a. apoc via 'hermeneutics of suspicion':

how i met the girl with beautiful hair is a weird story. me and jimmy cheerios and jimmy's cousin ray were out by traer, iowa, flashlight hunting out of the back of ray's old beater bronco, loaded to the eyeballs on meth and fresh out of beer, which meant a run back to waterloo (it was one a.m., only place open) where one of us was gonna have to face the certain doom of going in the food king and, y'know, having to DEAL with human beings, which we woulda skipped but we were hunting. see, back in '93 we had nasty-ass floods for a long time and some farms spent months isolated and empty and the livestock had kinda gone mad. so the state designated certain areas no-limit, and with the horses and most cows able to get shipped to holding pens, the big game was chickens and rabid pigs, who'd been known to attack when cornered. there were stories of a few hunters already dead but that was more likely just stupidity. anyway we needed the meth to keep us up and the beer to cut the anxiety, which was riding high by the time we got into town.

alright, well, fuck. this is gonna be a longer story than i thought.

b. apoc via 'will to nothing':

the end of the world is a form of linguistic shorthand which cannot be shortened without removing the integral semantic meaning. one may say, no. one may not say. there is no means by which we may speak intelligently of such occurrences, after which not only will there remain no we to speculate or witness, there will be no more subject, no more history, no more anything. the end of the earth presents the project of humanity as not only failure, but a nonexistence not only of our flesh-and-bone bodies, but of all systems by which we understand. the potential of speech, of history, of thought; it's some lovecraftian beast gnawing at our sanity, an utter futility against which one can stage no attack, a fact becoming increasingly apparent in our solipsistic, subjective time. the shift from discovery to invention, and the light it casts ex post facto on all aspects of our lives, brings on the realization that once there is no more we, there is no more anything. what we can we possibly say of such things?

unless there are escape trajectories....

c. apoc via 'deep ecology':

is charles manson the prototypical 'ecowarrior'? if you were looking to make a global statement on the death of nature as 'force', i.e. ours being the last generation to think of forests and jungle as conradian 'dark places' instead of areas of commerce and state-sponsored parks (the last generation, so to speak, alive to witness ecosystems), and if you were faced with limited time, would you resort to media war and star-killing? this is a deeper and far more terrifying form of martyrdom than we are accustomed to. the hyperbolic extent to which we regard 'individual freedom' and 'personal choice' allows us a detached and demeaned respect for self-immolating buddhist monks but bring out shill cries and hand-wringing when 'innocent people' suffer similar fates. is this apologia a means of casting blame onto sharon tate and off manson? no, certainly not. tate (and her unborn child) as well as all others killed that night were innocent victims, as are all victims of terrorist strikes. however, to call such things 'senseless tragedies' is untrue, a false means of alleviating guilt. there are statements being made, and it is our bovine ignorance which continues this cycle, a compliance through fear and self-destructive stupidity. why are we so afraid to listen to 'terrorists'?

d. apoc via signal-death:

statements have a short life by nature; they soon become a shorthand for themselves, referent to nothing, an excuse to heidegger's dread 'gossip.' we interact signs like legos, paying no quarter to any referent, fully believing the connection of half-understood cliché and headline makes for an argument. given this as the field on which we play, is it little wonder anyone aspiring to make political change transfers themselves to the mirrored dichotomy of art and terror? when one understands government and diplomacy as a massive demonstration of the politics of the schoolyard brawl, this will be the means by which discussion takes place. does the fact that the interconnected highway system we've come to rely on has its origin in nazi state-planners cause us to use the backroads? at what point does morality silence necessity?

e. apoc via 'the stooge theory':

the end of the world will never die as concept for the simple reason that, as the years go on, the stakes rise: there's more to lose. besides, the eschatological environment obviously changes and provides new takes on just what ends when this apocalypse takes place. there will always be a desire to see the backdrop of our lives gain the utter (and temporary) significance the big end provides. it is also indicative of how much we want to have something happen to us, instead of from us; see the overwhelming preference of the 'jesus descends, judgment day, reign of christ' school of millenarianism, as opposed to the 'unification of all on earth in belief/jesus descends' option, the one preferred by the church during the early centuries of its existence. there is always an outside force at work -whether satan, aliens, technology-gone-mad, capitalism, asteroids, communism, disease, ad nauseum. we are, and always have been, victims, asking for what we always ask for when we have done wrong, forgiveness. we take it the only way the victim knows how to be forgiven. we've been waiting to be punished.

