Your Own Personal Apocalypse

Mark Morford -SFGate

- Notes & Errata

Your imminent apocalyptic death

It's just around the corner. Any minute now. No, really

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the last four paragraphs

There is only one thing we know for certain, and that is everything is uncertain. Scientists are absolutely sure only that something dramatic and life-obliterating will sure as hell happen again. This is just the way the planet rolls. It's all a matter of when.

We can hardly wait. I mean that quite literally. So fascinated are we with such potentially lethal phenomena that we often seem to invite them in, offer up our wrists to the universe, somewhere subconsciously hoping, craving to accelerate the whole shebang. It's just so mesmerizing.

Global warming? Killing the oceans? Millions of pounds of recalled industrial meat? E.coli outbreaks in our cookie dough? We are not merely tempting fate. We are in happy collusion with fate in the planning of our own demise, proving that we love nothing more than to mess with nature far beyond her thresholds of respect and courtesy. Why? Simple: We can't wait to see how it all ends.

Maybe we know, deep down, that we sort of deserve it. Maybe we sense how we as a species are not really long for this world. Maybe we know, on a molecular level, that life is not meant to have any sort of real stability or permanence, that all is transitory, deliciously futile, so utterly and completely meaningless in every way as to be, well, deeply profound and eternal. What's not tempting about that?

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