Bad Weather

Apocalypse now, apocalypse tomorrow, apocalypse forever!

Everything’s got that low-down, last-days feeling, and I’m afraid to write.

The morning began with a siren screaming over St. Louis. It was March 14, or 314 Day, St Louis’s unofficial holiday. Our holiday is named after the area code because area codes don’t collapse. We celebrate 314 Day by eating St. Louis-style pizza — a delicacy comprised of melted candle wax and Chef Boyardee sauce on a giant cracker — topped with Red Hot Riplets.

Red Hot Riplets are chips made by a local brand called Old Vienna. When I eat them, I picture Hitler, Trotsky, Stalin, and Tito living together in Old Vienna in 1913, right before an earlier end-times.

I don’t think this era is what Old Vienna intends to evoke. But the chip company was formed in 1936, so maybe it was a subconscious choice. Freud lived in Old Vienna too, you know.

I had started my day the way a normal person does, by wandering outside and checking my collection of giant rocks I had unearthed from an abandoned mining site in Missouri’s lead belt.

I soak them overnight. By morning, the iron ore and sediment are stripped away, their true form revealed. Shimmery quartz, agate bands. I brush them gently with a toothbrush, making sure I get inside the cracks. These buried beauties cannot be betrayed by an incomplete restoration. They deserve to shine.

I am the Marchioness of Chalcedony.

With ore-coated gloves I wave to my neighbors, who glance at the rocks lining my porch and give me the polite nod reserved for the insane.

At 7:30 the siren went off. I assumed it was for 314 Day, which would be a wildly irresponsible decision, since that siren is reserved for tornados. But 314 Day celebrates St. Louis, a wildly irresponsible place, so I could not rule it out.

Tornados are not known to strike in the morning. But this warning was real, and the weather was changing fast. When you’ve lived in the Midwest for over two decades, you know when it’s safe to go outside in a tornado. You also know “It’s safe to go outside in a tornado” are the last words of people who die in a tornado.

I went out anyway to take photos. I like to document the source of top-down damage to humanity, so there is no confusion about blame.

The trees were waving their arms at the sky, pleading for help, not realizing it’s the sky that's what kills them. They reminded me of America.

By 9:00 am the storm was over. I went back to cleaning my rocks, now lit up in the morning sun. Missouri has some of the oldest geology in North America. These rocks had survived millions of years and multiple apocalypses, yet I was the one who had unearthed them. “Apocalypse” means “revelation”, and I was responsible for theirs.

I thought about how when the next apocalypse came, my rocks would get swept back into the soil. I wondered if, thousands of years from now, a new version of me would dig them up and have the same delusion of discovery.

*          *          *

At around noon, I went on Twitter, and Steve Mnuchin was trending.

Steve Mnuchin was Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury who went on to plan investment groups with the outgoing head of Mossad, various Gulf state actors, and David Friedman, Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer turned ambassador to Israel who in May 2018 stood grinning in front of a photo of a destroyed Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Christian and Jewish fundamentalists believe the destruction of Al-Aqsa and the building of the Third Temple of Jerusalem in its place will usher in the apocalypse, which they welcome as the dawn of the messianic age. Jewish fundamentalists, a fringe group, have largely ignored that the Christian fundamentalist dream includes mass Jewish death, and that this alliance is a devil’s bargain.

Mnuchin wants to buy TikTok, the platform that right-wing Zionists blame for giving young people information about Gaza. Mnuchin would not say with whom he was going to buy TikTok, but one suspects it involves Israel and his other favored partner, Saudi Arabia, which already invested in the takeover of Twitter.

Congress is rushing a bill for TikTok to be banned or regulated by an American corporation. They claim their problem with Tik-Tok is Chinese state surveillance. There is a Chinese surveillance problem with TikTok and other sites — but there is also an Israeli surveillance problem with everything, and Congress has done little to stop it.

The most likely reason for the urgency around TikTok is that it has created a problem for Israel. Israeli soldiers are using TikTok to proudly post their snuff videos, and Palestinian civilians are using it to post their screams.

That causes a problem for the US, which funds Israel’s military to the tune of billions.

Until recently, few in power seemed to care that Israel’s war crimes were out in the open. Hasbara no longer had a hold on Americans, but it did not matter: Israel still has unrivaled impunity, the kind that lets you murder UN workers and get away with it, for the United States will always veto UN attempts to contain Israel’s slaughter.

But now times are changing, and with disconcerting quickness. The rapid closure of news outlets, rampant media layoffs, and purchase of social media by right-wing tycoons with the intent to destroy communication and the historical record all point in one direction: something even worse is coming.

Something somehow worse than the live-streamed murder of 15,000 Palestinian children. Something powerbrokers do not want us to share, or discuss, or see.

