Mickey Z

Cool Observer

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Thursday, June 15, 2006

It's the end of the world as we know it...

When I was a teenager, among many other things, we did just fine without VCRs, DVDs, CDs, cell phones, microwave ovens, cable TV, personal computers, palm pilots, X-Boxes, or SUVs...so, it’s accurate for me to comment: “My, how things have changed.”

Fast forward, say, 30 years from now—2036—and things will have certainly changed by then, too. I’m not talking about new generations of consumer electronics, though. The changes I’m imagining could be catastrophic...spurred by bird flu or some other pandemic, peak oil, global warming, economic crisis (stock crash, devaluation of the dollar, etc.), rising ocean levels, topsoil depletion, or perhaps the old reliable nuclear war. But more likely, it’ll be something not yet on our radar screens that renders life “as we know it” unrecognizable.

Tyler Durden sez: “In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

Make no mistake about it, big changes are coming. Our world will be rocked and we will be tested. How many of us know how to grow our own food and even if we did, how many could effectively protect it? Who among us knows which plants are poisonous and which are medicinal? Can any of us tend to a wound or purify water? Can we even darn a sock?

William Burroughs sez: “Bryon Gysin had the all-purpose nuclear bedtime story… the all-purpose bedtime story, in fact: Some trillions of years ago, a sloppy, dirty giant flicked grease from his finger. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor...”

...splat.