Eve of Disruption
World of the Wars:
My Fifteen Second Armageddon.
It was November. It was 1983.
I was barely a few months into Being Eighteen. The word "Choronzon" was still nothing but a Tangerine Dream song to me that I'd somehow gotten in my head was named after some area around the coast of Spain.
I was adrift, as all eighteen year olds are, but more so, because a few weeks' prior, the apartment that my high school boyfriend and I were living in, on Durant around Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, had caught fire and everything in it had burned.
The fire had also ended my relationship with the boyfriend, whom I'll call Durnell, though it's not his real name, it sort of fits who he was, somehow. Always jiggering around with vehicle parts, could barely read a book...it was going nowhere and he didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss it with me. I was more into his girlfriend than him. He was not processing this at all. He still blames the end of our relationship on that girl, even though she was what had been holding it together for about a year. When I'd seen the intelligentsia at Berkeley, who could get stoned AND hold conversations that were not monosyllabic, I lost every bit of interest in him, and he lacked enough sophistication of mentality to even comprehend why.
He moved in with a friend of his from work. I moved in with a 24 year old Deadhead woman, a Friend of a Friend that I hardly knew. I had barely anything in the way of stuff since the fire had consumed it all, but the stuff had my folks' insurance on it and they weren't poor, so I didn't suffer financially. But my past, almost all the little bits of it, were gone forever.
Adrift...eighteen...so consciously aware of my freedom to move, to not have to report to anyone where I was going, and when I'd be back. The woman I was staying with had a coke habit and it was already making it one of my non-favourite drugs. I didn't feel like spending the night at her place so when Durnell called and asked if I wanted to come over and drink beer I said "Sure". I didn't really enjoy hanging out with my ex-boyfriend, either, but he'd get drunk and pass out, but my roommate wouldn't.
I don't remember Durnell's friend's name. Somewhere around the body shop they worked at, he had an apartment. It was a building that smelled like curry, the first one I'd ever been in and not my last. The apartment had red carpeting.
He had a black and white TV and he and Durnell waved hello as I made myself comfortable with a bottle of Vodka and a carton of orange juice.
I got stinking drunk. The only thing I could ever drink was screwdrivers. I loved them. You could never taste the alcohol and I was used to orange juice. I'd make the kind of screwdrivers that are more like rivet guns. You can see through the glass.
I saw my way through two such glasses, tall ones. I soon collapsed onto the floor and it started spinning and that's all I remembered.
Now, about a month before this there'd been a TV movie that was something of a hit at the time. It was called "The Day After". This movie wasn't that, but any hit anything spawns a flood of copies and riff-offs, and I gather that's what this must have been. I wish there was some way I could find out the title of that movie.
When it started, I'd already stopped. And sometime inbetween, Durnell and pal also passed out over in the sofa and easy chair sector, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans.
I never got into drinking much. You kind of have to be eighteen to drink that amount and handle it. But if you have, you know how you'd wake up in the middle of the night and have to pee or something, it automatically wakes you so you can vomit if you have to, somehow, or at least give your esophagus a fightin' chance to do so.
That is what happened. I woke up, dizzy, and in about fifteen seconds, I passed out again, and man, those were some strange seconds.
Because this movie was a televised version of a nuclear war, a la Orson Wells War of the Worlds, and I don't think I have to tell you what happened, because right about now, you are getting the picture.
The picture I was getting was a perfectly plausible television anchor and a voice and a news set with the little visual screen behind the talking head with (I think) a big radiation symbol and the word WAR in screaming red and what was being said was this, or something very like this:
"...being that the launch from Moscow HAS, I repeat, HAS HAPPENED, The United States has launched its first salvo. The targeted cities in the US: New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas and possibly Chicago and Philadelphia. We have nothing more to do but pray--" and there was static on the screen and that's when I fell out again.
I hadn't heard about this movie.
I hadn't seen any "SIMULATION" flashing on the screen.
I heard from someone in the distant future - the one I, at that moment, thought was going to be a definite no-show - that the network rule was to flash SIMULATION every fifteen seconds, so that's the only way I can really know how long I must have been awake, briefly, to catch that EXACT FIFTEEN SECONDS of the movie that would do the job on me.