My mind goes in many directions, particularly when Israeli officials like former prime minister Naftali Bennett tweet things like “With the threat of terrorism on its way to the West, it would be best if the international community would assist Israel.”

The threat of terrorism is on its way to the West, you say? From whom, exactly?

But there are other perilous possibilities of off-limits topics: Putin is threatening nukes again; new plagues are rising and old plagues have been revived; pundits are finally acknowledging that the DOJ is in on Trump’s crimes; the Royal Family is ailing in ways that started out funny but now seem sinister; and Netanyahu is preparing mass violence against the million Palestinians stranded in the city of Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and may be starting a new phase of a broader war.

I refresh Twitter. Al-Aqsa has replaced Mnuchin as the trending topic.

Whenever I see Al-Aqsa trending, particularly as Ramadan and Easter and Passover arrive in quick succession, I am afraid.

I click to see what happened, but my phone buzzes and I can no longer read the news. There’s an alert covering the apocalypse: a new tornado is in town. I run outside to rescue my rocks before the afternoon blows them away.

*          *          *

My family huddles, watching the lights flicker, as my daughter plays along with the tornado siren on the violin. Last year she played Carnegie Hall; this year she plays the basement. That is the story of 2024.

I check our apocalypse supplies. We always had these; everyone in a tornado zone does. We also have a large pile of emergency food from the 2020 beginning of the pandemic, dumped on a corroded Elizabeth Warren sign.

We haven’t eaten the food because we were waiting for the pandemic to end. Now we know that food will be there forever, rotting like a political promise.

“Prepper” is not a dirty word in St. Louis. In the Midwest and South, not expecting the worst is the weird way to live. Sometimes I wonder if the gulf of perception between Missouri and rich coastal cities — where our common sense is considered pissant paranoia — lies in our wild weather.

Then I remember disasters like Hurricane Sandy, and how New Yorkers were let down when they needed help. And how the Democratic governor of New York has enlisted the National Guard to patrol their subways for no particular reason, while actual New York problems like homelessness and poverty rise. And how slick a New York lie is, unlike a Missouri lie, which shoots straight like an unregulated gun.

And how every official nationwide seems to be preparing us for a terrible event, one that requires mass policing and forbids free speech.

In the backyard, the birds of St. Louis start shrieking. They are nature’s siren, letting us know the storm has passed and we are free. I remember Flaco, the New York owl that escaped from a zoo and won everyone’s love, only to crash into a skyscraper and die.

I live in the land where the rivers meet, the land where birds of prey fly natural. Eagles and vultures and hawks soar without fear, hunting for predators and prey. I wish I could steal their nonchalant vigilance, and have vision only be a thing I see.

*          *          *

At night the St. Louis sky turns blood-red with pink and yellow streaks. It is beautiful, but I’ve learned to be wary, as this is often the sign of fire from distant lands.

But it was worse: the storms had returned again, one last smackdown for 314 Day. The yellow turned that awful shade of pale green that any Midwesterner knows is trouble, and then darkness stole all the colors away.

Hail pummeled the ground and branches snapped and fell. The trees no longer had arms to wave skyward for help. I woke up the next morning to the sound of a chainsaw slicing fallen limbs. They’re a stranger’s firewood now.

I go online and see stories of the TikTok bill and AIPAC-backed politicians (which is to say, for the most part, just politicians) and I flash back to 2014, when Hakeem Jeffries — now House Minority Leader — defended Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza by paraphrasing segregationist George Wallace: “Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever!”

It was such a strange thing to do. It’s been almost a decade since he did it, and now it feels like the first act of a play, the kind Abraham Lincoln would watch.

I pick up a chunk of quartz that had been soaking overnight and wash it in the sink. Ore oozes out of its crevices, revealing tiny crystals. I take it outside and hold the crystals to the sun, so they could meet each other for the first time.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, but it’s not true. You have to scrub off the sediment first. You have to dig deep, you have to get your hands dirty, and you have to be careful, or your fragile treasure will become as inscrutable as it was in the earth.

That’s the challenge of parsing the news at the end of the world — of this phase of the world, anyway. That Old Vienna 1913 feeling. That yellow-green siren sky feeling. That apocalypse now, apocalypse tomorrow, apocalypse forever feeling.

You gaze into the quartz and all that it recorded: all those layers of time rolled into one mineral. You lay it out to dry and move on to the next. There are buckets of these left to decipher, and never enough time in the day.

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Little rocks I found on top of a big rock I found

The sunset during the storm

Hail, St Louis! Photo by my mother-in-law

Some quartz I dug up from the abandoned mine. I made that cutting board myself too!

I told you — I am the Marchioness of Chalcedony!