I live in a city. We've already had one coronavirus scare, and panic buying started on Saturday. It seems like all over the news there is fear, despair, paranoia about the impending fall of human civilization.
I feel very little of that. Sure, I did a bit of a bigger grocery run on Sunday, and noticed that certain sections of the store had been stripped bare -- toilet paper, canned fruit, cough and flu relievers, that sort of thing. A woman was trying to buy masks, and a worker was trying to suggest that maybe it would work if she tied a wet wipe around her face or something, since the store still had those in stock.
I just smile at it all. I'm not a depressed person. I'm just very acutely aware that there's little to nothing I can do to save myself, if and when the shit hits the fan.
I keep thinking of the novel Jam, written by Yahtzee Croshaw some years ago. In that novel, a bizarre apocalypse hits the city of Brisbane, Australia, cutting off all power and telecommunications and killing almost everybody, and nobody knows what the fuck just happened gray goo accident in a nanotech lab that was trying to prevent a hitherto hypothetical gray goo apocalypse and thought that a great place to start would be to manufacture actual gray goo. It also appears completely out of nowhere during rush hour on a weekday, killing all the normies who were going about their ordinary business and/or driving to their ordinary jobs.
The survivors are unemployeds, layabouts, college kids, and other weirdos who all immediately become very excited because they get to live out their post-apocalyptic survival fantasies. The survivors are universally bursting with (universally retarded) ideas about how to rebuild civilization now that the future of humanity has been unexpectedly thrust into their (universally incapable) hands. They then proceed to be a bunch of sociopathic idiots who kill each other and destroy all that remains of Brisbane.
Almost every character dies by the end, save for the narrator and one particular normie -- a low-level stooge at a local game development studio who had been working from home and thus hadn't been outside when the apocalypse hit. Everyone thinks he's a fucking crazy person because he's obsessed with hunting down and retrieving a hard drive with a build of the game he's been working on. They also think he's crazy because he clings stubbornly to the notion that the apocalypse is just localized and didn't wreck the entire world. He's taunted and shamed endlessly for this belief, and he eventually snaps and explains that he's acting this way because, unlike seemingly everyone else left in Brisbane, he's actually aware that he has no idea what the fuck to do in an apocalypse and the most he can hope for is to die in an amusing fashion.
He also winds up being the hero of the story, because the moment he gets an opportunity to send out a global call for help, he fucking seizes it.
As you've probably guessed by now, Jam was written mostly to be a mockery of post-apocalyptic fiction and its fans. And I find it to be quite relevant to current world events.
I live in a city. I fly a desk. I have no skills that would keep me alive during or after a total societal collapse. If the shit goes down, I'm fucked, and there's nothing I can do about it. So why fucking worry?
I'm reminded also of a strange, fucked up movie called Nosferatu the Vampyr. It's loosely based on Dracula, obviously. It had a very poignant scene. The Black Death strikes a town, and everybody takes to the streets and celebrates. Entire families leave their homes, dancing and singing and chatting and having open-air picnics, because we're already infected and we're all gonna die, so let's enjoy our last days on this godforsaken earth.
Back in the Middle Ages, people would make paintings, poems, and songs about the Danse Macabre -- about kings and peasants alike joining hands and dancing, celebrating because death has finally brought everybody down to the same level. The Ring Around the Rosie song and dance is thought to have originated from that, with "a pocket full of posies" referring to people carrying pouches of fragrant herbs in a vain attempt to ward off the sickness. Much like a mask upon the nosie in current year.
I don't know if it'll actually get that bad this time around. But it's a nice reminder to count our blessings and love every day we have left. I suppose you could call my attitude a form of learned helplessness.
