4:37
a.m.
In the morning.
I am dooming.
As the kids say.
Or so I’ve heard that’s what the kids say.
I am on old man. By any standard of measure. My sources on such matters could well be unreliable.
Old people don’t need as much sleep is also something they say. Not necessarily the kids say. Just the general they say.
Or old people need to sleep differently. Don’t be afraid to nap, they say. Keep it brief, though. No more than thirty minutes. Otherwise, you might have trouble sleeping at night.
At say,
4:37
a.m.
In the morning.
Problem is,
I don’t nap. It runs against the grain. There is work to be done. Blank spaces to be filled. Eyes to be dotted. Tease to be crossed.
The world is on fire, literally, as the kids say, as well as figuratively. Who has time to nap? To sleep, in fact. To sleep, perchance to dream. Who has dreams? Our sleep is that of nightmares.
Literally.
Dooming.
Indulge it. What else are you going to do? At 4:38 a.m. in the morning. It’s not as if you’ve earned a restful sleep, I tell myself. Name one thing you’ve done to help put out the fire, the literal fire, the figurative fire?
You Boomer, you.
Aside from standing back and tut-tutting the bad behaviour, the arson and blatant sabotage. What have you done, what did you do, to nip it all in the bud, buddy, in its nascency? To strangle the bad seed in its crib. You were there in its inglorious beginnings, standing right there. Sure, maybe you didn’t start the fire, you sang. It was always burning, you claim. Since the world’s been turning.
We didn’t light it but we tried to fight it.
How, though?
How did you try to fight it?
And how do I know the lyrics to that song? I wonder.
I was never a Billy Joel guy, was I?
Play us a song, you piano man.
Maybe at one time there was some Billy Joel in my life. The early stuff, they say. Back before he got big, as they say. Went all Hollywood. Back before all that… what was her name again? That model. That Uptown Girl.
Geesh, I think.
At 4:38 a.m.
In the morning.
It didn’t start off so monstrously, did it? This endpoint that we’re living through, not necessarily the endpoint, end times, end of days. This current situation we’re experiencing in history, in real time, what seems on so many fronts a most definite endpoint, one way another, it wasn’t inevitable from the get-go, was it? Nobody could’ve foreseen all this, could they?
Of course they could, Barnaby.
You old fool.
Lots of people saw it coming, pretty much as is. Lots and lots of people. Foresaw it. Predicted it. Wrote about it. Wrote books about it. All of it.
It just seemed all so impossible, I confess, belatedly. Too extreme. Too out there. Surely, if such possibilities existed for us, existed out there on the horizon, like icebergs floating menacingly ahead of us, so obvious a threat, threats, just right there for everyone to see, if they cared to see, if they took the time to look and see, we wouldn’t have just blithely kept pushing forward, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes! We would’ve recognized them as the threats they were and acted accordingly. We would’ve adapted to the new reality, the new situation we were facing and acted accordingly. Adapt or die. That’s what we did. Adapt accordingly. That’s what all successful species do in order to survive. Adapt accordingly.
And yet,
here we are.
At 4:39 a.m.
In the morning.
Dooming.
You know what no one predicted, I think. What no one foresaw. That one looming threat out there on the horizon packing a potential existential wallop that we are utterly unprepared for.
I laugh again at the thought of it.
Feral hogs. Feral pigs. Wild boars. Razorbacks.
A friend told me about it, about a show he watched, I can’t remember the name, a show his son had watched, or grandson, grandchild, I don’t remember which, about the uncontrolled growth in the United States of the feral hog population. Spreading north on the wave of climate change, tearing up ecosystems, laying waste to crops, polluting waterways.
“They killed a woman, Barnaby!” my friend Cecil informed me.
I found that difficult to believe. Cecil is prone to hyperbolic outbursts like this based on his internet scrolling. But in this, woman killed by pig, he was correct. That one time. In 2019. In Texas.
(It had to Texas), I think, parenthetically.
4:39 a.m.
Still.
Still,
seven years on and there’s much more to be concerned about by the feral hog insurgency, apparently, than outright homicide. The species is voracious in its appetites. It’s intelligent enough to quickly figure out trapping methods. Highly adaptive, in other words. And they reproduce like rabbits, like wild hogs. Efforts to contain the feral hog population growth have not kept up with the birth rates. In other words, we—us humans, of all species—cannot kill enough of these pigs to keep their population in check. At least, without threatening the wider ecosystem.
I chuckle again.
At 4:39 a.m.
Imagine that, I think to myself. Of all the catastrophes that could possibly befall us, the biblical-level cataclysms keeping us up nights, like tonight, fires, floods, deep freezes, viral and bacterial, nuclear Armageddon, comet strike, alien invasion—meeting our maker in a monster box office blockbuster fury!—that it could actually be pigs that serve as our ultimate undoing.
Fitting, I’d say.
Fittingly ironic, even. Since the feral hogs very existence owes to the fact that we bred them, raised them, transported them wherever we travelled, in order to eat them. To roast them up, bbq and fry them, carve them up on our tables, and fill our bellies up with them.
Payback’s a bitch, as the kids say.
I laugh again. No closer to sleep.
At 4:40 a.m.
In the morning.
Still.