I would love for someone, anyone, everyone to add my name into the fight at the front line until I can resume my place at the barricades.

My offline name is Shelly Leonard. (The article has some outdated info; I did not have the surgery, and have been instead admitted to hospice and am undergoing chemotherapy aimed at slowing the cancer down.)

To anyone who can help, thank you.

Tucker

Past Peak: A Story of the Near Future

The first sign we had in those early days was the lines. It started with the lines for gasoline: that was customary enough and had been done before. No one panicked when we went into gas rationing, two days a week for even numbered license plates, two days a week for odd, two for vanity plates and one day a week when no one was to get gasoline unless they had missed their regular day and their gas card had gone unswiped. It was a little inconvenient, but this echoed the seventies, as the local news helpfully pointed out with pictures comparing the lines of the current era and that one. In the first weeks, people in the gas lines would joke with each other; later, the mood tensed and tempers shortened. One day there was a shootout when someone line-jumped, and a mother from a nearby suburb died in the crossfire. After that incident I started filling up at odd hours, when fewer people might be out; I had always loved the deep early morning anyway, and three-thirty a.m. gas runs fit well into my sleep schedule.

The gas shortage was followed closely by a shortage of jobs, as businesses could not afford to pay for electricity and gas to ship products and still afford to pay workers. Of the three, only the workers were expendable. Job lines began appearing anywhere that looked like it might have work. It seemed odd at first to see middle-aged men and women in costly business suits standing in line for jobs cooking fast food or washing dishes, but we got used to it; and as the weeks wore on, the suits began to look bedraggled, a little frayed and wrinkled, a little more like they belonged.. Some of the prospective applicants had the more important pieces of their resumes written in big letters on signs that they could wave to get the attention of the management in the building. I noted these signs on my daily walk: one line twenty prospective workers deep at a Burger King contained three signs proclaiming “MA,” “MFA,” and “MSW.” Further down the line was an older, white-ponytailed man whose sign said “Ph.D Astronomy.”

I was in my third year as a court clerk, and this was a very good job to have, because the courts had become very busy. We didn't have enough money in our budget to hire on new staff, so those of us who were already employed found our workload escalating steadily. I didn't really mind, I liked my job and the longer hours were no hardship. The courthouse was only a half-mile walk from my one-bedroom walk-up apartment, so I stopped driving except on the rare occasions when I needed to go out of town.

It wasn't long after the appearance of the job lines that certain goods began to be scarce. Shoppers who still had a little money for luxuries lined up around the block at the rumor that the local grocery store had received a shipment of coffee; when the end of the line finally got into the store and saw empty shelves, the scene began to grow violent. The police arrived with one of the new microwave-based crowd dispersal units; the boy who was trampled as shoppers ran frenzied and in pain was brought to the regional hospital and eventually recovered.

Still we persevered, confident that our grandparents and great-grandparents had suffered far worse in the Depression. TV networks ran uplifting feel-good movies and game shows where anyone might become a millionaire, and we were placated. That was spring.


June brought a new horror to the city, as it was the beginning of the hottest summer on record. Our city had—used to have--a famously moderate climate, so most of us were unprepared for the heat wave. Electricity became intermittent as air conditioners struggled along. On some days there was no power to be had at all for dwellings and only a trickle for businesses other than the big chain stores. On days of extreme heat when there was no power, people who were too old or sick to make it to a store to cool off died in their homes with all the windows open to the sweltering asphalt. The EMTs and police officers bringing the bodies, bloated and stinking in the heat, from the doors of the high-rise buildings formed a grisly new kind of line. The obituary page in the local newspaper filled with lines: overheated, overheated.

In mid-July the days of no power came two in a row. The temperature was well over a hundred; in bars with generators and fuel to run them, we could watch the local meteorologist fry an egg on the sidewalk. The unemployed and the powerless took to sleeping in soaked-down sheets through the heat of the day and rising at night like a vampire horde. There was no shortage of liquor, some of it home-made, and the restless night-time mobs noised and fought until dawn.

Dogs all over the city had been abandoned, discarded by owners who could no longer afford them. The dogs congregated in the alleys behind buildings and in the public parks, patrolling the edges of the tent cities for whatever scraps of food might be given or stolen. Usually they didn't bother you, and their presence had become more and more ordinary since spring, but in the middle of the summer three cases of rabies were reported in the packs of evicted house-pets. Mothers began carrying baseball bats with them or not going outdoors at all.

The days without power were routine now; almost the whole city had gone nocturnal, lighting their midnight lives with candles or oil lamps. Restaurants began to adjust their hours, opening at dusk and closing up during the oppressive heat of midday. Ice had become a great luxury, and the trendy eateries with electricity contracts or generators had big neon signs touting the availability of “AC and I-C-E!” A trendy new bar opened to sell nothing but ice-water and chilled vodka; someone saw the real-estate heiress sipping drinks there. That bar was always cool inside, but they checked credit ratings at the door and under-700s weren't admitted. I could look in, but could not enter.

Realistic: for my lifespan and my kids' lifespan, and my grandkids' lifespan if my kids have kids--we are going to see a declining standard of living in the formerly industrialized world, growing wealth disparity everywhere, and combinations of localized social disorder followed by authoritarian crackdowns. Famines are almost inevitable, because arable land is being depleted, and because the changes in weather patterns are likely to make formerly abundant areas produce far less yield per acre of food crops and of feed crops for food animals. Escalating oil prices are an inevitability: many of the most productive regions are already at or past peak, and the price of getting the oil out of the ground is going up just as world demand for oil is ballooning at an unforeseen rate.

