Pursuing insight, I spent a couple of days at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in England. I called the woman I’d been told was the most farsighted person at FEMA. I talked to any self-identifying and not instantly, obviously insane futurologist who’d answer a query—Bill Lilly at the New School for Human Advancement was especially accommodating. I spoke with someone at the Vatican. The Vatican actually has a future expert, essentially a house Book of Revelation wonk. In short, I want you to know that I tried and tried, for months, to write about something other than what I’ve ended up writing on here, a tangent that came up early in the research but immediately screamed career killer and was repeatedly shunted aside by this reporter in favor of things like out-of-control nanotechnology of the near future (which, you’ll be delighted to hear, is something they’re fairly concerned about at the Future of Humanity Institute). But as I tried every way I knew to find some legitimate half-truths about the future for you to read about on your flight to Dallas or wherever your loved ones live—and I do suggest that you visit them soon, as in this year, I really do—the problem became that people who make a profession of thinking seriously about the future won’t really tell you anything that isn’t cautious, hedged, and quadruple-qualified, because, as I came slowly to comprehend and deal with, no one knows what’s going to happen in the future.

My surprise at this pretty obvious-seeming realization showed me the extent to which, thanks to Hollywood or my own paranoia or whatever, I’d unconsciously internalized a belief in the existence of some guy, some prematurely middle-aged guy, either Jewish or Asian (or, in the comedy version I sometimes screen internally, Irish), who sits in a room in the bowels of some governmental building and actually knows what’s going to happen in the future, whose mutterings need to be heeded, whose moods must be tracked with concern if not alarm, and whose very existence is a cause all over the world of slight, constant anxiety, and properly so. Is this a dying spasm of the religion gene? Probably. All I know is that it came as a great liberation to me, having this creature expunged from my imagination, with his alert levels and his survival kits and all his total crap that he goes on about while with the left hand building nukes and starting wars. I reminded myself that incessant potential catastrophe is the human condition, is in fact the price of possessing consciousness, and I determined to live with greater ease from now on, and not to let anyone scare me about the future, because the truth is, the worst thing that could ever happen to you is death, and that’s going to happen despite all your worry and effort, so it’s simply irrational not to say fuck it. I’m not saying start chain-smoking cloves and having unprotected sex with seaport trannie bar girls, though neither am I saying to abjure those things if they’re what make you feel most alive. I’m just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do. And these thoughts were so edifying to me, and I really looked forward to sharing them with you, hoping they might lighten your load along the road.

Then I was introduced to a person called Marcus Livengood.

Good day, sunshine.

– John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his essay Violence of the Lambs in GQ. The essay is terrific and I encourage you to read the piece. A wonderful collection of his essays, including this one, is available in a new book entitled Pulphead: Essays.