f. apoc via per ardua ad astra:

if we do believe in a global consciousness, the question arises: is it bound to this planet? can this so-called gaiamind exist elsewhere? can we take the earth to the stars? this changes the way we think of ourselves; no longer de landa's bees for the machines, we become a means of transportation/reproduction of Nature, the dna of our bones and tissue inadvertently left in the wake of our explorations which will find activation at some future point and begin this world anew. this apotheosis of the human plague, the benign sickness of god, in which the biological imperative of humanity - preservation and proliferation - is more than just survival mechanism. it is the self-serving means by which Nature finds a means to leave this earth and, thus, survive as well. the elements of this planet have been told they are in god's image, and as such are the means by which god is able to act in this dimension, perhaps suffering the inevitable signal-decay which takes place anytime a form of communication (particularly sentient forms of communication who believe themselves to be autonomous) is used, nevertheless underlying the concept that only through the ultimate negative stimulus, the king of terrors, can the god continue to exist. if we (the collective of living things) are the means by which god interacts with the universe, a post-apocalyptic god is faced with the daunting prospect of being without senses. god may not be dead, but it's in grave danger of entering terminal coma.

g. apoc via hero-worship:

if john kennedy really did fuck marilyn monroe, does that make him a better or worse person? look at it this way: there's a cult in kentucky whose basic tenet is, depending on your orthodoxy, a) that kennedy was the fabled second coming of christ, or b) that kennedy believed himself to be the second coming. both believe he ordered his own death. came to save us and we hit him with the fourth nail right through the skull. three shots, just like christ, brady getting one in the wrist a kind of in-joke. thirty-seven years from his death to the millennium; three the trinity, seven the seals. three alternate hells in the bible: sheol, the dark passage of the dead; the untitled underworld for the impure while the righteous go to the elysian fields; gehenna, the cesspools of jerusalem. hell come back as the earth, the final bardo, thirty-seven years in the making. kennedy himself said, quoting luke, 'for those of whom much is given, much is required.' all deaths prior to the earth-hell a means of ascending to the holy. removal from hell. vietnam was a holy war. kennedy knew, had himself martyred, a leader by nature leads. oswald as false pilate, whom ruby smote despite pleas to put the sword down, not his ear but his soul was severed, sealed his fate. jacqueline holding portions of the brain and body, it is accomplished.

does this make aids the rapture?

h. apoc via endgame:

your voice. your voice. this is no heaven. when the initial schism between the god and the satan took place the world was filled with novelty, expanded quantitatively when adam and eve left eden, for now souls were up for grabs, and one could keep score. the value of these initial souls was tremendous, due not only to their rarity but the age of said souls, lasting in cases up to seven centuries. what of the souls lost in the flood? what final resting place, or was this a wiping of the board, the echoes of checkmate and beginagain? naynever, for here the beginnings of hell proper begin. there was a craftsmanship and attention to fine detail, to irony and subtle nuance, each soul an individual end. take abidan, who was made to work eternal at a loom of his children's hair, bearing the screams as each strand was ripped from their skulls over and always, the cloth a thick textured brown. the satan took great delight in such devices, in custom-fitting and releasing his clockwork abominations to run until the end of the end. it was while creating the hell of sennacherib the blasphemer - a chessboard he played against himself, knowing each pawn taken connected with the deaths of ten thousand men across the earth in ten thousand pointless wars - that the satan realized he had failed. the satan had always believed fear was the punishment, the final of all sufferings, but as he watched sennacherib slaughter his own men rather than postpone the game any longer, he saw that man would commit and witness any atrocity to avoid inaction, that the only thing humans feared more than fear itself was boredom, particularly within the confines of eternity.