There are going to be shortages of anything that needs to be transported across oceans, due primarily to the economic depression (I don't think we're even on the up-swing of the "W" yet, and I expect some level of permanent contraction of the economy--unemployment that never goes back to 1990s levels, permanent lowering of home prices, permanent credit shrinkage) and also due to the rising cost of oil.

We are well past the point of being able to stop global climate change: if the entire human race made a deep commitment to lowering carbon emissions, we might be able to slow it a little, but once the methane in the permafrost starts leaking out (which started last summer on a relatively small scale) there's not going to be a way to mitigate the problem. That isn't to say Earth will become another Venus, but it will make some real problems for agriculture (and a lot of the endangered species on Earth will go extinct).

It is entirely possible that we are going to enter a New Dark Age that will last a few centuries before anything improves significantly. Long-term, if humans are still around in a thousand years, I might be optimistic. Short term, though, I'm bearish on humanity--it's not going places.

Tucker

I'm hypoglycemic, and when I was very underweight the hypoglycemia and low blood pressure "teamed up," and I had more than a few episodes of sudden vasovagal syncope--one minute I'd be feeling sorta hungry, then I'd get distracted, and then I'd fall down and people would call out an ambulance before I was able to come to consciousness and tell them I just needed my Glucotabs.

During this time, my own cockatoo (a rescue, and a velcro bird who's usually on me) started telling me when I was going to have a problem. He could give me a ten-minute lead time, probably by detecting the very beginnings of the onset of the shakes and by feeling my blood pressure through my wrist. Feet like sphygnamometers.

Anyway, I worked with him until we could go anywhere together. We could walk through a crowd of people at Wal-Mart, brushing up against people sometimes, without Gidi moving from his position or taking his attention off of me. I developed some cues, one that told him to focus on me and another that told him he was off-duty and could talk to people and ask kids to pet him. (He loves children.) Very often we would go somewhere and nobody would know there was a parrot in the room until someone--a kid, usually: adults often thought I was carrying a white towel--pointed him out to someone else. We even attended religious services with singing, clapping, and dancing--and everyone was surprised afterward that there'd been a bird there the whole time!

Fortunately, my weight has been over 90 lbs (most of the time) for a while, my blood pressure's back to normal, and I haven't vaso'ed in more than two years. I no longer rely on Gideon to prevent unnecessary 911 calls and embarrassment, so I don't need to have full access with him anymore. But I do keep him trained, just in case it ever happens again.

I do have a personal interest in this.

(Oddly, my friend lives a couple of blocks from me. Her parrot is also a cockatoo, but mine's an Umbrella and hers is a Moluccan.)

Tucker

They feed him flawed, spun, sometimes false "information", KNOWING his strong family history of psychiatric disorders and his personal history of addiction and instability. They insulate him so that he can't access the kind of ordinary reality-checking that would let him see that he's going off the edge. THIS IS THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF FEEDING HERSHEY BARS TO A DIABETIC AND THEN HIDING THE INSULIN.

If this man is not helped soon, by somebody, the outcome is not likely to be good. He will either hurt himself, hurt someone else, or suffer a breakdown so severe that he will need hospitalization and lose his career.

And FNC won't care; they'll just find the next brittle psyche to exploit on-air.

Tucker

In the troubled times ahead, you are going to meet a handsome stranger. He will probably be a newcomer to the world of politics; part of his appeal will be that he is an "outsider," a mystery candidate who seems to emerge on the scene out of nowhere. He will use this to his advantage: since he is not a part of the old and broken system, he is beholden to no one. You won't have to question his allegiances or worry that he is "bought and paid for" or "owned by AIPAC."

He will be charismatic and full of new ideas. All over the country, people from both the left and right will hear things in his platform that they like: national healthcare, end to illegal immigration, environmental protection, a flat tax, additional supports for struggling families. He'll ask for so little from you in return: a vote, maybe a boycott, maybe drop a business contact or a friendship here or there.

He'll promise you a flush economy and a national renewal you had never even dreamed possible. He'll give you hope. He'll be a dynamic speaker, absolutely alive with conviction; he will send the recession packing, raise wages, promise the middle-class prosperity again.

His platform's already written, and he's waiting in the wings for the time just after the Iran crisis, when you will be fed up enough to ask for him and put your trust in him. His name, his party, are yet unknown; but when America "wakes up," he will appear for you.

Tucker

He'll promise you a flush economy and a national renewal you had never even dreamed possible. He'll give you hope. He'll be a dynamic speaker, absolutely alive with conviction; he will send the recession packing, raise wages, promise the middle-class prosperity again. All over the country, people from both the left and right will hear things in his platform that they like: national healthcare, end to illegal immigration, environmental protection, a flat tax, additional supports for struggling families. He'll ask for so little from you in return: a vote, maybe a boycott, maybe drop a business contact or a friendship here or there.

His platform's already written, and he's waiting in the wings for the time just after the Iran crisis, when you will be fed up enough to ask for him and put your trust in him. His name, his party, are yet unknown; but when America "wakes up," he will appear for you.

Tucker



This is my prediction, based probably on heavy cold meds and sake. Not to get all spooky or anything--but if you find this candidate, remember, I told you you'd find him. Know that behind his mask is the face of pure evil.