Continues
https://hvom.blogspot.com/2025/04/today-is-04272025.html
by me, Kerry Burgess, 04/27/2025 (later, showering in the shower)
numb-ers
What does numb-ers have to do with anything?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_(literature)
Identification (literature)
From Wikipedia
Identification refers to the automatic, subconscious psychological process in which an individual becomes like or closely associates themselves with another person by adopting one or more of the others' perceived personality traits, physical attributes, or some other aspect of their identity. The concept of identification was founded by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the 1920’s, and has since been expanded on and applied in psychology, social studies, media studies, and literary and film criticism. In literature, identification most often refers to the audience identifying with a fictional character, however it can also be employed as a narrative device whereby one character identifies with another character within the text itself.
"Requiem For Methuselah" [ Star Trek ]
Original Airdate: 14 Feb, 1969
(from internet transcript)
SPOCK: How many other names shall we call you?
FLINT: Solomon, Alexander, Lazarus, Methuselah, Merlin, Abramson. A hundred other names you do not know.
SPOCK: You were born?
FLINT: In that region of earth later called Mesopotamia, in the year 3834 BC, as the millennia are reckoned. I was Akharin, a soldier, a bully and a fool. I fell in battle, pierced to the heart and did not die.
MCCOY: Instant tissue regeneration coupled with some perfect form of biological renewal. You learned that you were immortal and
FLINT: And to conceal it. To live some portion of a life, to pretend to age and then move on before my nature was suspected.
From 2/14/1969 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Star Trek"::"Requiem for Methuselah" ) To 4/27/2025 ( Today ) is 20526 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/13/2022 ( ) is 20526 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._Thomas_Caskey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Gurnett
From 6/8/2010 ( "The Passage: A Novel" by Justin Cronin, book 1 of The Passage Trilogy ) To 4/27/2025 ( Today ) is 5437 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/21/1980 ( the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 enacted ) is 5437 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Oversight_Act
"The Passage: A Novel" (Book One of The Passage Trilogy)
by Justin Cronin, author
page 225 of 881 (Amazon Kindle Version)
"Main Lab, report. Somebody tell me what the fuck is going on down there."
A terrified voice came through: Fortes? "They let them out!"
"Who? Who let them out?"
A blast of static, and Richards heard the first screams coming over the audio, and gunshots, and more screams - the screams men made when they died.
"Holy fuck!" Another blast of static. "They're all loose down here! The fucking sweeps let them all go!"
"The Twelve: A Novel" (Book Two of the Passage Trilogy)
by Justin Cronin, author
Page 52 of 593 (Amazon Kindle Version)
So it was that Deputy Director Horace Guilder (were there any actual directors anymore?) had found himself sitting before the Joint Chiefs (enough stars and bars around the table to start a Girl Scout troop) to offer his official assessment of the situation in Colorado. (Sorry, we made vampires; it seemed like a good idea at the time.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passage_(Cronin_novel)
From 5/8/1994 ( premiere USA TV miniseries "Stephen King's The Stand"::miniseries premiere "The Plague" ) To 4/27/2025 ( ) is 11312 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 10/22/1996 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Frontline"::"Why America Hates the Press" ) is 11312 days
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 19
“Where are you? Nobody’s seen you, Larry.”
“Well, I’m on the East Coast,” he said cautiously. “Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off.”
“Something about a big party?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard about that,” she said. “Big spender.”
“Is Wayne around, Arlene?”
“You mean Wayne Stukey?”
“I don’t mean John Wayne—he’s dead.”
“You mean you haven’t heard?”
“What would I hear? I’m on the other coast. Hey, he’s okay, isn’t he?”
“He’s in the hospital with this flu bug. Captain Trips, they’re calling it out here. Not that it’s any laughing matter. A lot of people have died with it, they say. People are scared, staying in. We’ve got six empty tables, and you know Jane’s never has empty tables.”
“How is he?”
“Who knows? They’ve got wards and wards of people and none of them can have visitors. It’s spooky, Larry. And there are lot of soldiers around.”
“On leave?”
“Soldiers on leave don’t carry guns or ride around in convoy trucks. A lot of people are really scared. You’re well off out where you are.”
“Hasn’t been anything on the news.”
“Out here there’s been a few things in the papers about getting flu boosters, that’s all. But some people are saying the army got careless with one of those little plague jars. Isn’t that creepy?”
“It’s just scare talk.”
“There’s nothing like it where you are?”
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 4
Len Creighton nodded. “Billy. This… Christ, I don’t know how to tell you.”
“I think one word at a time might go best, soldier.”
“Those men who handled Campion’s body are through their prelims at Atlanta, and the news isn’t good.”
