Currently on Nova: Megavolcanoes. I’ve already seen the Discovery Megavolcanoes twice, now for the PBS version. I am fascinated, horrified, will lose sleep over this. Back when I lived in Chicago, there was talk of some asteroid hitting the earth in say 2035. My bosses looked at the coverage in the Chicago Sun Times, and uniformly agreed without much ado that this would be just fine with them. I balked.

“You’re kidding, right?”

No, they weren’t.

“I’m going to be 85 at the time, near death anyway, what will I care?” they said.

“But,” I stammered, “Don’t you want the world to go on without you? Don’t you want people to talk about you when you’re dead?”

Somehow in the middle of a water cooler conversation, I’d revealed my everything, my hand, my psychological profile. It didn’t help that they were all psychologists. They asked more. “What exactly do you want people to talk about, Penelope?” Such an unrealistic expectation; one looks like a fool just for bringing the possibility up.

And its difficult to explain why I’d want people to talk about me after I couldn’t weigh in on the topic, because god knows so long as my heart beats I am terrified of gossip. I know a few folks who will drop this line in a conversation just to watch me quiver: “So I was talking about you the other day. That’s right. I was talking about you. Ears tingling? Nose itch? Hives any?” Yes. Ears tingle. Nose itches. Hives, many.

Today on the train I was reading New York Magazine, where Kurt Anderson weighs in on the current End of Days rages. There are so many ways we could go. Megavolcanoes. Tsunamis. Terrorists/third world war. There are Christian farmers in our hinterlands breeding red heifers for Jewish rituals in Israel, on account of they’re actively campaigning for the end of days. Our president has said to believe in Armageddon; I’ve read otherwise as well, but his recent reference of a “Third Awakening” doesn’t sit so well with me. It’s become a national obsession: instead of one television movie (The Day After) we have a television series (Jericho). Creepy. I feel like it’s a good time to have Pork Barbecue, because god damn, our high cholesterol won’t hurt us when we’re washed away in a flood.

For some reason, I’m fairly okay with dying young, but I’m completely not okay with the world ending early. Why should it matter what happens here when I’m gone? Maybe because I want to believe that at some point the Indians are going to win the Series, or that somebody will decide to read/publish my novel, or that one day thousands of years hence people of my warrior clan will rule over people of the Bush warrior clan. Shit if I know, because frankly, it doesn’t really make any sense.

Of course, one theory of all this apocalypse nonsense is that it’s as cyclical as my father claims Global Warming to be. Maybe it happens with Republican presidents: I seem to recall in grammar school practicing a really silly nuclear drill (who knew Catholic school desks could you protect you from an atom bomb?). Perhaps when we elect Eliot Spitzer or Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama, the frenzy will calm down again and we will go back to worrying about sex scandals. But just in case, I ask: outside of your children (everyone wants lives for their children), what do you care about the future, after you’re dead?