Yes.
I was on the edge of falling back into the anaesthesia-nausea of too much vodka again as though it were a baby-soft pillow, and I wasn't panicking or running around waking up the guys, I was just falling back onto the carpet again I thought it was REALLY HAPPENING.
I did.
The talking heads, the news set, looked real. I was drunk and REALLY very, very drunk, but not stoned or on acid or anything. I knew alcohol couldn't do this.
I thought we were, you know, going to die - all of us - right then.
And what I was feeling was relief. Weird relief. My future, something I was vaguely concerned about, was something not to have to worry about, because there would be no future for anyone else, either. It was a zero sum game.
I felt these things for real, thinking we were IN THE MIDDLE OF A NUCLEAR WAR, for real, not acid-real, REAL real.
And then I passed out again.
I didn't dream.
The next morning...WHAT?
NEXT MORNING?
Hold on. Back up here a bit....
Lying on the floor in a messy Berkeley batchelor pad of some guy whose name I don't remember and probably didn't then, either.
And through the window in the wall come streaming in on sunlight wings a million bright ambassadors of morning--
I bolted up from Pink-Floydian reverie, because something wasn't computing..
I remembered something and that was that I wasn't supposed to be able to remember anything because there wasn't supposed to be anything left of me to remember...or for me to remember it WITH. (The distance from San Francisco to Berkeley, in terms of a large nuclear warhead, was what I assumed to be short enough to have fried already. The bay might actually mitigate that some, just making for longer death on its east side. But I did not know this, then.)
The two guys were still crashed out.
I heard birds.
I was carrying a hatchet down the middle of my skull around and getting up made it bob around and wedge deeper. But I wasn't paying any attention to this, I was playing a guessing game never before played. "Dream, Acid Hallucination, or Real Life?"
I never played that guessing game because I was always way too good at it, but this was something of a challenge, and I was stumped this time.
There was supposed to have been a huge nuclear exchange. I ran to the window and looked outside. Though not a postcard view, it overlooked the Bay and the city to the west of it.
It was there.
The sky was blue.
This hadn't happened.
My stumbling about had woken the guys. They asked me what I was looking for.
"Holy fuck," I said..."
"Are you alright?"
I didn't really know. Was I?
"This news guy on TV--last night--there were missiles--a whole bunch of cities. What happened, why am I still here? What the--"
The no-name guy started laughing.
"Oh, you saw part of THAT movie? The fake nuke war flick?"
"WHAT fake nuke war flick? That was last month, I saw The Day After, it did not have THAT in it."
"No, different movie."
I gathered.
"You must've woken up and passed out again while the....Omigod, you...Ha ha hahahahaha!" He started slapping his knees and pointing at me like a dipshit pointing at a monkey for being a bigger dipshit than himself, and laughing at me.
I didn't care.
I walked into the kitchen and just sort of stared at everything for a while.
And went back to the cokehead's pad, got my things, left and checked into a hotel for a month before moving to Barrington and starting the adventure called My Life In The End Times...already having had a taste of the real thing that was, well, not the real thing.
I thought of War of the Worlds and how people had once freaked out in droves hearing of a Martian attack on radio.
I think I finally did laugh sometime that evening.
Recently, I had a vision of what will come to pass.
People will keep waiting for the End Times and they'll never see what's happening. That their Apocalypse is happening all around them already, but slowly. Maddeningly slowly, because such things don't happen in a flash of light. One thing leads to another leads to four more leads to eight more, et cetera, like streams of dominos knocking themselves down, but really, really long ones. Time marching on. People getting tired of waiting for...
For what?
Either for Jesus to come flyin' out of the sky and slay the dragon that is the plodding boredom of their lives, or for everything to just blow ski-hi and erase the maps we've writ across the face of this earth, in all but anything geologically meaningful to it, and be done with it already.
On the eve of 2000 everyone held their breath. The next morning let it out in a sigh. Was it a sigh of relief?
Was it?
Who celebrated that there was no Great Big Dramatic Climax? Anyone?
I never saw anyone celebrate.
The masses felt cheated, it seemed.
