The Calamities

ENTRY 2: THE CALAMITIES AND THE RAPID DETERIORATION OF THE PLANET. Beginning in the early part of the 21st century, there was the attack called 9/11 – which was essentially the calendar day the attack happened and it happened in three different places so the existing media couldn't call it The World Trade Center Attack or The Pentagon Attack – which were just two of the places it happened. The World Trade Center Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Attacks had no resonance, so the media just called it by the date that it happened. The Institute believes it was on this date that the media became less imaginative, as they might have given the disaster a much catchier name – like Plane Death Day or Run-Away-Run-Away Day. The Institute has tested these names and found them to be 33% more memorable. After the 9/11 incident, the Empire of the United States suffered what can only be deemed a national psychosis, and so unsettled the rest of the world that there were, in rapid succession, the Economic Collapse of 2008, the disasters of 4/14 in France, 6/17 in Stockholm, and 1/21 in Shanghai. Each of these was also named by the media and politicians of the Empire of the United States. Over one hundred fifty-two thousand people died in those events. These were followed by the Months of Rioting worldwide that resulted in over fifty thousand more deaths and about forty billion dollars in property damage. Then came the nuclear attack on Seattle and the Northwest, the plague in New York, and the series of natural disasters of earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, drought, sandstorms, flooding, and the great asteroid storm of 2028, which destroyed wide swaths of both the West Coast of North America and parts of the southern tip of South America. A huge hole in the ozone made most of Canada uninhabitable, and three quarters of what was called Greenland melted. When the oceans flooded every coastal city on the planet in the space of one year, the naysayers and lesser educated finally gave up their resistance to the concept of a changing climate. In this forty-year time span, approximately thirty million people died from either the multiple wars, natural disasters, radiation, food poisoning, terrorism, murder, or suicide. The situations engendered continue to cause death, further deterioration of the atmosphere, and tremendous psychological strain on the inhabitants of the planet. It is, in the words of one noted historian at an online technical university, "Some serious shit." —My coma has pretty much wiped the shelves of my memory clean as concerns The Calamities. I have some vague idea, random images in my head, made dull and blurry by the coma, like my memories were sitting in a jar of warm skim milk. You know something is floating around, but you really can't tell what it is. Marsha has done her best to bring me up to date, but I don't feel her horror, her loss, her anxiety about what happened in the past or what might happen in the future. She wants me to be more aware, so when she talks about them, I can join in and we can have a conversation. Right now, I just nod and smile. Honestly, that's what I thought women wanted you to do when they talked about something painful. Just listen. I read that somewhere, or saw it in a digi, as there isn't all that much worth reading anymore. I want someone to listen to me too. That's why I have a dog. Her name is Lassie. ***** Marsha puts her robe on and steps on Lassie's paw. "Damn it! Stupid dog!" she screams. Lassie doesn't acknowledge her paw getting stepped on. She just calmly shifts her body out of Marsha's path. Lassie is a Fru-Fru, which is a breed of dog no bigger than a dowager’s purse. They were bred to keep in small apartments, and to only eat the pellets they shit. It was known as a "sustainable" breed. The only thing about with them is that, generally, their breath stinks, but that can be overcome with several drops a day of eucalyptus oil. Marsha thinks it's funny I named her Lassie. I didn't name her. My Docs did. The dog came pre-named. She was a gift to me by my Docs after the coma. My mood Doc, Doc Manning, told me she would be a comfort to me psychologically, and my medical doc, Doc Peeples, said that a dog would help keep my brain active with routine. They said it would be good for me to engage the dog in my thinking, to talk to it about my thoughts and observations, as that would aid in jogging my memory, and turning the experiences and observations I have into memories. I'm good with that. I listen to Marsha. Lassie listens to me. "Collies are named Lassie," she said. "Timmy? Lassie? Lassie Come Home? It's a documentary, John! We studied it in lower school," she says and I have no fucking idea what she is talking about. Lassie is a watcher. Not a watchdog. A serious watcher. She watches every interaction I have with people we have to the apartment, or when we go out. She especially watches Marsha, particularly when we have sex. At first, Marsha would put the dog out of the bedroom, but Lassie knew how to open the door. I never knew how a dog that small could reach the door knob, but Doc Manning says it's because before they got her, she was a circus dog in Ecuador and learned how to do all sorts of nifty tricks. She can roll over and play dead, sure, but what I've seen her do that really made an impression was balancing a ball on her nose while she was watching a digi about seals. She did it better than a seal. In fact, I caught her a couple times imitating shit she saw on the digi's. Like the one time she was watching some cop and robber show, and a robber was hugging the wall, creeping along it so he wouldn't be seen by a helicopter above. Lassie got on her hind legs and crept along the hallway wall, just like the robber. Impressive. I could've sold tickets to that. Marsha would lock her out of the bedroom. But Lassie would howl and that would piss Marsha off. With the sound of the penis pump and the dog howling on the other side of the bedroom door, you can imagine it wasn't the sexiest atmosphere no matter how many candles I lit. So she gave up on Lassie not being able to watch, and then, after a while, she started making something out of it. She'd take her clothes off, like at the strip clubs that used to be all over the place at the turn of the century, and dance around in front of the dog. She stopped when Lassie actually did a better lap dance move than she did. Lassie would watch us fuck, like she was on a grant to observe creatures in the wild, like she was grading us, taking notes to bring back to her fellow circus dogs to incorporate into the act should the clowns go on strike. "It's time for my morning run," I say to both Marsha and Lassie. "Stay in this morning. Just this once," Marsha pleads, "I'll make you an omelet with some "I Can't Believe It's Not Bacon." I like phony bacon as much as the next guy, but Lassie has my sneakers in her mouth and waits by the door. Gotta run. Feet blur beneath me. Lassie does her short-legged trot by my side. We cross Sunset Boulevard, into the foothills of Hollywood, where the air is fresher and the cars are fewer and so it's safer. It's just after sunrise. The sky's bright red. I can hear the sound of distant morning ambulances busy taking the previous night's suicides, accidents, and death by natural causes to the crematoriums. The night is filled with unlucky shit. My doctors said the running and talking out loud to Lassie would be good. I figure the running keeps the blood moving and so feeds the brain and so feeds my memory. I tell Lassie all the things Marsha told me about this fucked-up world. Sometimes repeating the stories made them weirder, like how did we get ourselves in this shit storm, then I remember that a lot of it had to do with actual shit storms.