New York Challenged: The World is Ending and There’s Only One Thing to Do

By MARIO WEDDELL

A man shields his daughter from radiation in San Francisco, while a jackhammer unleashes hell at FCLC. (Mario Weddell/The Observer)

I spent the last four days of spring break in San Francisco with my family, where I realized that the apocalypse is approaching much sooner than I originally anticipated. It’s all very clear now. I can’t believe I wasted so many months doing things like sleeping and bathing. Precious minutes wasted.

There have been omens ranging from offensively blatant to very subtle. In San Francisco, the weather was terrible. I guess that alone shouldn’t be too alarming; even Sinatra’s tramp proclaimed California to be cold and damp. Still though, San Francisco is where I first realized the world was dying.

I was trapped in a brutal rainstorm as I scrambled around trying to take pictures along the coast. I ran around for a cold California minute, desperately trying to keep my camera dry while water penetrated every pore of my skin. I got back to the rental car gasping, trying to inhale any air that wasn’t heavy with rain.

My dad tuned the radio to a hardcore, grassroots-liberal talk show, the kind you can’t find anywhere but in the forested parts of California. A hippie scientist was being interviewed. He said, “The first radioactive cloud has appeared over California, Jane. The people need to know. Nothing is being done to warn them. They need to stay out of the rain at all costs, and make sure to take precautions. See, I knew this would happen, Jane, I knew it! I’ve been saying this for 30 years!”

My Geigers are probably through the roof. I know that the radioactivity in the air is supposedly at a non-dangerous level, but I soaked it up like a sponge. It’s terrifying. Radioactive clouds sound like something I would have made up when I was desperate to win a game of rock-paper-scissors.

Omen two. Another obvious harbinger of doom is the ferocious, nonstop digging by the machines in the Plaza. They’re in a mad dash to pierce the earth’s crust and reveal the fiery furnaces of hell. Soon the earth will split open, and Satan will crawl out of his pit, pumping dubstep (he loves dubstep) from his speakers while his minions overrun Lincoln Center. You can even hear the jackhammers when you’re in Quinn Library, as they pound in sync with the devil’s subwoofer.

That brings me to another indicator of our demise. The word “dubstep” has replaced “autotune” in YouTube searches. You can take pretty much any major person from our recent headlines, type their name into the search box, add “dubstep” to the end of it and you’ll probably find something. Sadly, “Gaddafi dubstep” yields no results. But Obama, Rebecca Black and Charlie Sheen do. Since I already convincingly established that dubstep is Satan’s soundtrack of choice, isn’t there something disturbing about dubstep’s swift domination of all things? I don’t believe in coincidences, unless the apocalypse is coincidently occurring at the same time that dubstep is taking over. The war of the wobbles is upon us (that’s a dubstep joke for you).

Speaking of wars, I go away for a quick spring break, and when I return the whole country is up in arms again. In a few short days, the entire United States launched an assault on Rebecca Black. Oh yeah, and Gaddafi. At this point, people are acting like they’re interchangeable. They might be. I don’t know. I can’t understand Gaddafi’s lyrics.

In any case, the endless string of earthquakes in the past few months and the raining of hellfire seem to be indicative of a dark and downward spiral. We are at the crux of a long-time-coming extinction. It is vital that we make a serious effort to save the planet. Life as we know it cannot persist. Unless we do something soon, the world will crumble into a ball of dubstepped decay. I’m calling for the initiation of an emergency, counter-apocalyptic program. We need to begin jettisoning humankind into space, or dropping them in volcanoes. It’s the only way to save Earth.