Sunday, June 26, 2005 The end of the world
Today is already so pleasant that I'm overwhelmed. I woke up for the market, even though I was up late last night debating the merits of vegetarianism and watching downloaded episodes of 24 on Tracy's computer. Now I have a chance to sleep, and I tried, but I just can't do it.
The people at the market who sell Thai spring rolls and sticky rice said that they don't have a restaurant, but they said they would deliver food from their house to mine, free of charge. They don't know what they've unleashed.
This may be longer than it should be. I've been thinking and thinking for the last few days, but I haven't had more than a few minutes that I've wanted to devote to writing until now.
I've been thinking about the end of the world since I read Sweetney's post about the feeling that the country or the culture or the oil-dependant world or whoever is heading for a collapse.
I'm no stranger to the end of the world: it's how I was raised. My parents are impressionable people, and in the 1970s, as best I can tell, they picked up book after book that skewed the way they perceived things. Evidently, these were heady times, even for a couple of non-drug-using computer programmers. My mother told me that when the last Whole Earth catologue came out, it seemed like a prophecy: this is the Last Whole Earth. I don't know what came first in the procession of chickens and eggs of hysteria, but as they were reading up on seeds and tractors and growing more dissatisfied with their lives, some asshole sold my parents a book about gold and the world economy that convinced them that within the next few years, the currencies of the world would be worthless, and chaos would descend.
My family has a knack for sober common sense and practicality. Once they'd made the giant initial step of deciding that the coming crisis was real, they attacked the problem the way they would any other. They shopped for land, read more and more about homesteading, tried to warn their own families, and hoarded gold.
If the one assumption they were running off of had proven to be correct, right now I would be a post-apocalyptic princess of an empire rich in knowledge of vegetable canning and hoarded cigarettes. The foolish neighbors would be paying my parents tributes of animal hides and double-A batteries, and they would be sorry that they hadn't predicted the end the way their king and queen had.
I am being unfair. I am playing this for a laugh, and it's a bitter laugh, because as they age, my parents are less able or less willing to explain themselves, and I am more and more curious. They left their jobs and bought a few acres of land in rural Virginia. The WestVaCo logging company had clearcut it a few years back, and my mother told me that for about the first three years they lived there, they didn't hear any birds. It was cheap, though, and so was the trailer they bought to live in.
They improved the land the best they could. They planted seeds and rooted out brush. They built a root cellar, a rickety garage-like structure that I grew up calling the cat roof, and all kinds of things like that. They tried raising hippie-touted "solution to man's problems" crops like amaranth (according to my mother, the difficuly of collecting the tiny, unpredictably bursting seeds made this grain a disappointment) and regular old food that doesn't solve anything, like cantaloupes.
When my sister and I came, they built a room onto the trailer. They got an aboveground pool. They designated trees in the yard as beloning personally to my sister and I. My sister got a sycamore, and I don't remember which one was mine. I was very little. We moved when I was just about to turn five.
We moved. My parents had done nothing to produce any income for ten years, and still the world economy had stubbornly failed to collapse. They hadn't bothered to get going making artisinal cheeses or selling produce or weaving baby carriers or any of the other things that like-minded couples do when they drop out of society. It didn't seem weird to me for years, but now that I know that a lot of people have jobs, it strikes me that they were really banking on this idea of collapse.
My mother, when I corner her and ask her questions, gives me anecdotes about a woman she read about somewhere who tried to sell goat cheese and got in a lot of trouble for not adhering to local regulations, and how she had to relabel her product and market it differently. My mother has the capacity to believe that an anecdote of this nature can serve as an explanation for anything, ever. What she's getting at is that if she and my dad had come up with some kind of income generating scheme, something would've fucked it up, so why bother?
I don't know: my parents are determined people, as most total crackpots tend to be, and I bet that if they'd let themselves realize that the world might not end at all, they could have found a way to make their lunatic back-to-the-land fantasy work just fine.
Instead, they picked up on this idea of a coming crisis, and they used it to coast on. Why bother improving the world or making your own chosen lifetsyle sustainable? The sky is falling. Might as well spend our savings. Might as well live nearest to a town with awful nowheresville schools and not much to redeem it, once the pizza parlor and the feed store have worn thin.
I wish they'd tell me how they woke up, and what that was like. I wonder, too, if they're still expecting everything to fall apart around them, or if the smart money's on old age these days.
The world ends all the time, for a lot of people. Somebody bombs you, your kid gets sick, there's a natural disaster. Your dumb little country that isn't even America gets into some kind of crazy crap about politics and coups, your crops fail, you're laid off. The end of the world doesn't have to affect anyone else but you, and you will still know when it's arrived. It's not the kind of thing you can count on, and it's not the kind of thing to panic about.
Even if it is: world's ending! Get it while it's hot. posted by Frenz | 6/26/2005 01:01:00 PM
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