That a couple people are reading this today means the apocalypse was postponed or postponed itself somehow. That I am writing it, a couple days before our collective expiry, means, well, I figure not but am wondering what if... It has been as difficult to believe in the December 21 world's end as it has been to dismiss it entirely; hanging like Walcott's bat at the back of my head is what-if and, like my dislike for parang, it has been tricky to express.
My friends and I have spent a few playful evenings this year planning our great escape; we didn't talk about escape to where, or from where. Nor did we confirm a methodology beyond trekking through a jungle somewhere with a flashlight.
I can see the National Flour Mills silos from where I live and I won't lie-I have wondered if I could jump atop one as they float past in the tsunami. Impossible, I answered myself, followed immediately by a reminder that in crises, humans sometimes do superhuman things, and survive.
From far the silos look like they can be straddled; knowing their actual circumference didn't inform my imagination as I envisioned riding atop a big wave, hair blowing in the wind and skiing barefoot on smooth, cool water. I haven't packed a survival kit, but I have considered what I might put in one. A knee band for one thing, but then again, if I have to use knee support in a post-apocalypse Trinidad, I might as well just dead in the first flash of light.
I have been on the look-out too, for signs that the end is hours away. Plenty rain the last few days was a sure sign, I thought, but while I am writing the sun hot outside and, common at this time of the year, the breeze cool-perfect weather to be lying in a hammock under a tall wooden house. Not a reckoning conducive to an apocalypse.
Been listening at nights for the schwett, that bird that foretells death by passing over your home at nights and screeching, "Scchweettt!" Haven't heard it yet. But that may be because the TV drowning out the accidental prophet or because I sleeping.
Meanwhile, the blackbirds on St Vincent Street, although lacking the visionary powers of the schwett, have continued to gather in their scores each evening, lining the telephone cables and shrouding the cropped trees outside the Industrial Court. Is it me, or are they swooping that much lower?
Is it me, or are they moving more hostile these days? Imagination beckons again: they too brazen! If two dozen of them wild little things fly on me, well watch and see how they dead before the apocalypse!
The Lara promenade pigeons, too, territorial most times, are seeming ultra so. Like they don't know how to co-exist. They didn't get the memo that we have harmony in diversity in this town, that how we fly is not how we party, that we sit on a height on the food chain and we could (I hope) out they lights whenever we choose. Passing alongside one of their numbers, the mad thing fly up my chest and walk down my back. In broad daylight.
If that is not provocation, tell me what is. So for that particular pigeon, at least, I hope the end did come cause if he want to be among the living, he should learn how to live. (On that note, to the bird in Siegert Square that defecated on my car just as I finished washing it a year ago, and when I looked up to identify the miscreant, let loose one on me that went tic-tac-toe on my head, shoulder and back: look the apocalypse coming, so do something now, nah.)
December 21 is an opportunity for pacifists like me to be baddists, even if the recipient of my vengeance is a lawless bird. On that note, perhaps President Max Richards could throw caution to the wind that will blow all of us away anyway and take the fight to the Prime Minister and the Government she formed and leads.
Today, two days before the end of the world (at the time of writing) he shouldn't take that boof and, having failed so immaculately with his appointments to the Integrity Commission, I venture he should broaden his shoulders and end his tenure in a blaze of glory, if only for fear of the fire next time and fire 'pon Rome.
I ate a last supper of early ham and turkey-just in case-but was sane enough not to stuff myself with barely resistible sweets-just in case. Bills have been paid-for the most part-and an extra telephone call put in to my mother, if not disagreeable relatives-just in case I see them for Christmas anyway.
If the end does not come, the doomsday prediction has made some of us consider the unknown, and the inevitable, not a bad thing at the end of a calendar year-Gregorian calendar, that is. And it has made members of the Chinese group Almighty God ponder the possibility of a female Jesus, either the ultimate we-time-reach or so foreboding a prospect that it had to be associated with an apocalypse.
The most I will do on Friday, December 21 is follow the advice of Caribbean mothers: wear good underwear; you never know what could happen. Should the world end, I had some last-hour fun writing this. Should it not, I hope you have some fun reading. A safe season to all.