Dazed and Confused

I love disaster movies.

One of my earliest, fondest movie memories is that of seeing "The Poseidon Adventure" at the drive-in in 1972. I believe that I was capsizing boats in the bathtub for the next two years until my attention was turned to drawing/designing giant fireproof skyscrapers upon seeing "The Towering Inferno." These movies really exhilarated my young mind.

But the real-life disaster unfolding before us for the last few days does not give me the same sort of feeling. It really does seem like some sort of doomsday scenario is playing itself out before our very eyes.

From millions of sardines washing up dead in Redondo Beach (now theorized to be the result of a toxic algae bloom), through greedy politicians/corporations hellbent on redistribution of wealth which can best be described not as capitalism, but "reverse socialism," right on through to the earthquake and nuclear disasters still unfolding in Japan -- let me catch my breath -- one could says it plays like someone took the plots of "Rollerball", "Earthquake", "The China Syndrome", "The Final Programme" and threw them into a blender.

But it's not Doomsday -- I mean, that's silly, right? It's just that there's a palpable sense of anxiety in the air that I've not felt since the turn of the millennium. As I mentioned last week, at the time I had written a sci-fi/horror script that was never made. I'm prone to free-floating anxiety (anxiety with no obvious cause), and I believe that what made that script good was that I channeled my fears into it without conscious knowledge. A week after it's completion, with no outlet for my anxiety, I had a panic attack that landed me in the hospital one night.

As the years went by, my issues with free-floating anxiety subsided. Lately they seem to have returned. Perhaps that's why I feel the need to rant, as I mentioned in the earlier post.

Here's why that's kind of scary. If one read that script today, with no knowledge of the fact that it was written in early 1999, one might think I was reacting to the history of the past decade. Amongst other events in the script, there is a major terrorist attack and a stolen presidency. Let's hope those are my only predictions. The script was itself an apocalyptic zombie tale.

And those fish all seem to have been full of a dangerous neurotoxin.