Finger Crossed (A Depressing Look at the End)

I hope the economy collapses. Flatlines. Nothing left.
I think we could use it. We can rebuild from the rubble.
A new start? A new dawn? Sure.

Let's hope those 2012 predictions pan out as well.
The sun scorches the earth and earthquakes split the ground, eat us alive. California launches into the ocean and the magnetic poles turn upside down.

And I don't care for them, but those environmental scare tactics about climate change? Mine as well pray for mass extinction and melting ice caps. The new El Niño.A new ice age. A new dawn.

Remember that Russian professor who predicted the downfall of America by the end of this year?
He forecasted inevitable civil war and even estimated how the states would be divided. I wrote a New Year's blog about how to make this next year, 2009, the best ever because it could be America's last.

Wonder if we'd still be killing random Arabs then. Wonder if we'd still torture. Wonder if.

But back to that prof. -- I don't feel I've really made my life all that much better by now. It's only been a month and a half, and January always blows. I'm not exactly behind am I?
But now I'm worried. So worried that I just want my worries to come true.
I still haven't found a way to deal with any of this. I don't have a World War Z plan. I don't have a metaphorical bomb shelter. Nothing.
All I have is my camera, my pen and a package of cigarettes to protect me.

Oh, and today I learned that Wal-Mart and Walgreens are completely becoming dry labs by March. Target will likely follow suit. No more film developing, except for send-out, but that's a little more expensive, I believe. I don't have the money, but that's OK; I have the debt.

Everything is going digital much faster now because it's cheaper. In this economy, no one can afford to spend $10 just for 24 pictures. Soon CDs and Vinyl records will be gone too. I hope print newspapers and books will last another decade, or at least that, but I don't have my fingers crossed.

Here I am, shivering with my soon-to-be-obsolete technology. It's comfortable, isn't it?

Maybe the solution is to curl up in a ball and listen to sad songs.
I recommend The Bad Plus' cover of Wilco's "Radio Cure".
Arcade Fire's "Windowsill".
Elbow's "Grace Under Pressure".
Radiohead's "No Surprises" or "Lucky" or maybe just all of OK Computer.
Maybe I should just make an apocalypse playlist and then I'll sit on a mountain and play it while writing what I see, those atom bombs blossoming in the sunset, and the whole event will mean something.

As Bright Eyes said once, "I just can't work it out, but for memory and clarity, I had better write it down."

When I was a kid, I used to read those Bailey School Kids books, about the four friends who always assumed their teachers were vampires, werewolves or leprechauns. Sometimes they were close to right, sometimes they were dead wrong, but it usually had this open-ended, cop-out finish. That one girl, Liza, whenever she freaked out and worried her teacher was a goblin, her nose would start bleeding. This fascinated me, and sometimes I wished it happened to me. I like bloody noses. They make me feel important.

I got sick of the Kids and started reading Goosebumps. Both series of books had terrible cookie-cutter plots with cliché bullshit endings. They were supposed to be scary, but never really disturbed me. Except the aliens. I was never afraid of ghosts or witches cause I knew for certain they didn't exist. But aliens? No one could disprove that. The aliens books gave me nightmares of having the life sucked out of me, of being dissected, of being kidnapped.

I also read those worse than terrible Left Behind books, but the whole "the sky is falling" storyline scared the hell out of me. I musta been ten and I cried and cried that The End was Nigh. That I would die at age 11 and never live a full life and I would never experience all the wonderful life promised me once I reached 21. Or at least once my balls dropped.

I was never, not really, worried about Y2K. As grocery store shelves emptied of water and canned goods, I just went to school and drew comic strips. I played Nintendo and used AOL. When the big night finally came, when the ball dropped, I was sitting in the living room, playing Donkey Kong 64 with my brother. My alarm went off and that meant it was my turn to play. The power didn't even flicker.
I heard the next day some casinos lost memory, but the rest of the world was safe. Airplanes didn't nosedive out of the sky, gas tanks didn't explode. In the morning, the pacemakers and credit cards still worked and the rest of the planet was still on life support.

Those things, those worries, seem silly now. Adorable, if you think neurotic children are adorable. There's got to be a way to face these current problems differently.

I could ram a truck into a gas tanker like this woman, only do it the right way.
http://www.azdailysun.com/articles/2009/02/14/news/20090214_front_190872.txt?rating=true

I could listen to the advice of Interpol: "Pace is the Trick / and to all the destruction in man. . .and to all the corruption in my hand."

What I'm most likely to do is keep worrying, petty and stupid and helpless. But like I said, I'm so worried I just want my worries to come true.

But perhaps this is the best advice of all from Robert Anton Wilson:
"All of us should treasure (John Dillinger's) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: "Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.""