Panopticon

I got a vaccine the other day. It was to innoculate me against The Deadly Wuhan-Coronavirus, COVID-19. Have you seen this? Have you heard about this? It’s a disease. It’s been around for a little while. Caused a bunch of problems. Just been a real bear. Cratered the economy, sent psychological shockwaves through whatever normalcy our society once had, murdered hundreds of thousands of people. COVID-19. You’ve heard of this, right?

So I went to get the vaccine. They give them out at Wal-Mart now. I got the Johnson & Johnson version, which is a one-shot, all-inclusive needle poke. And this vaccine is different. Vaccines of the past contained dead or weakened cells of the disease they were meant to protect you from. So you’d introduce the weakened contagion into your body, and your immune system would basically figure out a gameplan on how to beat this fucker down. But the COVID vaccine is an…uh..mRNA vaccine. Which is a brand new thing. Instead of pumping you full of beat up COVID cells, it teaches your body how to make the proteins that are found in the virus, and then your body learns how to combat them from that. Your own body creates a simulacrum of the enemy and then kicks its ass. Wowzers.

I went to Wal-Mart. I went to the Pharmacy area, because that is the medical part of Wal-Mart.

It is also pertinent to mention that I never had a smart phone until about 5 months ago. I had one of those little burner prepaid drug-dealer phones for most of my adult life. A TracFone that was about the size of a graham cracker and only needed to be charged once every two weeks. It had no camera, no internet access. If a text was too long, it would break it into multiple parts. Our modern smartphones started to become commonplace in or around 2010, and I purposely spent a decade not getting one because I didn’t like them. I mean, they’re neat and everything. But anytime a person has like, 30 seconds where they are not required to be doing anything, they pull out their phone. They don’t even know why they are pulling it out. It’s just the boredom cessation machine. Why look at the sky, or be quiet and think? Twitter is in your pocket and just a moment away…

So I had this piece of shit phone for like 13 years, and it became kind of a joke among my friends and me. I could send and receive texts, assuming they had no images or internet links. I would T9 my response back to you. In November of 2020, TracFone sent me some messages that were like “We are no longer going to be supporting your stupid phone. You have to buy a smart phone.”

I would prefer not to, but okay.

So I got one, some cheap beater phone because I am not one to need the newest and greatest thing. I got a crappy smart phone and went about my life.

I was in Wal-Mart. The medical wing. An older lady in front of me was also there for the vaccine. She talked to the pharmacist and then took a seat. I told the pharmacist I was there for the same reason. She told me it would be a few minutes, but to please stick around the area.

I stood in the little truncated aisle there. The shelves were full of Slim-Fast, and keto diet bars, and fat burning pills. I idly passed the time reading the packaging for banana flavored protein shakes and trail mix that would induce ketosis. After about twenty minutes, I got the shot. They took me into a little cordoned off booth and jabbed me and then I left.

Upon coming home, I fired up the old desktop computer and went to facebook. The first ad that popped up in my feed was for fat-burning pills. Let me repeat that the first ad that came up was for fat-burning pills.

I have never searched that, I have never clicked on links related to that. But somehow the Internet knew that I was standing in that aisle for like 20 minutes. Not just the store, but the place I was standing. The four-foot wide enclosure where products like that are sold. My new smart phone was broadcasting that I spent some time looking for fat burning solutions while I was idling there to stave off the plague.

People just act differently when they know they are being recorded. There is an aspect of performativeness, and therefore something dis·in·gen·u·ous. We all realize we are being constantly recorded now, whether by choice or by passive surveillance. This was not the reality that I was born into. And I think one of the strangest parts of it is that we don’t all completely hate it. We would like a document, a proof of our having lived and existed. To have some kind of an imprint on this world that ripples and looks back at us. To be seen and understood but this shit. This ain’t cuttin’ it. This is cynical.

Please like and subscribe to BeardBiteMan.com and also I will also have a Patreon soon maybe and I will give you a million kisses.