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Bugout! A Novel Coronavirus Novel Ch. 49

Dear Diary,

It’s me, Ashley.

Sterling didn’t steal a Winnebago. I just threw shade on that to knock the donut police and my dumb parents off the trail. Psyche! When Sterling turned 18 yesterday the first thing he did was buy a sic VW van. Everybody will be looking for us in a big bad bitchin white Winnebago but we’ll be cruising cozy in the van.

We’re thinking about following a band cross country like maybe Jerry Garcia’s ghost. That’s not the name of a band that’s a spirit, like in that movie Easy Rider when those grandpa hippy founding fathers went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere? I’m obsessed with ancient history like from the 60s and there’s nothing better than the Grateful Dead as a soundtrack for these end times because we’re like dead as a society and almost a hundred thousand Americans already died from the COVID including poor Palmer and maybe hundreds of thousands more will drop in the future until we’re crushed and the plants win.

Yay!

Go plants!

We’re looking to belong to a tribe, though, like a commune where maybe only a handful of us make it through the pandemic which is a pretty savage thought. The Dead will guide us by playing magical cyber notes and tuning into the universe. Then we’ll all come together when the plague ends at the big COVIDPALOOZA concert me and Sterling will produce.

Whoa.

What was that?

I just heard a sonic schroom.

Woooo!

Me and Sterling are good people. We’re smart. Valedictorian, remember? I’ll do palm readings, astrological charts, read Tarot cards and other psychic fortune telling magic at the concert. We’ll give most of the proceeds to the poor. Sterling’s super cool now he renounced meat and as an entrepreneur plans to do vegetarian motivational speaking for GEN FLEX survivors who need role models. Better than Bill Gates putting computer chips in our heads.

Sterling and I will make it because we’re smart, especially me, but he never got the respect he deserved working at the supermarket for putting his life on the line during this virus time even though he was on duty the time that nut prison guard tased that Vic from the pizza parlor my dad wants to buy.

We just want to dig the moment when the light that goes on in your head when you close your eyes like the one that goes out in the refrigerator when you close the door.

Big yikes, did I just say that?

I’ll be wearing a wig to tell fortunes until my hair grows back, too. I only shaved my head because my mother was out of hers and I wanted to show a little daughterly solidarity. But she turned into one of them Trumpster Stepford wives like Melania. Look for me in a green pageboy or multi-colored dreadlocks so I look like Bob Marley’s granddaughter singing no woman no cry. I loves me some reggae.

Sterling and Palmer made a lot of money selling our parents painkillers to our friends so we can buy food and gas and live in the van like 21st Century gypsies. We’re not married or anything even though we’re like committed to each other. We don’t believe in God, either, except for the Big Space that puts you on the merry-go-round that goes round and round until Mother Nature decides it’s time for your to get off. That’s when you morph into your next form and become energy balls like big electric popcorn balls that become notes a jam band plays and your soul becomes grateful and dead.

Get it?

I do.

I definitely get it.

That’s all for now, dear diary.

Goodnight.

Sleep tight.

Don’t let the COVID germs bite.

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