texts: Well, if the Clock People give you any inside information on the end of the world, drop us a postcard.
labels: The world isn't going to end, you dummy; I hope you know that much.  But it is going to change. It's going to change drastically, and probably in your lifetime. The Clock People see calamitous earthquakes as the agent of change, and they may be right, since there are a hundred thousand earthquakes a year and major ones are long overdue. But there are far worse catastrophes coming... unless the human race can bring itself to abandon the goals and values of civilization, in other words, unless it can break the consumption habit -- and we are so conditioned to consuming as a way of life that for most of us life would have no meaning without the yearnings and rewards of progressive consumption. It isn't merely that our bad habits will cause global catastrophes, but that our operative political-economic philosophies have us in such a blind crab grip that they prevent us from preparing for the natural disasters that are not our fault. So the apocalyptic shit is going to hit the fan, all right, but there'll be some of us it'll miss. Little pockets of humanity. Like the Clock People. Like you two honeys, if you decide to accept my offer of a lease on Siwash Cave. There's almost no worldwide calamity -- famine, nuclear accident, plague, weather warfare or reduction of the ozone shield -- that you couldn't survive in that cave.