The End of the World

I keep thinking about nuclear disaster.  Or some other apocalyptic thing.  Tsunami, mega-earthquake, plague– something.  As long as you made it through, as long as you were not burned by radiation or given giant infectious pustules– as long as you made it through, and weren’t somehow trapped caring for the millions of others who did have radiation burns and giant pustules– the end of the world world be fucking great.

And this is why there are so many movies about it, books about it– it’s not out of fear.  It’s out of wish fulfillment.  Just like Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins and etc . etc. etc.–aren’t orphans in their stories because of fear of losing your parents, but because kids wish their parents were dead.  That the bumbling, irritating schlumps constantly pestering you with questions that are like cigarette burns on the back of your neck– they wish these people had never existed for them, and that their real mommy were a princess who owned a huge magical castle that you could live in, and would have plenty of space to keep the two of you apart.

But anyway, if the world ended, it would be great.  Or at least, if civilization ended.  Loot the grocery store for a bunch of food and go up to the mountains and camp.  Shoot a deer once in a while.  Nice quiet nights by the fire.  Find a young woman of breeding age who needs you for protection and couldn’t leave you or she would die.  Take over some abandoned cabin and raise a modest amount of livestock and just rawdog her for the rest of your life.

The end of the world would be awesome because I wouldn’t have to keep going to fucking work.  I like clean running water, refrigerated food, hot showers, Xbox– I like all those things.  But the price we pay for them is too motherfucking high.  Getting out of bed every morning knowing that not one good thing is going to happen to you all god damn motherfucking day is too much. If the world ended, finding a blackberry patch would be a cause for celebration.  Discovering a cistern that was not full of irradiated corpses who had cannibalized one another before expiring and rotting into poisonous mush would be the equivalent of getting a big promotion.  Fuck– taking a shit without getting bit by an 18 foot mutant rattlesnake or gang raped by pink-mohawked white supremacists in gas masks would be a red letter day.  I want to live in that world.

I guess what I’m saying is– the standards of modern life are too demanding, and merely making a decent living and having an apartment and all four limbs– things our ancestors would have killed for– just feels like a sad desperate existence. The bar for actual success is a happy relationship and a remunerative and prestigious career and a well decorated home and cool car and etc. etc. and once you get one thing it’s on to the next excruciatingly tedious-to-attain thing and it’s just an endless trap of increasingly difficult milestones– the bar needs to be lowered.  I need a meal of an oversized rat to fill my belly and make me sleep the best sleep I’ve had in years, over the distant groans of mangled and tortured nuke survivors.  I need to hear the satisfying crunch of pungi sticks at the bottom of a tiger trap and know that my children are free from rape gangs for the next few days.  This will give me a sense of achievement, finally.  Right now it’s toil and toil over complex elaborate and interminable projects that you never see the tangible results of; it’s all just getting to zero, just not fucking up– and there’s no satisfying purpose to it. I want to look around at three out of ten surviving children and a one room corrugated tin shelter with a possum roasting on a stick over a burning tire and think: “success!”