Pining for apocalypse.

Apocalypse stories area always a little popular, aren't they? Whether it's nuclear war or pandemic or zombies, the upshot is the same: 99% of people are dead, and the story follows the other 1%. Their lives are utterly changed, and utterly refined down to the basics: get food, get shelter, don't get killed. There's something bizarrely appealing about this. Watching Zombieland for instance, the fun part isn't (just) blasting away zombies; the fun part is that the heroes all pile in a car and just go. They leave their homes with nothing and never come back.

I'm frustrated sometimes by the amount of stuff that's attached to me. I'm not just a woman; I'm a woman and a job and a family and a blog and a history and a group of friends and two guinea pigs and a chest of drawers and way too many books. I like all this stuff, but it's a lot to carry around. It takes up almost all my time; almost all my self. I spend half my waking life working at a job to afford the possessions and pursuits that take up the other half. Now, that job contributes an important service to society and those possessions and pursuits give me great value and joy, so it's not a bad deal and I don't intend to ditch it. I just wonder sometimes what it would be like to have a different deal with life.

Now and then I have goofy little fantasies about walking into the wilderness and whatever random spot I ended up at, there I'd be. I would need only food and water, know only trees and dirt, sleep when I was tired and eat when I was hungry. When I moved around I would bring nothing with me. I would exist only as myself. ('Til I starved to death in an abandoned bus.)

The closest I can get to that state, the little taste of apocalyptic wilderness, is sex. In sex I am naked and many things do not matter. I have a tight and sensitive pussy and that matters; what my job is and whether my car needs maintenance do not. Depersonalization, in this way, isn't a degradation but a relief. Sometimes I don't want to be all the complex and beautiful things that make up me. Sometimes I want to be a body.