gategrrl

Okay. It's been weeks now since I read through The Stand. Months, even. And I cannot shake the premise of that book out of my head. It's like sand that gets in your shorts and invades all those little places that later you have to shower out, and hope you get all those irritating grains from where they've lodged.

I'll be driving down the freeway and imaging the roads empty, the neighborhoods dark, the houses empty (except for all the bodies rotting away). And it won't go away.

I'm starting to wonder if there's more to it. I've read lots of SF, and this isn't really a new premise to work from. Maybe it's how all the stuff was left behind, like a giant ghost town. All those photographs, memories, dreams, lying around with all their owners dead. All that stuff, there, still existing and yet with no meaning.

There's something even more frightening, somehow, about that scenario than the usual one in which a bomb destroys everything, leaving an enormous pit of glass where all the people and their stuff used to be.

And there are so many things that King didn't even touch upon, when it came to his characters' survival. So much of modern stuff ages fast. Elastic. Batteries. Cloth. Clothing would last for a while, but eventually even that would get brittle. Paper. So many things in this modern world are made to destroy itself (planned obsolescence).

I'm starting to think there's only one way to make this go away. sigh Gonna have to write it out.