Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Monday, April 16, 2007

the end of the world

when the world ends, will we know it?

will we know that everything we love is gone?

i suspect many of us will not. we will get out of bed, and shower, and eat breakfast like nothing happened. we'll drive to work and we will not see the smoldering ruins all around us.

we will see what we have always seen, and what our children always saw, and what our parents taught us to accept.

the world has ended. get up. hit the alarm clock. get dressed. put on the gasmask. make sure the rubber gloves cover all of your hands. go to the stables where the mutated two-headed emu will pull your hubcap and coffee-can chariot through the streets to your job flinging slog from one pit to another, just like your father and his father before him after the end of the world. sure things are getting worse, but things have been getting worse a long time, and they still can get worse.

when the world ends, it will probably be very slow. big things don't change quickly. one volcano couldn't change the world. we'd need lots of them. two bombs have already dropped, and plenty more where tested out in the empty hills, empty islands.

we'd need lots of them.

we'll wake up one day, and we won't really notice that the sunlight isn't really so bright anymore - or that it's too bright - because it happened so slowly.

we won't see the pattern until it's too late, and nobody even noticed when it finally happened.

that's the end of the world.

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