Oh Rapturous Day!

This is how well Jeremiah knows me. He knows that if the world doesn't end today, if things don't boil and bubble and break into small unrepairable pieces and there are no dragons waking up from the bowels of the earth or giant spaceships or glowing magical women with swords, I'm secretly going to be a little disappointed. How many of the rest of you know that about me? How many of you saw that? No really, who knew? I need to know who you are so I can kill you.

Jere would give you a run down on the historical significance of raptures. History, though I love it, isn't my thing. My thing is thinking about how the presence of this history in our daily lives affects the immediate moment. What it is now. How we feel about it now. I'm lazy and time is arbitrary.


Tara understands the importance of water. When I tell her all the cities on my short list to move to are there because of their large bodies of water, and that the rivers in Pittsburgh frankly don't cut it, she understands exactly why. Lake people, that's what we are. We like the caves and the hills and the deserts, but in our eyes, there's Lake water. In my eyes, it overflows. Unless there is a Lake around, I don't really feel safe. Like, when the end of the world comes, I want access to most fresh drinking water. And to not be anywhere near tsunamis from the asteroid crashing into the ocean floor.


Once again, I turn to the internet to be amazed at humanity, because it shows me that we are so bored as a species that a) we still come up with Raptures, and b) when some crazy preacher guy organizes some buses to drive through downtowns with flashy crazy cellphone photo worthy advertising, and tells us all the Rapture is coming, we seize upon the opportunity immediately to have a new kind of party. That's the history of humanity - Where the fuck is the new party? What is my excuse for getting drunk now? I love you humanity. I'm in it for the long haul with you. But also I long for your destruction just to see.


When you say Rapture seventeen times fast, you sound like you are hissing, or whistling, or talking about your jail time.

Why do we identify the most with velociraptors? Similarity of the words aside, since that's the trend this minute Rapture = Raptor, I think we wish we didn't come from dirty clumsy jack off monkeys, but from sleek unbeatable lizard birds. Velociraptors are our aspirational ancestry.

Oh the people come and go, like water in and out of your cavernous Lake eyes. They are there for a minute, they seem oh so important for a month, a year, a week, a day. But the thing that lasts is the Lake and the Train and the Green. Growing old means not caring anymore when someone's time is up, because frankly you're more into inanimate objects these days, things bigger than you, and beyond that, older you starts to see what would happen if you were completely alone. No, not just single, but completely alone. Like, never to speak with another human being again. You start to see what that would mean to you as an individual, no longer theory but an actual thing that might happen if you run away to the mountains or the Lake islands, which becomes a stronger possibility with every work day. It means recognizing how very separate your life is, how it keeps going no matter what, whether happily or unhappily.


Dear Rapture: If you really wanted to punish the wicked, you would take away everything in the world except us. You would leave an empty black void filled with nothing but people. No need to eat or drink, no bodily functions to relieve. Just us. And we would have to look at ourselves for eternity, with no sun or moon or water or wind or dogs or skyscrapers or bridges or spaceships or printed words to keep us sane. Just other people, the only things left out of all of creation. We would talk and fuck and fight at first, though probably we would just text. Eventually though, we would all fall silent and still, standing there shoulder to shoulder with other humans, quiet, forever. We would forget the way the world used to look like, and maybe lose our eyesight and hearing and taste because there would be nothing to use them on except the faces and shadows of necks and elbows we already spent a century memorizing. A factory of humans in hibernation mode, functioning but dead. Returned defective and left in storage.


There will be karaoke tonight, I think surviving the manufactured apocalypse pairs well with karaoke, and I'm drinking with some guy I don't know at all who's like 7 years younger than me, and I'm wearing the sequins, and I'm forcing my friend to do something she's highly uncomfortable with just because I like to do that to people. And I wake up every day wishing to be rescued, but I can't pin down what I want rescuing from. I just want to be lifted up and taken away into something new. I don't sleep anymore, I nervously twiddle my thumbs and toes, waiting for the next thing to happen. I rush towards any breath of fresh air. I use it all up and then wait in the asphyxiation for the next new thing. And new, anything everything new, is rapturous because of the hope it provides, that there may keep being new things forever if I keep trying.

Rules for Living in the Snowbound State

There is no better cure for that horrible moment when your online music station starts playing Heart, and you start singing along, than to immediately quickly without hesitation play some George Michael. George Michael's Greatest Hits is almost always a good idea, it's that strong shot of Goldschlager you used to do in the basement of the old Grid, because you were underage, it had gold in it, and you hadn't developed your hatred of cinnamon yet.

I'm extremely tired. I went to sleep full of eggnog that various lawyers fed me like candy, and woke up two hours later, not hungover but vaguely broken. Disassociated. Full of things left to say, but there's the rub in waking up sometimes by yourself. My muscles ache now, in that warm exhausted way, when every small direction you stretch - your ribs, your neck, your eyelids even burn slowly. It's that vulnerable time when any classic pop song is going to win, and loads of other things that are bad for you. We're so sensitive in the winter here, easily disappointed, easily excited. Then by March we'll be regular stone profiles, done with all this shit. Oh and then Spring. I can imagine the Spring light if I close my eyes really tight. It's under the ice. The ice even smells like it.

It was so cold outside today the hairs on the back of my neck frosted over. We got out of the car and were instantly hit by a wall of frozen air. We walked to the rocks, and in five minutes our noses were red. In another five, my fingers could no longer work the camera. Ten, we were falling asleep. Fifteen, we were snow zombies, stumbling on the ice, giddily taking bad pictures of each other. Twenty and there were no longer two girls on the beach, but two silent huddled things, trying to find the car like bats, with echolocation.

There were sentries every where on the lake shore, watching and waiting. The annual appearance of the sentries means we're no longer in control. Instead this giant slow body of water is taking over, burying us alive. You have to fight back or it won't respect you. It's hard to fight something so harsh and gorgeous, enormous and heavy. It takes intent.

After all, we're the least affected, really. We're the lucky ones, with thumbs and coats and scarfs and heated cars to escape to. If we just keep moving, the ice won't get us.

All these dead monsters got swept out by the ice, whales and snakes and giant rotting trunks of man eating sturgeon. Winter is when the Lake cleans itself, I think. Exfoliates it's evils. Walking along around the carcasses, it's like that really cool dream you had when you were a kid, and you were St. George fighting the dragons, but the dragons were all dead to begin with, buried under continental drift. See, they stopped moving. This is the lesson today.

All roads going to the Lake are ice. All roads away from the Lake are ice. All paths to the water are now designed to kill you by an apathetic titan. You are so fucked. But the ships are still coming through. The ships always come through. They are tanks and siege engines and monstrous mountain dogs. The ships are amazing; never give up, never back down, never stop bringing the coal and the salt and the rock. God, that's hot.

And there's this creeping deadly advancing growth of water, water desperately crawling out of it's bed, reaching for dry land. It's an invasion by something that thinks it belongs here more than us.

Steel yourself by any means necessary. Food, drink, sex, whatever it is that keeps you agitated and keeps your vibrations from syncing up with the rest of the world. You have to stay on a different frequency from the Lake.









More photos from Snow Day 2010