TO THE CLASS OF 2011: a hearty hail and hello to you and to those others from the town and from your families who have been able to make it here today. I greet you and I thank you for inviting me to this ceremony. It is a date which must have seemed so significant when you began the academic year nine months ago, but which could easily have been overshadowed by the current crisis. After all, faced with what we are facing, why should this day be different from any other day? What meaning could it possibly hold placed against the grim import of that ultimate hour, rushing even now out of the future and toward the present? Nothing will change after today, certainly. Why should you pause in your great work? Why should you put off, even for a moment, your search for a solution, for a way to elude the grip of this final moment? Why should you stop and listen to me? READ MORE

A poem by Rachel Herman-Gross. READ MORE

Some years ago I toured a container ship as a guest of its ambitious young Yugoslav captain. It was by far the most awe-inspiring company tour I’ve ever been on; the sheer size and scale of everything we were shown made us feel utterly antlike, awestruck, and then awestruck again, in a different way, at the magnificence of what people are able to achieve when they put their minds to it.

These container ships are commonly 300 meters long or more, and they burn a very filthy low-grade petroleum sludge the consistency of Nutella that must be warmed in order for it to liquefy to a combustible state. For this reason the engine room, which seemed the size of a ballroom in a ducal palace, was unbelievably warm, even though the building-sized engine was barely idling. There are nearly five thousand container ships in total (plus over thirteen thousand tankers and almost nine thousand "bulk carriers" of iron ore, coal and so on,) and all these enormous vessels are plowing back and forth across the ocean at every moment, spewing all sorts of muck into the air and water in order to get us our cheap consumer goods. The pollution created by these ships is gargantuan, despite the shipping industry’s ludicrous attempts to acquire the PC-friendly veneer of "green transport." Shipping contributes to the wreckage of ecosystems by belching rapacious jellyfish and other foreign beasts out of their ballast tanks; shipping contributes over 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2 exhaust every year (a rapidly growing figure); particulate matter from shipping exhaust rains onto the earth by the thousands of tons every day, infusing even the Arctic snow with soot and hastening the Arctic melt. READ MORE

If I knew the world was coming to an end, I would fuck with impunity. I would crunch birth control pills between my teeth like they were pink Pez all day long. With the specter of annihilation on horizon, all would be carnage and I would need to start regularly shaving my legs.

I have a picture of every man I ever slept with. I’d pin each photo up on my living room wall, use a marker to rank each one based on looks, IQ and technique. I’d invite my friends over to drink and comment on the exhibition. I’d tell them all the secrets I was supposed to keep.

I’d grind RU-486 into my morning breakfast mush, just to be safe. Then I’d go steal one exquisite piece of clothing each day from a high-end department store. READ MORE

I have known some impatient people over the years who couldn’t wait for the end of the world.

So they killed themselves.

Eric and his mom lived in a one-room rental with a carport and no fence. Eric and my little brother and I all went to school together. My brother said people used to make fun of Eric because he didn’t wear clean clothes. He also said Eric liked to pick on other kids. From what I remember, Eric always had a smudge of dirt on his face, as if he dropped from the womb and landed in dirt, and the dirt stuck like a white-trash birthmark. Maybe that is why Eric was such an asshole.

After work one day, Eric’s mom found him hanging from a tree in their backyard. READ MORE

What, you thought we’d been canning our own goods for fun? That we set up farms on the roofs of buildings because we had nothing better to do? Carved “artists' lofts” out of crumbling factories because they’re so much more aesthetically pleasing? Let me let you in on a little secret here: for any disaster that's coming, the young Brooklynites? We’re ready to survive it.

We’ve already been experimenting with setting up our own sustainable communities. In fact, you may have read about them in the New York Times, in articles such as “A Commune Grows in Brooklyn” or pretty much any other Styles-section article with “Brooklyn” in the title. READ MORE

As crazy as it seems now, when I was a freshman in high school I was convinced that my life was going to end, healthy and unadulterated, sometime before December 31st 1988. Of course it’s common for sensitive teens to consider their mortality during those tumultuous years when the hormones start to kick in. But I was different. While other kids pondered death in the conventional fashion—that is, contemplating suicide while listening to the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now”—I came to terms with my mortality the old fashioned way. I learned about it in church.

The specifics of my doom were revealed to me when I was fifteen, in the basement of Bon Air Baptist in the exurbs of Richmond, Virginia. I was among a group of about twenty-five teens who'd assembled in the church's dark basement for Wednesday night youth group, primarily for the free pizza.

“The Antichrist is alive and well today,” Bon Air's youth minister Mike Honaker stated assuredly, waving a book called The Late Great Planet Earth above his head. READ MORE

9/22/12
New opening bit: Who do we got out here tonight? Hold on a minute. Is that…? Is that the Road Warrior out there? Do we got Mad Max out in the audience this evening? Wait. No, that’s just Tina Turner’s weave from Beyond Thunderdome. (Start singing “We Don’t Need Another Hero” and try to get the audience to sing and clap along.) Segue into: How is Mel Gibson still racist? There’s only one skin color now—dirt—and he’s that color, too!