it was during the middle ages, when man was busy delighting in telling stories of the punishments of the wicked, that the modus operandi of hell shifted. the earth had always been the true birth of hell; the satan took every existing punishment from a corresponding event committed by some human somewhere; it was an oft-forgotten declaration from the god that the satan could not commit an act until man had committed it. the novelty of hell began to fade from the satan, the delight was gone, the drive to create grew smaller and smaller within the satan until it could not be found. for a time the infernal devices remained, but the surroundings grew into the antiseptic white of sickness and death. once the satan became so desperate for souls that he took them from animals, clouds, toys. now there was more than one could ever count (which became a punishment in itself), all excited in a way they could never admit to themselves to see the greatest show beneath the earth. terror became replaced with disappointment, fear sunk down into confusion. by the twentieth century, hell consisted of endless games of pong, endless pushing change into cola machines which gave up nothing, endless calls to numbers which would never answer. but the bottom, the lowest of the lowest sufferings consisted of memories, memories of wonderful days, of happiness and love and bliss, over and over and over until the colors faded and the sick set in and the souls begged for anything anything anything else than their lives one more time. but this hell is not one inflicted from an outside source. this is the hell which is called absence. and it is the only hell there ever was, and the only hell there ever will be, and the end which awaits us, not stalking us as though we were worthy prey, but waiting, patiently, because there is no way we can escape. hell and heaven are both static, they do not change. and anything which does not change is, by definition, hell. there was nothing and no hope, and no waiting to best the god because it became obvious, in the end times, that the god and the satan were the same, warring across two sides of the same board, and once the end ended it would all start over, the separation, the creation, the banishment, the war, the rapture, and it would then begin again, and again, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

"….it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man's insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world's end." - michel foucault, Madness and Civilization

"greater dooms with greater destinies" - heraclitus, Fragments

i. apoc via d.i.y.:

in hostage situations, the hostages selected are of utmost importance. dependence on political amnesty or promises made by government officials are never binding (an examination of such contracts made in the past prove them to be area or time specific, i.e. you will be offered complete amnesty from 4:51:00 a.m. to 4:51:01 a.m.) and not to be trusted, thus take over and secure the entire area, bringing in your own aerial assistance as soon as possible. destroy all potential liabilities without hesitation. line remaining hostages along windows or other open areas. bring along battery-fed televisions and lighting with which to plan attacks on hostile forces during prime time hours. keep any media interaction short and shoutable. destroying media reporters/cameramen is a certain way to assure media saturation. if reconnaissance from air becomes impossible, destroy everything, selves included, preferably with a series of detonations engineered to collapse the building. one such event says nothing. a few such events say much. a regularity of such events says nothing. terror is predicated on novelty.

j. apoc via neural atrophy:

if we live in a self-contained solipsistic universe, our end (in a self-centered, solipsistic way) is the end of the earth. not only is this evident through death, but through the alternate means of dementia, senility and brain damage; the signal which makes up the world becoming incoherent, just so much noise. in such a universe of one, where is the ever-loved split between the Self and the Other to be made? are we all Self? are we all Other? regardless, it is the death of history, of memory, of organized coherency. or, in a foucaultian sense, the subjective death of the society's 'regime of truth.' any claim that an institutionalized person is outside the societal network of power is facetious at best; however, once one is incapable or unwilling to participate in collective normalization processes, one is then cut off from the contextual process of culture, its gratification systems and dream machinery and, regardless of its physical placement, begins to create an individual means of understanding relationships and data. we see our new hell as an irreversible babel-scenario where there seem to be too many realities. the end of the world, then, is the death of context and the subsequent death of communication.

k. apoc via game-theory:

postmodern theory is hooked on the idea of philosophy as game. lyotard's 'games played in peace,' foucault's claiming his arguments as 'opening moves.' what is this game? can any number play? when cleverness is rewarded over functionality, one runs the risk of incomprehensibility equaling brilliance. 'i won, you'll just have to take my word on it.' once the deconstruction of existing foundations and aspirations, setting itself up as interpreter and insisting on 'cooperative games' (which, remember, are winner/loserless and, thus, endless), philosophy attempts to offset the end of the world by means of a scheherezadesque perpetuation of 'the game.' is the usurpation of the omega point of humanism a fear-based attempt to throw us into overtime?

