Bygones

9:06

Amy, the girl from nowhere, protagonist of THE PASSAGE trilogy.

It's Thursday and I have the day off. I have bills to pay, a job fair to go to, and all sorts of other crap as it's my only day off. I've doing maintenance and clean up on all of my electronic devices. 

My plants are doing very well. 

But in the interim, I am off for a quick soak in the hot tub. I pulled a muscle in my back last week, just reaching across the trim table. Now I stretch before work. I need to remind myself that I am doing physical labor and that I'm 48 years old. While I've taken to it pretty well, I am not 21 anymore, when I could party with abandon and then wake up at 6:30 and mow lawns in 90 degree heat for 8 hours. I can only imagine that I was made of rubber back then. and really stupid.

I finished Justin Cronin's City of Mirrors, the final book The Passage Trilogy. Firstly, its scope is amazing, spanning 1200 years after a viral vampire outbreak which completely destroys North America, and eventually the world. I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

While I adored The Stand, by Stephen King, The Passage makes it looks pedestrian in breadth. And "the Hand of God" doesn't come down and miraculously fix things, as in The Stand. No knock on King, as his work, published in '78, was like nothing I had ever read. I read it much later, after the unedited version came out (almost twice the size of the original at 1152 pages.) 

But it's been almost forty years since King wrote a masterpiece, and we live in a much darker, visceral world than in 1978. The world is running down. We are maybe fifty years away from devastating events that will change our planet forever. We soon will be living for the basics; food, water, protecting our loved ones, and surviving.  

The biggest threats? Climate change, rising oceans (see ya Florida, NYC and London, just to name a few,) oil running out (which will start wars between the strongest nations,) and a lack of fresh drinking water. 

The most brilliant aspect of Cronin's trilogy is that after a thousand year nightmare, the population returns to sustainable levels. Having suffered such horrendous loss, with all of the former nations of the world vanquished, humanity has a fresh start, and a real chance at not fucking it up this time. 

Fiction like this is why I began writing, why I will always write, and my hope that someday I will add something significant to our planet's literary canon.

Until then, you're stuck with this shitty blog.

Bygones!