9/26/12
Did a show at an actual comedy club instead of some six-legged-rat-infested dump—must still be in use because of its basement location/surplus of booze they had on Doomsday—and opened for Joan Rivers! Joan: “I told ya, yalousy bastards! Me and the fucking roaches!” Talked awhile with her afterwards. Great lady. Made plans to do another show in a month or so. Traded her a ton of make-up for some canned fruit and booze. Knew that fucking make-up would come in handy! READ MORE

As a child I realized I would die, and thought about it often. My parents, now divorced, both like to recount the time I made this sad, if fairly inevitable, discovery. We were driving by a cemetery; I asked if all animals died, then if people were animals, and when I got my answers, was quiet for a long time. In second grade, I realized that looking forward to summer vacation was the same as eating away at the balance of my time on Earth. It was hard to enjoy the tire swing after that. Two years later, it was even worse. My family went to Montreal (again, the summer) and to this day, I associate the Expos with my own flesh gone cold and rotting.

That fall, I came up with a solution. I would devote myself, steadfastly, to the end of the world. That would be my thing. READ MORE

About a year ago, without discussing it with one another, we each made a choice: Some of us were going to call this current year “two-thousand ten,” and some of us were going to call it “twenty ten.” For those going with the former, it was a mere continuation of the format we had used for the past decade. And those people were wrong. The double-digits format is easier and quicker to use now, just as it was for all the years we employed it before 2000, and just as it will be if we start to use it uniformly for the rest of this millennium. How do you pronounce “1789”? See, you don’t say “one-thousand seven-hundred eighty-nine.” Unless that’s a rare kind of autism, and you have it.

Twelve months later, society is still divided on what to call this year, and it seems we will be in conflict anew over what to call 2011. These are, after all, the Years of Our Lord, and He has to be getting pretty annoyed with us no longer being able to reach consensus on something as simple as what to call them. It’ll come as no surprise when we get to 2012 and He decides to finally put an end to this pathetic species. READ MORE

You go to hell. Or: hell comes to you. You are unemployed, pursuing work, any sort. You submit a cover letter so typo-ridden it breaks the Internet. The Internet, of course, is what braces the laws of thermodynamics. So now there’s a temperature colder than absolute zero. Though scientists keep that discovery quiet.

Initially it isn’t too bad, an indefinite shift, your coffee tasting like wine, your hair growing too fast, inert objects gleaming with raw and terrible life. In fact, it might just be you: you were always half-certain you’d lose your grip on things one day, and if not now, when? But reality is what’s unraveling—one can’t ignore the neighbor’s habit of standing on her porch in the mornings and sniffing each page of the newspaper, wincing at the smoky scent of information. READ MORE

Greetings.

I'm Patrick Cox, founder of Tax Masters. In these challenging times, there is nothing that can ruin your plans like tax uncertainty.

If you are looking at next year and concerned whether you should bother paying taxes, we can help. READ MORE

I can’t think of a better place to spend the apocalypse than Massachusetts, where the air is tinged with woodsmoke, survivalism, and the sneaking suspicion that, whatever it is we’ve got coming, we probably deserve it. This is what I remember from last time, anyway. It was this time of year in 1999, and we were holed up in one of those punk-cum-frat houses out by the railroad tracks, stocked with bottled water, vintage Metallica bootlegs and André. On New Year’s Eve there was a bonfire. At midnight, when the lights didn’t go out, we burned broken furniture and cardboard boxes, so it would at least feel like the end was near.

Carefully considered symbolic acts like these are common in Massachusetts, which should also explain why the only pact I’ve made in my adult life was rendered there. This was a few years later, 2003 or so, a time that felt so much like the future it was hard to imagine the future. In keeping with local (read: khaki) custom, this pact erred on the side of casual. No blood was drawn. It wasn’t even a secret. In fact, in the intervening years I’ve referenced it frequently, when cocktail conversation with an acquaintance old or new revealed a kindred nostalgia. “Listen,” I’d say, with the conspiratorial tone demanded of even the least cinematic pact. “There’s this thing you might be interested in. It’s called Massachusetts 2011.” READ MORE

One of the things I remember most vividly about the 1994 6.7 magnitude Northridge earthquake is the Budweiser six packs of canned water they gave each of us at my elementary school a week later. I also remember waking up about thirty seconds before the quake, and sitting up in bed, and the wood shelf that fell where my head had just been. I sat on the edge of the bed and I looked out the window into the darkness and for some reason I felt like I was deep underwater as the world lurched into a kind of long, undulating wave. It lasted for 45 seconds, which of course felt like an hour. When it was over, more than 9,000 had been injured and 72 died. There was $20 billion in damage. It might've been worse, had it not happened at 4:31 a.m., with few cars on the road.

But still the canned water was somehow the most memorable. Anheuser Busch plants near disaster sites often divert their operations from beer to water and donate it—Louisiana and Texas were full of the stuff post-Katrina. When you see those cans of water, you know things are really bad. (Though when you see those cans of water at age ten, you also think they're awesome, but here I digress.) And given our track record, I'm half-expecting to see those cans again in 2011, or at least some time in the next decade. After all, we're due. READ MORE

I do not believe in things like ghosts or astrology or gods who care if you eat shellfish, so I feel unwaveringly confident in saying that the world is not going to end in 2012. If I did believe that, I think I’d whittle away the rest of my time at a months-long beach party in Thailand, physically and mentally removed from cable news caterwauling and any chance that I’d humiliate my mother in a whiskey mishap. I’d dance and probably ease my negative opinions on drum circles, and, as the sun collapsed over the horizon, I'd find someone to hold hands with and stand before the boiling ocean. I’d try to have my eyes open the instant before I became ash, and my ashes united with the ashes of everything else, flitting into the black sky and the ancient silence.

I’m not sure if that’s how the Mayans envisioned it, and I’m not a Roland Emmerich fan, but it doesn’t really matter, because, again, the world is not ending in 2012. In fact, the world is not ending for a long, long time, and for me, that's the problem. READ MORE