I couldn't quite figure it out, but I remembered that night in 1983 and figured it out all right, but I couldn't figure it IN.
I see people waiting for their Apocalypse, players on the stage or groundlings in the audience, but never thinking of writing the script or doing any of the directing.
Even those who are divested of their belief in God are still convinced all effort is quixotic, on some deep level, not worth the energy.
And for a long, long time, I sure as hell did.
I'm not sure what changed me. I'm not sure if I'm changed ENOUGH.
I don't remember what year it was that Reagan picked up a mic and said "Ladies and gentlemen, I have just introduced legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes..."
People at my co-op commune had heard that and were freaking out, SCARED. No one thought it was funny at ALL. They thought the President had just lost his marbles.
Not one of us could have EVER BELIEVED that a man like George W. Bush would ever get to be President, or stay President through a whole term, and a second term after that. We called Reagan "Insane Anglo Warlord", and he WAS one, but compared to Shrub he was affable.
Now we hear this sort of thing every day and it is not even registering on our minds as unusual.
It's a sea change that makes me uncomfortable. When you hear a rumble and the tsunami tides are rolling in, do you try to stand against the wall of water like the little fucking Dutch boy?
No, you go looking for a goddam BOAT and a pair of oars, and if you've a brain in your head, some canned food.
And a "prayer", to your WHATEVER, not to make it stop, or go away, because you know it won't...but that you can simply HANDLE what's to come.
O Great CHORONZON, my Friend through thick, thin and middle, O CHORONZON, the one from Chaos who yet learns Control, and great CHORONZON who has turn'd me on my head and emptied it of pain and worry that were cluttering the pathways upon which he liked to run...
O sweet CHORONZON, mirage or mystery, entity or figment, what matter it if you have brought me out of a fall, able to feel legs and stand after my vertebrae had done something they were not supposed to do to the cord they hold - the precious staff upon which the serpents wind, you are my Chaos and also my caduceus. Give me what I need, and you shall have what you do.
O CHORONZON, hear, hear! For this time we are not alone! Dance your sweet dance of forms by the light of a new moon, for whatever the moon's phase it is a new one, now.
My Fifteen Second Armageddon.
It was November. It was 1983.
I was barely a few months into Being Eighteen. The word "Choronzon" was still nothing but a Tangerine Dream song to me that I'd somehow gotten in my head was named after some area around the coast of Spain.
I was adrift, as all eighteen year olds are, but more so, because a few weeks' prior, the apartment that my high school boyfriend and I were living in, on Durant around Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, had caught fire and everything in it had burned.
The fire had also ended my relationship with the boyfriend, whom I'll call Durnell, though it's not his real name, it sort of fits who he was, somehow. Always jiggering around with vehicle parts, could barely read a book...it was going nowhere and he didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss it with me. I was more into his girlfriend than him. He was not processing this at all. He still blames the end of our relationship on that girl, even though she was what had been holding it together for about a year. When I'd seen the intelligentsia at Berkeley, who could get stoned AND hold conversations that were not monosyllabic, I lost every bit of interest in him, and he lacked enough sophistication of mentality to even comprehend why.
He moved in with a friend of his from work. I moved in with a 24 year old Deadhead woman, a Friend of a Friend that I hardly knew. I had barely anything in the way of stuff since the fire had consumed it all, but the stuff had my folks' insurance on it and they weren't poor, so I didn't suffer financially. But my past, almost all the little bits of it, were gone forever.
Adrift...eighteen...so consciously aware of my freedom to move, to not have to report to anyone where I was going, and when I'd be back. The woman I was staying with had a coke habit and it was already making it one of my non-favourite drugs. I didn't feel like spending the night at her place so when Durnell called and asked if I wanted to come over and drink beer I said "Sure". I didn't really enjoy hanging out with my ex-boyfriend, either, but he'd get drunk and pass out, but my roommate wouldn't.
I don't remember Durnell's friend's name. Somewhere around the body shop they worked at, he had an apartment. It was a building that smelled like curry, the first one I'd ever been in and not my last. The apartment had red carpeting.
He had a black and white TV and he and Durnell waved hello as I made myself comfortable with a bottle of Vodka and a carton of orange juice.
