My Conversation With An Anti-Vaxxer: A Story of Unfavorable Winds, The Double-Slit Experiment, and The Secret Mind of Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander

Recently I had one of those conversations that left me feeling like I’d walked into a bar, ordered a steaming pint of hob piss and drained the entire thing. I was contaminated, internally, in a way that might require purging. I’d just spoken to a deadly serious primate who believed, among other things, that the covid vaccines were melting people’s skins off, that the CDC claimed they didn’t work anyway and said so on their website, and that if I couldn’t describe, on a nuanced molecular level, what mRNA technology is I was the crazy one. Masks, he righteously declared, did not work (I assume surgeons the world over would be stunned they’d been duped into wearing these useless things). Fauci was a fraud who didn’t even have a medical degree. Fauci’s medical doctorate from Cornell must have been a forgery, I guess. In all things viral, the high school graduate I was talking to knew better. He even claimed to have contracted covid every year for almost a decade and recovered easily. There was more, every last bit of it the kind of angry, remedial thinking I generally associate with FOX News, but it made me consider what was going on in the mind of this lost individual. My reaction- a kind of pity mixed with glimmer of bigger picture tragedy and subtle loathing- made me wonder, too. The strange feeling of doom I had while falling asleep that night, a result of this lecture/conversation, made me think about all this. There was no point in dumping a huge load of science fact and basic morality into this guy’s underpowered melon. He wasn’t a villain. Poor dude was clearly a victim. But of who or what? I started there.

Walter Mosley, in his new novel Blood Grove, has a scene that might shed some light on this. When Easy Rawlins, the LA detective, discovers his friend Raymond ‘Mouse’ Alexander reading a book he asks about it. Reading is out of character for Mouse, and his reply is illuminating. The author’s views, Mouse claims, are surprisingly in line with his own thoughts, the private thoughts he has in what he refers to as his ‘secret mind’. The Secret Mind. Hmm. We can all relate to this private internal space, but how does the notion apply to the conversations we have with those around us and why is it even important?

I caught a glimpse of this anti-vaxxer’s secret mind while he was jabbering. That’s what disturbed me. The peep through the keyhole was… disquieting. What I beheld was the social isolation of a proud individual who felt left behind, easy prey for the mainstream media products Big Fear and Big Anger, and this was folded into a smoldering and sickly personal rage likely stemming from insomnia, poor diet and sloth. Defensive about all this weakness, he wrapped everything up in an indignant, faux masculine righteousness, something that always strikes me as the saddest projection. To an observer like myself, or anyone who has read this far, his secret mind wasn’t especially secret. And that, dear reader, is distressingly common. We live in a different, less discrete age than Mouse and Easy. Empowered by elements of the internet, social media and television and inspired by terror, misinformation, too much information, inaccurate data, over refined data, obscure truths with cloudy applications and bold lies with big ribbons, many of our secret minds have been laid bare by the endless, torrential friction of it all. As with this fella. And that’s not all.

In Blood Grove, Easy Rawlins was inspired by this exchange with Mouse to explore his own secret mind. I did the same, and that’s what led to the rare feeling of doom I felt last night. My secret mind is as active as yours or anyone else’s. I personally come from a long line of wretched Missouri bean pickers. Generations of broken, small, petty, bitter men and women who lead angry, meaningless lives, sour, gossipy slobs who procreated like dejected zoo animals and then died. It seems to stretch back as far as I’ve been able to detect. We can use a computer metaphor here. Becoming aware of the programming led to a type of phase shift, as in the Double-Slit Experiment. It isn’t rare at all to realize that you were made by defectives and thus defective as well, and it also isn’t especially rare to decide to rewrite, add to, alter or modify that programming and break or distort the cycle. Self-improvement is possible if you’re self-aware (or try to be, anyway), and every generation should be better, in theory. It hardly hurts to try, right? So, try for a happy life, do good things, work well, be kind and thoughtful and supportive and inquisitive, etc. All things that deviate from my flawed but malleable generational programming. The sinking feeling of doom came from the terrible certainly that this poor guy, a sentient being, a human born with so much promise, was no more than a blade of grass in the hurricane of Now, empowered by potent data winds that match his temperament, and that temperament is one that was made for him by chance rather than one of his own ongoing efforts. On some level we all are all swayed by this endless deluge of information. The difference- his understanding of his own personal identity, or his ‘secret mind’, and his ability to shape it in some capacity, was simply not detectably present, especially in an evolving capacity. His secret mind is the perfect clay thanks to his programming and his lack of awareness of said programming. An angry man can find angry news to keep him angry. A paranoid man can find terrible stuff to feed his nightmares. A curious mind can find curiosities. A peaceful thinker can find signs of hope. And on and on. We can all now find more information than ever to support our personas and freeze in place and… Congeal. My conclusion (one I’ve come to before, you likely have too)- we can’t lecture, cajole, or convince anyone of anything. We never could. We might try, but seldom for good reasons. BUT, it just might be possible to lead by example. And I made a small start right then, dear reader, in that very conversation, with the simple suggestion that we all have our shoulder to the wheel whether we want to or not. We can’t help it and we can’t stop it. Finding out where your individual effort, your individual energy, is really going is a worthwhile effort. Food for thought, and easy to digest, and it might help because such an exercise might lead to a greater awareness of self, and in his case the terrible confusion and bleak illness therein. Someone far more intelligent than I am will have to devise a mode of thought to break this internet, blade-of-grass-in-the-data-wind phenomenon. I wish them luck. In the meantime, Flat Earth theorists will multiply, cattle will watch FOX News and believe Mexicans stole their dream jobs, Elvis will live on and live in ever more locations, and truck lovers will find proof that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Crazy and stupid both make friends fast.

On the plus side, exploring all this gave me a really good idea for a horror movie. If that shit becomes real? Well. I’ll use a piece of that money to buy that dummy a book.