The Diaries of a Sozzled Scribbler #7

Transcribed by DMETRI KAKMI

16 April 2020

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to my press conference. I called you to my private rooms at the Hotel Cortez to make possibly the most shocking revelation of our times.

The coronavirus pandemic is a hoax, a ruse, a deception, a jape, a bluff, a practical joke, a heavenly jest. In short, a lie.

As your friend and ally, I tell you that you don’t have to hunker down in your ugly little homes, too scared to go out in case you catch the virus and die, because it ain’t real.

There’s nothing out there except fresh air now that you busy busy worker bees aren’t driving your cheap little motorcars to work every day or taking ghastly passenger jets to famous tourists sites when your masters release you briefly from servitude.

I repeat. Coronavirus is a fiction. An illusion, like civilization or Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s brain. And you, my friend, have been hornswoggled.

But I see sceptical faces. Who made it up? I hear you say.

That’s easy. A cabal of toilet paper manufacturers and protective mask makers.

Settle down. Allow me to clarify before you cancel me on social media.

These are not your average toilet paper hucksters from Chattanooga and fashionable purveyors of protective masks from Tokyo. They are apex predators, ultra rich individuals who control the world behind the governments you elect to power.

What was that, young man? Yes, you, the fey one. Why did they make it up?

The answer is twofold.

First, the coronavirus was invented to keep the poor off the streets. While you hunker down in your sad little homes, watching Netflix, the rich are out and about, enjoying in sublime solitude the world’s great beauty spots heretofore swamped by the great unwashed.

Second, the coronavirus and its overflow—the stockpiling of toilet paper—was invented for laughs. For the rich, the pandemic is a comic interlude in a life filled with divertissement.

You may not be aware, but every poor man’s toilet is equipped with a secret camera. It’s placed inside the bowl to capture his likeness as he wipes his fundament with the rarest of all commodities: the toilet paper, which has made kings of those who sit upon the throne of filthy lucre.

You see, nothing is funnier for the rich than watching the poor wipe their behinds with the very substance that has made them wealthy. They scream with laughter and fall about.

Here’s another scoop. The rich, of course, don’t wipe their bottoms. They get poor people from third world countries to rim them clean. It’s quite effective and rather naughtily piquant, I’m told.

Final question please. This press conference is becoming rather raucous, and I’m running out of alcohol.

How do I know this?

Easy. I am part of the international jet-set who flit here and yon, without a care in the world, knowing all good things will come to them sooner rather than later. Needless to say one hears things when one moves in such elite circles. It’s lucky for you I have a social conscience and wish to help those less fortunate than I.

But why the long faces? I see, you feel despondent. You think you have been made a fool of and want to avenge yourselves on those who have led you down the garden path.

Let me give you that final push towards the abyss. I saved the best for last. The nail in the coronavirus coffin, shall we say.

What do you think of protective face masks?

I can now reveal the mask is as big a fraud as toilet paper. There is no need to wear a face mask when you go out. Truth is the rich invented face masks for the poor to wear; you haven’t seen Mr Musk wear one, have you? There is good reason for that.

Nothing is worse for the rich than having to look upon the countenance of the poor. It puts one off champagne and caviar, what? And so they came up with this neat little trick with the masks.

Wear an approved face covering, they said, and you will be protected from airborne droplets that may or may not contain the virus—a virus, let us remember, that does not exist.

What they didn’t say is that the mask stops them from having to look at you.

And now I shall make perhaps my most radical observation.

Like the hipster beard, the face mask is the Islamification of the western face. Which gives you a little clue as to who might be behind all this… No, no, settle down. Think about it, I beg you. After all, the Middle East does not use toilet paper; it uses the shatafa.

Stop that. I’m not Islamophobic. Some of my best friends were Muslim terrorists.

So I say unto the poor, wipe the bull dust from your eyes. There is no coronavirus. You don’t have to stay at home. Go forth and commingle with your brethren.

Until next we meet. Cheerio!

Uttered sotto voce as Mr Sozzled left the podium, but captured by ultra-sensitive microphones: ‘If that doesn’t wipe out three quarters of the vermin nothing will. Now where’s my fucking martini?’

The Sozzled Scribbler was born in the shadow of the Erechtheion in Athens, Greece, to an Egyptian street walker (his father) and a Greek bear wrestler (his mother). He has lived in Istanbul, Rome, London, New Orleans and is currently stateless. He partakes of four bottles of Bombay gin and nine packets of Gauloises cigarettes a day.

Dmetri Kakmi, is a writer and editor. His first book Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia, and his new book The Door will be released in September 2020.