BEFORE BED

TV news: San Francisco had its first confirmed covid death today. Still, we went into lockdown and masking fast, and people are complying; I'm hoping our deathrate stays low. We'll see.

I stumble on a show about religious practices round the world. Three each week. Tonight:

• An aspiring monk in Shaolin Temple. Serious kungfu, but he just rote-memorizes Buddhist texts for exams. Since mindless recital's so holy.
• A leader of a gorgeous new Hindu temple in London where they build a Lego Land of cookies & candy. Since sugar shock's so holy.
• A Jerusalem ambulance guy. At Ramadan, he rescues idiots who stood in the hot sun without hydrating. Since heatstroke's so holy.

THAT NIGHT

Round this pedestrian's cyclone eye chaos cacaphonous swirls though never yet quite kills-- that ambling pachyderm (just pissing by) does drop a fuming barrelturd toward his target head (non-bald); he jumps, evading dung (and jumbo dong. Dang.) Red car swerves to miss his deftish pirouette; a bare-inch gap, only to spin asprawl the bicycle path thrusting magenta helmeted appalled cyclist onto the walk. Her spandex vortex flounders, forced to ding and shock Our Lady of the Luggage. A hard case makes a prison-run, an Eisenstein awheel. Freaks the cockapoo who yelps and leaps into... and on. A specialist ghoul! So a shaman comes and pins it down for a little eth- ical heart-to-heart. Quel sort! A Celtic ghost who compulsively re- enacts some suicide myth or death by preposterous misfor- tune with variations; as Plath a path as any spook can cook. I for- get the sobriquet. A Poltershee? Yet artistic Bangeist: a Rube far more enthralled by up(creative)roar than boring ("been there!") death.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

Weird names for the ghost: today my friend Mike mentioned that 'delog' is a Buddhist term for a soul who's escaped hell... but maybe has some prison tattoos--and habits. I forgot what names the shaman in the dream used, so I mishmashed banshee and poltergeist. Rube, of course, is for Rube Goldberg (look his cartoons up) plus old circus slang: "Hey Rube!" as trouble, and "rube" as victim.

Hmm. All the letters in delog are in Goldberg. All the letters of dog are in delog, too. Well then!

I bet Jung would says this poltergeist is an inventive side of me, a trickster who's loves uproar. But I wonder. Doesn't it seem like a portrait of Covid? Not plague, typhoid or smallpox, yet a deft social disruptor punching way above its deathrate.

A YEAR LATER

The dream's oddly nonfatal chain of crashes seems clear now. San Francisco got Covid-19 early and saw plenty of cases, but the Bay Area deathrate stayed far below the (shameful) national or world averages. Can't credit vaccination; the rollout here was quite slow, as the state diverted vaccine to disastrous hotspots in the Central Valley and LA. We just listened to the science, wore masks, took our vitamins, ate our faddish, silly, California healthfood, and stayed home. And mostly lived.

Not my friend Dave. But most.

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