I woke up last Thursday morning to a cascade of late-night text messages and phone calls I’d missed. “Are you guys okay???!!!” Was the overall gist. Concerned, alarmed messages from people who were watching the news long after I’d fallen asleep to the sound of pounding rain on the roof. I knew it was raining badly. I had gotten the flash flood warnings. I’d peered out our windows and seen the other side of the street obscured by the sheets of water pouring out of the sky.

Then I went to bed. Living on the third floor of a building in a neighborhood not prone to flooding beyond a few clogged sewer drains causing grandiose puddles at corners, I wasn’t concerned.

Lucky me.

I’ve always had a thing for the apocalypse. It started when I decided to minor in theology in college (long story). The Book of Revelations and other apocalypse stories in the Bible fascinated me. It did not inspire in me any organized belief in god or god’s wrath or hell or the coming of Jesus or whatever Messiah or anything like that. Instead it dovetailed with my love of disaster movies about long-dormant volcanoes discovered under heavily populated areas or catastrophic earthquakes or Godzilla-tall tsunamis or unstoppable floods or devastating tornadoes, and caused a bit of an obsession with the concept of the apocalypse. They have a word for this in theology:

Eschatology

1: A belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind.

The apocalypse is a fantastically entertaining trope. While I’m not a fan of most horror movies, zombie movies like the 28 Days/Week/Months movies and World War Z are among my favorites because it’s as much about the end of the world as it is about zombies. Independence Day is an enduring favorite of mine not because it’s a sci-fi alien movie (though I do enjoy that kind of thing), but because it’s about the end of the world. The Day After Tomorrow was ridiculous and I loved it. I'll watch anything by Roland Emmerich. Dr. Strangelove? All time favorite. Armageddon? Can watch that one again and again. I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer because of all the apocalypses she and her quirky band of misfits averted, season after season. In the days I was online dating, I had a question for anyone who came calling to my profile: Would you prefer an alien invasion or a zombie apocalypse? (It’s a question I still ask people sometimes. It’s a good ice breaker. But maybe it should be updated with actual apocalypse scenarios, e.g., would you prefer to drown in floodwater or be burned alive by a wildfire?) I did some light prepping when Y2K rolled over and some minor stockpiling of dry goods when COVID was getting warmed up last year. I wonder regularly about what I’ll do if I survive the initial collapse of society; will i buy some guns and attempt to survive the post apocalyptic hellscape? Or will I just walk into the ocean and swim until I drown? Yes, I’m very fun at parties.

My point being, I’ve always been pretty fatalistic about the idea of the end of the world. But what we’re all learning is that the end of the world isn’t a boom and a flash and a sudden transfer into the unknowable void of the alleged afterlife. It’s not a horde of marauding zombies staggering over the horizon. It’s not a fleet of huge alien spaceships shooting destructive beams into our world’s capitals. The end of the world here in real life is a doomscroll of wildfires and floods and violence and desperate people all over the globe who are all way, way ahead of most of us in the apocalypse timeline. Tell the people of Afghanistan that the world isn’t ending. Tell the people in Louisiana or in the towns wiped from the earth by fire in California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington state. We remember the sight of those blood red and sunless skies in San Francisco last year. We see footage of mountains of water tumbling down the subway stairs, floating whole homes off their foundations, the forces of nature subduing major metropolises in under an hour. And all that’s only getting worse and will keep getting worse.

This is all to say nothing of the pandemic, the plague that is spawning even more insidious plagues of misinformation, ineptitude, appalling selfishness and deeply damaging stupidity. If there was ever one thing that might’ve bonded humanity to a common cause it could’ve been a global pandemic. But I think it’s painfully obvious to everyone it only fractured us further in every way, which doesn’t bode well for humanity’s collective ability to achieve anything of significance or effectiveness against the even bigger and more catastrophic problem of climate change.

Not to get nihilistic here, but it seems like we’re fairly fucked, guys.

But I tend toward catastrophizing and I have a completionist stripe that sees the worst coming and just wants to get it over with. But I’m also a bit of a hedonist who is prepared to drink champagne while the world burns, wondering if my reusable grocery bags and impeccable recycling habits and my loyalty to public transportation and my almost stalwart adherence to eco-friendly products made any difference at all.

I’ll never know if it did. We (most of us) wear our masks at the store, or walking into bars or restaurants with the faith that this simple act will possibly spare someone we’ll never meet catching the virus. But we’ll never know if it did. We only trust that it can. Some of us throw money at the ACLU or refugee assistance organizations or food banks and trust that those contributions made some difference. But we’re not sure. We don’t see any quantifiable evidence that it does. I’m not saying that because I think it’s pointless. On the contrary, the faith that these little actions make any difference can be what stands between us and the real Neitzchian nihilism, the true darkness of simply giving up.

Thursday morning, prompted by the worried messages, I caught up with the news and got an idea of just how bad shit got for people in my immediate region. People drowned trapped in basement apartments or swamped cars. People are still missing. The damage to property is staggering. All this happened within a few miles of where we live on higher ground, where we slept through it all. The privilege we have is modest compared to some and astronomical compared to others. The privilege of sleeping through a biblical deluge, unworried about anything besides a possible power outage; the privilege of going out to dinner the very next night like a normal human, talking about the wreckage in other parts of the city; the privilege of going out for brunch while the world burns around us.

The catastrophes are quickening. Or perhaps the world is always a catastrophe, but thanks to the internet, we’re more painfully aware of it all. At any rate, I believe we only have this one life to live, and if civilization is going to hell, I think we should all savor every tiny bit of joy or delight or even the smallest sense of “normal” we can salvage from it.

And in the meantime, we can hope things will get better. We can vote for better things. We can keep recycling. We can keep bringing our canvas tote bags to the grocery store. Personally, I take some comfort in thinking of how the earth will thrive once the human population is cut down to size (or totally eliminated). Long after my time, probably, so easy for me to say. But in the meantime, we can hope that this is a particularly bad patch in our brief stint in the geologic timeline, and not the beginning of the end of it. But that hope relies on the human animals’ collective ability to recognize what needs to be done and to act on it.

So, you know, fingers crossed I guess.