Cart, Bag or Basket - pick your ride!

That nascent story I’m currently kicking and nudging around in the  infant writer’s sandbox pivots on the idea that the world has, for all practical purposes, ceased to function. It has not perished in a cataclysmic natural event or been hijacked and systematically looted of resources by intergalactic conquerors, but simply driven into the ground by it's most intelligent inhabitants. It was a great chariot when it rolled off the showroom floor. It carried us comfortably, even luxuriously, through the solar system for a long and good time. But we fudged on the regular servicing and bickered about the costs of preventive maintenance. So now  it's just a junkyarded jalopy that gets scavenged of any remaining useful parts by multi-national  companies in collusion with interplanetary salvagers.

Since this tale unfolds mainly in the cadaverous world that persists after we humans have squandered its essences through our  negligence and ignorance of the warnings from those who devote their lives to the study such things, it'll be tough not to be polemic. But this is intended to be something distinctly removed from a cautionary tale. In fact there is no  suffer the consequences part. In the midst of this wholesale and multi-century frittering away process, interplanetary travel on a large scale becomes feasible and we get to leave without cleaning up our mess.( Yep, there's forensic evidence of Neil Young's " After the Gold Rush" in this).

 But sometimes the most seemingly innocuous things call a few of us back.

 

 So....  unless those inscrutable Mayans were right and a week Friday is all we get, I was figuring, as I fleshed out these setting type  things, that  I needed to familiarize myself more  with  the plausibility angle on this  " end of the world as I see it " setting element.  In the process of exploring how such a thing could actually happen I saw mucho, maybe even too mucho,  out there on the web. It was one of those  just scratch the surface things alright.

  BTW - My better half and I spent a few days in and around the city of Merida on the Mayan Peninsula last Feb  and most of the people who live by the tourist trade find this calendar phenomenon to be a welcome and  increasingly lucrative one.  Everything that you could imagine was to be found somewhere in the shopping areas festooned with likenesses of that stony circular calendar. Propriety prevents me from repeating the phrase that accompanied its presence on each sheet of a roll of bathroom tissue found in one shop. 



 Investigating the ruins of that once magnificent culture is one of the few things I’ve ever done that gave me an almost otherworldly feeling. I look forward to returning this year for more of the same.

The most likely chain of events leading to the end of the world ain’t the best seasonal topic, for sure.  It  gets ominously engrossing at times. I'm far from becoming a Greenpeace Guerrilla but it's really an endless smorgasbord of food for thought .. 

 Traditionally, there's been a choice of rides to transport us and our home planet to this sad end. A handcart, hand basket or handbag are all cited in various places and at various times as the apparent vessel for the trip. I’m opting for the handcart myself as it sounds to be the most sturdy and comfortable of the three. 

  Yesterday,quite by accident, or maybe serendipitiously, my attention was drawn to the closing  lines of " Requiem"  a poem  by  Kurt Vonnegut.  In my very cursory survey of info and opinions relating to how we are treating this place and where that's taking us, it might make a nice postscript :

" When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, ' It is done. People did not like it here.''

While we're talking about world halting events Carolyn, I doubt I can fully communicate my sense of disappointment at there being no riddlin" to ingest from your last entry, - he said, tongue securely planted in cheek.  I remember all too well the end of term marking gauntlet even though I've not run it for four years. If I forget there's my daughter's laments in her e-mails and regular chit-chats to keep the idea front and centre as well. So we'll leave last week's riddles up for another go.

 I haven't forgotten  though that you are the one who first unveiled the riddle carrot for me  and I haven't been able to stop chasing it since!

Don