The End of the World As We Know It

6/23/2024

I was scavenging today. I found an old record player. I plugged it into the solar converter and it worked.

​So I went back into the abandoned zone even deeper, trying to remember where the music store had been. On the way I found some canned pumpkin pie filling. I am looking forward to using it when I make my bread and pressing it with my tongs in the space heater I have at camp.

​I also threw a metal pipe at the glass doors of a CVS. It wasn’t enough. I still had to improvise.

But once I was in, I found some new colors for my makeup sachet. Now added to my inventory I have:

3 eyeliner pencils: Turquoise blue, orange, black

2 lip liners: Dusky Rose and Blushing Beige

1 powder compact, broken

4 lip gloss, two are plumping with shimmer

1 SPF 50 foundation, non-comedogenic

I also have found two nail polish vials that were missed by the looters. Since the doors hadn’t been smashed in during the evacuations, and they were locked with a chain, someone still thought they would be able to come back. The place still had been ransacked, but I guess they convinced people to leave with some sort of determined persuasion. Now I have the song “Crystal Blue Persuasion” in my head, as well as an image of an American who was once an immigrant who scrapped and saved his way into owning a franchise come out with a double barrel shotgun from the back of his store when the world was going to hell in a handbasket.

It looked like the store owner successfully forced out the looters.

Other things in my inventory:

1 nail stamp kit

2 nail polish vials: Midnight and Silver

1 box of 9 mm LUGER 115 GRAIN Full Metal Jacket Winchester bullets.

Now I am thinking of creepy ghost mansions with all sorts of doors to nowhere and guns. I wonder what the ghosts are doing out there now, after the American West went up in sparks leaving nothing but an unending char blanket.

It wasn’t the mass fires that resulted from the Earth’s temperature rising beyond the low-end projections of 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit toward the more devastating reality of a 4 degree increase worldwide just in this 2024 year alone, due to our gas and Carbon emissions. Which, by the way, will continue escalating toward the utterly destructive 10 degrees difference mark predicted by scientists.

​It wasn’t the obsessive oil grab by America, and our President choosing to continue inserting ever more pipelines across the continent instead of transitioning to an alt energy industry and utilizing the better power systems that have been suppressed since the 60s and well before with the work of people like Nikola Tesla.

It wasn’t the build up of slow violence against the Earth, the dumping of trash, ravaging of fish by the trafficking and exploiting of the commercial fishing industry that resulted in an accelerated wiping out of the oceans that further upended our entire atmosphere and climate.

It wasn’t the huge swaths of dead zones created by Red Tide due to the fertilizers and waste of humans, the meat industry, Big Sugar and Big Agra, or the dying of the Reefs and the massive oil spills repercussions finally being felt killing off many of our coastal fisheries.

Or even the rupture of the pipeline I fought that they forced in on the Western side of Florida that ruptured in 2021 and 2022 after they tried to keep it all covered up but couldn’t.

Neither was it the fracking that caused earthquakes or the contaminated water that erupts into flame if a spark or match hits it.

It wasn’t the Dust Bowl that happened out West when the over use of chemicals destroyed the soil and farmable land, the effects of the GMO industry on bee extinction, cancer, or the terminator gene that stops natural seed reproduction.

It wasn’t really even the extinction of a third of the animals on planet earth caused by humans and the loss of the rainforests that did it.

In the end it wasn’t even the allowing of corrupt politician predators to use armies and nuclear weapons for their own gains.

It wasn’t the Pandemic and the government shut downs it lead to, or the result of the build-up of Carbon in our atmosphere that caused not only the mass fires but also the melting of the ice caps which created the Great Flood-

It was all of them combined.

​That is why I am writing this on the third floor of a building with blown out windows after having rowed my kayak in through a window on the second floor and tying it off on a pipe next to the stairwell where I moored it. The sound of water slapping in empty rooms is an eerie hollow kind of lullaby. I try to not think about any people who used to be here and who still might be under the water below me on the lower floor as much as I can help it.

​Even with the Global Mean Sea Level rising faster than expected due to the convergence of these various factors to be at about 8.5 feet right now, it can also be worse in Miami with the local sea level rise or SLR. That is why I parked my kayak on the mezzanine.

