Fudagraphy Blogography

At a far off Croatian Military base in 1982 the story of the end truly begins. The building had been dubbed "Dox" because the official clerical name "Diagnostical Optical Experiment" was far too boring for anyone who lived and work there to repeat on a daily basis. This complex built three years prior had the appearance of a building that had aged far beyond anything the architect could ever have imagined for a sleepy suburban outpost. It wasn’t built with any of the flare of the recent Art Deco movement in the city, which was a mere 50 Km from its perimeter, but based more on a dull but practical gray cement motif which was more an echo of Communist architecture. This complex was built for a purpose, but built to last; it would accomplish neither.

One of the recently enrolled cadets, Andelko, had taken to playing guitar outside of the Dox. The growing political turmoil affected everyone in the complex differently, mostly turning to drinking vodka or playing cards with the badly worn nudey deck one of the cadets had hastily thrown in with his travel gear. Andelko didn't have a stomach for alcohol and was terrible at all dealings with nude women so he instead chose the acoustic guitar, which had been left by a prior resident but badly warped and out of tune from the dry outpost air. He strummed the few minor chords he knew to the audience of an echoless cold night to drive out his tensions. He had more agitations and angst that he could or would let on verbally.

He should have been thinking of the political climate, he should have been worried of the imminent doom which would shortly overtake his waking and half asleep senses, but his mind was back home in the country where his girlfriend Jelka sat drinking - waiting. He had stopped writing her because he knew that the more he wrote the more worried he would sound and the less he wrote the more obvious it would become that he was not telling her something big. Silence often has a way of saying more than words can sometimes - in this case the silence was most deafening.

In town, the Senate had floor had adopted an unnatural calm. Psychologists call the term "Learned Helplessness" but the political term for it was Bill 1105. Bill 1105 was a revision to the earlier passed Bill 1104 which saw a diversion of government funding from all Military facilities to Medical Research centers in light of recent international and interspatial events. The Bill 1105 revision stated that the "DOX" would still receive funding in hope that its original purpose could somehow alleviate the current situation. Everyone in attendance voted with confidence for Bill 1105 confident that it would be more of a symbolic gesture to the public to show control and stability than an action of any real consequence.

It is common knowledge to most that animals are more sensitive to changes in weather than humans. Dogs can smell odors which are 100 million times below the threshold of their human masters. A dogs wet nose helps it determine which direction air current is traveling and its cold receptors can sense the evaporation of moisture caused by changing air currents. Some people think that elephants can sense incoming earthquakes because they are sensitive to changes in ground vibrations; an evolutionary advantage in sensing incoming packs of predators.

Interestingly, when felines sense danger their whiskers twitch and their nostrils flare open to smell the incoming threat. Some vertebrates like cats have something called a Jacobson's organ which is used to detect trace amounts of chemicals. This process is called "Flehmening" and occurs when an animal curls its upper lip in a sneer so it can expose the Jacobson organ to sense chemicals such as the pheromones of another predator or the odor communication of a potential mate.

The energy in our universe is constant. Whenever it moves from one place to another, it gives signs, warnings, however subtle they may be. It is in times of stress that we become more sensitive to these changes around us. On some level all animals can sense danger and the tide of change. It was on the morning of June 3rd, 1982, when children were getting ready for school, when bakeries were delivering their fresh morning orders, when fishermen were pulling in their nets containing the first catch of the day, when the busy morning traffic was still so silent as to allow a father to teach his son the basics of how to ride an off-road bike in the parking lot of a nearby shopping mall, that change came so sudden, so abruptly that it surprised even the most sensitive of God's creatures.

For those of you who have a Bergman like view of the world, as you look at the stark, dull, gray tones of reality you may optimistically state that love and God are the same. "If I believe that (God and Love are the same) then the void fills with God" - the father says to his son as his daughter is dragged off to the mental hospital.

There is no God. No carnage such as this would exist if there was. Images of destruction are so desensitizing - it fills its surroundings, the air it occupies blocking out the light in all its suffocating abomination. Destruction of this scale displaces the atoms which create it - the perfect chaos of divinity. Its havoc travels in beats, in frequencies we can hear in the silence, sense in the matte dark of space. The music we hear, the white noise that calms us is the shattering, the echo of extinction so strong all we hear is its music, its horror replaces the beats of our broken hearts.

Andelko somehow survived. His location was ironically a place of security; being so close to the initial explosions, he had grown sensitive to its growing power and sought shelter underground before the first waves hit the nearby city. The second wave would never hit but would slowly surface like blood seeping into a newly exposed cut. The next wave would destroy every nearby building, every lamppost, every living person so that the only thing left was the cobble road - which had merely further fragmented into smaller cobble.

Earlier that morning Chloe had been worrying about her wardrobe for the upcoming show. She was the singer in a classic 50s rock revival band which called itself "Buddy My Waters" - A reference to Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, and Muddy Waters that no one but her and the rest of the band got. Her day job was shopping for local in-town celebrities. She had no creative control, but was merely the subordinate of a well known stylist who was too busy e-mailing and dodging the in-house creditors of upscale stores companies to find her clients clothing. She had spent all day putting on robes of a man who just happened to have the same build and stature as comedian Ben Stiller – the non-present celebrity of the day.

After work she waited for the bands bass player Derrick to get off school and sat beside his vintage Volkswagen. As she sat relaxing in the evening sun, a photography student with a mop of red hair snapped her photo with his digital SLR and showed her the back of his camera. "I am sorry to interrupt you, but I just thought you looked so wonderful sitting in front of this beautiful car" he seemed to say without breathing as he cleaned his glasses and scanned the far off distance. She smiled and looked up, "It's a nice photo and I would ask you to send it to my e-mail but I doubt you will want to once I tell you this is my boyfriend's car I am waiting in front of". He smiled and said he would post it on his blog - which he promptly displayed a business card for from his camera bag pocket.

All day she had a bad feeling about something. But then again, those days she seemed to have a bad feeling most of the time. She had been depressed for a while and that gave everything a plastic, fake feeling. Her doctor had said that depression often feels like you are an actor in someone else’s reality, that you become detached from yourself and everything around you turns into a sort of play. Recently she had felt she was a side character in some terrible summer comedy.

As her mind drifted she found herself remembering looking through her parents wedding album and being struck by one particular pose where the page opposite had a quote from Corinthians 1:13 that read "Through A Glass Darkly". She thought it odd that her mother would have written a quote from the bible because she had never considered her mother a religious person. She dismissed the irrelevance and awkwardness of the phrase to her mother’s inability to complete a coherent thought, but the juxtaposition of the phrase with the photo had made the quote stick with her. The photo was as awkward a photo that her parents had ever taken. It was odd how her thoughts connected in such an erratic way that they would lead her to think of that then. At that moment she felt the quote somehow applied to her current perspective of thinking. "How odd it is - she thought, how everything, including your thoughts, become connected when you place them beside one another".

Her boyfriend had been taking longer than usual to return from his class so Chloe pulled a local events paper from her knitted purse which not so cleverly called itself "Happening”. She had started the crossword, but didn't feel particularly driven to count out the letters of words she wasn't particularly confident in the spellings of.

All the faces have a blankness to them she thought. All of them are looking at me, but really they are looking into a void that is at this moment filled by me. If everything around us were suddenly replaced by nothing - would this face printed on paper even notice. Yet, all that remains of us when we are gone are photos and images - graffiti on the wall of oblivion.