I got stinking drunk. The only thing I could ever drink was screwdrivers. I loved them. You could never taste the alcohol and I was used to orange juice. I'd make the kind of screwdrivers that are more like rivet guns. You can see through the glass.
I saw my way through two such glasses, tall ones. I soon collapsed onto the floor and it started spinning and that's all I remembered.
Now, about a month before this there'd been a TV movie that was something of a hit at the time. It was called "The Day After". This movie wasn't that, but any hit anything spawns a flood of copies and riff-offs, and I gather that's what this must have been. I wish there was some way I could find out the title of that movie.
When it started, I'd already stopped. And sometime inbetween, Durnell and pal also passed out over in the sofa and easy chair sector, surrounded by towers of empty beer cans.
I never got into drinking much. You kind of have to be eighteen to drink that amount and handle it. But if you have, you know how you'd wake up in the middle of the night and have to pee or something, it automatically wakes you so you can vomit if you have to, somehow, or at least give your esophagus a fightin' chance to do so.
That is what happened. I woke up, dizzy, and in about fifteen seconds, I passed out again, and man, those were some strange seconds.
Because this movie was a televised version of a nuclear war, a la Orson Wells War of the Worlds, and I don't think I have to tell you what happened, because right about now, you are getting the picture.
The picture I was getting was a perfectly plausible television anchor and a voice and a news set with the little visual screen behind the talking head with (I think) a big radiation symbol and the word WAR in screaming red and what was being said was this, or something very like this:
"...being that the launch from Moscow HAS, I repeat, HAS HAPPENED, The United States has launched its first salvo. The targeted cities in the US: New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas and possibly Chicago and Philadelphia. We have nothing more to do but pray--" and there was static on the screen and that's when I fell out again.
I hadn't heard about this movie.
I hadn't seen any "SIMULATION" flashing on the screen.
I heard from someone in the distant future - the one I, at that moment, thought was going to be a definite no-show - that the network rule was to flash SIMULATION every fifteen seconds, so that's the only way I can really know how long I must have been awake, briefly, to catch that EXACT FIFTEEN SECONDS of the movie that would do the job on me.
Yes.
I was on the edge of falling back into the anaesthesia-nausea of too much vodka again as though it were a baby-soft pillow, and I wasn't panicking or running around waking up the guys, I was just falling back onto the carpet again I thought it was REALLY HAPPENING.
I did.
The talking heads, the news set, looked real. I was drunk and REALLY very, very drunk, but not stoned or on acid or anything. I knew alcohol couldn't do this.
I thought we were, you know, going to die - all of us - right then.
And what I was feeling was relief. Weird relief. My future, something I was vaguely concerned about, was something not to have to worry about, because there would be no future for anyone else, either. It was a zero sum game.
I felt these things for real, thinking we were IN THE MIDDLE OF A NUCLEAR WAR, for real, not acid-real, REAL real.
And then I passed out again.
I didn't dream.
The next morning...WHAT?
NEXT MORNING?
Hold on. Back up here a bit....
Lying on the floor in a messy Berkeley batchelor pad of some guy whose name I don't remember and probably didn't then, either.
And through the window in the wall come streaming in on sunlight wings a million bright ambassadors of morning--
I bolted up from Pink-Floydian reverie, because something wasn't computing..
I remembered something and that was that I wasn't supposed to be able to remember anything because there wasn't supposed to be anything left of me to remember...or for me to remember it WITH. (The distance from San Francisco to Berkeley, in terms of a large nuclear warhead, was what I assumed to be short enough to have fried already. The bay might actually mitigate that some, just making for longer death on its east side. But I did not know this, then.)
The two guys were still crashed out.
I heard birds.
I was carrying a hatchet down the middle of my skull around and getting up made it bob around and wedge deeper. But I wasn't paying any attention to this, I was playing a guessing game never before played. "Dream, Acid Hallucination, or Real Life?"
I never played that guessing game because I was always way too good at it, but this was something of a challenge, and I was stumped this time.
There was supposed to have been a huge nuclear exchange. I ran to the window and looked outside. Though not a postcard view, it overlooked the Bay and the city to the west of it.
It was there.
The sky was blue.
