Friday, January 25

Right ascension 16 47 47.9
Declination -75 18 19
Elongation 80.4
Delta 0.57 AU

Josh McCown is frowning as he peers at the cellphone I have handed to him.  The light from the video illuminates his face, flashing occasionally as the images on the screen change.  He doesn’t say a word until it’s finished, at which point he smiles wryly and hands me back my phone.

“So, what do you think?” I ask.

He sighs, the vague smile still lingering on his face.  “I don’t know.  I mean, it doesn’t make any particular sense.  I don’t see why you’re so fascinated with it.”

Josh is sitting in a booth across from me at Gigi’s Cupcakes.  It’s one of only a few places that has changed very little since the announcement.  Since hyperinflation kicked in, it’s generally been difficult to actually pay for anything other than via a barter system, but the owners of this place, fellow members of the NFL fraternity, are suffering from advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy and aren’t able to store it in their long-term memory that the wads of cash we hand them every time we drop by are essentially worthless as anything other than toilet paper.

I glance at Ryan to see if he has any interest in attempting to follow this conversation, but he doesn’t seem to.  Ever since the announcement – and the realization that he no longer needs to play ball with the NFL’s testing regime – he’s spent the vast majority of his time in a weed-induced stupor, and today is no different.  He’s munching on another cupcake, probably his third since we sat down, and is gazing placidly out the window.  I decide to give it a shot anyways.

“Hey, Harvard, what do you think?”

He glances at me.  He reaches up, slowly, to take off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of eyes so pink they match the walls of the cupcake shop.  “Think about what, Stretch?”

“This video.”

He blinks at me.  “I don’t know, man.  ‘Most Glorious Communist Party’?  Sounds like some propaganda nonsense.”

I guess he was paying attention after all.

“I think it says ‘Commentist’,” Josh interjects.

“That makes even less sense. Even to me.”

Ryan has fully come to terms with the fact that he’s given up.  It’s kind of a moot point, because we’re all going to be destroyed – every multicellular organism on the planet is expected to perish – so there’s not really any such thing as not giving up, but whatever it still means to have given up, that’s exactly what Ryan is doing.

Even though Josh has more experience, Ryan is definitely the smartest of our little cadre of journeymen.  He’s got a degree in economics, so it really put the zap on his head to see the entire world economy get upended.  I suppose there might have been a point during his education where some professor in a tweed jacket talked about the cascade of effects that would occur in a local economy following a catastrophe like a tsunami, but I don’t think that same professor would have had much of a theory about what would happen if that catastrophe were predicted a good solid two weeks in advance, and if that catastrophe was definitively going to be the end.  Of that local economy, and of the global economy, and of everything else.

—

Mere moments after Rex Burkhead plunged into the end zone in overtime of the AFC Championship, sending the Patriots to the Super Bowl for the third year in a row, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an online poll of the question “Who would you prefer to see win the Super Bowl in 2019?” on their website.  The choices were: the New England Patriots, the Los Angeles Rams, or A VERY LARGE METEOR.  The meteor won by sixty-five percentage points.

We all had a good laugh, until eighteen hours later, when NASA announced that a meteor approximately the size of the state of Rhode Island would be striking somewhere on the southeastern seaboard of the United States at 6:30 p.m. on February 3, 2019.

—

“Have you ever met him before?” Josh asks me.  He doesn’t want to admit that his curiosity has been piqued, but it has.

“I have not.”

“He’s kind of an unusual dude.”

“Yeah, I get that.  I mean, maybe this is just him going crazy.”

“Maybe, but…I never got the impression that was unstable.  He was pretty political, but he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist.”

“So what on earth is he talking about here?”

Ryan finally speaks up.  “The first thing to do is to figure out how the two of you are connected.  Why is he reaching out to you?  And why does he think you need this kind of encouragement?  It’s obviously not football related; none of us will ever be playing another down.”

None of us will ever be playing another down, but that doesn’t mean that football is finished.  Despite a good three days of strident insistence by all the astronomical communities in the world that this was really happening, that we really were doomed, the vast majority of people in the world insisted that it was a hoax.  It wasn’t until Neal DeGrasse Tyson had cashed out every single one of his investments and appeared on an isle in the Caribbean covered head to toe in cocaine residue and surrounded by a dozen of the most expensive prostitutes in the world that more than just a few people started to take it seriously.  The subsequent run on banks caused massive inflation of every currency, as people rushed to acquire enough food, liquor, and drugs to last them what would be the final week of their lives.

But none of that changed the plans for Super Bowl LIII.

“We don’t believe that it’s true,” the NFL said in a statement read on national television by Roger Goodell, “but even if we did, the game would still go on.  If this truly is the end of civilization, and of humanity, all we can do at the end is to spend time with our loved ones, and spend that time doing something we love.  And is there anything we love more than football?”

“My point is that you need to start with the part that does make sense,” Ryan says.

Josh raises his eyebrows.  It’s not obvious to him.

“He said ‘don’t let the small men get you down’,” Ryan says patiently.  “Can you think of any ‘small men’ he might be referring to?”

I practically slap myself on the forehead when I realize how oblivious I’ve been.

Ryan smiles at my dawning realization.  “Yeah, the wheels are turning now.  You got somebody you think maybe you should call?”

—