Wednesday, May 6, 2009

WHERE IS MY POST-APOCALYPTIC AFTERMATH?





When I was in high school, I watched a lot of B-grade science fiction movies on late-night cable. These movies virtually promised me that by this point in my life I would be driving an armored dune buggy through a post-apocalyptic aftermath that looks a lot like the area around Barstow, escaping from mohawked cannibals as I search for more fuel.
Where is the world that I was promised? I have the dune buggy. I've been working on the grizzled and slightly sinister looks and hairstyle that the lead male requires. But no dice.
Instead, I am forced to spend the best years of my life paying off my Ford Focus and eating breakfast burritos on the way to my job talking on the phone in a cloth-covered office cubicle.

I WANT MY POST-APOCALYPTIC AFTERMATH.

1 comment:

  1. The trouble with a Golden Age is that those lucky enough to be born in one don’t necessarily know it. The flip side of this, the estimable Jerry Pournelle tells us, is that the people cursed to live in a Dark Age by definition no longer even remember that their ancestors could do great things.

    Might our time in fact be a sort post-apocalyptic aftermath to the wars, revolutions, and political purges that the world has gone through in the last century, only with fast food instead of peasant gruel? Would our ancestors—Thomas Jefferson in his book-lined study at Monticello, or ornery and stubbornly independent Great Great Grandfather in his frontier shack with no need or desire for much more than his unregistered rifle, an unlicensed coon hound, and a jug of tax-free corn liquor--regard this era with anything other than unalloyed horror and disgust?

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