alive at the end of the world.
How could it not have felt like the end of the world? The moon was blotting out the sun. A madman who was either a nazi or dumb as shit or probably both was leading a rag-tag team of fuckwads, dolts, and dickheads bravely into oblivion while the rest of us cracked jokes at 140 characters per second.
The only people who felt sane, I think, were the ones who had either stopped paying attention or the ones had never started to begin with. The latter were the ones who really bothered me. I imagined a grown ass man in his room playing Call of Duty for the whole duration of World War II while his girlfriend brought him snacks and the world burned madly on, and one day, after the peace came, and then after children came, and their children came, he declared himself a hero.
This was it. This was our War. This was our Depression. And these people just slept straight through. It was time to pick a side… good or evil… and just they chose a long nap.
Sleep did feel easier, though. Maybe I mostly just envied them.
The night of the election started like a normal night. I had dinner off St. Peter in New Orleans. A few votes trickled in, and everything seemed according to plan, and we were all still laughing, still planning the afterparty. We made our way to Royal street where the sinking feeling started. Texts of what the fuck and this can’t be happening trickled in. Soon it was eerily silent, everywhere. The fix was in. You could feel it in your stomach. You could taste it in your mouth. Something big had been stolen from this country. Not a million dollars, not a billion. Not a famous painting or anything that could be felt or touched. By the end of the night it was the end of the world and everyone knew it. Even the ones who were celebrating on that TV in that lonely quiet bar.
It’s a strange thing to be alive at the end of the world.
On 9/11 I was a sophomore in college. My girlfriend woke me up with a phone call to turn on the TV and by noon we knew it was the end of the world. The world had gone mad, and an incurious asshole was in charge and we knew what that meant. Now, this time that the world ended, America’s Id personified in a perfect bloated caricature of every terrible thing that had ever been said about this damned monument to capitalism and excess had control of the reigns—and he was staring directly into the sun, simply because, like a small child, he had been told not to.
Things were not looking up.
I suspect the world has ended many times on this planet. I have no proof, but I think this is not humanity’s first time around the block. You get to a certain point technologically and we outgrow our important built-in feature: an animal’s limited capacity to fuck everything up too much. At some point we step out of the food chain. At some point once we can blow it all to hell, we do blow it all to hell. It’s just who we are. Maybe we reset ourselves like a forest fire from time to time. Maybe we just blow away with everything else. It’s hard to say.
I suspect many people in far worse situations have expected the world to end. It just refuses to stop spinning for some reason, despite our best efforts. How did we ever make it this far, anyway, I wonder? It’s miracle enough to make someone like me almost question this innate lack of faith I’ve nurtured well for quite some time.
But even if humanity has not ended many times over only to grow up and stupid again, the world ends all the same. It ended during all the world wars. All the famines and floods that seemed like they would last forever. All the little forgotten battles over little plots of land and sacks full of gold. Fuck, we have such pride for what little nothings we are.
I suspect many kings and conquerors, after many great feats of nothing, knew this feeling well, looking up at the stars at night after the dust settled and the bodies had been counted. Strange little nothings. Many great men with great titles and greater wealth all know that same feeling, looking up to that giant orange ball in the sky being eclipsed by a tiny hollow dead moon.
I suspect the president felt it, too, that day, staring at that big light being eclipsed by something so small, squinting his eyes without the protection any smarter man would have used, trying to see something bigger than himself, feeling, even for only a second or maybe two, that despite it all, he’s stuck here, too, with all the rest of us, spinning and lost and waiting for the world to end.