l. apoc via the joy of sloppy thinking:

"she had too much chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first" - james joyce, ulysses

if, since the time of plato, philosophy's dread rival has been rhetoric, and only circa derrida has it been willing to admit these things not only come from the same sources, they are the same, it is little wonder the disdain 'high thought' has shown the end of the world, firmly camped at the farthest screaming edge of rhetoric. having been thus forsaken, it has become the proving grounds of cult literature, fringe science, pop fiction and pseudo-documentary. one needs only look at the current proliferation of 'asteroid' influence on major television shows, an interesting spin on the 'alien' meme (which seems, like country music, to pop up every ten to twelve years). being such an integral piece of popular consciousness, it allows us to play rather fast and loose with ideas we may not really understand. classic philosophers dismiss such pondering the way 'hard' science fiction writers dismiss new-wave/cyberpunk/pro-apoc fiction; it hasn't done (and painstakingly explained) its research, thus it's of no value. gregory benford typifies this stance when he claims the role of science fiction is techno-sociological planning for the future; a cadre of cassandras able to steer us through the perils of life post-millennium. the avarice and ignorance of such a statement astounds. as bernard wolfe said, "anybody who 'paints a picture' is kidding - he's only fancying up something in the present or past, not blueprinting the future." the same can be said for the folk-tales of the end of the world: this is not a future statement. this is a statement of where we are right now.

m. apoc via kool-aid:

the apoc reading jim jones held was the end of the world was 1) inevitable, given the current escalation in weapons technology and the increasing threat of global pollution, 2) going to be a prolonged event instead of the 'flash' we currently associate with it, and 3) provided the surest means of gnosis currently available. apoc, the unmistakable knowledge of one's own mortality (and the mortality of all we know to exist) would be the bridge to reach jones' version of the christ-figure. it is through the crucifixion that christ was able to accept his nature and destiny and thus ascend to heaven. this was the rationale behind the 'jonestown massacre,' that mass suicide would allow the jonestown inhabitants (fearing for their lives from the guyanese army) to transcend this world. echoes of this rationale can be found in david koresh's 'seven seals' document and in statements made by aum supreme truth leaders in the wake of the sarin gas attack, to pick out two large-press examples. these things happen everyday, and will grow exponentially. we are in the eleventh hour. we are running out of time.

n. apoc via displacement

there are certain times in which the normal means of daily activity are suspended. take wwII, when people planted victory gardens, rosie the riveter encouraged women to work, and asians were held in 'containment facilities.' such times also allow for alternate allocations of government funds. wars provide money to weapons manufacturers who advance weapons technology which allow for more wars to be fought, and more importantly, look good on-camera. calling the gulf war a month of u.s. weaponry r&d becomes particularly ironic when most destruction took place not with our fancy-pants patriot missiles but with good ol' carpet-bombing. advanced weapon tech is outside the realm of supply-demand economics, bought and sold as luxury items. the threat of the end of the world circa cold war made this possible. the continuation of the apoc meme is necessary in order for defense contractors (and everybody's got their fingers in that particular pie) to stay afloat. notice the number of military personnel currently warning us of the threat of asteroids. the united states can only remain a superpower due to the profit made from arms sales. once this is gone, what will become of it?

o. apoc via the necessity of fear:

FEAR is the machine by which we ALL OF US become willing to perpetuate the LIE to sell the hours of our lives in order to stay aliveandfedandwarmand ALL OF US willing to buy into the placebo effect of the capitalist war machine the means by which we feed each other all cut-up shot-up children and chunks of babies into the DEATH FACTORY we get our checks from pull the elderly from their beds by chain and wire and electrode and drag them kicking and screaming trailing blood and shit down to be cut-up and put in the DEATH FACTORY we do we are ALL OF US calling us better and holding up high heads like rats feeding off each other force-fed the stickyred cables of meat pigs ears and disgust on the tv where we learn not to care needle in the eyes and the corporate mantra of the LIE and we learn how to FEAR and what to FEAR and hoarding our scraps for FEAR we lose what we got ALL OF US go under and will not come up again broken and had our memory destroyed and their hands in your body and all one can hope to do is make more FEAR to speed the LIE until the waves cover us and the blood washes us away and none will be spared until this hell black vomit DEATH FACTORY sewerworld is gone and done and not until the tide of destruction of the FEAR and the LIE have not will ebb until and end and all is destroyed in the DEATH FACTORY gone and covered in skin and bile and all ALL OF US is ended and it is over.

