Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

You're listening to Jolly Roger and his whole sick crew… and that means you, too, baby.

Remember: all you have to do to set sail with us is search out my revolving website. You can find its latest incarnation by paying close attention to what that homeless guy talking to himself next to you on the bus is saying. Or by clicking that unassuming link on the website you'll happen upon at two tomorrow morning. O-or maybe just by committing to making each and every piece of spam that arrives in your inbox your long lost friend. Then scroll down to the lower left-hand corner. That's where you'll find my cell phone number. It's good for twenty-four hours, give or take, más o menos, very roughly speaking.

Do as you like, and do it in your own time, for Jolly Roger plans on sticking around long enough to hear what everybody has to say who The Man and His Minions have banished from thought…

Let me begin this evening by painting you a little picture. I'm recording this message in a digital bottle in the back seat of my faithful blue Saab. The engine is off, the windows rolled down. The temperature is in the middling desert-night eighties. My battery icon tells me I have just over an hour and a half of electric spirit left. My clock icon tells me it's barely tipped eleven in the p.m.

Which is to say it's early days, folks, and here I am, parked amid tumbleweed and rusted-out barrels at the bitter end of humanity in an interzone called Slab City. Its entrance is easily identifiable by the Froot-Loop colorful and prophetically awesome secret handshake known as Salvation Mountain: a crazed visionary prominence three stories high covered in roughly ten thousand gallons of donated acrylic paint, concrete, and adobe, and festooned with Biblical sentiments. A yellow brick road, a spectacular frozen blue and white waterfall, a rainbow mound of Looney Tunes flowers, an igloo chapel built of hay bales, trees, and tires — all these serve as an ongoing ode to God the Highest composed over the course of more than two decades by one Mr. Leonard Knight, among the most goodhearted and gentle proselytizers of celestial benevolence you'll ever have the distinct honor to meet.

Continue down that road past Leonard's reveries and soon you'll come upon all that remains of the World War Two military base called Camp Dunlap: six-hundred-and-forty state-owned acres of sagebrush, barren sand, the occasional cluster of prickly pear, and a few concrete slabs, the latter of which gives this turnout in the immense wasteland called the Colorado Desert its name. General George S. Patton once trained troops here. The Enola Gay's pilots took off from its runways to practice dropping dummy A-bombs into… you guessed it… the Salton Sea.

And after the base closed at the end of the fifties, a group of intrepid servicemen remained behind to birth the dream of an intentional community, decommissioned, uncontrolled, and, above all, free of charge, of mind, open to possibility's twinkle.

These days about three thousand dub this corner of alterity home during the winter months. By July, all that's left is the diehard coven of fewer than one hundred fifty. There's no electricity, no running water, no sewerage, no services. Many denizens use generators or solar panels for power, buckets for bathrooms. Most subsist on government checks, and almost all arrived at this exceptional condition of inbetweenness through poverty and/or an ardent desire to be shut of such onerous concepts as America.

As I utter these words, Slabbers domicile to my left and right, before me and behind me, in tents, campers, motor homes, hollowed-out vehicles, handmade shacks, aluminum sheds, what's left of those ammo bunkers from yesterworld. Some laze cross-legged around campfires, smell of burning salt oak in the air, drinking, talking, and enjoying a little giggle weed. Many recline solitary and contemplative in lawn chairs or chaise lounges before their dwellings, watching the night sky perform above them, waiting for the immense black boomerangs and blacker memories of their former lives to glide silently into view.

Someone is playing Frank Sinatra, someone else Frank Zappa. I hear strains of Megadeth and Arcade Fire and Mr. Hank Williams, all reminding us that wealth won't save our souls.

In the distance, occasional explosions thunder in from Chocolate Mountain Aerial Bombing and Gunnery Range.

Oh, yeah…

And, with that, welcome to my vessel. My rubber zodiac cruising the Straights of Slab City a hair's breadth east of Salvation Mountain. The inside of my head for the next twenty minutes…

I want to talk about the day after the planet finally shakes us off no one talks about that I don't get it that's what I want to talk about.

The great Rapture, you mean?

No no no the little one the little ones. Like those you know car suicides across Europe back in the Seventies where they just started blowing themselves up on the highways and no one remembers anymore? It'll be like that start small you'll hardly notice. But what happens next what happens after the end of the end that's what I want to know.

What's your name, friend?

Keith I'm Keith from Lexington.

Massachusetts?

Kentucky but not really I was raised in Chicago I'm twenty-eight. Landed here after a tour in Iraq Najaf I'm a librarian got a degree in library science do you know this book by Alan Weisman called The World Without Us?

An important one for you, I presume?

It's about humankind's long slow fadeout after the earth says turn off the lights and shut the goddamn door behind you it doesn't matter how pollution pestilence overpopulation famine war whatever it doesn't matter you blew it and I wonder why nobody ever asks what happens next.

Maybe if it isn't about us, it isn't interesting. Like at parties, only moreso.

Everything's always interesting especially without us.

Teach us what we should learn, Keith. We're your auditory systems for as long as you'd like to employ us.

Okay well after we leave the thing that gets me is how it starts happening really fast you'd think it might take millennia but it doesn't. In New York City for example in New York without continuous pumping the subway system floods within two days imagine that two days. Seven and the cooling systems on nuclear reactors fail the reactors melt down it's hard to get your mind around that. One year of water freezing and thawing in cracks and sidewalks and streets begin buckling who would have thought then the colonizing weeds and trees move in.

You're asking how important can a single human life be.

Homes and office buildings begin crumbling because there's no heat in them nothing to stabilize interior climates and one lightning strike in Central Park wham the whole city is on fire.

You're asking who do we think we are.

The planet blinks and everything we've done for the past ten thousand years starts going away immediately it makes you reflect.

You're suggesting each of us is not unlike a solitary dust mite traveling on a 747 from L.A. to Bangkok. He thinks it's his universe he's inhabiting, that he controls it, that he knows where he is and what he's doing and where he's going. Only the poor little fuck has absolutely no idea, does he, that he's just along for the ride, that the exterminator is ambling up the aisle even as he muses, full face-piece respirator in place, pesticide sprayer in hand.

Twenty years and streams and marshes appear in the streets one hundred and all the roofs have caved in three hundred and all the bridges have collapsed.

You're saying do what you want because in the end even Einstein is a nobody.

Five hundred and mature forests blanket the metropolitan area.