Waiting, Part 2: Us

Waiting, Part 2: Us

Disaster movie trailers, History Channel and the prophets of destruction, galactic alignment, catastrophic such and such, apocalyptic whatever. I’m not sure anymore whether our love of doomsday theories spawns from a fear of extinction or lust for it.

“Tomorrow,” we say, “tomorrow we are doomed.” “Every last one of us,” we assure ourselves. And without fail we wake up, flounder in the morning sun, work, and fuck. And we work. And we fuck. The same way we have been working and fucking since the 50’s when working and fucking was decreed to be our collective dream. And now, with no more saintly animals to chew us up, our stagnant masses can work and fuck their way to becoming the frosting on the cake celebrating our triumph over natural selection.

Piled atop one another, generation on generation, like coarse layers of biogeological sediment, the youngest of us the squirming top soil born at the very edge of the Earth’s orbit, clinging to our older brothers’ coattails so we don’t drift off into that black space between here and Mars. Me and you will be the unlucky ancestors, sojourners of “sea level,” the bottom layer where the heat and pressure of our progeny have mashed us into a wet, people-colored paste. And by people-colored, I don’t mean the irrelevant skin, but the helpless pink and white of our insides. The worst of us will have gathered and condensed into dark, infertile splotches. Like the tough lumps buried in the flesh of a potato.

“Any sign of the meteor yet?” asks some buried voice. “Not yet” says a scout at the surface. “How about a solar storm?” “Maybe a small one.” “Tomorrow,” we say, “tomorrow we are definitely doomed.” “Every last one of us,” we assure ourselves.