Welcome! This zine is a curated collection of covid conscious drawings from 2025, along with my thoughts reflecting on the past five years.
Adults only. Contains weed and nudity, and is possibly mind expanding. Reader discretion is advised.
As an internet entity, it is my nature to lurk and observe. That’s what the internet was made for, after all.
So naturally, since the pandemic hit, I have been closely watching the covid conscious community.
Which is just as well, since it’s to my benefit as a human being.
To me, the KF94, the K/N95 is a thing of beauty.
Since adopting it, my personality has changed from, “a person who is always sick” to, “a person who is doing alright.”
It’s like night and day.
If I had the option to mask as child, the benefit of high quality air filtration as a child, things would have been a lot different. It wouldn’t have been so hard to learn how to live.
But since I can’t physically go back in time to change the past, militant mask discipline in the present is the next best thing.
People don’t like it.
In fact, it might even be possible to say…most people hate it.
On some level, I understand. It muffles your voice, and I myself have difficulties hearing.
Also, it triggers everyone to hell and back.
But, I don’t give up. Because on some level, people understand. Even if they aren’t masking, people get it.
You know who really gets it?
Smokers. The homeless. Sick people.
And kids.
The kids get it.
I feel bad for the kids.
Because of the social category I’ve been placed in, I tend to avoid them, because once you start displaying nurturing behaviors, everybody (not just children) expects you to be their mommy. That’s lame…
Still, I can see it clearly — the kids are being set up to fail.
That shithead pedophile president has a really fantastic air filtration system and Paxlovid on tap, but the kids? The kids don’t have anything. Just eternal sickness and inflammation unending.
There’s an erroneous view that the immune system is like a muscle that you exercise by getting sick (????). The truth of things is, it’s more like that barrier in Space Invaders…each infection, any type, chips away at it, little by little.
Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
This was over a decade ago, but I remember being so drained of vitality I could barely leave my room. Over ten fucking years, and I still clearly remember the nightmare of not having the energy to read a book, or even watch a movie. Just me alone with my relentless misery.
Forget about playing a game!
Forget about doing anything!
Since I’m aware that long covid can trap you into that type of living hell or worse…well, I already dealt with that, there’s no need to do to it again.
My assumption is that most people masking at this point in time have experience with this sort of thing.
It’s not just the inherent difficulty of losing all the things that make you feel like a person — it’s how you are treated once you stop providing so-called value and productivity.
Before the pandemic, I used to be filled with a lot of self-pity. “I’m clearly struggling! Why doesn’t anyone help me???”
Glossing over the fact that I hardly ever reached out to anybody or even asked to be helped, I have now to come to realize —
Everyone is struggling! Everyone is walking with unstable ground underneath their feet. The immense effort it takes to keep your own head up, to maintain the barest necessities for your own life, is all consuming. We are all really one bad connection, bad day, bad week from losing everything. How can you expect anyone to help you if they can barely help themselves?
It doesn’t have to be that way.
But how do we get the world to change when we can’t even agree on the simplest things?
So that’s part of why masks piss people off so much.
The one thing most people seem to agree on is, no matter their political values or whatever, is: The pandemic is over! No need to worry about getting sick or anything!
That’s social reality!
Who are you to interfere with our collective dream?
And you know what?
They’ve got a point.
I didn’t intuitively understand this pre-pandemic, but on the most base, essential level, people need each other in order to regulate their nervous systems. Just physically being around a calm person makes people feel calm.
That’s why the mentally ill are looked down upon — being around a fucked up person makes people feel on edge, and when people are on edge…bad things happen.
But yes, the fact is, people literally can’t *stop* being social. That is how we regulate our nervous systems, fulfill our emotional needs, and derive our sense of selves. This is how we stay alive!
If what most people collectively believe is, “the pandemic is over”, then, to challenge that is to challenge people’s means of staying alive.
It’s one thing if you’re used to standing out from the crowd, but for most, it literally feels like death.
In some respect, the outsider has special privileges, because they’re not expected to be normal. But for someone in the in-group to deviate…hoo boy! That’s when the feathers really start to fly.
That’s where the “maskers are a cult” thing comes from, I believe. Not only is any sort of strongly held belief scary, it’s that socially, you’re asking someone to trade their “normal” status for being tarred and feathered. If you’re not willing or able to to provide a social alternative for what they’re giving up, they will probably swing back to normalcy with an increased hatred for any sort of disease mitigation. Active change requires active community.
If you’re not really about that life…it’s probably best to just let things be and enjoy them for what they are.
I’m not the perfect picture of covid caution.
I don’t fit test, nor do I pursue community advocacy, and can only stand to wear ear loops most of the time. I wish I had the money to throw at dentists to wear N95s, but I can’t afford molecular tests, or even the latest vaccines. Far UVC seems like a distant dream.
But I can buy masks, have the privilege of air purifiers, made buddies with a few good herbal antivirals, and fully appreciate sunny days and windy skies.
It’s extremely annoying to be looked at as a hypochondriac one moment, and as ICE another but…c’est la vie.
Despite it all, I love life, and life loves me!
Thanks for reading!
~January 2026