This book results from sitting alone inside a delivery vehicle for eight hours a day for nearly two years on end (2016-2018). I wrote this one and As You Were while working with Stephen Graham Jones at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He’s never heard of this one, however. But it’s something of a nod to hisThe Bird is Gone. Read it. The military left me with shit for customer service skills, so driving around alone all day, speaking only to hospital workers and avoiding the sick and dying became my paid profession. It was this mindless vocation which got me wondering about a million different “what-ifs.” It really had nothing to do with the pandemic that kicked off in March of 2020. I’m just observant. This blue ball has suffered a pandemic every one hundred years since the printing press got its start. The title has everything to do with me lazily covering up the name of the private hospital I worked at while in grad school. The doctor I dated supplied me with a copy of the dress code that took effect after a private company bought the Catholic hospital, and the results would have made Margaret Atwood weep. I once spied their territory map which spanned from Chicago to Boise, buying up every clinic they could in between. So, the Absurdist in me asked, what if—like the media or mainstream publishing—only a few companies controlled all of the medical care across the country. I asked myself a lot of questions that became plot points which have since become public policy. F-U-C-K The Essentials is a story of late capitalism, and a populace comfortably numb with consumerism—even when profits get prioritized over people. The underpinned story is the exacerbation of what was done to the Native Americans, echoed by the Nazi’s treatment of the Jewish during the holocaust, refined in the Japanese internment camps, and now live-streamed on every screen you have acted out by who-the-fuck-knows on who-the-fuck-ever-they-want. Never did I think they’d kill Roe V. Wade after COVID and all its cousins killed so many—or refer to us as “human capital.”

I’m dark, but, Jesus, man.

This, too, is a book of ironies. Count them all and you’ll get a prize!

The monstrosity of a hospital, where Bob Dylan was born, that served as my muse has since turned itself into an enormous tower, complete with apartments and around-the-clock food options so workers never have to leave until they too become patients. Never mind the folks displaced from its new footprint. The competing hospital a few blocks away, where I was born, is building around the clock to catch up, too. More houses (homes) gone *poof.*

“They” were the original antagonist in this story, but “We, the People” became the problem before an editor ever sank their teeth into this manuscript. Books often take longer to get pitched, accepted, edited, marketed, and published than they do to write.