p. apoc via reference:

"do not expect too much of the end of the world." - stanislaw j. lem

q. apoc via 'posthumanism':

end of the end of the world. overstatement, hyperviolence, information war, the central dynamic being new ideas, new tensions. the multinationals have abandoned japanese monster flicks for brain-computer interfaces: vicarious sex, post-industrial love story, ontological roses, noise as form. "people need to make mysteries and legends" - don delillo. zero-sum null-set zeitgeist of global power struggles, death and negation, still no substitute for strange destinies of Fuck Me Up The Ass. years before we realized sleaze we appropriated unpayable debts, life lessons, synaptic junk food for gen subtext (alas, no post-hippie gen XXX). fractal levels of complexity belie human emotion? this end will be ein mude tod, artificial politics and everyday life and the need for alternate genitalia a dead channel. undeal with reality. this is the end.

r. apoc via 'our man in the field':

their bodies had dammed and effectively contaminated the river spilling out into the road, and their eyes had closed up and turned to black mush, and the bugs had picked away at their faces so they didn't look like us anymore. vx nerve gas provokes a chemical reaction in the human nervous system, causing the lungs to fill with mucous at a rate which bursts blood vessels, effectively drowning the victim in their own fluid. u.n. officials stated in monday's report that although human rights regulations had been breached, it would be "inadvisable at this time to enact trade sanctions due to the fragile economic condition of the area." cranial swelling hemorrhaging and full immune system collapse within three hours. DO NOT RUB EYES OR EAT OR DRINK EXPOSED SUBSTANCES. thank you for your assistance! yes, it's gone black and swelled, i know, i know. keep its mouth empty, okay, and morphine, uh, fuck, needle in arm feel good? NEEDLE IN ARM… yeah, yeah. and keep it out of sight, for fuck's sake. "who maintains that the current influx of small arms and narcotics in no way assures airdropped medicine will reach those in need." all correspondents have been claimed missing or dead. media blackout. reports of biochemical saturation as of yet unverified. the fourth red cross airlift in as many days considered lost. "it's simply too late for any form of military intervention to have any viable effect other than caving in to senseless guilt." over to you.

s. apoc via ghost story:

there is a certain delight we take in scaring children. as we grow, we feel ourselves growing into new skins, coming to resemble the closetdwelling boogeymen we once so feared. as we feel our forms of power-in-the-world slip away, learning that responsibility is another word for subordination, we find ourselves grappling at whatever means of superiority we can claim. the 'relationship' is a flawed model of this system of needs, in which we take pleasure in the small tortures love affords, but only at childbirth do we fully savor the heady taste of inspiring fear. the other, in a relationship, exists outside the battleground of the home, but the child is trapped, a captive audience to schadenfreude and suffering. have you ever scared a child? it is a kind of karmic retribution for your sufferings or good clean fun. 'we like to be scared'; perhaps, when we are allowed our payoff, the catharsis which uncasts the spell. a child has no access to such devices. if i die before i wake, pray the lord my soul to take. there is no dispelling the end of the world, particularly the small worlds children inhabit, a terror which will hobble them until they gather the hopeless fatalism to look into the closet and see nothing there, at which point they gather the first of adulthood's weapons. when you look into the closet, remember, the closet looks into you.

