Ding-Dong of Doom

“I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking!” — William Faulkner

The best aviary I know of is my mom’s deck overlooking a wooded hillside on the periphery of Kingston Springs, Tennessee, itself a satellite orbiting Nashville at a remove great enough to bar her from voting in the forthcoming mayoral election but near enough that I can plausibly assert that Music City is where she lives. It’s a wooden platform about big enough to fit two pool tables if you didn’t mind banging your cue against the side of the house on shots from that quarter. Of course that’d be missing the point anyway since you’d scare off the big swaggering woodpecker with his crimson mohawk and the dagger beak he uses to sound the pepper-hot suet block hanging in its cage from a black steel bow clamped to the rail. Likewise you’d drive away his slightly dimwitted spouse from her futile efforts to reach another hunk of suet, repeatedly landing and sliding down the bow like a kid on a playground slide. You’d scatter the hopping, flapping, frenetic activity of the bustling throngs of nighthawks and flycatchers, phoebes and pewees, titmice and nuthatches, and the occasional blue jay arriving like a presidential candidate emerging from a black limousine swarmed by a cadre of purposeful bodyguards equipped with earpieces and ineffable sunglasses. Above all the veritable cloud of hummingbirds—tiny flashes of black and red and white, hovering and darting and jabbing needle beaks into plastic cylinders of sugar water—these would evaporate like morning fog in the hot sun.

The sun. It’s like a glede, always seeming to touch the whole body even at the absurd distance of almost a hundred million miles. I can’t remember the last time I welcomed a sunny day. To the contrary, the sun these days bathes everything in an ominous amber light like old sepia photographs from times long dead. The withering heat is overwhelming; a smothering blanket of incipient ruin, like a still and silent smokeless fire grinding everything slowly yet relentlessly to ash.

It can be hard to enjoy the birds when the news is like the prologue to a science fiction tale of life in a wasteland. Every day, with each fresh hit we all reel, stunned at the words on the page. If the temperature of the air and water were to just level off where it has been for the last several weeks, well that would be bad. But we all know the truth: this is just the beginning. 

We should be doing something, right? Like, this should be an emergency. Very serious people should be calling congressional hearings, voting huge chunks of cash for some Manhattan-project style attack on the doom bearing down on us. Individually we should be volunteering for some kind of bucket brigade. I read this morning that divers are hauling coral out of the Gulf of Mexico to be placed in climate-controlled tanks on land, lest it boil to death in the smoldering water. How many divers, I wonder. A dozen? There should be thousands. Give me a snorkel and flippers.

Instead I spent the day fixing a bunch of websites I doubt anyone reads.¹ That’s the joke: the world is literally on fire and we’re just going to work; doing the same shit we’ve been doing forever, like birds ignorant of the cat lurking in the bushes. Except we aren’t birds, and we’re not ignorant. 

Us.

We aren’t ignorant, and yet in the words of the inimitable Fear, the human reaction to the crisis is: let’s have a war. Here we are day after day, watching a bunch of guys struggle to kill some other guys in a ditch on the other side of a pocked field. It’s incredible, isn’t it? The very worst thing a country could choose to do at a time like this is to try to blast another country to pieces for no other reason than a desire for their land, which, let’s face it, is going to be utterly worthless very soon. Have we really not progressed beyond the impulse toward domination that characterized, say, the fucking Mongols? The great joke of the moment is that we are paralyzed in the face of existential problems until Ukraine is free of a bunch of assholes with drones and and mines and artillery tubes employing 9th century politics. It’s like having a heart attack and being unable to get to the hospital because your car is full of raccoons.

What’s really harrowing is the ease with which one can see a path to a situation oh so much worse. As I write, people are digesting the news that our orange-haired national tumor is nearing 50 indictments. Shit, Charles Manson was only charged with eight crimes. And yet apparently there is no limit to the number or seriousness of the transgressions that might deflect people from concluding this raging narcissist—nay, this raging criminal, who is clearly running primarily to stay ahead of the jailer—deserves to make life and death decisions for seven billion people. It beggars belief that he could actually become president again. That, of course, would be the death knell. We honestly can’t even afford the time it will take to resolve the question; how can we possibly afford giving him the wheel of the ship?

Sorry to be such a downer but this is completely surreal. I struggle with the words. We’re standing on a precipice, folks. Against all common sense, there’s almost an even chance we’ll simply jump in.

Samuel Johnson wrote that “The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.” It’s why I look to the birds in my mom’s aviary. It’s why I busy myself with my job and my hobbies, as multitudinous as the seas. At some point, though, it becomes a kind of somnambulance. Samuel Johnson never wrote about that. He couldn’t possibly have done so. No one could. I sure as hell can’t.

1. Talk about sticking your head in the sand. As you receive this the author is on his way to a fucking ballgame.