Happy Birthday to Me

And what has happened in a year? Nothing. I am one year fatter. One year older. One year closer to the day when I will be thrown out on the street like a used-up tool, discarded, left to die in the gutter because my owners no longer have any use for me. One more year of watching this nation, which once had a dream regardless of its many, many flaws, slip towards nightmare and collapse, dreams dead or twisted into lies that terrify in the night. And the world slowly winds down as resources are exhausted and life becomes harder every year, until in the end humanity eats itself. Will there be mankind in the end? Perhaps. Perhaps. A few hunter-gatherers living in the poisoned ruins of civilization, dodging the dead zones where radioactivity renders the land unfit for life or poisons in the waters kill anybody who drinks from them. And maybe some small child shall wander and come to the ruins of a building and ask his father, "What is this, daddy?" and his father shall only be able to shake his head and say "Once upon a time we were a better people."

Or maybe it will be only cockroaches in a poisoned blasted land, until some billions of years hence, the burning-out Sun expands and turns the burned out husk of the Earth into vapor.

Or maybe only dust, on a radioactive and poisonous planet incapable of life. In the end it really does not matter, because I will be dead. I have no delusions about that. And once you're dead, that's it. Game over. Gone to dust, like every other animal when it dies. And a hundred years from now, no one will remember my name, or care. That is reality, cold and harsh and implacable, a reality that many flee from and hide behind lies to avoid facing. But so it goes. Penguins aren't much on the whole lying thing. Not many lies on an ice floe in the South Pacific, just sun, and wind, and reality.

-- Badtux the Gloomy Penguin