(from Sunday)

I like the insularity of weekends. Me at home alone with nobody around playing around on the computer or letting emails ferment in the ‘Action’ folder. Nice and quiet. Except for the Blue Angels. It looks like it’ll be clearer today outside so they’ll be able to drop cluster bombs on the surbanites longer than yesterday.

Do you ever imagine your hometown in a war? Sometimes I imagine what Chicago would be like if it were in the same condition as Falluja or Baghdad. Tanks patrolling the streets. Fences separating neighborhoods. Rotting stench of garbage piling up or sewage in the streets. Total break down of social order. Or I imagine Chicago 28 days later with the infected running up the 6 flights of stairs in my building and then hurling themselves against my door that I’ve thankfully bolted shut and barricaded with plywood and 2 x 4s. I probably need to stock up on a month’s worth of water, dry foods and get an AM radio or a CB – that and a power generator or solar cells I can hang out the window. The city would be so quiet at night with only the sounds of the gestapo raids a few blocks away. You would be able to see the stars and even hear the mass executions happening inside Wrigley Fields. Alcohol and cigarettes and drugs become the new currency. I’ve commandeered the entire floor since the residents left long ago. Except in room 601 which they barricaded and no one has heard from them in weeks – though you can hear the flies buzzing inside. Or I think of the book Hiroshima and how all of the survivors made their way to the waters to try and cool their burns. Hollywood Beach becomes an outdoor morgue as the lack of tides means bodies float for days as scavenging birds search for a delicious eyeball. I think since Americans haven’t experienced the affects of the war at home (save Pearl Harbor and WTC) that there’s a big fetishizing of a human-induced apocalypse. Or maybe I’m just crazy.


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One response to “(from Sunday)”

  1. Bill Avatar
    Bill

    I think we Americans are rather complacent about the ramifications of war on society’s infrastructure. When Katrina blew on shore in NO, we saw what things could be like in a war situation. Everything normal would be suspended indefinitely. Each Labor Day weekend the airshow comes to Cleveland. For a week prior, jets are racing around the skies over the downtown and some outlying areas. It is unnerving to hear the shrieking engines as they zoom low overhead. Sometimes, I can see them from my office window in the hospital where I work. These are just some of the sounds of what a war might be like. My greatest fear is being separated from my honey should some disaster befall us. I would so want to be with him at such a time. We have to go together in the end.

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