Sunday, June 27, 2010

Pining for apocalypse.

Apocalypse stories area always a little popular, aren't they? Whether it's nuclear war or pandemic or zombies, the upshot is the same: 99% of people are dead, and the story follows the other 1%. Their lives are utterly changed, and utterly refined down to the basics: get food, get shelter, don't get killed. There's something bizarrely appealing about this. Watching Zombieland for instance, the fun part isn't (just) blasting away zombies; the fun part is that the heroes all pile in a car and just go. They leave their homes with nothing and never come back.

I'm frustrated sometimes by the amount of stuff that's attached to me. I'm not just a woman; I'm a woman and a job and a family and a blog and a history and a group of friends and two guinea pigs and a chest of drawers and way too many books. I like all this stuff, but it's a lot to carry around. It takes up almost all my time; almost all my self. I spend half my waking life working at a job to afford the possessions and pursuits that take up the other half. Now, that job contributes an important service to society and those possessions and pursuits give me great value and joy, so it's not a bad deal and I don't intend to ditch it. I just wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a different deal with life.

Now and then I have goofy little fantasies about walking into the wilderness and whatever random spot I ended up at, there I'd be. I would need only food and water, know only trees and dirt, sleep when I was tired and eat when I was hungry. When I moved around I would bring nothing with me. I would exist only as myself. ('Til I starved to death in an abandoned bus.)

The closest I can get to that state, the little taste of apocalyptic wilderness, is sex. In sex I am naked and many things do not matter. I have a tight and sensitive pussy and that matters; what my job is and whether my car needs maintenance do not. Depersonalization, in this way, isn't a degradation but a relief. Sometimes I don't want to be all the complex and beautiful things that make up me. Sometimes I want to be a body.

26 comments:

  1. I suggest moving to Wyoming and adopting a cowboy. And some cows and goats... And maybe a strange girl from the Internet.

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  2. Ahh, so Into the Wild had the same effect on you that it had on me, eh? :)

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  3. It probably says something about my life that if I were one of the 1% survivors of an apocalpyse, the change would probably be more of a mild inconvenience than anything fundamentally different from what I've had to deal with at times.

    I'd really hate having to babysit a bunch of people who are too shell-shocked and ignorant of life outside the modern paradigm to easily adapt to the new reality, though.

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  4. Time to get a Warcraft account.

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  5. My post-apocalyptic fantasy doesn't involve the woods--I'm not a fan of bugs, and plants make me itchy and sneezy. I'd much rather have an endless, deserted highway with exits leading to empty cities and gas stations. When one car broke down, I'd fix it or steal a new one. Throw in a couple of friends and it's a road movie with no destination.

    Most likely, however, I'd be one of the nameless victims of whatever depopulated the world. Or I'd turn my handgun on myself when shit got really crazy in the time between the apocalyptic event and the post-apocalyptic fantasy.

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  6. There are other activities which provide a relief from the daily mundane. For me: skydiving and motorcycling.

    After you've jumped out of a plane and are hurtling towards the ground at 120mph, the thought of whether the water bill is paid simply doesn't come into your mind. When you're going to fit the oil change into your week just doesn't exist. you exist totally in the moment. Every thing you're doing has a direct and measurable effect on the next couple minutes of your life.

    It's pretty liberating.

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  7. I love apocalypse movies, too, but a big part of that is the shots of famous, crowded places like Times Square sitting absolutely empty. I have social anxiety that makes me wig out in crowds - plus I'm painfully aware of how overpopulated the planet is getting, and of course I just don't especially like people - so those empty metropolis shots are lovely and soothing to me.

    But the whole "leaving it all behind" thing is certainly compelling, too. As they say in Fight Club, the things you own own you...and since I'm a bit of a hermit and a packrat, I'm owned by a lot of things. It makes me feel trapped, but much more than that it makes me feel safe. The horrible downside of zombie movies and whatnot is that the main characters rarely find a niche with a lockable door that's just theirs and that they feel safe in. I couldn't deal with that.

