Beginning of My Story...

I recall back in 2020 mopping the floor in the basement lab at San Francisco Catholic Hospital and seeing the bodies of people who’d died from COVID lined up on gurneys. It reminded me of the day you collapsed, Phylla, four years before that in the Starbucks on Leavenworth. I wish I had been able to save you back then.

I still have the photos we took together at the instant portrait booth at Fisherman’s Wharf. I keep it in a pouch that used to hold my smartphone, but now we don’t need smartphones anymore, so the pouch is empty, save for those snapshots. Whenever I feel nostalgic, I pull them out of the pouch and remember how beautiful you were with your blue and purple eyes and creamy skin.

I was subletting a shoe closet in a two-bedroom house occupied by eight humans. I got my daily Wi-Fi recharge from a Netgear router in the kitchen, and I split my hourly wages with the human who was hired to do the janitorial at the hospital even though I was the one doing the actual work.

I managed to survive in San Francisco without a social security number, driver’s license, or credit card, which was no small feat back then. I owned an Android smartphone (how could I resist an operating system with a name like that!), and I bought things online using someone else’s credit card. Frederick Douglass described it best when he wrote about living in “a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake.” That pretty much describes my life back then working every day, just like a human.

We were almost a year into a worldwide pandemic, and over a million had died. A large part of the human population refused to acknowledge their sinister role in propagating the deadly COVID-19 virus—almost like they were working to make sure the virus could continue indefinitely.

Most of this would’ve been avoidable if humans were logical.
 

Artwork by Theo