The Doomsday Clock (redux)
“still life, with gooseberry” Vol.1
Chapter Two within my eleventh self-published book “still life, with gooseberry” is one of the briefest in a book totalling over 450 pages, but as we’re on the cusp of the yearly ritual of wheeling the damn thing out and back onto our televisions to scare the populace witless, I thought it time (geddit?) to showcase this brief and early chapter from a book I’m immensely proud of and which is available in both paperback and hardback and also free to read should you have an Amazon Kindle “Unlimited” membership.
I hope you’ll be intrigued to take a peek at the contents of the book via the link below and hopefully enticed into supporting an indie author.
Thanks.
"still life, with gooseberry" - link to Amazon
The Doomsday Clock
My heart goes out to the Doomsday Clock. For 364 days of the year it sits untouched, unwanted and unloved in a Harry Potter style cupboard under the stairs and then, its big day! It’s wheeled out to the glare of the media, the hubbub and flashbulbs of a worldwide press desperate to propagate yet another…
My heart goes out to the Doomsday Clock.
For 364 days of the year it sits untouched, unwanted and unloved in a Harry Potter style cupboard under the stairs and then, its big day! It’s wheeled out to the glare of the media, the hubbub and flashbulbs of a worldwide press desperate to propagate yet another story full of fear, death and existential angst to foist upon the plebs and the great unwashed and then, with the task of pumping fear around the world duly completed and everyone fully aware that we’re still 30 seconds to Mars, the poor old thing is wheeled back to its dark dungeon under the stairs for another year.
So my heart goes out to the Doomsday Clock.
Growing up, I always remember this being a throwaway item at the end of the “News at 10” late at night here in the UK. Grave tones were used by the newscaster and that “experts” at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists had moved the arms of the clock closer not to Mars but to Midnight, and our impending doom as a human species.
War
Climate Disasters
AI
Bio Terrorism
The shopping list of doom grows longer with each and every passing year, but even as a kid I knew this to be an oddity and a surreal item of “news” reserved for the graveyard slot normally filled by a feel good item at the end of a barrage of doom and gloom to keep the populace fearful and compliant.
But all these years later this grisly sideshow continues and the carnival of the bizarre never leaves town anymore.
It’s just another news item full of fear.
It’s just another Tuesday on Planet Starbucks.
I’ve written at length on the vaudevillian strangeness that is the Doomsday Clock before, and at much more length, so I won’t rehash it all again. But my heart does go out to the Doomsday Clock even in spite of the plainly obvious facts that (a) it’s utter madness (b) a piece of plastic (c) manually adjusted (d) not even a real clock, just a quarter size! and (e) utter fucking madness.
So please don’t take it or this article seriously.
Just feel the fear.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.