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Fredric Brown - Solipsist

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Walter B. Jehovah, for whose name I make no apology since it really was his name, had been a solipsist all his life. A solipsist, in case you don't happen to know the word, is one who believes that he himself is the only thing that really exists, that other people and the universe in general exist only in his imagination, and that if he quit imagining them, they would cease to exist. One day, Walter B. Jehovah became a practicing solipsist. Within a week, his wife had run away with another man, he'd lost his job as a shipping clerk and he had broken his leg chasing a black cat to keep it from crossing his path. He decided, in a hospital, to end it all. Looking out the window, staring up at the stars, he wished them out of existence, and they weren't there anymore. Then he wished all other people out of existence, and the hospital became strangely quiet, even for a hospital. Next the world, and he found himself suspended in a void. He got rid of his body quite easily and...
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The Meaning of it all

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There are videos circulating in WhatsApp and YouTube. Facebook too, maybe. Twitter? They have medium-long texts, nicely divided into frames, with calming pictures in the background and a soft male (or sweet female) voice that keeps the pace. As for the images, it's usually a mix of running children, blossoming flowers, two women of different ages on yoga mats on top of a hill at sunrise, people laughing heartedly, people crying, waves of the ocean, impossibly green forests, aerial views and views of the earth from space, extreme zoom-ins into the green left eye of a beautiful woman and extreme zoom-outs of planers, stars, and galaxies. Apparently this virus came to teach us something. Or it came because we had lost our ways (who knew?), we were not kind to the planet nor to each other. And we are getting what we deserve. Or a mix of the two. The virus came because it wants us to be more polite to each other. Spend less time on our phones. It really wants that we talk more ...
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This is not what keeps me awake

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For some days, now, I haven't been sleeping at nights. I have statistics in my head, projections, exponential curves and numbers of deaths coming from all around the globe. I think of stock market dives, draconian measures of isolation, closed shops, closed parks, closed borders and empty airports. I think of the hospital beds we don't have. I think a lot about the word "triage". I play endless conversations with myself. I think of what it might be in one week, in two weeks, in six months. But mainly I think of what it might be in one or even two years. And numbers keep coming in, every evening, and people say things like: "wow, that's the highest death toll ever for one single day!" And then comes tomorrow and the deaths are more. Maybe double. And I know they will be more. Of course they will be more. This breaks my heart, but that's not what keeps me awake. Most people think of tomorrow. Of how tedious it is to stay at home, of how one misses...
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