Apocalypse How?

Let me count the ways

There are so many ways the world could end. Seriously. That fact that it hasn’t yet is almost ridiculous (just ask Jim Jones, Jeane Dixon, or Harold Camping.) Despite all the ice ages; asteroid impacts; world wars; pandemics; and my personal favorite, the looming threat of bioterrorist death cults; life has found a way to keep going. Hell, we don’t even try that hard to avoid it. For no particularly good reason, we’re still here.

That’s a frightening thought. Fortunately, we humans have developed a time-tested, sure-fire way to cope: Just don’t think about it. It’s a good strategy, for the most part. If we were all constantly having an existential crisis, how would anything get done? How could life ever be enjoyed? I wouldn’t say we should never think about these things, but like sugar, it’s perhaps best done sparingly.

Try convincing a meth addict of that.

Wikipedia is a dangerous place when you’re freshly high after a good, long fourteen hour nap. It’s like the beginning of a choose-your-own-adventure game. Except in this case, the adventure tends to become more of a paranoid romp through a conspiratorial hell pit. What starts as an innocent search could end with you sitting in the fetal position in the back booth of a doughnut shop.

Let me explain.

I loved the brief periods of peace between waking up and getting high. In fact, they are some of the best moments I had as a drug addict. Everything was right with the world. My brown-paper, gas-station bag of snacks was still full; the sun was on its way down, meaning no one would be trying to text or call me; I still had enough drugs to get through the night (very important); and most significantly, I wasn’t paranoid yet.

It never lasted. Once I began medicating myself, things tended to go downhill. With uppers in particular, the mundane became interesting and the interesting became spellbinding. How do oceans work? There’s so much water. How deep does it go? What can survive down there? I wanted to learn everything about whatever had my attention at the moment. Fortunately, Wikipedia’s a great website for that. Unfortunately, it would only take one bit of suspicious information to send me spiraling. 

One such piece was mentioned in the “History of Puget Sound.” The article briefly mentioned something called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Suspicious. I took a closer look. What sounded like something from an old geography textbook was actually a reference to a megathrust fault line. That didn’t sound great. My leg bounced restlessly. This thing stretched up and down the entire coast. To calculate how nervous I should be, I did a quick google search. This led me to a fantastic article by Kathryn Schulz. Here’s my favorite passage:.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries…water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable.

Definitely not great. I followed up with a new search: “seattle earthquake when?” It did little to help my fear. Most results agreed with each other—the region was overdue. My leg quit bouncing and started twitching. I became acutely aware of my surroundings. My apartment was five floors up, with another three above. If we had an earthquake, I’d be sandwiched between piles of concrete, plumbing, and drywall. If I were lucky, I’d die instantly. Imagine the pain of withdrawing from narcotics while trapped under rubble.

That’s when the building shook. Seriously. It was slight, but it shook. What I didn’t know was that this happened to buildings all the time, especially when large trucks drove by. Panic overtook rationalization, and I darted from my apartment, down each flight of stairs, and straight into the street faster than I’ve ever run in my life. My legs vibrated with the pounding beat of my heart. I didn’t even have shoes or socks. 

It took the length of two cigarettes to calm down enough to try going back inside. Nothing had happened, obviously I had been too on edge. This flash of rationality didn’t last long. By the time I made it back to my room, another vehicle sped down the road. I could have sworn I saw my desk tremble. Too be clear, I wasn’t dumb. I knew it wasn’t an earthquake at this point. But that knowledge couldn’t hold a candle to the fear I felt. Terror hijacked my higher brain.

So back outside I ran. This continued throughout the night. Up and down. Up and down. I think the longest I lasted was the length of a YouTube clip simulating the effect that different magnitudes of earthquakes have on buildings. That certainly didn’t help. After about the fourth time of leaving and coming back, it was enough. I emptied my backpack and turned it into an emergency go-bag—filling it with heroin, meth, a half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew Voltage, one Granny B’s pink cookie, and my laptop. With all the essentials in tote, I stumbled back into the three a.m. streets. 

Nothing was open except for the local doughnut shop around the corner. The owner didn’t even move when I entered. He remained fast asleep in a rocking chair. I set myself up in the booth closest to the door. I was much safer here. But just to be sure, I cracked open my laptop, found PNSNs online map of seismographs, and monitored their fluctuations until morning.

We’ve all been there.

Okay, maybe not to such an extreme. But I suspect I’m not the only one to make questionable choices in the face of such abject fear. Existence is terrifying, and the fact that it will one day end is even worse. Perhaps there’s a better way than just not thinking about it. We can try taking a good, hard look from time to time. It may cause us to end up holed away in a doughnut shop, but when we emerge it will be with a newly discovered courage (and if we’re lucky, a fresh baked apple fritter).