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  8. "Now and then I have goofy little fantasies about walking into the wilderness and whatever random spot I ended up at, there I'd be. I would need only food and water, know only trees and dirt, sleep when I was tired and eat when I was hungry. When I moved around I would bring nothing with me. I would exist only as myself."

    Okay. But how long until you got bored? Once you secured snacks and knew enough trees for the day, would you just space out and drool a little until the next need came along? For a reasonably self-aware mammal, the stuff you (and by 'you' I mean all of us, not specifically you, Holly) think about and do during your downtime is (I believe) the largest portion of the 'self' you refer to.

    Now go get your goddamned wicker basket and collect some eggs. (But wait... you won't have created wicker baskets to work with; hell, you might not even move off the wet spot after you pee if you're living fully in the moment) :)

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  9. In addition to motorcycling (doit) and skydiving (intend to do it), there's also paddling (of the watercraft kind) and scuba. Scuba especially is all-encompassing of one's mental faculties.

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  10. Jack - Well, that's why, in addition to the practicalities, it's a goofy fantasy. (Although my ability to space out and drool is formidable.) But being bored is the whole point--the opposite of bored is "constantly occupied," and the fantasy is about escaping that.

    Outward Bound courses include a "solo," where participants simply hunker down somewhere in the woods for 18-72 hours alone with basic supplies and a journal. The idea always appealed to me tremendously--I'd love to do it once with the journal and once without. (I probably should just go do this sometime, since the limited time frame and the allowance of supplies makes it entirely feasible.) I'm not sure exactly what it would be like, but the fluffy-wuffy Thoreau side of my brain wants to know.

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  11. Perversecowgirl - One of my favorite weird experiences is going to a big 24-hour megacasino at about 4 or 5 in the morning. There'll still be a few people there, but very few for the size of the establishment--there's a real gap of an hour or two between the late-night partiers and the early-bird specials. If you go then and just walk around, it's a huge building full of blinking lights and sound effects and goofy decorations and almost no other humans, and it's an amazing "I own this place" feeling.

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  12. This immediately made me think of John Varley's story, "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)." Which I actually found online: http://www.varley.net/Pages/Manhattan.htm

    "But that’s not the point. We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn’t, why would there be so many of them? There’s something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, defending one’s family from marauders. Sure, it’s horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start all over.

    Secretly, we know we’ll survive. All those other folks will die. That’s what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

    All those after-the-bomb stories were lies. Lies, lies, lies.

    This is the only true after-the-bomb story you will ever read."

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  13. "But being bored is the whole point--the opposite of bored is "constantly occupied," and the fantasy is about escaping that."

    But don't you feel 'constantly occupied' during sex (mentally [and also physically at times, of course])? Unless the sex is utterly lousy, that is...

    I mean, I get the sex reducing one's focus to just a narrow aperture (I don't mean your aperture, literally); but even with that reduction, it's still (usually) a pretty intensive, honed-in focus, albeit narrow. The wandering-the-wilderness fantasy seems (to me, I may be interpreting it wrongly) one of more or less emptying yourself out and de-focusing as completely as possible, 'spacing out.' The closest-you-can-get-to-that-state sex you mention seems to be something at least slightly different -- an extreme narrowing of focus, vs. de-focusing. Do you see the two as almost the same, a little similar, or very different from each other? For me it's two very different states of mind. But, of course, our minds may not work much like each other's, I dunno.

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  14. Jack - I would say I'm very de-focused during sex--not unoccupied, exactly, but unthinking. If it's good, I'm not thinking "YUM COCK" so much as I'm thinking "......."

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  15. Holly explained well what post-apocalyptic stories include that makes them fun. Connie Willis wrote a short story, Last of the Winnebagos, that was consciously about what the authors leave out to make them fun. It takes place after a comparatively tiny apocalypse: domestic dogs have been wiped out by a plauge. It's about what is lost, whereas as Holly pointed out the standard story directs your attention to the simplicity gained, and, of course, the action.

    Post-apocalyptic stories are fun reading. I still enjoy them. But after Connie Willis' story I have a much deeper appreciation for how enormously better it is to be alive now than experiencing that forced simplicity. No hint of pining any more.

