My Plans for the Apocalypse

     I moved to New York in what are apparently its last days. I know this because my friends are environmentalists, and when they aren't busy saving the world, they're telling me how doomed it is. These are the sorts of people who treat city life like a last minute pre-blizzard run to the A&P. When discussing real estate, they don't talk about the gorgeous three-story brownstone in Brooklyn, but the farm they will one day buy in Canada, the bomb shelters they will build in Colorado. If this is being prepared, humanity may not be doomed, but I certainly am. Build a cistern for rainwater? I can barely reheat a package of Stouffer’s.

    Survival has never been a big priority of mine. I’m no Keith Richards, but I’ve always put fun before safety, the now before the later. On the global level this kind of thinking is what’s killing us all, but I’m talking about my personal life. I'm as green as you can be and still have good hygiene (I don't care if it saves water - I don't want to hear the words "yellow" and "mellow" in the same sentence unless I'm listening to a Donovan song), but when it comes to my own body, I’m like Exxon Mobile. When faced with a decision about whether to eat/snort/have-sex-with X, my rule of thumb is to refer to that Hunter S. Thompson quote: “I’ve always been very good to my body. I give it exactly what it wants.” When my body wants whiskey, I oblige. On the rare occasion it craves spinach and pan-seared kale, I break out the wok. I operate on instinct, motivated by momentary cravings rather than a grand plan, and so far it’s worked pretty well. I will most likely die an unnatural death, but it won’t be from stress (my blood pressure is like one over three) and I’ll certainly go satisfied.

        That’s not to say I never consider the future. If the apocalypse is coming, I’m making plans. Specifically, I’m planning to stay in New York. Yes I’ll drown, but if this is the Titanic, I'd rather be the cellist playing as the ship goes down than the crank who jumped in the lifeboat at the first chilly wind. When all my eco-friendly friends are crouching over septic pits in the Alaskan wilds, I and those like me will be having one last party in the greatest city ever built. Moreover, when the survivalists are gone, the rest of us get all their stuff. Walking up Central Park East, I scan the penthouses across the park and imagine them abandoned, drawers hastily emptied, the TV still flickering in the conversation pit, a lone champagne glass rolling across the carpet. Their owners will be safe in swanky subterranean hideaways in Iceland, complete with seed banks and acres of dried peaches. Or maybe all of them have chartered rockets to a secret colony on the moon. Who knows? But like the old adage goes – you can’t take it with you. And what you leave behind, I will use when you’re gone.

         So until that bright dawn when I and my hedonistic comrades awake on the roof of the Empire State building, dead bottles of Courvoisier piled in drifts, cocaine sticking to our knees like wet sand – until the moment we hear the waves crashing over Battery Park, I will continue living for the now, knowing that at least for me, everything is going according to plan.

- 4/24/08