Saturday, May 11, 2019

Our Current Time and Other Apocalypses

We have kept this week-end free of most engagements, and I'm surprised by how unnatural that is.  It's hard for me to strike a balance--I need a goodly chunk of time at home, but I also need some time socializing with friends. 

My spouse and I both begin teaching summer classes this week.  I need to do all the adjustments to the course shells for my online classes by tomorrow at 11:59 p.m.  My goal is to get that done today.  It's mainly a matter of deciding on dates and then entering those date into multiple places, but that takes more time than you might think.

Yesterday I took some time to go eat lunch with a friend.  She was once one of my English major students, and for a Creative Writing class with a different teacher, she asked me to participate.  It was a Creative Nonfiction class, and she had to do an interview, but in a place that held relevance.  So she interviewed me in a British tea room.  What a treat!  And from there, our friendship grew.

As she said yesterday, "Our friendship is old enough to be going to college."

Our talk lately has often turned to apocalypse.  These are strange days we live in.  We talked about The Handmaid's Tale and Fahrenheit 451 and the recent draconian abortion law just passed in Georgia.  She told me about this intriguing Instagram project that created Instagram posts through the voice of a real-life 13 year old victim of the Holocaust. 

Later, I wrote this Facebook post:


"When apocalyptic ladies lunch: we debate about where we are societally by using a rubric adapted from our unique mix of "The Handmaid's Tale" and assorted Ray Bradbury texts. I will be sent to clean the toxic waste areas, but at least as a post-menopausal woman, I won't be part of some deranged fertility ritual with a captain and his wife.

We part with my pledge of a hurricane wrecked cottage as a hiding place should we be further along in the apocalyptic scenarios than we think.

Of course, I will be at the aforementioned toxic waste area. I bet it will have lots of cool remnants of civilization from which we can make art."

This morning, my thoughts are slightly less apocalyptic.  I've been working on my Noah poems--it's clear to me that I'm writing some sort of series.

I wrote about Noah calling the FEMA hotline after the flood.  I thought I would write a single poem about Noah and FEMA, but it's clear to me that the applying for the loan to clean up is a different poem than Noah calling the FEMA hotline and getting a recording.  And just now, I thought about Noah feeling sorrow for everything he didn't get onto the arc, everything that couldn't be saved.  I thought about the jars of canned preserves and the photos that he thought he had safe on a hard drive, until the hard drive crashed.

Yes, I realize that the "real" Noah (he who built the arc before the great flood) didn't have a computer or FEMA, but that's what makes it intriguing, I hope.

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