The Last Days

Posted on May 18, 2005 in California Watch Journals & Notebooks

We — my wife and a few friends — were walking out of a lecture when I looked at the bright lights of the parking structure at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange. All those bright lights made me think of their dimming and I muttered about living in “the last days”.

One of our companions gave me the funny look. “Not THOSE Last Days,” I said. “I mean the real last days. The ones which seem to be coming, when we will have to survive with none of this.” I swept my hand around the complex.

The odd look disappeared as we listened to the last bangs of the fireworks at Disneyland.

---

A few days ago, I wrote this in my notebook:

What do I fear? I fear the abrupt stoppage of civilization, the loss of the medications that keep me sane and alive. I fear that when we can no longer travel far, we will be forced to converge in the areas close to us, decimating the wild countryside of anything edible, eating the squirrels, the skunks, the possums, the deer, the rattlesnakes, the bobcats, — even the mountain lions. And when we have stripped the land, the masses will march until they either die of starvation or conquer another hungry people — I fear the military striving to enforce the peace and killing those who try to seize the stores for themselves — I fear people dragging the bodies off the streets, butchering them, and selling the cuts for pork as happened in the Siege of Leningrad except for this: there will be no army surrounding us, only the chaparral, the mountains, the desert, and the overfished Catalina Channel.

Is my vision so unlikely? The trough overflows and yet we have seen that the feed bag that fills it is empty.