“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.
Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner. It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner. Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth. The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.
It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.
Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago. Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it. Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs. (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people. It just takes timing. You should try it.)
But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?
When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .
The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.
We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference. There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever. How to make that better? Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.
As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today: The Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:
Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside. Spoiler alert: it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party? Death.
The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.
Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.
What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?
Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up. Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it. Nurses and doctors? Not taking it.
The result? Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities. Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.
Oops.
I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview. “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.
In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates. If you need an ambulance ride, you get one. It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.
- Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands. Why? Pilots don’t want “the jab” either. Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.
- Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.
- The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
- Inflation? Happening everywhere, and with everything.
- Political collapse? FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.
Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.
As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic. This isn’t the script for a happy ending. This is the script for a collapse.
I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades. Those ripples are here and now. Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.
Energy? More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity. But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.
He must be fun at parties.
I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding. While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward. This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story. That’s where Death joined the party. To me? That sounds creepy.
I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death. I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner. At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.
