Last Day of Fortitude

So today is my last day on the road, my sublet moves out of my place at 7. Last night I closed out the trip pretty well by going to the onion society for preservation of alcohol's free jameson giveaway and managed to get 3 whiskey's in during the 41 minutes before they ran out. Of course, now its 8'oclock and we are in full swing, which implies that after 3 hours of "who can throw onions or jameson shots into each others drinks", "who can make a worse playlist on the jukebox", and "who can put a cigarette out on their hand" (me), This crew of pretty much strangers was already going to bed, despite the fact that it was eleven. After a streetside taco, and a couple long, yet too short, phone calls to korea I went to sleep on my buddies couch in brooklyn, close enough to the airport to hear planes go over head.

I proceeded to have a dream set in the not so near future where the world is gripped by war a war for supremacy between the nuclear super powers U.S. and europe, and the want to be nuclear super powers, japan, perhaps india, and their ally china. It stemmed from the need of these countries to break international nuclear proliferation laws so they could gain the right to make nuclear weapons and get upgraded to superpower status. I was in this dream trying to survive in this seemingly apocalypitic circumstance with a friend of mine who currently runs a bucket factory. If our day to day was a hemingway novel it'd more like the sun also rises than a separate piece. Advancements in nuclear bombs and other technology made it so that we could hang out at bars in viewing distance from the battlefield. We could hang out a bar drinking and when they heard planes coming overhead with the bombs they had these lead walls they would put out there to protect you. One time my buddy got caught not behind one, and he was hit with a wave of radiation, he had to sit a couple plays out but he rallied. I guess everybody in this lifestyle gets hit with the radiation, medical advancements may have made it treatable, or our little world of bomb watchers were sufficiently grizzled. It was also kind of weird that we were in Japan. I guess it makes since, the world is globalized so if there was a world war there would be a bunch of people who stay over seas to work. So there we were in Japan watching America destroy their infrastructure with nuclear bombs, while getting drunk and talking to other expatriot women.

Then I woke up a couple hours before I planned and wondered what the dream meant. Maybe it expessed my inner frustration with america's complacency with its position of the lone global super power. With no real superpowers to distract us we're spreading ourselves thin and weakening our ability to protect ourself from a large scale army because we're focusing on terrorists. Kind of like a bear spending all of its attention trying to kill ants. Meanwhile all these other countries are advancing their technology and manufacturing while ours are weakening. Our moving our manufacturing overseas isn't helping either. Perhaps my dream comes the sense that the state where most of the WWII tanks were made is sending their manufacturing jobs to mexico, how can we mobilize for a war when all our plants are closed. Then I really couldn't go back to sleep. I kept wondering how the war would have turned out, the U.S. was winning when i woke up, so that was good, and we were on our way into a korean restaurnat with a good view of the japanese airbase that was getting bombed, so that would of been cool too.