My Affair With A Day In March [Contains some swearing]

Warning: This post is depressing.

The human race has a weird collective obsession. Just as it's obsessed with how life came into existence, we're also morbidly obsessed with how it will end too. And, I'm particularly guilty of this. I find the idea of Armageddon weirdly interesting. Largely because of the various ways in which it's presented both in theology and popular culture. But, also, because I have some weird morbid fun of trying to work out the most likely way the human race will end.

Many will look to something such as climate change or nuclear war as a way in which the human race will come to a dramatic conclusion. However, these aren't necessarily 'world ending'. Climate change, although there's much evidence to suggest we've accelerated the effects, is a natural phenomenon. And, it's likely, it's happened a couple of times since humans have walked the Earth, or at least our ancestors. So there's a good chance the human race will survive in some way shape or form. As for nuclear war, viewed by many as the ultimate horror to quote my favourite radio play 'The Last Broadcast', it wouldn't necessarily end the entire human race. It will cause unimaginable disruption to the southern hemisphere (which will be largely untouched by nuclear weaponry), but it would cause the human race to dwindle over time. An initial and short nuclear conflict wouldn't end the human race straight off. Not unless everyone unleashed their weapons all at once, which seems extremely unlikely somehow. 

I'm talking something truly cataclysmic. Something that would leave no human alive to tell the tale. And there are plenty of things that could do this. Asteroid strike, gamma ray bursts, black holes, coronal mass ejection, magnetar stars, the list is endless. And many of these could happen at any moment without us even knowing! Especially many of the celestial events. 

So, why am I talking about this? It's because I've reached a personal philosophical conclusion. Given everything that could happen and probably will happen, I'm fully expecting the world to end in my life time. And, to be honest, I'm fine with it. I've made peace with it.

Personal context.

I've been obsessed (for better or worse) with the idea of the end of the world since I was about 8 years old. One of my favourite films growing up was The Day After Tomorrow, a movie about climate change taking a bunch of steroids and tearing up the world as it goes. I enjoyed it for two reasons. 1) It was fantastical enough for it to be enjoyable and 2) certain scenes scared me, which was good. I believe kids should be scared every now and again in a controlled way. (Probably why I love Doctor Who so much as they seem to have the right formula for this). 

I also enjoyed it because I thought the end of the world was fictitious. When you're that age, you don't really think about an end to it all do you. I mean, you're young, why would you? You can barely comprehend individual death, let alone the death of everyone on the planet. So, at the time, for me it was fictitious.

That changed in 2004. I was 9 years old. The date escapes me, but I was sat watching ITV News. Mark Austin was hosting and giving the usual roundup of the days news. But, that night, something extreme caught my attention.

Mark Austin went on to explain that NASA had detected a large asteroid that was heading towards the Earth, and that, if it changed course even a tiny bit, it would collide with Earth and cause major devastation. They coupled this with the scenes from films such as Deep Impact and Armageddon to show what could happen if this event were to actually happen. This unnerved me to the point of panic. What made it worse was that Mark Austin even gave a date when this would occur. March 21st 2014. In this instance, Bowie was wrong. We didn't have Five Years, we had double that. 

To my young autistic mind, this finality meant only one thing. The world was going to end and I, my mum, and all of my family and friends were going to die on this day because of a large piece of space rock was going to collide with the Earth and fuck shit up. 

This led to a morbid fear of death and a couple of years of minor therapy to curb my paranoia. (Thank you Dr Zoe Ellison-Wright for all your hard work if you happen to be reading this, but I did unfortunately get hypochondria for a while. Sorry). 

This morbid fear of death, in my opinion, wasn't totally unfounded. As a 9 year old with this news, and believing it to be so final, I was forced to confront my own mortality for the first time. Most children probably get this through the death of a pet, or a loved one, I got it through a potentially apocalyptic event delivered by Mark Austin of all people. (I did have a rabbit when I was 7 but it died very soon after getting it so I didn't have the same perspective or emotional attachment when it did pass away. RIP Rio). 

This fear only escalated a year later, in 2005, when the news bigged up the Bird Flu epidemic. Bird flu was creeping ever closer to the UK and i was getting worried. Then a swan in Scotland got it and I shit myself. Now, 10/11 year old me didn't understand that the likelihood of me getting bird flu was almost zero. But that didn't stop me freaking out about it. I was determined that I was going to get bird flu and die, and I could not be reasoned with.

After this, it started to die down a bit. With age comes experience. And the experience of not dying of bird flu helped me see there was light at the end of the tunnel. However, I was still scared of March 21st 2014. 

This led me to conclude that every other end of the world stuff before that date was bullshit. March 21st 2014 was the day the world would end, because Mark Austin said so. And, why would the news lie? (Oh, younger me). 

In 2009, CERN fired up the Large Hadron Collider underneath Geneva, Switzerland. This was met with cries of 'OH MY GOD IT WILL CAUSE A BLACK HOLE THAT WILL DESTROY THE EARTH'. Enter my RE teacher, Mr Craig, who put me right on that one. "No, Josh, just no".

On the day it happened, I made sure I knew the time it would go on, just in case something did go wrong. I knew when it would be and I kept an eye on the clock. It was turned on before school started. So, 5 minutes before, I walked to the front of the school so I was looking at a view of the nearby Duncliffe Hill. I stood there alone, with my thoughts, as the children coming off the buses streamed past me. I stood there, sighed, and with two minutes to go I said to myself "I'm ready. I'm ready to die". For a brief moment, I'd conquered my fear of death. And, for that one moment, I was ready to die. 