t. apoc via inverted metaphor:

maybe it would be better to forget. there are languages where the only words are variants on goodbye, a meditation in action on transitoriness. the road turns. around the corner and across the field there's an old-tyme ragtime band made up of human-sized wind-up animals. monkeys, squirrels, a lizard that stands on its hind legs and plays the drums. music is important when it's the only way outside of Time. alas, they wind down and slow and stop, someday i'll show you the score, where this is taken into account and written in the margins. the things you take into consideration when you begin thinking in another language are frightening, sometimes. the people who used to live here before the sickness got 'em tried to teach these little shaved monkey-things to keep the band wound but the monkey-things were too dumb, they thought. not true. "hell is filled with people who tried to stretch time, and when heaven is as easy to find as a juicy nest of bugs you don't fuck with the Cosmic Mysteries, mon amour," says the Monkey King, who speaks for all monkeys, even the fallen domesticated ones, in a voice as steady as a frost that will never thaw. my goddess once held council with the Monkey King, who taught her things i will never understand, and in exchange turned her body into a flute, pores opening, the hollows through her bones clearing, the wind run through her like soft rods. you have heard this sound. the Monkey King has the highest respect and the greatest fear of instruments. my goddess and i once placed strings through the passages in her body when the holes were open. the pitch shifted and the clouds grew solid and fell from the sky. we learned not to mess, and we haven't since.

the loyal order of failed prophets, of which i am one, hidden winds lost beneath underground rivers, the fossilized flotsam of what-once-were artifacts to transmit the cyclic nature of time, we pondered over such and realized the plants were going to sell us out to the aliens. "the god damn government has been controlling the weather for years!" the insectoid hive nature of alien culture, blow-ups of mandibles, layered wings, multiple eyes gone glistening the streets crosses on doorways painted in herbicide the scent sticks to your clothes your face and churchbells distanced timestretched the weeds, the vines, man, they're getting to be fucking arrogant, alien truces with the vegetable kingdom organic technology pollenspread "stars and beyond," the promises, the subvocal alliances, "all any living thing wants to do is claim and conquer, planets cold trade, it's our fucking turn" exoskeletal placement accumulation to new gravities, new destinies, the sky a distraction. gutteral -60 Hz cries a swan song. we prophets needed guidance. the fortune-teller, a dark matted brown its body all up to the dolls head, a lightbulb where the brain would be. it took up nearly the whole closet, but it wouldn't come on unless the door was closed. so i squeezed between wood and glass and dust and closed the door. moth balls, old pine, grandmotherly the smell. the light in the bear's head came on, and unsettled. i placed my hands in the hole where the fortunes came out and formed my mudra, index finger beneath thumb, ringfinger up to the sky. head and arms moved along axes. consideration, consternation, this certainly wasn't a good sign. (silly mystyk, majyk's for kydz.) the hazy blue neon of the light confused me, fingers misplaced. no matter, i have the answer. "never the never, forever and ever, those who give it will take it in the end." SO SAYETH MY CRYPTIC RUBRIC. 50 cents, please.

u. apoc via 'will-to-invisibility':

"these stories deliberately confuse and obscure, they cover over what should be made clear in an attempt to convince us the author knows more than the author says. the inverse is obviously the case. what other conclusion can we come to concerning 'the end of the world,' an impossible subject; what does the end of the world look like? what happens? how long does it take? only by a rigid reliance on the abstract can the concept hope to exist. it is an excuse to the lowest form of ignorance at a time in which we are in desperate need of solutions, not this adolescent playing-at-armageddon. what becomes of us when we model ourselves, when we find the locus of our fears and desires, in death? this faux-cynicism and cheap nihilism serves no purpose but to make us numb to the symptoms of this universal death of affect. is this what we deserve? does anybody care?"

v. apoc via 'i-love-you':

that shakespeare saw fit to compare the fury of the scorned and the fury of hell says much. it is a maxim throughout time: "my world is empty without you." from a purely psychological standpoint, what can we say about this infatuation with apoc and its connections to failed interpersonal relationships? the end of the world found solid ferment in the early church, which was never known for healthy relationships. the self versus the other becomes typified to a nearly absurd level in the self-help mantra 'men are from mars, women are from venus, i'm from uranus': burroughs' split-species theory becoming mode and model for sexual warfare. fear that which is not you, and want not to fear; destroy what is not you. the vision and the void.

