How to Find Peace at the End of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

since my car is so low to the ground. I feel like I’m riding an elephant. I edge the Beast down the side street and onto the main street and turn it towards my house.

3:30 PM. I passed another plane crash on the way home. It had taken out half of the strip mall where I go for wings and trivia on Thursday nights. Or where I used to go for wings. No explosion or anything, just a bunch of debris all over the place, the only thing recognizable as plane like the tail and wings. A smaller plane, maybe one of those private jets. I briefly think about how much easier it would be if I could get a plane and fly it to Dallas. But then, I have no fucking idea how to fly a plane.

Other than the plane, nothing else has changed. Nothing has moved. The same cars, parked or crashed, exactly where they were since I passed them this morning. That pickup lodged in the lobby of the McDonalds. That compact wrapped around the sign for the gaudy Valentine that was the Heart-breakers sign. It’s weird because my mind expects a certain amount of dynamism, of change. My mind expects activity like blinking and blaring emergency vehicles, or at least the aftermath, the wound, patched up to an extent. Instead, no activity. I had crawled, edging down the road, keeping my eyes open for any sign, any movement. Nothing. The world looks feels like a diorama, a slice of frozen time that I’m crawling through, ant like.

I get home at 3:35 and the sun is making moves towards some clouds on the horizon. The pickup on the retainer wall. The garbage truck mid dump. The forgotten yard implements. The blower engine has stopped idling, though. I pull back into my house and even that feels weird: I’ve never seen it from this high up.
    I’d been plotting the whole way from work what to bring along. There is the computer where basically my whole life is contained: four terabytes of pictures (amazing and personal and pronographic), movies, TV shows, papers, all the way from high school, backups of books, notes, love notes, saved instant messenger conversations, everything.
    I debated the merits of other things. I didn’t have much that wasn’t digital. All the older photos were at my folks place up in Wichita. All the trappings of my childhood. Posters and old toys and things once special to me. I’m glad for it, to a certain extent. I feel free now, thinking of that faraway place, to focus on what I need, right away, what will get me to Dallas and the woman I love.
    I open the pantry. It’s floor to ceiling blue and red cardboard boxes. I don’t cook so there aren’t any utensils nor jars full of uncooked pasta nor spice bottles nor unused appliances-I was waiting for Amy to move down to purchase those. Instead at the very bottom there are ten boxes labeled: property of the U.S. government. Not for resale. This was from Rita not so long ago.
    I had a friend in the National guard and he stayed with me, showing up one night with the back of his car full of these medium sized boxes. We opened up a few of them on the days where all the local restaurants were still closed. Inside are pouches labeled with things like: Meat Loaf dinner. Beef Steak. Pork rib. Chicken Tortellini. Everything came in bags of thick plastic. Brown bags on the outside, and inside a puck of clear plastic hugging the vacuum sealed dinners. Tommy, my military friend, showed me how to cook them, cutting the flat bags open and filling them with water to the line, then stuffing them back into the thick brown bags so that the exothermic chemical reaction could heat the meals up. Just heat them up, of course, only got to a little over boiling. Some of them were quite good, tasted like good canned stuff. Some were horrible. It was food, though, food that would last. That was years ago, but not yet ten. He told me there was a shelf life of ten years. I often look in the pantry and wonder how the heck I’ll ever finish a hundred meals when it gets to the time to retire them. It’s been seven