The Comets Decide: Chapter 2 - Mass Panic

It was all over the evening news that night.

Is there really mass panic? Women screaming, throwing their hands in the air while running from their homes; men playing Russian Roulette, or charging in throngs to municipal buildings, burning libraries and shattering city halls?

How about impotent parliaments, dissolved and broken by hoards of mindless voters in chaotic revolution, passing laws against death and clothing so that new naked immortals can walk the earth like John Barleycorn forever in flower?

Or what about money? Is it deemed useless immaterial; are goods trampled and damned; are cattle freed and then hunted by bands of accountants?

Can you see tribes of special needs teaching assistants, clothed in freshly cut goat-skin jerkins, hanging from dark lampposts and talking like birds?

What of crowds surging through the streets, trampling brother and sister alike, caught in a fervour for death, a fury of hopeless descent?

Do people, have people, are people acting like they do in the fantasises of newspapers and moviemen? It is the end of the world! But we are all still ourselves. These nightmares are not stronger than our condition and our condition cannot focus on one thousand comets all at once.

We still remember to brush, we crave warmth and companionship, we sing songs, write letters or watch the television and then we still need our sleep, so we draw the curtains as the power dies.

Stuck in ourselves like spiders in the bathtub, we still dream of broken promises and fighting school bullies and wearing jeans to a wedding we weren't invited to, like we always have.

We maintain our veneer, unable to become another person; become this wild, crazed rioter from disaster movies and the nightmares of politicians.

The fact is: we are ourselves.

No comets are going to change that.