Monday, April 20 - Krakatoa Erupts
Jorah Kai CHONGQING, CHINA

Day 88. I am a volcano. Krakatoa is dormant no longer. What has been a mountain, long silent through the indignities of the smelly feet of climbers, ropes, and other bindings, has roared to life, pouring smoke, spewing fire, shootinog lava. I am hot around the collar. I'm incinerating friends that get in the way of my hot fire. It's a gruesome way to go, their blood boiling and their skulls exploding. Our chat history is a time capsule, a plaster cast, of the moment of incineration, frozen in ash, like the people of Pompeii.

There has been a tragedy upon a tragedy in the maritime provinces of Canada. A man in rural Nova Scotia dressed up as a police officer and murdered at least 16 people in an inexplicable rampage. It is an unspeakable tragedy with no easy answer or explanation. The body count is 19 and growing, my friend on the scene tells me. My first thought is how horrible and confusing it must have been, to be chased and gunned down by a man in uniform. My second thought was that for rural white people, this is probably the first time they've ever been confused and terrified by the inexplicable and random violence at the hands of police, something my black, Latino, and native friends are not strangers to. It's a horrible tragedy, some of us have been living horrible tragedies for years, others centuries. RIP to the lost souls and love to the torn asunder families. I wish you peace.

I wake up, make a strong pot of Italian coffee in my French press. I'm down to my last half KG of beans, so we order two more KG bags, and I hope they arrive in time.

"Zoo says coronavirus may force it to feed animals to each other" -- in crazy and sad news, a German zoo owner is discussing feeding the high maintenance animals to the other ones to save them from starving. "We've listed the animals we'll have to slaughter first," Neumünster Zoo's Verena Kaspari told Die Welt, as translated by BBC News. Kaspari explained that killing some animals so that others could live would be a last resort, and "unpleasant," but even that would not solve the financial crisis they're currently facing. She said the seals and penguins needed large quantities of fresh fish daily."If it comes to it, I'll have to euthanize animals, rather than let them starve," she told the German news outlet. "At the worst, we would have to feed some of the animals to others." Ok, I'll come clean, that was a Fox News story but it still tugged at my heart. Germany's zoos are reportedly also requesting government aid to the tune of 100 million euros.

If Youtube is any example, 10% of the people that listen to me speak to say I'm a slave. To what? To my own positive attitude? Or to China, for living here? Or to the CCP, for saying Chongqing did a good job in defying a mathematical model from Hong Kong that said we would be decimated, the second epicenter after Wuhan, but our strong measures controlled the outbreak and kept me safe, alive, and happy? I guess all of it. I'm an early adapter, a high adaptability quotient, says Myagi, one of the smartest people I've ever met, and I'm not new to this - Day 88 means a lot of time to process my feelings. I imagine those that comment quickly, from the hip, haven't taken the time to process all of this, though. But, I'm a philosopher, so I will come to sit on your Stoa, your porch, and ask you a question. I wonder, are we not all slaves? Slaves to our ambition, our hunger, our desires, and lust, or to fit in, to be loved, or remembered, our egos? If so, is death not the only freedom? Or is freedom in the mind, is it in our choice, our reaction and better, our pro-action?

I go out for packages, and I get a box of avocados. They are tiny and hard, but one day they might be breakfast. I have hope. Shaolin is taking the subway again already. She believes the protocols make it safe: they use temperature checks and thermal imaging guns, but if it was busy enough, I know carriers would be sharing those crowded low vent areas with her, and I'm not stoked about that. But it's been a month since we found a new infection. In Chongqing, we trust.

Antibodies point to a potential weak spot on novel coronavirus: Scientists are working around the clock to understand how antibodies could create an effective vaccine for COVID-19.
This antibody is called CR302 and is shown bound to the surface of the novel coronavirus.
Researchers with the Scripps Institute in California utilized high-resolution X-ray crystallography tools in a paper recently published in the journal Science to capture the antibody's atomic structure. Each antibody is only about 10 nanometers or one-billionth of a meter.

The scientists were hoping to figure out exactly where the antibody attaches to the deadly virus. If those more vulnerable areas can be pinpointed, scientists will be able to use that information in designing a vaccine. One of their findings is that the antibody binds on a similar site in both the SARS and novel coronaviruses. "The human antibody shown in this image locks onto the virus's spike protein at a different location than where the human ACE2 protein binds to the novel coronavirus. Intriguingly, the antibody binds to a spot on the novel coronavirus that is usually hidden, except for when [the] virus shapeshifts its structure in order to infect a cell," Dr. Francis Collins said on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Blog.

