Notes from the Ameripocalypse: The Best of Essay Club 2016

All works ©2016 by the essay authors as listed

ISBN: 9781483594842

Published by Naïve Books

First printing, March 2017

Essayclub.org

Facebook.com/EssayClub

CONTENTS

Foreword

Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

The Truth Is Out There

The Day the World Changed

The Case of the Good Intention

Cage Match: Education vs. Intelligence

The Ghost In My House

Love the One You’re With

Nostalgia Uber Alles

Plan B

Automation and Calvinism: The Fate of the American Work Ethic

Inconvenient Truths

Dear 2017

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Foreword

by Matthew Broyles

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Publishing essays in the age of the tweet is a bit like selling buggywhips next to the car dealership. One would only expect such an activity to be pursued by old fuddy-duddies waving their canes at the kids on their lawns.

I am actually a huge proponent of social media. The restrictions of 140 characters have brought soul back to wit, and created surprisingly elegant moments of poignancy in the decade since first I tweeted. (Twote? Twat? Never am sure of the past tense there…) Not to mention the fact that most of the people represented in this compilation are folks who I never would have met without the magic of the interconnected interwebs.

Still, one day, after consuming a cascade of snappy one-liners and cat gifs, my brain began to feel as if it really hadn’t eaten anything. Like a salad with only salad in it. I began to crave mental meat. Intellectual protein, to fortify and nourish. And while certainly there are plenty of resources online to find such nutrition, I began to wonder what the incredibly smart and entertaining people I knew online would say if they had more space to stretch out, and paid no heed to tl;dr conventions.

I remembered the songwriting clubs run by people like Matt the Electrician and Bob Schneider. Throw out a title, and by the end of the week, everyone on the list has to have written a song with that title. Why not do the same with prose? The 900-word limit of the essay form seemed ideal, both for management and digestion, so I reached out to a specially selected group of thought-thinkers to see if anyone would go for it.

To my delight, they did, and throughout the latter quarter of 2016, they kept my mind more than engaged as I got to see what they made of the random titles that blooped up in the chicken noodle soup of my brain. I continue to be astonished at what interesting flights of thinkery result from the prod of just a few words.

And so, defying the times yet again, this book-form compilation endeavors to extend the lifespan of these compositions beyond their usual expiration date in the ephemerality of the digital ether. And given the momentous times we live in, I hope this may additionally serve as a kind of historical record, alerting future generations to the fact that not all of us who lived in 2016 were completely bugnuts insane.

Many thanks to the writers, readers, and supporters of this singular undertaking. Tell a friend, and we’ll see you in the pixels.

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Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

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Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

by Anna Bardin

I’ve seen it a lot in recent years, though I know its origins go back thousands. That yearning, the salivating desire for The End. A period on the sentence of our open-ended existence.

Is it about boredom? Is life so mundane that the only thing which could bring us to pay attention to the dull moments sliding by is the final destruction of all future moments?

Or do we think we’re special? That we would be the survivors, filling the vacuum with our indomitable wills, ridding the earth at last of our species’ weakest strains? That somehow there would be something left to rule, and it would be ours, all ours?

Do we hate other people that much? That we would rather see them crushed under the boot of our rightness than tolerate their wrongness? Can we imagine that there would be no collateral damage? That innocents wouldn’t be punished for the sins of their parents? Looking at the pictures from places like Syria, and our national response to them, perhaps that question has already been answered.

Is it simply too hard to focus on the here and now? On our responsibilities as humans, children, parents, citizens, stewards? Is the apocalyptic get-out-of-jail-free card really the only way to keep us from drowning in the drudgery that my Facebook feed bemoans, day in, day out?

When my older friends shrug and say not my problem, do they really care that little for me and for the younger people who will have to live in the hellscape they long to usher in?

For the ones who believe in a god-driven cataclysm, is the suffering of those whose beliefs differ from yours completely immaterial to the glory you seek to experience?

Are there simply too many of us? Has the seething mass of humanity grown to such proportions that empathy is impossible? If we truly felt the suffering of so many others, could we actually handle it? Would we collapse into a sobbing heap on the floor? Have we already, and is this what is driving us to seek release from our instinct to set things right? Is it too big a job for mere humans?

Maybe it’s all of this. Maybe it’s more. But at some point, in this mad flurry into escapism, prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. If the end does come, it will be because an awful lot of us wanted it to.

Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

by Aron Michalski

It was morning and I was already exhausted. We had made our way through this country of sultry movement, the rhythm and danger, the heat. It was time to go home. All that stood between us and that was an extremely long flight in coach and hour in a cab to the airport.

To my surprise, the promoters provided a ride for us. We stood in front of the chain hotel, waiting. An old-school VW bus pulled up, earth tone and white, a fine trail of white smoke coming from the exhaust. The driver put the bus into neutral and applied the parking brake. Our rep waved his arm like a spokesmodel on The Price is Right and the door slid open.

After loading our bags my travel companions and I got in the back of the bus. They took the forward-facing seat which left me with the rear facing bench which was against the drivers’ seat. I was a little concerned with car sickness in this position but had no choice. The promoter rep closed the sliding door and rattled off something to the driver in Portuguese. This is when I first noticed the driver looked a little bit like a Tasmanian Devil mixed with a Wanted poster in a post office. He popped the clutch and hit the gas; we were off.

Sometimes it’s a crapshoot when you get a ride from someone other than a transportation company. This was way before the days of Uber. There was a path to your destination and sometimes it was full of traffic. Sitting among the alcohol burning cars below the Favelas would give you a chance to be grateful for your home in the States, your grass, your doors, your windows.

This driver was having none of that.

He deftly shifted the van, bringing our speed up to the traffic around us and then beyond. This guy was gonna go for it. I looked to my friends and they smiled. Maybe we would have time for breakfast at the airport.

There was a point rather quickly where my two co-workers’ smiles began to change, initially like a smirk and then into a rictus grin. The air cooled engine worked hard, his shifting style gliding from bus driver to Senna fan. I was with my back to the front window and was simply being told of our adventurous path by the matching faces before me. Bulging eyes. Drawn breaths. Bobbing heads. We seemed to be picking up speed.

As I finally turned my head to see where we were going I saw a pack of cars all stopped for a red light. The driver was smiling now. He moved the bus to the right lane and then onto the side walk. People scattered in every direction. He honked his horn and proceeded through the cross traffic from the sidewalk back to the empty lane, the blockade avoided.

On we went, the busy city around us moving seemingly slow, the bus careening through the urban clutter in proper lanes and oncoming traffic. We began to voice our concern to our apparently mad driver but he spoke no English and we didn’t know how to beg for our lives in Portuguese. He laughed and talked quietly to no one. The engine whined as he downshifted between lanes.

I really wanted to know what the promoter rep said to him.

They are late, get them there at any cost!

Don’t forget, you have a probation appointment in a half hour…

If you get them to soil themselves there is some extra money in it for you.

On we went, the background looking familiar, the garbage filled canals, the new buildings going up looking 50 years old, the air traffic. Weaving, shifting, swerving we proceeded, somehow only hitting the occasional curb or sidewalk. The driver’s hair, wild and seemingly growing, blowing around in his open window. My friends were now silent, nothing could be said to save us.

And then, we were there. The bus came to a stop.

We fell out of the sliding door like jockeys off a still carousel. The driver hopped out and went to the rear of the smoking van, starting to remove our suitcases. I checked my watch and realized that the 45-minute drive to the airport from our hotel he had accomplished in 22 minutes. We all thanked him, the Stockholm Syndrome-like responses of our ride, congratulating him on not crashing and probably not killing any pedestrians.

Now all we had to do was get on a jumbo jet and fly 6000 miles.

I slept all the way home.

Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

by C. Longoria Gonzalez

Death is like Christmas. We prepare for it with garlands, colored lights, and poinsettias. The persons we loved and lost are the Christmas trees, decorated, exalted, and reminisced.

When a death happens, we converge to mourn the loss and celebrate life. At least, that’s the goal. The gifts we bring are supposed to be the memories and the love we shared with mutual friends and family.

But many times, we don’t bring the gifts that people who are there for the same reasons, want or need. Instead, we stuff our insecurities, resentments and regrets inside recycled cardboard boxes and carefully wrap them with green, red, and shiny silver paper. We tie them with classy golden bows and hand them to the people we perceive to deserve the same trappings inside the darkest corners of our hearts and minds.

And when they reject those gifts, there’s hell to pay. The celebration of life becomes a chain reaction of new resentment and broken bonds. The lights meant to bring cheer will short out even before the decaying begins, before we vacuum the pine needles before we drag our once beloved tree to the dumpster.

Like Christmas, death becomes a cesspool of selfishness among the living. We forget the meaning of the tree.

