Dread Ahead

I’m not ready for the future. I’m so used to electricity, running water, food procured easily at a grocery store, the ability to contact other people by phone or internet, that their lack is inconceivable. I’m spoiled. Beyond spoiled: I’m so tightly connected to this apparatus – what people like to call “the grid” – that I’m not even sure where my identity ends and the external world begins. I don’t feel separated from the world by my body, a unique, singular identity nicely enveloped in this soft, highly pliable organ called skin; I feel connected by my skin. I don’t feel a separation from the world at all. I feel very much a part of the world. But this conception is a luxury. It’s the product of leisure. Of freedom. Freedom from brute survival. I don’t need to hunt. I don’t need to seek or build a shelter. I’m part of a giant social network called civilization that takes what it needs from the environment and wraps it in plastic and puts it on a shelf in a store. And even that setup is disappearing. I’m now more apt to find what I need via a corporate colossus called Amazon. What would I be without this set-up? I’d be fucked.

If the grid were to collapse, I’d be lost. It’s not even a question of if; it’s a question of when. My mind races in circles and spirals searching for a plan, a strategy, a series of actions I can take to prepare for this horror. Should I buy a gun? A pistol for protection and to prevent our neighbors – crazed with hunger – from eating our cat? A rifle to kill squirrels? How do you prepare a squirrel for eating? What kind of stove can I buy that won’t require electricity? How many squirrels will be running around in a densely populated neighborhood of starving, disoriented people who – even on the best of days – evinced very little in the way of kindness or courtesy? Signs of the collapse are woefully present already. Every day I see people who appear hollowed out by a combination of technology and social isolation, zombies staring emptily at smartphones, people stewing with unmet needs and personal injuries in the lines at Starbucks.

Should I be buying canned goods? Fruit cocktail, bean and bacon soup, Dinty Moore beef stew? A solar charger? A prepper pack? Mayday survival bars? What about bathing? Illness? A nice private place to defecate without stepping in someone else’s deposits?

Will something in me heretofore unexpected suddenly emerge and turn me into a tough, enduring, self-reliant mountain man like Hugh Glass or Jedidiah Smith? Do I have capacities I don’t know about? I doubt it. I wore a coonskin cap in the 50s. I also earned some badges as a cub scout, but I forget what they were for. I vaguely remember making a radio with the help of my dad. That’s as close to self-reliance as I’ve come so far.

Most of the time, I sit and gaze into the void without a clue. Every time there’s a power outage we get some flashlights and candles out and wait patiently for the energy to return. The key word here is ‘patience.’ That’s the first and only implement in our survival kit thus far. The ability to wait for power to return. And enjoy a dinner of ham sandwiches by candlelight.

Depression, observed Rollo May, is the incapacity to construct a future. I can construct a future, but it’s a very bleak one. It strongly resembles what Cormac McCarthy mapped out in his novel The Road.

I envision horrific temperatures of cold and heat, massive hurricanes, ginormous tornadoes, respirable air and potable water sorely diminished, crop failure, famine, disease from the Paleolithic pathogens in the thawing tundra of the north, not to mention the diseases already afloat form the growing pandemic of homelessness and habit loss in the world, hordes of brain-devouring zombies attacking our door with hatchets and bloodthirsty determination.

Today, we still have electricity and running water and food to cook and eat. I’m typing this on a laptop which is connected to the rest of the world via Wi-Fi. And I’ve had a tough time adjusting to this world. I’m a writer writing at a time when fewer and fewer people are capable of reading and are far more inclined to play a video game anyway. They could be functionally illiterate and not give a damn. Try to sell a book in these circumstances. Ron Jonson made a tidy sum writing about porn. Do that. Write about porn.

Or don’t. Just saying. People don’t read for style. People read for content. Big tits and blow jobs. That’s where we’re at as a society now.

I don’t remember the last time I went camping. I think it was sometime in the 80s. I drank then. Maintaining a nice alcoholic buzz helped considerably when going a few days without a shower or running water. Some of the campgrounds had public bathrooms equipped with the basic amenities, a sink and a toilet and a mirror. I liked swigging beer and gazing at a mountain. A nice warm shower at a motel was just a few miles distant in time and geography. I could think about other things than hunting animals. I could think about Zen. I could think about my next beer.

A course in survival training might be helpful. But these classes are based on the functioning of a planet – planet Earth – as it has done for millions of years. Until now. The climates are different. Everything is different. Survival training will teach you how to catch insects and eat them. But there has been a dramatic decline in insect populations. I’m not sure crickets and ants and stinkbugs will still be on the menu. I suspect the menu of the future will include things like shoes and cannibalism.

Then there is the option put forward – albeit, of necessity, somewhat vaguely – by the writer Deb Ozarko, author of Beyond Hope: Letting Go of a World in Collapse. She has said that when the going becomes intolerable, she has a “graceful exit strategy.” I’m guessing morphine.

It’s comforting to think of that moment in the movie Gravity when Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) floating in endless space, his only chance of survival the parachute cord which Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) has caught with her foot, which is attached to what is left of the space station decimated by debris from a disintegrated Russian satellite, both of them clinging insecurely to the strand stretched to capacity, taut and delicate, both arriving at the sober conclusion that the survival of Ryan Stone will only have a chance of Kowalski lets go of her hand. Which he does. Calmly. Stoically. Gracefully. We watch as he floats away, receding into the infinite reaches of space to die in his spacesuit as Doctor Stone comes to the sobering, terrifying reality of being totally, utterly alone.

And then there’s that final, glorious scene at the end when Stone swims ashore from the lake in which her space capsule – Tiangong Shenzou (shenzou translates roughly as “divine vessel”) – has sunk to the bottom, and she crawls onto the sand and weakly manages to bring herself to stand, erect, under a gorgeous blue sky still streaked with the meteoric burn of disintegrating, falling spacecraft. This place called home, which is itself rapidly disintegrating. I hope, when the time comes, I can let go as calmly and stoically as Matt Kowalski.