I cried on TV today. I'm sorry to the warriors who this will disappoint. I'm ok with sharing the truth, even when it's hard. Everything was going fine, and then, we started talking about Dash's song, a tribute to the front line heroes, and the doctors and nurses in the trenches, fighting the war front. They wanted to know how I felt about the catastrophes in Wuhan, Italy, Spain, and New York…as the hospitals collapsed under the battlefield conditions and weight of the choking victims. The enormity of their suffering and sacrifice just overwhelmed me, as I've been feeling tapped into some pretty big batteries these days, close to the cosmic source that births us all, and although I was stoic for 75 days of writing my diary and lighting the signal fires all it took was one listen through that song, like a cathartic ocean to bring all my pent up trauma and emotions back from some bottled up place. A shared experience, where art is therapy and music and laughter are powerful medicine.

Natural light and fresh air could keep COVID-19 out of workplaces. With billions of people around the world displaced by the pandemic, experts are trying to create protocols for safe returning to work. These could include opening windows, avoiding central air, and fostering more natural sunlight. "Daylight exists as a free, widely available resource to building occupants with little downside to its use and many documented positive human health benefits," the researchers wrote. The scientists also write that more air entering the building from the outside can dilute any virus particles that are already indoors.

Dash and I polish the copy and send out the stems for our three-pronged release pack call-to-action. First, we are going to pump the song to all radios, from college to national syndication. Radios, always hungry for Canadian content, will snap up a new SOCAN tune, which Dash, as a Canadian songwriter, has already registered it as. Two, we will light the hearth fires of bedroom producers around the world, and I imagine their children bringing them sandwiches and late-night snacks while they work with agency and purpose, to bring light and love and our positive message to their social networks. Chongqing is the citadel on the hill for me, and we are the lighthouse in the storm, and my job is to fan the signal fires to other lighthouses to guide their people through this storm, safe and sound, to the other side. Finally, we will initiate our street stories challenge, getting rappers to tell their COVID-19 experience over a hot 16 (bars), and release them on the internet. Another way to give agency to people, and artists (artists are people too, as much as like to think we're creative machines) … and give back in our own way.

In China, I send the song to a former student, and Shaolin sends it to an ex-boyfriend. My student is young and coming up and wants to do the hard work to make it a beautiful song in Chinese. Her ex-boyfriend is nice enough, but he's already recorded five COVID-19 songs, and is on the set of a huge "Voice of China" style singing show, and would need some serious incentive to take time off filming to do this favor for us. So, we just keep on with what we're doing: throwing flying spaghetti to the wall and seeing what sticks.

This is busywork, and it's often thankless and hard, but this time it's different. I feel the gratitude in my people, who all seem to handle this crisis with steely resolve and cool-headedness. We must first take care of ourselves before we protect others, and by helping them to prepare as far back as at the end of January, this tribe is 500+ strong and ready to positively influence their family, friends, and community. We, like ripples cast from a stone, thrown, skipping across a pond, affect those around us, creating greater ripples. The butterfly effect of a single Canadian screaming a warning of love and joy and urgent warnings to prepare for the storm have been felt across the world, and their eventual resting place is unknown, in the nebulous future. Some forces, often with the loudest megaphones, are eager to jab fingers the other way, for they, without much in the way of inspired leadership or new ideas, at least need to deflect the blame away from themselves onto convenient targets.
I rest and regroup, and the volcano sims and the smoke peters away I am a mountain again, quite, resolute, and strong. China has quietly upped their death toll by 50%, to 4,632, to reflect other factors, I imagine, such as those who died out of the hospital. Many still feel that number is low, but it might better reflect the reality of these hard months and the front line fight in Wuhan. Wuhan is open again now, but the city's people may be scared for years to come.

In 2008, the roadrunner looked down, and realized, our economy, the endless series of bubbles, had crashed. Somehow, the genie got stuffed back in the bottle, and the music box kept playing…another 12 years… until this virus put an end to all that.

As the Fed prints trillions of dollars to buy junk bonds and protect their billionaires and millionaires while giving crumbs to the normal people, remember these trillions are on your heads. You will have to pay back the billionaires, further enslaved financially to the 0.01% at the top of the pile. It's a tragedy within a tragedy.

Sharpen your pitchforks, dust off your guillotines.

As the pendulum swings, when we reboot society, the currency will have to swing a junk bond with no value to the bartering and trading of hard assets. This will be a good thing.
If you don't understand this, ask how 100 people could all hold a promissory note for the same ounce of gold, and then realize that only holding the physical wealth, be it metal or land, is really worth a thing as economies collapse. The curtain is pulled back on an overly leveraged system that's collapsing upon itself.

