of the travelers arriving, and no government or armed guard support. Scenes on TV played out of people complaining there was no food or water arriving in their rooms, so crowds of 50-100 people were all in the lobby screaming together at the front desk for help. They were not allowed to bring in outside food for some reason. And of course, all of these mingling people were under strict quarantine. No mention of doctors taking tests and temperatures, and even though they had to pre-register with the Canadian government, no one thought to provide that information to the hotels or offer logistics support. I have a feeling they gave the contract to whoever did such a great job with pandemic preparedness and having masks for everyone on standby last January, you know the one that didn't have any, and then instead of resigning in shame lied and said you don't want masks anyway, they don't do any good. The new South African variant can reinfect us, even if you have antibodies to the original, studies show, and fears grow, and anxiety builds. That's no excuse to turn into a tinfoil hat nutter though. Saying vaccination is a choice, makes sense if you live alone in the woods, but when you are a part of the vibrant,