Solar flares, my Sobriety and the end of it all.
I woke up to the news that a “severe geomagnetic G-4 storm” was hurtling through space at an indeterminant rate of speed and would crash into earth’s ionosphere sometime very soon. That sounded ominous news to me, ticked off my panic pulse and gave me a little something to fixate on for the next day or two. I’ve got some ism’s and this is the type of doomsday forecast that really wakes them up and sends them into overdrive. That, of course, came and went without incident, just the light show we all got to gawk at from our backyards.
To be perfectly honest it was a nice break from worrying about the job market, inflation and the millions of other things that occupy the talking heads within my head. The potential end of the world as we know it, this is much more fun than complaining about the partially reanimated corpse of President Joe Biden or the legal drama surrounding porn stars and our former President.
The solar flares came, the went, I was able to see the Northern Lights for the first time in my life. This was the type of apocalypse I could get behind. We got the Aurora's as far south as Alabama in The States.
No serious person was predicting a power grid collapse but I never describe myself as serious, so, thats where my mind went. Some in the news media, mentioned the potential for localized blackouts due to safety systems cycling. Next week might be pretty busy for Nasa, spaceX and star-link as it may adversely effect some satellites spinning around the globe at Mock 36. Everyday Janes and Joes shouldn’t even notice. Just kick back and enjoy the light show.
That being said, I can’t help but let my mind wander and not always to the most forgiving of neighborhoods. What if this solar event had somehow knocked out the power grid, sent us to back to the 1800’s in a blink of an eye? What the hell would I do then?
I’m guessing I would drink.
That’s not an insignificant statement coming from me. I haven’t had a drink in eighteen years. Not a beer, glass of wine or a fucking shot of NyQuil. There’s very good reasons for that, believe me.
Let’s just say I’ve got an allergy and when I put booze into my system I tend to break out in handcuffs. But if the world spirals backward a couple hundred years overnight, I’m guessing issues with law enforcement are not going to be high on anybody’s list of priorities.
First on everybody’s list should be water. It’s the top of mine. The next is food. Then firearms. Yeah, I went staight to guns. Watch The Walking Dead people!
The walking dead, I’m sad to say, might, might be the most accurate way of looking at a life after electricity, cell phones, internet or any other form of communications. If power grid crashes and we are all lost to time and space, the abyss, the dark come once again to claim us all, what is the human animal capable of, once the water stops coming out of the pipes? There’s an uneasy knowledge contained within that question.
That brings me back around to drinking? Would I want a drink as some sort of escape? To drown my sorrows so to speak, as a crutch to deal with the knowledge that every diabetic on the planet would be dead within days, with no refrigeration to store insulin. Why would that make me feel any better about it all?
It wouldn’t and that’s not why I would have a drink or two or ten. I would have to use drinking as a tool. I would need to summon my Mister Hyde back from exile. I’d need his help with the tasks ahead if I wanted to survive. There’s a damn good chance I wouldn’t want to survive but I’m too Catholic for suicide and not Catholic enough to prevent the what’s coming next. What’s coming next is the main problem here, choosing to survive in advance of minor ethical issues would be something for us all to grapple with. Would we become predators or prey? Savengers, loners or try to draw in others to have community with? Would we become Shelob and Gollum or Samwise and Fordo? The hard truth is that we would have to become a some mixture of both in the short run, very low on the time horizion we’d be unrecognizable to ourselves.
Then again, I’m just a writer. What possible utility would I have in a post apocalyptic world? I’m a video game loot drop for much harder men who would have just inherited the world. I’m the meek, wondering if that verse was a bad translation when the bible made the jump from Aramaic to greek to English and so on.
Then again, the solar flares have come and gone, so not much to worry about here. Not exactly food for thought, more of a snack.