w. apoc via 'ceremony-decay':

we find passage through the day-to-day by relying on a) the routine and habit of our lives and b) on the pomp and circumstance (n. ogre's 'circusdance') of figures outside our immediate lives: political-entertainment people. the desire to alter 'rut' in our lives, to make abrupt and permanent change at any point in which we are not content (and who's ever content?), both in the be-there-firstness of pop culture and the revisionist nostalgia for the mythic 'better time' (the '60s, the '50s, previous centuries, or even our own childhoods) as coupled with the unreality of american government: ceremony the public no longer has interest or faith in, and we find ourselves floating without referent, easy prey for those who know our hopes and desires, as easy to decode as the clothes we wear and the foods we eat. in a world where we literally wear our psyches on our sleeves, are we not leaving ourselves dangerously open to demagogues fed on proper vocal intonation and semantic weaponry? and if this is so, why not throw your future into the capable hands of the ultimate heat-death, reducer of all things, the great equalizer, an angel of mercy to a sick and dying planet? when we understand heaven as a structured society of infinite bliss, our longing for death increases as our order and control of our daily lives decreases. why wait? besides, in a world in which the only constant is change, the ultimate transition becomes a smaller and smaller leap to make. live free and die.

x. apoc via 'manufacture of disgust':

much has been made of the impulse toward sabotage in factory jobs, the dark desire to see machines malfunction, collapse. from the manga dreams of attack mecha to the small victory of beating our technology into ordered submission (admit it, you have hit a tv, kicked a car, who hasn't?), we seem to feel a small amount of power in exerting force, both in the real and vicariously, on the instruments which make up our modern landscape. are these impulses limited to tech and beyond nature? any kid who's ever kicked a cat, tortured ants, exploded frogs can answer that question, just as anyone who's thrilled at a tornado ripping through a cornfield or a nuclear blast flattening trees knows the answer. we may find such impulses vile, inhuman, loathsome, but they are a part of us, and to varied degrees inform our actions. from the miniaturized war of gardening and lawn maintenance to the asphalting of swampland, from weekend hunting to the eco-death of irradiated land, we all harbor a will-to-destroy, and as with any desire, the extreme case fascinates us. listen to the care and detail with which both pro- and anti-apoc speakers craft their vision of the end; the endless loss statistics, the explanations of how such an event would affect the human body, the ugly joy of terminology like 'spasm war,' 'nuclear winter,' 'vaporized clouds of blood and bone.' can we hide ourselves from these impulses, come to terms with our wants, before we involuntarily give ourselves over to release?

y. apoc via 'media sickness':

i remember when i first told her about the album. how the vocal recordings were taken from some third-world country undergoing civil war in the early '90s (this is indicative of just how american i really am, how little i know about the world outside my two-mile radius). how the songs were lamentations for the dead, sung by the remaining family of three children killed in a shelling attack the previous week. how there was a picture of the funeral published in the liner notes of the album. how the tapes and photographs were smuggled out of the country. how copies of the released album made it back to the country. how all those in the picture were rounded up, had their hands bound by plastic ties, and executed. i don't know why i told her this. we went out later that night, and at some nameless bar during a lull in the conversation she started screaming 'STOP IT! STOP IT!' i had to drag her back to the apartment. it was the beginning of our end, that night, the beginning of a lot of endings. but there was still time, then.

z. apoc via a galactic shutting the door:

"As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse." - anthony burgess

if the world doesn't end on new year's day, 2000 (which i guess we've collectively decided isn't the last year of the 20th century, seeing as how there was no 0 a.d.), what will change? will we all of a sudden realize how close we all came and, for once, make new year's resolutions we intend to keep? will we get all excited over 3000 a.d., the way we get excited for the next football season the minute the superbowl ends? will we hope that providence will clear away our global mistakes, trusting that having made it this far we'll be fine? or will it just be another day, another party, another hangover? the real lesson of history remains: after the big textbook-making events are come and gone, we're all still here to pick up the pieces and go on with our lives. i've still got to get up in the morning and tie my shoes and do all the annoying little things that keep me alive. i'll still have to live with the mistakes i've made, the chances i missed, the embarrassing late night drunken phone calls i made. it's hard. but being alive means one thing: things can change. not much, but it's something. that's my weak attempt at an answer. your turn.