You know you've lost touch with reality when you start feeling nostalgic about electricity and running water.
I've just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy and have been watching the excellent Survivors on telly. This morning as I was filling the kettle to make coffee I genuinely thought 'it's going to be so sad when I turn on the tap and no more water comes out'.
I've also started sizing up the people I walk past on the street, wondering which of them will share their last can of baked beans with me when all the supermarkets have been looted and which will chain me to a wall in a cellar and systematically cut off my limbs and roast them for dinner.
Come to that I've had to question whether I'd be able to resist the lure of cooked human flesh if that were really all that stood between me and death from starvation.
I really really hope I never get to find out.
NYT: Last Ones Left in a Toxic Town
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So, uh, maybe I can't make it to the barbecue after all.
Oh yeah — I finished The Road last month and I know exactly what you're talking about.
I really do love the trappings of civilization. Plus, given my last post comments, my entire career would not just cease to exist — it would be a meta-meta comment on what had ceased to exist — if society collapses.
So I'm keeping my fingers crossed, because I'm going to be absolutely annoying post-apocalypse. Sure, I can knit, grow food and make soap. But with my bossy nature I suspect the End will find me sitting on a barren hillside, all alone in a field, trying to order the rocks around. And writing their performance reviews.
It's always the apocalypse. But I think you already know who it's going to be Bureauista. Long pig is reputed to be tasty. All that time I spent training for nuclear armageddon back in the 80s will finally come in useful for something. Meantime I'm stockpiling coffee and pornography. Anyhoo, back to sharpening my entrenching tools...
I find it surprising how ill-prepared I feel for armageddon given that I spent most of my childhood outside, hiding, spying, looking for berries and animals and rushing about to keep warm. Fast forward thirty years and I rarely leave the air-conditioned or centrally heated indoors, and feel high levels of anxiety if separated from my laptop for more than a few hours. When the hush descends I'll probably just crawl into a heating vent and wait for the ants to eat me.
Re The Road, guys on the `survivalist' forum of one of the gun boards I read did a review and it seemed to be equally split between loathing it and loving it. The best comment was from ice9 who opined in reply to someone comparing McCarthy favourably with Hemingway - "A reclusive, arrogant, bitter, Hemingway clone with much less talent and none of the personality."
As for the new Survivors the reviews I've seen convinced me it's a travesty of the excellent original series, full of comfortable falsehoods and lame stereotypes, so I'll not be watching it.
For a truly interesting real-life narrative on what life in a collapsed society is really like, check out "Surviving in Argentina". The way things are going we could be there in a few years time...
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