Waiting for the End of the World − 28 June, 2008
Waiting for the End of the World
He sat in the bar and drank because that was all that was left to do. It was a winter afternoon and the light had gone. The first office workers were getting out on the street looking for cabs, waiting for busses, trying to go home. A few drifted into the bar needing fortification against the grind. That wasn't his problem though. He had left work early. He was sitting in the bar drinking because all other actions at this time were, in his opinion, useless. He wondered if this was what it had felt like in Germany in the nineteen thirties, everyday the darkness growing deeper everyday the nightmare becoming more tangible.
It was his curse to be smart. He read books and newspapers and he could see that things were not going well. Of course few people could see that yet most still believed in the system. Most still believed that wiser heads were at the controls that there was nothing to worry about.
It was his curse to have no capacity for belief, belief in god or a plan or a hope for a happy ending. Things were not going to turn out well despite what most people might hope. The world was going to hell in a hand basket and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. He felt as helpless as a man trying to board up the windows of a beachfront home in the face of a tidal wave.
Between the smarts and the skepticism he had to be careful whom he talked to. If he told people what he knew they would just laugh and think him a fool or worse a crackpot. What would be the point in the end any way? The wave was coming across the sea and it would sweep all of them away whether they believed it would or not.
The man ordered another drink and thought "Well at least there is a little more time, a few more evenings of drinking, a few more big meals to be eaten before we find ourselves living under a bridge waiting for the rat heads in the old tin can to come to a boil.” When it came to that at least he would have his memories. He could lie down in his rags and his hunger and dream of roast beef and red wine and naked women fresh from the bath.
The waitress asked him if he wanted another drink and he said yes even though he couldn't afford it. The money wouldn't save him and it would be worthless soon anyway so why not buy a memory while he still could.
He had been waiting for the end of the world for at least fifty years. It hadn't happened yet but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t.
There were the duck and cover drills, which started when he was in first grade. He was told to go into the hall and put his head under his coat. He was warned not to look at the flash. There was a filmstrip that went with the exercise with a cheerful sound track and animated characters. He had been hearing regular tests of the emergency broadcast system most of his life but they had all been just, "Tests".
He remembered helping his mother and father tear up sheets for bandages, fill jugs with water, and barricade a corner of the basement as a fallout shelter against an atomic strike against New York a hundred miles away. Castro had acquired atomic weapons from the Russians and we were getting ready to invade Cuba to disarm him.
In the early seventies there were annual race riots in the cities, government troops were firing into crowds of unarmed students, and people had started to notice that the environment was falling apart. At the time he thought his phone was tapped and he and his friends seriously talked about aliens from another planet showing up to take the faithful away to paradise. As it turned out that was just the drugs talking. (The Drug Years) When he went to college the Club of Rome report had just been issued. He spent the next few years contemplating Malthusian collapse.
After college he moved to Utah to live amongst the Mormons, which didn't help matters much. They were into storing food for the coming end of civilization. They liked to have a lot of ammunition on hand as well. He lived down the street from a business called the Survival Shop.
There was inflation, stagflation, and the stock market crash of the Nineteen-eighties. He saw the price of an ounce of silver top fifty dollars and the price of gold push six hundred an ounce. He bought gold as Russian troops massed along the border of Poland. He figured if they were seriously going to try and hold the eastern European countries by force risking in the process, nuclear war the price of gold would double. As he was leaving the shop with his life savings reduced to three little gold bricks the door alarm short-circuited and the doorframe caught on fire. It was a sign, but he didn't understand what it meant. The Russians stood down. The Berlin Wall fell and the price of gold dropped like a stone.
As the years passed he bought guns. He bought more gold. He bought bags of rice and beans. He kept the guns in a closet. He still had the gold in the back of his freezer. The beans and rice got bugs in them and he threw them out. Some of his friends are still waiting for the aliens. They call them angels now. The environment continues to decline. Specialized species die out every day, but the weed species were going strong. Can you make a viable ecology out of zebra mussels, kudzu, blackberry bushes, rats, pigeons, and cockroaches? It seemed to him that we would find out probably sooner than latter.
Lunch With Walter
Most recently he had been thinking about the economy as a result of a lunch with his friend Walter. Actually it was more than just a lunch it was more like a weekly seminar in despair. Walter spent his time reading the financial page and surfing the web trying to figure out what would prompt the onset of the next financial collapse. He could never get out of Walter whether it would be a massive devaluation or a rip-roaring hyperinflation. Either way when it was all over we would be back to a pure barter economy because the money would be NO DAMN GOOD!!!!
He wondered why he listens to Walter. It was upsetting but still it was more interesting than talking about sex. And Walter seemed to get so much pleasure getting it off his chest. It was the least he could do to let him sound off.
Lately a lot of the things Walter had been talking about were beginning to happen. The financial press reported on these incidents as if they were isolated anomalies rather than symptoms of a deeper malaise, as Walter would have it. Still it was one thing to bullshit about an economic collapse, it was another to actually see the whole house of cards starting to shake.
The other day it had really grabbed him by the throat that civilization, as he had known it might be on the verge of coming to an end. He knew a guy who had lived through the last depression in the thirties as a child. This guy’s mother had gotten in the habit of picking through other people’s garbage and the habit stuck with her long after the need for it was over. She went dumpster diving through the fifties and sixties until she was too frail to do it anymore. This guy was only slightly less scared. The guy had made millions of dollars in his life but wouldn’t spend more than twenty bucks for dinner. That was the legacy we were going to leave our children this deep, deep, fear of scarcity. It was a damn shame
He ordered another drink. There had been a day when he had made plans to survive the end of the world. But it was clear to him that survival was a young man’s game and he was no longer young. Everybody has to die some day he thought. He wouldn’t be happy about it but at least he had lived. Walter had pointed out how absurd it would be for two million people in the greater Seattle area to try living in the woods. The sewage alone would make things intolerable very quickly.
