husband, no children. I am entirely alone. I am safe that way. The poetry envelops my life. I am the poetry.
I was sure moving out to Milbury would be a magic bullet & fix everything, so when it didn’t, I felt more powerless. Started staying up late looking online & stumbled on the philosophy of survivalism. I got these catalogs. I would pore over them w/ more energy than I gave my Omni reports. The stuff you could buy, to ensure that your family would survive large-scale disaster. Fascinating. Anything. Barrels for capturing rainwater. Seeds. Radios. Bows & arrows.
When Juliet got pregnant w/ George, I signed up on a lark for a Wilderness First Responder course at the Litchfield Nature Center. That’s where I met this guy Don Alley.
Are you prepared? Don Alley asked me.
Prepared for what? I said. Is there an exam?
I looked around at the group. We were in a class of 6. 3 males & 3 females. Standing there in the shade in our middle-aged shorts & big knees.
No, said Don. Prepared for social and environmental collapse.
I got this for myself as a birthday present, I said.
Happy Birthday, Don said.
So what are you preparing for, exactly? I ventured to ask.
Most of us here are prepared for anything, Don explained. You name it. Drought. Flood. Asteroids. Although personally I think the most probable scenario is that once we are fully digitized in every area of our life, someone will shut down the internet. Everyone will panic and turn to violence. We’ll be like babies being weaned cold turkey. But not me, Don said. Not me and LeeAnn.
We watched LeeAnn single-handedly drag Isaac onto a gurney. Isaac didn’t scream like the rest of us when we had to be the victim. He moaned like a woman in labor. He was totally unwilling to cheat by inching in the right direction. He was just two hundred pounds of dying weight.
He’s really good, I said.
He’s the best, Don said.
Then Don turned to me and said, very intimately, So we know people are already living like primitives. I mean modern people. A guy in Syria, a pediatric dentist or something, with kids, he’s already living in a bombed-out version of his life. He’s living like an ancient person now. Chopping up his furniture and making fires. Depending on himself. Spin the wheel, and that’s you.
I looked over at him through a cloud of gnats. He seemed to hear my thoughts.
Rescue? he said. By whom? Superfuckingman? By the West? You know what Obama let Assad do? ANYTHING HE WANTED. This is Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Remember the Superdome? Holy shit. Satan couldn’t dream that stuff up. FEMA sends you to the Superdome and you’re robbed of your baby formula at gunpoint, then raped. Democracy? We kick our democracy around like it’s a football. We’re too barbaric to be democratic. All we ever do is argue like conjoined twins who can’t stand each other. So you’re a privileged white man, anointed from birth to prevail? Good for you. In the next life, you’ll probably be reincarnated as the seventh daughter of a farmer in Eritrea. THIS is where you find yourself, through no fault of your own and certainly not to your credit, but it’s your life. Me and LeeAnn didn’t have kids. I think it’s unethical to have kids at this stage in history. But I take care of my mother. I’ve got a generator for her dialysis machine. A cellar full of food, water, seeds. The whole spread. Am I happier? No. I think happiness is an irrelevant metric at this stage in history. FUCK happiness. But am I afraid? No I am NOT afraid, Michael. I am prepared.
Well, meeting Don Alley had an effect on me.
Historically, in me & Juliet’s marriage, I’m the sane one. Juliet’s the poet, the hothead, the crier. We used to fight about it, how even-keeled I was. Like it was a liability. She’d say, It’s not fair, it’s not fair, you’re so invulnerable.