What I'd Like to See Happen

(Here comes a poorly prepared, not fully thought out, uncaffinated rant. Prepare yourself.)

No more oil. We wake up tomorrow and the headlines about who won what and where in Super Tuesday have been pushed aside, and in there place stand cool, dark, forbidding words telling of certain doom: No more oil. Somehow, every single oil well everywhere has dried up, all of a sudden. All we have left of the sticky black substance is all that we have left. People panic and, despite the government's and Exxon's and Shell's and BP's and Chevron's assurances that 'we will find oil elsewhere!', rush all at once to the gas station to get their one last fix. The lines go on for miles, but I laugh and instead make about a billion trips back and forth to the grocery store on my bike, carrying as much as I can, because only I (and my roommates and friends and people I like) realize what's going to go first -- not the commute to work, but the infrastructure of necessary services and goods.

In a matter of days, everything's come to a standstill. A few dazed people wander the streets, in silent panic, but there's no monster from which we can run, nor in any direction, safety. Electricity's availability comes into question, and soon we're limited to a few headlines every few days. Apparently, all the oil executives (and their ridiculously wealthy friends/board members) have all gone bankrupt from their vain attempts to find new oil wells, and they and their families and trust funds are out on the street. Too bad all that money can't buy much anymore, not even a phone call, since cellular and most landline service went out. Makes it hard to call home.

There's not a lot left for me here in L.A., and it's come to everyone's attention a little late that this city really is impossible to navigate without a car. School's out indefinitely, so cue a road trip as I decide to pack it all in and bike up to San Francisco. If I can't call my parents I feel I'd best go find them, make sure they're surviving. I fashion a sort of bike trailer to haul all my food with me -- I can leave the rest of my stuff in LA, it's not going anywhere -- and set off for the 101. The 5 runs through too much desert and if the 101/Mission Trail good enough for the Spanish Monks, it's good enough for me. Plus nice ocean views. Although lots of hills.

I arrive in Norcal a couple of weeks later, to find San Francisco hanging on, barely, though faring better than L.A. I cross the Bay Bridge on bike for the first time, with no daytime traffic (also for the first time), and find my parents to be well and at home, having figured out some really clever way of getting by because, after all, they had to produce a kid as clever as me.

San Francisco, thankfully, is equipped for the Green Revolution (hippies + silicon valley engineers = handy after all!), and leads the way in restoring things -- well, at least we think we're leading the way, we don't really hear much from the rest of the country or world these days (the only sad part of this story). In a few months time, there are glimpses of normalcy once again and within a year life has been restored to almost how we knew it, only better. People decided that, they didn't really like that commute and that job anyway, so they're going to stay home and help install the new solar panels in their complex or tend their new front-lawn-turned-vegetable-garden, and so the pace of life slows and becomes a very nice as-close-to-communist-as-you-can-get-without-actually-being-officially-instituted system of commune-ities where people find they get on just fine without Wi-Fi and HDTV. Also, no one can be bothered manufacturing chemicals or pesticides or Doritos or other harmful relics of the post-industrial era anymore, so everything cleans up considerably.

I spend a lot of time chilling and playing Beatles songs on my guitar until I decide to start a business transporting food around with my bike and little trailer, and it turns out to be pretty damn profitable, since people (though now more enlightened) are still too lazy to go out and buy all their (now organic) groceries themselves. Eventually someone invents an airplane or rocket or super fast boat that runs on sunshine or rainbows or something so I can travel around the globe and visit all my friends in other countries. And life is pretty cool. Also in there somewhere some media is restored and we find out that (although we assume Global Warming has been mostly stopped) drought and hurricanes and generally nasty conditions are affecting all the predominantly Republican areas of the USA, and that Dick Cheney has accidentally shot himself in the face (but no one can really tell). Oh, irony, you saucy mistress.

And I will never have to find a real job. Ever. :)