Our days to breathe, think and discover are numbered and over the last century, we’ve given the Angel of Death more tools to end us.

Those spiked waves that traverse across a heart rate monitor will flatten out, accompanied by a long beep, and followed by our longest sleep.

There’s no stopping it. Death never misses an appointment. We are all going to die, so we may as well pursue happiness. And in the process, share the joy with people who need it. Gift wrap paper and bows? Unnecessary. We don’t have to wait till Christmas. Happiness can be all year long.

Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

by Chris Dashiell

Oh my God, we’re all gonna die!

This phrase, now become a humorous cliché, may have had its origin in a horror movie. If you leave off the first three words, it’s a literal statement of fact, but perhaps still humorous if said in the right way. There are two reasons for its fright value. The first is the implication that we’re all going to die now, or at least very soon. The second is a little more subtle: we’re going to die together. The prospect of dying, while at the same time witnessing the deaths of all the other people around me or in my group, is terrifying, although it’s not immediately obvious why this should be so.

We have ties of kinship and affection with others, so obviously seeing the people that we love and care about suffer and get killed would be extremely painful. During the Holocaust, to use a common historical example, the suffering of the victims was not only in losing their lives, but in knowing that their family and their community were being murdered along with them. Those who have not experienced this agony can only attempt to imagine it. The bonds that we have with other people, and by extension with the cultures and communities of which we are a part, is far stronger and deeper than we are generally aware of in everyday life. A direct attack on that web of relationships that sustains us is more shocking than an attack on myself alone. In this case, the element of conscious threat and malice from an enemy who deliberately seeks our harm, adds even more to the sense of horror.

But leaving aside such historical atrocities, there has been in all of our lives, for the past 71 years, a persistent, lurking symptom of the same kind of fear, but in this case largely ignored and unacknowledged. The possibility of the human race being suddenly exterminated became real with the advent of nuclear weapons. For those of us born after the second World War, the threat of being wiped out en masse has been hanging over us for our entire lives. Such threats were previously the province of believers in religious apocalypse, an article of faith for Christians and Muslims, but not measurable in real terms since such metaphors have inevitably seemed distant from ordinary life.

In our time, human beings achieved destructive powers of a seemingly godlike nature. The first response of the powers-that-be was to deny how real the threat was. We were told that nuclear war was something we could survive by taking shelter. As more and more weapons were manufactured, and we became more educated, the illusion fell away. Now the denial needed to be simply emotional—just put it out of our minds because, what can we do? And we managed to navigate through life without thinking about it too much. I’ve always suspected, however, that underneath our conscious thought processes, the generations that grew up with the bomb have adopted a new attitude towards life. If it’s literally the case that everyone I know may die suddenly, and all at once, and that society itself may be utterly vaporized, doesn’t it seem evident that I would have less regard for the future? Wouldn’t I tend, without even being aware of it, to focus much more on the present and its enjoyments, while considering the future—both for me and in general—to be a shaky, tentative proposition? I think that is what happened to us, those born after the war, but it was always an untenable attitude to live by. I’m not just thinking of the low-level anxiety that is ever-present. The lack of belief in a continuity of society and culture drains meaning from human experience, which cannot be simply one of individual isolation. The ties of family and relationship, as I said, are stronger than we think, and if their endurance is in doubt, then everything is in doubt.

In the last quarter-century, the nuclear threat has become less prominent, due to the end of the Cold War. To say that it doesn’t exist would be false. Thousands of weapons are still out there. But we’ve grown used to not thinking much about it. Now, however, there is another threat. Humanity’s exploitation of fossil fuels threatens a catastrophic imbalance in our planet’s ecology. Once more, humanity could be made extinct, or undergo levels of mortality that are horrifying to contemplate. This time the threat is not sudden, but gradual, but the time is running out to stop disaster, and may have already run out to stop radical but survivable changes in climate.

Once again, the response from much (but not all) of the powers-that-be has been denial. The desperation of this tactic is clear from the wild charges of hoax made against the scientific community. But what is really scary about this scenario is that, unlike nuclear weapons, it is Nature itself that will destroy us, and we can only try to prevent this through positive actions to lessen our effect on the environment. Now we are putting it out of our minds in order to go about our business, just as we did before. But beneath our conscious thought processes, are we perhaps frozen in the fear that indeed we have no future?

Oh My God, We’re All Gonna Die

by Clark Weddle

It’s over, good-bye, the end, finis, kaput, no second chance, no reincarnation, no afterlife, no "see you later in