Not with a bang.

Our dried voices, when 

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

So on Monday, my girlfriend and I were out with another friend for drinks, and the waitress ruefully informed us that the restaurant was out of dry ribs and nachos.  Then on Tuesday, we decided to have hot dogs at Costco, and they were out of relish. Our local grocery store has been out of stock on our favourite brand of farmer's sausage for a week, and I'm still waiting for Staples to deliver four whole boxes of paper that were ordered last Friday.

Is it just me or is this the first chapter of a novel about the Apocaplypse? Personally, this is how I always thought it would start, with little cracks in the structure of things: little cracks that would get bigger and bigger and bigger...

Recommended reading on this topic would have to be John Brunner's 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up, with Philip Wylie's posthumous The End of the Dream from 1973 running a close second.* Both books detail the end of the world as the result of a thousand little synergies between environmental damage, viral mutation, lowered immunity, lack of resources, collapse of services, civil unrest, and so on that eventually domino into complete catastrophe.  The Sheep Look Up is particularly grim, and paints a far too plausible picture of a disaster which takes place so gradually that most people don't even realize it's happening.

Somebody hold me - I'm scared....

  - Sid

* Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang takes the bronze - an excellent book, but the apocalypse is secondary to the theme of individuality.