A friend gave me a nice image in a discussion we just had. He said, it's like as if the leaders of the world are a bunch of jolly friends pub-hopping, and China was the first one into the pub, and tripped on the step, spilling half his beer. Shy to look foolish, he covered for his trip with a fancy dance move and quickly ordered more drinks. The other friends, Italy, Spain, France, U.K., America, Canada, and the rest, all, one by one, stumbled. The other friends, spilling all their drinks, look to China, already recovered at a table with a round of new beers, and accuse them of lying about their own spilled beer. It's an awkward thing, when you watch the guy in front of you trip and fall on his face, do the same thing, and then get mad that nobody warned you.

Next week I will be back in school, teaching a room full of students in masks, me at the front, air purifier at my feet on blast, gas mask on my face. The students say they're scared too. None of us feel ready. But it's been weeks since there was a case in Chongqing, except for the five local cases that got caught in their quarantines, and people say it's safe.

I walk through the streets and see the looks, they're different after my media tour. At the little fruit shop, or on the street, I'm not just the foreigner guy, I'm that foreigner guy, the writer from the news. It's odd, but it's ok. The work is important, the rest doesn't matter.

A new friend has been giving wonderful advice over how my focus on research could be more helpful than any little bit of work, rather than promoting my book, or a new book asks if I've checked out the Global One World At Home superstar concert Lady Gaga and the WHO have put together. I'm just waking up, but turn it on. She says, "Hey, you know Coldplay, right?" Coldplay is Shaolin's favorite band. No, I don't know Coldplay. Shaolin doesn't know Chris Martin, and he's an old friend of mine. The fact that all of this coincides but doesn't align might only make sense if you grew up in Ottawa. A week or two back, when my good buddy, who I used to press dubplates of my tunes with at his studio "Chopstick Dubplates" in Montreal; Jacky Murda, known to some as the 'don of ragga jungle' was tripping out because Chris was slagging' on me on Facebook for something, and he was temporarily starstruck. If you knew either Jacky or Chris, it would be even harder to believe, but as Jacky said, this whole year is surreal. But it works. I slept for a few days. I pulled back from 24 hours a day world clock, and I try to spend time with Shaolin and the RZA and I feel myself recovering, back from the breaking point, replenishing.

Evidence of a parallel world that travels backward was recently discovered. Not sure if it's helpful, but knowing you're slowly getting younger somewhere, not social distancing should be small comfort.
2.5 million cases now…165k dead. That's just what we know about. The scary thing is all the big numbers are from rich countries. The poor ones aren't even on the board, but that doesn't mean they are corona-free.
"Microneedle coronavirus vaccine triggers an immune response in mice."The NIH notes that the immune system is highly active in the skin, so delivering vaccines this way could produce a more rapid and robust immune response than standard injections under the skin. It can create antibodies quickly, and hopefully, immunity.

On the other hand, scientists -- including NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci -- have said that developing an effective vaccine for COVID-19 would take about 12 to 18 months. 'Significant' coronavirus mutation discovered, could make vaccine search 'futile,' study says"Researchers have discovered what they described as a "significant" mutation of the novel coronavirus, which they believe "raises the alarm" that the search for a vaccine could become "futile" down the line. The study, published on the biorxiv.org repository, notes researchers were able to analyze a sample of SARS-CoV-2 from India on January 27 and found a mutation that "leads to weaker receptor binding capability." The receptor, known as ACE2, is an enzyme in a person's lungs."The discrepant phylogenies for the spike protein and its receptor-binding domain proved a previously reported structural rearrangement prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2," researchers wrote in the study. "Despite that we found, the spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2 is particularly more conserved, we identified a mutation that leads to weaker receptor binding capability, which concerns a SARS-CoV-2 sample collected on January 27 26 2020 from India. This represents the first report of a significant SARS-CoV-2 mutant, and raises the alarm that the ongoing vaccine development may become futile in future epidemic if more mutations were identified."

Life is back to normal in much of China. I walk down the street, and many people don't even wear masks anymore, although an article says: Foxconn workers in China face daily temperature checks and thermal screenings. It's normal-ish. But we stand on guard, all the same.

 

This diary entry is part of Kai’s collection, from an upcoming book titled The Lighthouse, his second collection of COVID-19 diary entries, this one is a collaboration of voices from around the globe. He shares with them iChongqing, and at www.theinvisiblewar.co.