​It works using my backpack tent when I am out late, I know I have to paddle for a couple hours tomorrow to get back to camp. I avoid carpets, the black mold is the threat in buildings. This one is all tile and cement, good pitch site. The mosquitoes buzz a cloud around me when I am closer to the dry spots. At least I can kill the ones that get inside when I enter the tent and sleep. My solar lamp has been doing well. I have fixed it once. I am thankful for LEDs. And solar panels.

​It hits me though sometimes at night. Memories. How strange a difference things are now. I think about my parent’s house in Cutler Bay where I grew up underwater. When I went over it, touched the roof in my kayak. That time I had to scuba dive to get some of my things.

​I am so glad that they left when they did. And for the times we finally got through to each other. It means everything just knowing they made it north. I think sometimes about how I could have taken the D.C. job after I finished my program at FIU in cybersecurity. Like Mike did. I heard on the backchannels that he went into military intelligence. He likes to riff on me for staying here and working for a Smart House installation company. I wanted to be close to family when they were having health problems.

​I know it started when the Pandemic messed so much up, although I didn’t mind working from home considering I have always been the type to relish computer time.

But now I stayed for the local job I ended up with and my family I stayed for left, so here I am. I didn’t leave before Mary hit. The hurricane was bad enough. And then the ice sheet happened.

​It was recorded that an ice chunk the size of Germany broke off before the big surge came. It was actually bigger, by about 138 miles or 222.18 km according to reported accounts. I know that the ice had been melting like waterfalls already for a long time. With erupting cracks breaking and exploding as the permafrost melted and the underlying structures of the ice sheets failed. I learned about that years ago, back in 2018 when I was still in my college fast-track program.

​After the cyber-attack that shut down the gasoline pipeline that fed the southern states of America I also felt like it mattered to be close to home. I stayed out of the things going on in the world, or I was, until what was going wrong in the world found me.

​

6/24/2024

​Before heading back two hours paddle to Base Camp I went to the Mall while I could. It had been the new shiny addition after the Turnpike Extension was put in, that is now half underwater. The good news is that it is multi-level. So I can explore on dry ground. I wear my ventilation mask in case of mold. But I needed to stop before leaving the area. I liked noticing the Star Wars poster of Rey on her shield sliding over sand as she scavenged. The relevance and irony was not lost on me. I rolled it up and tied it to my pack to put up at Base Camp.

Inventory:

1 Star Wars poster

1 pack of cards

5 cans of food: 2 Tomato Soup, 3 Black Beans

1 jar of Peanut Butter! WooHoo! 😊

2 shirts

1 headband

1 nail clipper w/ file

​When I was heading back toward Base Camp I stopped when I got to the edge of the rock ridge for lunch. I like it there, where some of the pine trees still are standing. When I stand between them you can’t see all the wrecked, empty skyscrapers. I like to imagine the world is new, and this continent never was touched by man. I walked back into the trees and was surprised to find a trail there. I followed it, and it led to a house with beautiful modern design, white concrete walls and wood and whole sections of walls of glass. It was overgrown but still inspired, and the glass seemed expensive and high grade hurricane resistant because many remained intact. I couldn’t resist, I went in to explore, and I found some great hardware, I tied them onto my raft of finds.

I also found a small red heart locket on the upper floor in a drawer that reminded me of the one I used to have in my charm collection when I did fortune readings for people online. It brought back the words of my father, about loving someone enough that they always stay in your heart. It made me think of all I used to do about Climate Change. Every campaign that wasn’t enough to raise awareness, alarms, to get the changes we needed to happen. Of everything I never won.

If only we’d loved what we had enough to change things when we had the chance.

The heart charm makes me think of that, and secrets.

It makes me think of so much that is buried. Buried inside. The person I used to be. Family. Home. Who we used to be. All the things that matter most locked away inside.

​It felt good to paddle today, the day was bright and hot and the sky was blue and shining. I stopped on a building for a break again and to eat my precious Goldfish crackers and some even more precious peanut butter. The good thing when it all is shinning is there is a sort of freedom seeing blue everywhere. I always adored Venice. That one hurts to think about now, but at least water paths can be beautiful. After how nature has been so abused I feel we don’t really deserve to keep staying here, but I miss the joy of the Keys and the Miami River, restaurants and the laughter of people and music in the night air. So I will help my hurting tonight, by making my own.

​I love paddling in to my Base Camp. I am proud of it, really. I am glad I found one of the high points that used to be part of the coastal land to be my little island. Especially the way these old growth mangroves shelter my entrance. I always longed for a grand driveway. Now I have what was once million dollar property just for me.