The Corona Diaries

As king royall he raid upon his chair,
The quhilk Phaeton gydit sum tyme upricht...

- Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid




Confession: I spent six months of the last year homeless. Lol.

Not my fault, Corona fucked me. University curled up and died, I was furloughed from my shit job, and I laughed; 80% wages for sitting on the internet, piloting my wanking chariot to the stars and back 24 hours a day. When I wasn't cratering that fucker into the moon, I was either thundering apocalyptic poetry at sandalled hipsters or banging a 23 year old guitarist on her parent's couch. I had two grand in savings to burn through over the course of the pandemic, and the promise of my furlough money forever dangling just beyond my reach. Next week, sayeth some lisping faggot in human resources. The money was always coming. But always next week.

I should explain a little about my job: I worked in a hotel bought by the Chinese two seasons past. I waitered, I poured pints (not too many – for the oriental liver quails, and the guts miraculously transmogrify wheat into explosive diarrhoea) and I poured whisky (for the braver women, whose brains are fury and whose farts are an unholy wind) ... I watched buses packed with methane and demi-mongols pull in at night, I welcomed the insectile masses of Chinese lunatics as they disgorged. I worked the reception, I booked them in, I looked at page after page of Wangs assigned to room after room, I tallied the numbers and asked that overwhelming question:

–Truly, how many Wangs is too many Wangs?

The casual racism started in the kitchen; in truth, the kitchen may have always been racist. *I* may have always been racist, and I have recently made peace with that fact: perhaps you'll have better luck next generation, or after the next war. Attribute it, if you must, to the sectarian streak that runs through the Scottish character, it dates back from the days where clans and clansmen thumped fuck out each other, long before the fucking English got here and taught us how to properly express our unique and undying hatred for the fucking English. I'm told we're a better people these days, for the most part, but a distrust of outsiders still runs like poisonous pish beneath the surface of our tartan skins.

The conclusion I have come to is that intolerance is a fair reaction to something that constantly irritates. And prejudice is an evolutionary trait, bred into our ancestors aeons past, one that serves to keep us wary of unknown dangers. The clay beneath our feet is full of those who failed to heed this warning – I wonder if Darwin looked at the fossilized skulls of our own failed prototypes, and felt something in the back of his brain tickle.

And the Chinese were not entirely undeserving of scorn: from top to bottom, the centuries have turned them into a confused emulsion of extremely fucked up people. Their upper echelons – eg: those who own the hotel and owe me remuneration – are the worst form of fail-capitalist. We're talking pure yellow excrement, legions of idiot children shat into the Outer Party, daddy's favourite toddlers spraffing their misbegotten inheritance against the wall with illogical, spiteful derision. One in particular – a cretinous third son, bewitched by the cinematic delusions of Mel Gibson – had invested all his money into buying up collapsing hotels the length and breadth of Scotland. He then bought a fleet of semi-motile, semi-automatic self-destructing buses to ferry the teeming hordes of his countrymen into this green and peaceful land, milking them for every Yuan he could along the way.

From top, to bottom: I have never seen tourists of the like. They hate us, of that I am convinced. And if I were Chinese, I would hate us too. The promise of 80% wages, the masturbating sons of fair Phoebus, pale and radiant as prisms; when our glorious Chinese overlords – suspecting malfeasance on the part of their diligent Caledonian serfdom – installed facial recognition and a thumbprint scanner to punch us in and out of work, the kitchen's immediate reaction was to replace the bulb above the scanner. It blasted the light of a sun directly into the faces of those being scanned: somewhere, someday, in the bowels of some shit-tier Chinese server farm, there is a year's worth of Scottish head-shots saved and waiting to be harvested for ID fraud. A record of days upon days, a database of ten thousand faces scrunched against the light, eyes squinted, nostrils flared, teeth hanging out over their lips...

And a lot of thumbprints from the left hand. Eat shit, you chinky bastards, as the kitchen would say.

A cultural war evolved, as much as anything; the worst of the east meets meets the worst of the west. Their thin veneer of the civilization over rapacious individualism, it clashed against a piss-thick puddle of servility covering a nation's contempt. It was the rage of Caliban reflected against a passive-aggressive mirror; they might try to fuck us, but we would give them aids.

Forgive the digression – the established masturbatory nature of the Scots once again spills out of me, and thence into my literature. We must turn back to the tourists – we must establish the poverty of their character – lest my invective poison righteous men against me and lessen the lessons imparted.

So: it is an unequivocal fact that only a complete retard would visit Scotland on holiday; luckily, then, that the world is proved retarded. From our position behind the beer engines, we see fat Americans sit down and slowly vanish beneath the horizon of the bar, the enormous cheeks of their fucking arses sooking hungrily, devouring the barstool inch by inch. The English are the English, and we are used to the whinge and whine of that particular brand of upthemselves-fucknuttery. The Irish are fine company, right up until the moment when the Pope walks in and something explodes. The Swedes are gay and their women are rapists. The French stay at home, staunchly honouring the auld alliance by pre-emptively retreating. And the Chinese...

(end of part 1)