I used to think apocalyptic dreaming was the purview of the politically lazy who'd grown up on too many nineties disaster movies. Now I know differently, not because I'm an ardent conspiracy theorist (more of a casual conspiracy theorist), and not because Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization doco convinced me the cinematic image of burning cities was an affective-apparatus meant to soften us to the reception of 9/11 (though I kind of do think that), but mostly because the material effects of the western world winding down from lethal proximity with climate-change and the depletion of finite resources is a global reality, an unthinkable challenge to every existing approach to life as yet road-tested by industrial society. THE END was meant to be something laughable, a utopian fantasy whereby less rigorously minded people got to imagine alternatives to capitalism by dissociating from it and envisioning it's accelerated demise rather than engaging with the compromised beast which it is. An idealistic fantasy that was barely cognisant of the suffering and misery which actual collapse would entail even if it eventually meant a viable alternative could rise from the ashes.
But now here we are walking the end, and the naive child in me grieving all the comforts which less enlightened times meant I could enjoy with a clear conscience is assuming the foetal position and rocking itself into a traumatised stupor, and the adult-suit I wear on the outside is pretty much on the brink of doing the same.
So...
Where to from here?
Like any human currently living I don't pertain to having solid answers or even a remote sense of direction at this point in time, but I have tentative plans to slouch toward some austere mode of survival and endure until such a time living conditions become grossly untenable and I quit the game (morbid I know but morbidity characterises the times, if you hadn't noticed). If you have children, my condolences. You have a fixed stake in an otherwise rigged future. For myself, not having kids, my investment in a steadily dimming future becomes less and less. I would like to say I have the imagination to envision and then action a tomorrow which doesn't prioritise human flesh as the food-pyramid's base, but if the alternative is insects then just how ludicrous is cannibalism really?
Fuck me up.
When I stop to think about the threats to human survival accumulating in the wings (for some, for others those threats are merrily devastating life-worlds as we speak), one of the more terrifying prospects is super-bugs which will mutate and spread as temperatures rise, creating warm humid atmospheres conducive to an increase of hyper-virulence; which will include the resurgence of diseases thought defeated by modern medicine. There's been half-public conversation around antibiotics losing efficacy and being out-manoeuvred by adaptive strains for years, but combine these emergent worries with climate-change's untimely nudge of archaic disease back out from the proverbial grave and into the body-public again and we have the conditions for epidemics the likes of which we've never seen. Add to this the unprecedentedly stacked living-spaces of modern cities (and the poverty they tend to camouflage) and suddenly you have urban spaces which in all likelihood will transform into mass graves virtually overnight.
Fun!
And that's what's changed for me. This fantasy of end-times. They used to be CGI masterpieces of elegantly crumbling skyscrapers and gorgeously rendered meteorites smashing into earth and sending shockwaves across a reverently hushed humanity, swooning into death like a consumptive romantic poet. Now, I realise that things are going to be less picaresque, are going to be a lot harder and more drawn out. A slow and agonising decline as the institutions singly responsible for collapse flail possessively over their respective piles, binding the vulnerable with even worse instances of immiseration while justifying their actions as economical.
No dragons or leviathans, no four horsemen rising up from hell to claim sinners. The time for metaphors is over.
Instead we have destroyers masquerading as our last and only resorts, the wealthy becoming wealthier, the poor becoming poorer and being excluded from affluent solutions to collapse which more often than not entail gated Green Zones, sophisticated technological enclosures to shelter the rich from the successive waves of devastation which from here on out will only get worse.
Most of the time I feel like I'm choking on my own hate and fear.
And then I remember sex and alcohol.
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