APOCALYPSE
Daily Telegraph - April 2007

When the tsunami didn't happen this week, was I the only one disappointed? Judging by the number of people left standing on clifftops holding cameras, apparently not.

And who could blame them? What with rising sea levels, the renewed threat of nuclear war, bird flu and Starbucks outlets multiplying like bacteria, I can't be alone in my impatience for the apocalypse to just hurry up and happen already.

I have had apocalyptic fantasies for some time now, but it is difficult to tell when they began. Perhaps after Ronald Reagan launched Star Wars and my mother announced, with a straight face that if there was ever a nuclear war we could always live on the property my father had purchased in the mountains.

Maybe it's just a standard male thing. I'm not sure; I don't trust psychiatrists.

Whatever the case, my doomsday fantasies have, over the years, grown increasingly baroque. My bunker is the centrepiece of my apocalypse survival plan, lists of who is and is not allowed inside it now occupying me in the way fantasy football teams obsess other, more healthy, individuals.

There are very strict requirements for a place within my bunker's steel-reinforced concrete walls. Successful applicants will have to have a good balance of skills, but not so good as to threaten my position as top dog.

My friend Nick, for instance, has been bugging me for a spot for ages and, although he offers useful talents in wood chopping and motor repair, his ego is far too big to risk. I've seen Lord of the Flies and there'll only be room for one choir leader on my island.

The apocalypse will test me both physically and mentally.

There will be little room for sentiment. Therefore, although I love my parents, they are approaching an age of limited usefulness, and so will nobly volunteer (at my suggestion) to sacrifice themselves on the radioactive tundra to ease the burden on the youthful pioneers who will carry on their now-mutated genes.

We'll name a future city after them or something.

Women are, of course, welcome in my bunker -- under the proviso they are prepared to have at least a dozen children. In the apocalypse there will not, unfortunately, be much room for the professional woman, careers being limited for the most part to raiding parties on surrounding communities and stripping corpses of valuables.

The upside is that it will be the responsibility of mothers to train these hordes of children into an army of the future, which we will need in our on-going war against marauding bikie gangs and feral cats grown to the size of compact cars.

With so much talk of the apocalypse, the only worse than it happening is waiting for it. I'm tired of waiting. I don't want an apocalypse tomorrow.

I want an apocalypse now.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008