2 minutes after the powering up, feeling both relieved and weirdly disappointed, the world didn't end. The only weird thing to happen that day was my Mum, who worked at the same school I attended, saw two students walking backwards. When she inquired as to why, their response was "we're being dragged towards Switzerland, Miss!"

So, life went on. The next big thing to happen was the news of the Mayan Calendar, causing the world to end in 2012. Potentially. Now, we all remember this don't we? The weird theories, the god awful Roland Emmerich film depicting John Cusack outrunning lava and Woody Harrelson getting killed by a volcanic rock at Yellowstone. But do you remember the 21st December 2014? I weirdly do. I was at home, waiting for the world to end. 

Because of my well-hidden obsession with March 21st 2014, I kinda knew that the world wouldn't end. But I wanted to see it regardless. 

So, that day, at the time (GMT) they said it would all go down, I sat on my sofa with my laptop open watching the official countdown to the end of times. I sat with eager anticipation, even treating myself to jelly babies one last time in case, and watched as the countdown went to 10 seconds. I counted down along with it...5...4...3...2...1!

Suddenly, the website exploded. I looked around as everything went quiet. For an uneasy moment, I thought "shit, might it actually be happening?" Only to be reassured when the countdown website returned...going into a negative countdown. Which, to this day, I still find hilarious.

With 2012 out of the way, and the Harold Camping cataclysms of 2011 gone too, the immortal enemy reared its ugly head. 21st March 2014. It was coming, with just over a year to go.

When you've spend the best part of 8 years preparing for an asteroid coming, what's the best thing to do? Well, I discovered, it's just carrying on. If the world ends, it ends. Just do what you want or need to in the meantime.

I could go into the interim years in some profound detail but I don't wish to bore you. Nor it is actually relevant to the overall point of this post.

So, with eager expectation, came the fateful day. 21st March 2014. It was a standard Friday. Of course the world would end on a Friday, finish work for the weekend and you don't even get to enjoy it. 

The day went by without a hitch, and as day turned to night, I walked out of my student accommodation and went for a little walk around campus. I found a bench to sit on, and I just stared at the sky. Unfortunately, I didn't have my binoculars with me at the time, nor a telescope of any kind, in which to view the asteroid that had plagued my mind until that time. I sat for a while and just stared at the sky.

I have seen an asteroid through a telescope before, once in 2012, but it wasn't my mortal enemy. 

Alone, on a bench in Winchester, I stared at the sky in wait. In wait for something to happen. I'd been waiting most of my life for this day and I was damned to let it slip by unnoticed. Once again, I found myself feeling ready to die if the unthinkable should occur, but I just stared. I stared and I waited. As midnight approached, I checked my phone to see the data on it. The asteroid has now safely passed the Earth without a change in direction. The asteroid was not going to hit the Earth. 

Upon seeing this, I gave a huge sigh of relief and stood up, ready to go back to my cosy flat. But, given the mental anguish this asteroid had put me through as a child, I felt it only right to do one more thing before retiring for the night.

Using a star map on the NASA website, I managed to work out where the asteroid was at that point. I turned to it and looked in the general facility. I smiled as I managed to locate it to the best of my ability with the naked eye, I put my middle finger up towards it and said quietly to it "fuck you". 

And, with a simple vulgar expression, that was it. A decade of paranoia, fear and mental anguish, all gone. Almost as quickly as it came back in 2004. It was over. It was finally over.

THEN I FOUND OUT ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR.

I was writing a song with my cousin when I discovered the wonderful world of emergency alert systems. But that's a story for another blog. 

Since then, I've educated myself on ways in which the world could end. Just because 2014 has passed us by, doesn't mean we'll be that lucky again. Besides, asteroids aren't the only threat out there. Nor is nuclear war the only threat on this planet.

So, as February 2018 draws to a close, I find myself looking back over this and I realise something actually quite profound about my fear of Death.

After watching family die and attending various funerals in the past couple of years, I finally realise something about myself that, realistically, I should've realised many, many, years ago.

My fear of Death is not that at all. Death, in and of itself, doesn't scare me. The idea of death is not a scary thing for me anymore. What scares me is that I die by someone else's hand, my death is under someone else's control. Because that can be prevented. Being murdered scares me. Being hit by a car scares me. Dying of disease scares me. 

Nuclear war doesn't scare me anymore, in fact, it'd be kind of morbidly interesting to witness. Yeah, I'd be scared, but I wouldn't be scared of dying from it. Dying from a celestial event doesn't scare me. Dying from the Yellowstone volcano doesn't scare me. 

And, now, I've worked out why.

If I'm murdered, it's just me dying. I die alone, no time for regret, goodbye or rescue. 

If there's an apocalyptic event that takes the whole human race, I'm not dying alone. 

I'm a huge lover of history and of what could happen the future. In fact, the future is probably my greatest addiction. I want to know what happens. I know I will naturally die some day but I want to see as much of the future as I possibly can, no matter what that involves. At least if the apocalypse occurs, I can't die unfulfilled, because there is no human future in that instance.

If I'm murdered, it's just me. Alone. Witnessing a few more seconds before finding myself being drawn into the eternal night. 

I've recently rediscovered my faith in God so, I guess, that idea doesn't scare me as much as an afterlife seems more attractive now. However, I'm still allowed to be selfish and want to witness as much future as I can.

Talking of which, I need to wash up, take a shower and score my next fix of future.

The moral to be taken from this? The end of days can happen at any time. So, treasure life and those around you. Life is far too short to do anything else. Thinking about it logically, life isn't even short. It's momentary. Do the thing you want to do, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. Skydive, try that food, tell that person you love them, you never know what could be lurking around the corner. You never know, could be a gamma ray that burns you into a nearby rock. (look that up, genuinely fascinating).

Have a happy future everyone and see you in it.