    P.S. I especially like S.M. Stirling's "Change" series, or at least the first two books that I've read so far; you can tell Stirling loves the adventure he writes but never slips into thinking "it would be SO COOL to live this way".

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  16. But don't you feel 'constantly occupied' during sex (mentally [and also physically at times, of course])?
    I do not. I can't speak for Holly, but it wouldn't surprise me if the capacity to focus on fucking at its most fundamental, biological level is part of why she enjoys it so much and it's generally been "eh" for me.

    P.S. I especially like S.M. Stirling's "Change" series, or at least the first two books that I've read so far; you can tell Stirling loves the adventure he writes but never slips into thinking "it would be SO COOL to live this way".
    I get the opposite sense -- he thinks he'd get to use his SCA skillz and finally lose weight.

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  17. George R. Stewart's Earth Abides is my favorite apocalyptic novel. Largely because it depicts the remnants of humanity--especially the generation born after the apocalypse--as truly changed by their changed circumstances, rather than acting like normal people who don't happen to have very many neighbors.

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  18. One of my favorite weird experiences is going to a big 24-hour megacasino at about 4 or 5 in the morning. There'll still be a few people there, but very few for the size of the establishment

    Love that kind of stuff. See also: going to the 24 hour grocery store in the middle of the night. Not as impressive, but much more accessible (there's a 24 hour grocery down the street) and you still get that feeling of owning the place. :D

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  19. Bruno - Hmm. Do you take all those passages where the characters are pining for the old days and the things they miss as Stirling trying to convince both the reader and himself that he really doesn't pine for the apocalypse? 'Cause there's more of that than in most of the ones I've read. The main villian is the only character who is supposed to like the Change; which would fit with such an attempt to convince himself. I did get the feeling that he'd like to be there in the "Sea of Time" series.

    Holly - I'll have to give Earth Abides a try. Of the ones I've read, the best for depicting a change in people, though over just a year not a generation, was Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer. They lose points for a bad prediction that feminism dies when the comet hits, though; feminism will be in no danger as long as women can use weapons as well as men.

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  20. Mousie00 - Earth Abides contains a prediction that racism will die when the comet (actually a plague in this case) hits, because, essentially, in a tiny population "my black friend who's not like the others" will be the only black person you know. Hard to stereotype huge groups when there aren't any huge groups.

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  21. Holly - that's a nicer prediction but I think it's also wrong. It's easier to sterotype then; 'cause then you have a stereotype you learned and you know only one exception to it, and you also form new stereotypes based on all the black people you know. I think a larger sample set works to make stereotypes less persistent not more, as long as the sample set is not skewed and the stereotype is not mostly true. E.g, the mostly-white, abolitionist North had the myth that black people's skin color came off on things, but it couldn't have been believed in the slave-importing South or they wouldn't have had slaves in the house touching laundry.

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  22. Mousie00 - The specific thing in Earth Abides is that the white protagonist falls in love with and has kids with a black woman, in 1949 when that was a big deal. Because when he only knows about three living women, they're all individual people to him, in a way they wouldn't be otherwise. He doesn't have the luxury to write her off as "dark-skinned, unsuitable, move on" when she happens to be the smartest and sanest woman in a very small pool.

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  23. The thing about zombie apocalypses, as best as I can tell, is that they're supposed to be like a video game in real life. Lots of stuff to shoot without worrying about ethics, lots of stuff to pillage and smash up, complete and utter freedom.

    The problem with that is that in real life you don't get a save point.

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  24. Holly - Ah yes. With the small group, the perception of the real individual transcends the stereotype, though the stereotype may still exist in the perceiver's head.

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  25. While I haven't seen any zombie movies aside from the original version of Night of the Living Dead, the whole slow, nearly mindless zombie idea doesn't seem like an apocalypse-level threat unless they already outnumber the living by at least 4-to-1. Who's going to let things go that far before doing something about it?

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  26. Not Me - If you haven't already seen the xkcd zombie outbreak cartoon, I'm sure it'll amuse you.

    http://xkcd.com/734/

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