This hadn't happened.
My stumbling about had woken the guys. They asked me what I was looking for.
"Holy fuck," I said..."
"Are you alright?"
I didn't really know. Was I?
"This news guy on TV--last night--there were missiles--a whole bunch of cities. What happened, why am I still here? What the--"
The no-name guy started laughing.
"Oh, you saw part of THAT movie? The fake nuke war flick?"
"WHAT fake nuke war flick? That was last month, I saw The Day After, it did not have THAT in it."
"No, different movie."
I gathered.
"You must've woken up and passed out again while the....Omigod, you...Ha ha hahahahaha!" He started slapping his knees and pointing at me like a dipshit pointing at a monkey for being a bigger dipshit than himself, and laughing at me.
I didn't care.
I walked into the kitchen and just sort of stared at everything for a while.
And went back to the cokehead's pad, got my things, left and checked into a hotel for a month before moving to Barrington and starting the adventure called My Life In The End Times...already having had a taste of the real thing that was, well, not the real thing.
I thought of War of the Worlds and how people had once freaked out in droves hearing of a Martian attack on radio.
I think I finally did laugh sometime that evening.
Recently, I had a vision of what will come to pass.
People will keep waiting for the End Times and they'll never see what's happening. That their Apocalypse is happening all around them already, but slowly. Maddeningly slowly, because such things don't happen in a flash of light. One thing leads to another leads to four more leads to eight more, et cetera, like streams of dominos knocking themselves down, but really, really long ones. Time marching on. People getting tired of waiting for...
For what?
Either for Jesus to come flyin' out of the sky and slay the dragon that is the plodding boredom of their lives, or for everything to just blow ski-hi and erase the maps we've writ across the face of this earth, in all but anything geologically meaningful to it, and be done with it already.
On the eve of 2000 everyone held their breath. The next morning let it out in a sigh. Was it a sigh of relief?
Was it?
Who celebrated that there was no Great Big Dramatic Climax? Anyone?
I never saw anyone celebrate.
The masses felt cheated, it seemed.
I couldn't quite figure it out, but I remembered that night in 1983 and figured it out all right, but I couldn't figure it IN.
I see people waiting for their Apocalypse, players on the stage or groundlings in the audience, but never thinking of writing the script or doing any of the directing.
Even those who are divested of their belief in God are still convinced all effort is quixotic, on some deep level, not worth the energy.
And for a long, long time, I sure as hell did.
I'm not sure what changed me. I'm not sure if I'm changed ENOUGH.
I don't remember what year it was that Reagan picked up a mic and said "Ladies and gentlemen, I have just introduced legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes..."
People at my co-op commune had heard that and were freaking out, SCARED. No one thought it was funny at ALL. They thought the President had just lost his marbles.
Not one of us could have EVER BELIEVED that a man like George W. Bush would ever get to be President, or stay President through a whole term, and a second term after that. We called Reagan "Insane Anglo Warlord", and he WAS one, but compared to Shrub he was affable.
Now we hear this sort of thing every day and it is not even registering on our minds as unusual.
It's a sea change that makes me uncomfortable. When you hear a rumble and the tsunami tides are rolling in, do you try to stand against the wall of water like the little fucking Dutch boy?
No, you go looking for a goddam BOAT and a pair of oars, and if you've a brain in your head, some canned food.
And a "prayer", to your WHATEVER, not to make it stop, or go away, because you know it won't...but that you can simply HANDLE what's to come.
O Great CHORONZON, my Friend through thick, thin and middle, O CHORONZON, the one from Chaos who yet learns Control, and great CHORONZON who has turn'd me on my head and emptied it of pain and worry that were cluttering the pathways upon which he liked to run...
O sweet CHORONZON, mirage or mystery, entity or figment, what matter it if you have brought me out of a fall, able to feel legs and stand after my vertebrae had done something they were not supposed to do to the cord they hold - the precious staff upon which the serpents wind, you are my Chaos and also my caduceus. Give me what I need, and you shall have what you do.
O CHORONZON, hear, hear! For this time we are not alone! Dance your sweet dance of forms by the light of a new moon, for whatever the moon's phase it is a new one, now.