“All of them?”
“Five for sure. There’s one—his name is Stuart Redman—who’s negative so far. But as far as we can tell, Campion himself was negative for over fifty hours.”
“If only Campion hadn’t run,” Starkey said. “That was sloppy security, Len. Very sloppy.”
Creighton nodded.
“Go on.”
“Arnette has been quarantined. We’ve isolated at least sixteen cases of constantly shifting A-Prime flu there so far. And those are just the overt ones.”
“The news media?”
“So far, no problem. They believe it’s anthrax.”
“What else?”
“One very serious problem. We have a Texas highway patrolman named Joseph Robert Brentwood. His cousin owns the gas station where Campion ended up. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked him up three hours ago and he’s en route to Atlanta now. In the meantime he’s been patrolling half of East Texas. God knows how many people he’s been in contact with.”
“Oh, shit,” Starkey said, and was appalled by the watery weakness in his voice and the skin-crawl that had started near the base of his testicles and was now working up into his belly. 99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create.
99.4%.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 54
And a queer certainty stole over her, as numbing as some creeping anesthesia, that they would finish by wading in blood. The thought made her place her hands protectively over her belly, and she found herself thinking for the first time in weeks of her dream: the dark man with his grin… and his twisted coathanger.
As well as hunting for Mother Abagail with a picked group of volunteers in his spare time, Harold Lauder was on the Burial Committee, and on August 21 he spent the day in the back of a dump truck with five other men, all of them wearing boots and protective clothing and heavy-duty Playtex rubber gloves. The head of the Burial Committee, Chad Norris, was out at what he referred to, with an almost grisly calm, as Burial Site #1. It was ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal. The site lay as bleak and barren as the mountains of the moon under the burning August sun. Chad had accepted the post reluctantly because he had once been an undertaker’s assistant in Morristown, New Jersey.
“There’s no undertaking about this,” he had said this morning at the Greyhound Bus Terminal between Arapahoe and Walnut, which was the Burial Committee’s base of operations. He lit a Winston with a wooden match and grinned at the twenty men sitting around. “That is, it’s an undertaking but not an undertaking undertaking, if you get my meaning.”
There were a few strained smiles, Harold’s largest among them. His belly had been rumbling constantly because he hadn’t dared eat breakfast. He hadn’t been sure he could keep it down, considering the nature of the work. He could have stuck with finding Mother Abagail and no one would have murmured a word of protest, even though it had to be obvious to every thinking man in the Zone (if there were any thinking men in the Free Zone besides himself—a debatable question) that looking for her with fifteen men was an exercise in comic relief when you considered the thousands of square miles of empty forest and plain around Boulder. And, of course, she might never have left Boulder, none of them seemed to have thought of that (which didn’t surprise Harold at all). She could be set up in a house just about anywhere beyond the center of town and they’d still never find her without a house-to-house search. Redman and Andros hadn’t raised a word of protest between them when Harold suggested that the Search Committee be a weekend and evening sort of thing, which told Harold that they accepted it as a closed case, too.
He could have stuck with it, but who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn’t bring yourself to do.
“It’s going to be like burying cordwood,” Chad told them. “If you can keep it on that level in your mind, you’ll be okay. Some of you may have to vomit here at the start. There’s no shame in that; just try to go someplace where the rest won’t have to look at you do it. Once you’ve puked, you’ll find it easier to think that way: cordwood. Nothing but cordwood.”
The men were eyeing each other uncomfortably.
Chad broke them up into three six-man crews. He and the two odd men out went to prepare a place for those who were brought. Each of the three crews were given a specific area of town to work. Harold’s truck had spent the day in the Table Mesa area, working their way slowly west from the Denver-Boulder Turnpike exit ramp. Up Martin Drive to the Broadway intersection. Down Thirty-ninth Street and then back up Fortieth, suburban houses in a tract area now about thirty years old, dating back to the start of Boulder’s population boom, houses with one floor aboveground and a second below.
Chad had provided gas masks from the local National Guard armory, but they didn’t have to use them until after lunch (lunch? what lunch? Harold’s consisted of a can of Berry’s apple pie filling; it was all he could bring himself to eat), when they entered the Church of Latter-Day Saints on lower Table Mesa Drive. They had come here, filled with the plague, and they had died there, over seventy of them, and the stink was enormous.
“Cordwood,” one of Harold’s mates had said in a high, revolted, laughing voice, and Harold had turned and stumbled out past him. He went around the corner of the handsome brick building that had once been a polling place in election years and up came the Berry’s apple pie filling and he discovered that Norris had been right: He really felt better without it.
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 4:54 PM Pacific-timezone USA Sunday 04/27/2025
