Steve’s day continued, much as it had before and much as they usually did. He drove the truck, he stopped, the schnauzer leapt out, the truck sprang up, and he collected supplies in a workmanlike manner, wending his way through the stops he marked for himself across the town. Stores were getting lower, but he found they needed less and less. That had been the idea behind the self-rationing, and Steve was glad to see their foresight had paid off. To have ruined all the good stocks of leftover items, before they’d worked out what they needed and what they could reproduce- not to mention how- would have been a disaster on par with extinction. It might, he thought and had said at the time, be considered an extinction of them. And so he’d spent his time filling up his truck with small amounts of various items rather than with single huge hauls of all one thing. It had the added benefit of giving him a routine, for which he was grateful.
It also gave him agita sometimes, particularly when one of his holes dried up unexpectedly. As he sat on the hood of his truck, looking through the gap in a broken chain link fence at an empty space where last month had been a pile of weather-treated cedar two-by-fours, he considered the implications. Normally he might have blamed some other customer for wiping out the stock like this, and so he was probably right to do so on this occasion as well. The schnauzer licked his hand, massive tongue encompassing the entire patch of exposed skin, and Steve shook it in response. Slobber flew. The two-by-fours did not return.
The immediate problem was how to pivot and construct the new fence he’d been planning to make. There were, of course, several options for this, but few had the aesthetic properties of a nice cedar. That wasn’t going to be an option, at least not without a new source, and he racked his brain trying to remember another place in the area where he might acquire the materials. The other problem, of course, was where the fuck had all the two-by-fours gone? Granted, he thought, commerce knew no bounds, but he had to imagine that if there had been a rush on the sale of the century he might have been entitled to know about it. He was, after all, a loyal customer, and there had not been a little bit of cedar here. There had been a fence’s worth. He stared at the void which had replaced it.
We consider product availability to be a hallmark of the modern world. Not a positive or negative, and certainly not a thing to be dismissed as trivial either way, but a serious thing for which our age (if we can be said to have one) will one day be known. The fact that there is nothing you might want that you cannot acquire is our defining characteristic- like iron, or coal, or electricity, or slavery. There are chains of consequence that culminate in some feature stamping itself on daily life in a way that history remembers. Abundance is ours, and, like the other examples listed, it’s not particularly great if you stop and think about it.
We think in terms of instancy.
Perhaps this is confusing.
Let us clarify: certainly, of course, we think in said terms, but so do we as well.
And considering the inherent fragility of every system ever devised by anything other than the evolution of natural forces, it’s not, perhaps, the best comment on the foresight of society as a whole that it’s built in our time on a platform of Just In Time consumption. What happens, for instance, when anything breaks down? When the relied-upon pile of cedar happens to be gone and you can’t explain why or when the situation will be rectified? Yes, the situation encourages a lateral set of thoughts, but consider the difficulty in this for you. With a more limited stream of expected inputs might you not already be prepared with a second option? Mightn’t you be more prepared to think laterally if the circumstances of your normal life were different? We think so, and we think this is the wolf masquerading in the cultural ovinity of our lives.
The conflict, of course, is that specialization and the streamlining of decision making is what makes for an advancing species. Iguanas spend their whole day looking for food and they’ve never built a particle accelerator. Those have to be linked.
Steve’s mind chugged along, the track down which it had begun stretching long and off into the distance. If there was no wood, and there had been wood, and there was no evidence of rot or fire, and there was no evidence of alchemical transformation- physical, historical, mystical, or otherwise- then the most likely explanation was that someone, and more specifically someone else, had taken the wood. For what purpose? Steve felt his mind begin to shudder and smoke, the endless possibilities choking with aplomb on the limits he provided. He had been planning to build a fence. They might be planning to build a fence. Of course, they could also be planning to build a trebuchet or a human-sized bird cage. Wood was a malleable material. It could have been the quartermaster of some apocalyptic militia collecting materials for a hundred bo-staves. Then he’d really be fucked. He sat back.
Would he be fucked? If the goal were to come after Steve, which was obviously on the table but by no means certain (like salt and pepper at a pancake restaurant), then why go to the trouble of carting off a truckload of wood? Steve was fairly confident in his abilities, across the varying spectrums, but he had no doubt that an accomplished set of individuals which would require one hundred bo-staves to be properly armed could take him down on his lonesome without the theorized weaponry. So that was unlikely to be the case. A flame of romantic defiance died in his heart as the engine of his brain rumbled back to life and kicked the sludgy petrol-placenta of failed thought out its exhaust pipe.
So what to do? The most correct answer was to go home. This had been the last of his chores for the day, and in general there wasn’t a lot of happy-houring anymore. He slid down off the hood of his truck and leaned against the grate, wishing he had a cigarette to complete the image even though he didn’t smoke. He put his hands in his pockets and took a long, deep look at the empty wood bay. He looked at the ground around it, and at the fence he himself had cut this particular rent into weeks ago, the one through which he had been planning to move the wood which had been so rudely absconded with. He looked at the tracks leading away from it, invisible from his previous perch and inconsistent with the ones his own truck made. He looked at the schnauzer, licking himself on the ground with…well… dogged insistence. Then he looked into the distance, took his keys from his pocket, and got in the truck.
We wonder at the human capacity for adaptation. Whatever your views on evolution, once upon a time the human race lived on the face of the earth in much the same way as a hedgehog. Or a goat. More or less defenseless, save for the power of ingenuity, and eating what came. And then once upon another time the human race, like the locusts of old and/or of third world countries where no big company had a vested interest in preventing swarms of them the size of Siberia, they consumed and consumed and consumed until there was basically nothing left to consume. And both ways fit perfectly within the paradigm of humanity. Both ways were, in a word: normal. And that’s fascinating- because it’s not how everything else seems to work.
Consider the concept of a carnivorous rabbit. An image which strikes, if not fear then misapprehension in the heart of any good student of zoological history. Sure, they eat their babies sometimes, but by and large what the rabbit wants is vegetables. When a rabbit eats meat, whether in filicide or some other misguided movement along the gastrocurious spectrum, it’s an unsettling thing, a thing to note, a thing to be shot. The human has no such red line. The human wishes they did, and sometimes acts as though they do, but there isn’t anything hardcoded in the human brain that can’t be overwritten and then flipped on its particularly noxious head. It is the power of adaptability. It also makes the human susceptible to enormous bouts of stupidity on a more or less daily basis.
Steve turned the key in the ignition and put the truck’s nose in the center of the track lines leading away from, in order: the hardware store, himself, and safety. He eased it forward, nudged past the various society-related obstacles which had survived the neglect inherent in society’s collapse, and then dropped his foot and let the truck run hard into the afternoon twilight.
