Last Call On The Titanic

I’m on the upper deck, getting some air. The music is still playing, meal service is proceeding, people are still dressed up and sitting out. The waiter apologizes for sake being unavailable. Meanwhile, a bulkhead explodes downstairs and three hundred people drown.

We’re actually in Colombo, on a rooftop, having sushi. Though sake actually is unavailable. I look out over the bamboo, look back at the people having dinner and everything seems fine. But I know beams are breaking and ice water is flooding underneath. It feels obscene.

I wrote about this in the past tense before, about the collapse during the war. But this is somehow worse. War was hell for the people in the north and the poor sent to fight it out, but for most people in Colombo, the bombs were mainly inconvenient. This wholesale economic collapse affects everyone. Fuel, money, medicine, it affects everything, and it’s all running out.

As I wrote about then:

Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.

Now here I am again.