I’m nostalgic for your brand of practice disaster,
your dress-up apocalypse pop-up shops
and school bus bunkers waiting with flats
of tin can dinners for the ball to drop,
nostalgic for the simplicity of your question:
whether modern life stood on nothing more
than strands of old code, a few worn fibers
holding up the whole frame.
Who knows? you seemed to say,
it was a good run, and maybe retracting
like an industrial tape measure back to yore
without electricity or running water
would be good for us, too soft, too
comfortable with our start-ups
and millennium pop songs. I confess, I liked
to say your initials, all caps like a license plate
on a Studebaker, hard K that signaled
a kitsch of danger. Like Oz
behind the curtain on its tinkered pulley,
you were all preface, setting up some high school
prank where we know it’s a stunt but go
along with the staging anyway because we love
a good strobe light and punch bowl.
Before txtng would consume language,
small towns slung into opioid stupor,
social media-eroded hours, before orange alerts
and orange tyrants, wars we couldn’t end,
school lockdown shooting sprees,
fire seasons that would parch the west,
hurricanes that would steal cities—the list is long,
Y2K, do you think you can stay up late enough?
Did you see it all coming in your lines of legacy code,
how the unraveling would be so slow we might
just miss it, doom-scrolling and doordashing,
rage-tweeting, masked and shutdown, 20/20, right
into a pandemic no one thought to be scared of?
I walked through a Midwest neighborhood
that last night—did we ever firmly agree
when the century officially ended and began?—
saw families in lawn chairs in their stockpiled
garages with coolers of beer casually rooting
for the ruins. If this was the apocalypse
they would go down quietly with hot wings
by the light of a mini antenna tv. Pitched toward
the futurama of flying cars and space pods and
freeze-dried meals, you offered up this Frankenstein
ruse at the rise of big tech, where we would
count down, zone by zone and some invisible binding
that held us would let go. I miss that
teenage melodrama, the metallic-painted amateur hour
you gathered the world around and did nothing
but usher us into the continuation of the story,
and when you died down and time was revealed
to be a construct that wouldn’t kill us, we resumed
living toward all the other things that would.
That night hospitals gave whistles to their patients
just in case the call-bells failed to ring nurses.
Y2K, I think we might be blowing them decades
too late and it turns out that we can’t hear
a cry for help the way we used to.
