27th July – waiting for the summer rain.

Just along from our barn, there is a small bridge over a dried-up river bed. It’s where me and my second best droog, Friend John, have taken to spending the daylight hours. I must admit, I had him down as a barely concealed tyrant when we first met. But I’ve since elevated him to second place behind Keith. It’s nothing to get carried away about – there is no third. It was all confirmed a couple of days ago when a poor hungry dog came barking at us. He had a bark just like my old dog, and I beckoned him closer to listen to what he was saying. Friend John, meanwhile, jumped over the side and hid behind the levee.

I coaxed him back by showing him how the dog was an expert recipient of a stroke, and knew exactly how to get the best out of that moment of adoration – do you think that dogs relish that attention for the rest of the day, replaying it in their minds, as we do when we become the fleeting object of a stranger’s unexpected affections? Or do they just squeeze the best out of it while it lasts? I made a mental note to create a new positivity-reinforcement card to say, “I will return as a dog”. Basically a good-natured idiot, he took a while to adapt to the stroking action, but the dog was patient with him. I jest. He seems to be very clever, in so far as two people without a shared language, can make such judgments about each other. It is in the new words that belong to neither language that his ingenuity is revealed.

We have been occupied by the prospekt of the imminent end of human civilisation. It goes like this: A.I. alone might do it; A.I. in the hands of a bad-actor would almost guarantee it. Putin is uneducated and capable of the cold cruelty of a psychopath, but Trump is all that, a moron, desperate, and the sort of dog that only knows he’s being tickled now. His only political conviction – to promote conspiracy theories, could not fit better with the malevolent use of A.I.. Add to A.I., war. The conflict appearing at your cinemas soon will be USA vs China. It may develop from the semi-final being played at the moment: Ukraine vs Russia; or it might be precipitated by some other event. But one way or another, the aspirant hegemon always finds a way to have a fight against the current one as soon as it thinks it’s big enough, and China’s just about there – even though the conflict always takes a long time to resolve, inflicts untold damage on the aggressor and its allies, and the nation that began the conflict as strongest, always wins. The interesting part of the story, though, is that the winner is seldom the one who triumphs in the conflict – a new power always emerges (see British Empire vs German Empire, out of which the USA became the new world power (and every serious conflict ever in the history of the world before that)))); and, what is more, the losers tend to win the peace.

This is the issue which has exercised me and Friend John most. Forget about who might emerge as the new world power after a China vs US spat for the moment, and think instead of the nations that might profit from a world which the USA no longer dominates. First off, all raw commodities will cease to be priced in dollars, and by that single act, the USA folds, since then it is no longer a country that can run on an unaffordable deficit, since no one will be obliged to seek dollars as a precursor to purchasing anything any longer. And that means that resource-rich countries will rise under a new world currency. It points to a sort of BRICS + Saudi Arabia alliance, who sell oil and other stuff that comes out of the ground to the rest of us. That sounds scary enough on its own before you consider its impact on the third horseman of the new apocalypse: climate change. The new world order will have no interest in pursuing a green agenda, in fact, it will desire the opposite, and there will be no one left to tell them, ‘No’. And of course, this will, in turn, herald the return of traditional, biblical, disasters back into global life – floods, pestilence, famine, and fire will become yet more commonplace than they are today. All this into a world that has already shown itself to be poorly equipped to prevent and manage pandemics – it will inevitably become more and more vulnerable to new ones. For most of us, life on earth is almost over. Both of us agree about this. Obvious innit? But here we part.

In this new world order, Friend John’s view is that a new stage of human prosperity will emerge. For one, he claims that each new epoch of human development is ALWAYS preceded by a pandemic. He mentions the Black Death and the Renaissance, something about the end of the Bronze Age, and something else, pretty terrible, about the end of the Roman Empire. All it does is make me think that Covid is a pretty lame way to go into an epochal change, and I start to think about it as a mere curtain-raiser, to the plague to which most of us will eventually succumb; resurgent cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, or maybe Ebola, or perhaps something new – Trump would introduce a viral nerve agent if it helped him win a game of darts. I digress. To Friend’s point: Space Billionaires will colonise the cosmos and the people who will run and manage the new territories will migrate from their base planet into their prosperous, clean, healthy and long-lived futures, inside a solar-powered space bubble. Humans, he claims, have an enormous proclivity to make massive leaps in scientific discovery when it’s needed. Living forever is no longer a pipe-dream for some, he adds, as a mere aside, as if we all know that, already. Oh crumbs. I don’t like it.

Perhaps it’s because it scares me, but I do wonder about all this. It was bad enough standing on the dockside waving away my contemporaries as the ship called fulfilment weighed anchor and chugged off towards the horizon, it’s quite another to be left standing on the runway as Elon Musk’s last batch of new pioneers leaves the abandoned earth to plunder another planet. It’s not so much the lack of beaches and dog walks that concern me, but the prospect of living for an eternity alongside the sort of people that are likely to qualify for such a trip. But lacking the facts and rhetorical skills to refute his argument, I turned the conversation towards suicide as a better, and more viable, alternative to the coming predicament.

The only thing that stops me, I tell Friend John, is my belief that if you don’t live out your allotted time, ending it by your own hand, that you will be damned to come back next time at the same level, whereas, if you see it through, you’ll step up a spiritual level for the next time around. It is the fear of repetition, I tell him, that is my sole impetus to keep going. And I am planning to return as a dog, I say, to hammer home the importance of the point. Friend tells me, with some conviction, that it’s not how it works. According to him, there is always a bit of everyone reborn in everyone. It’s how come I recognised my dog and knew how to chat to it, he says. I should reconsider the trip to the Nevsky Prospekt, he tells me, “It will be fun.”

I don’t know. Living in a floating space factory which Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have had a hand in designing, and decided what constitutes fun for the shipmates, AND where you might also live forever, is not the sort of prospekt that excites me much.

If I had a ticket I’d give it to someone else, I tell him. Though, if Chew-Chew were the only one who wanted it, I’d pretend to go, then get a tummy-ache in the departure lounge. That way at least, I’d be doing my bit for what remains of our race.