Collective Chaos
What does it feel like when the world ends? And how about when it starts back up again?
Alex DeOrio
When wildfires began raging in Canada, not too far from the New York State border, the fallout ended up being a bit more than any of us expected. At sunrise, New York City was still enveloped by that welcoming hazy dawn we’ve come to know so well. By 9am, an eerie gray fog had rolled in from the north. By 1pm, the entire skyline was all but invisible, swallowed by smoke. By 5pm, the entire northern Atlantic region of the United States had become a setting for “The Book Of Eli.” Our entire world had become engulfed by a hideous piss-yellow filter, like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust in a dystopian novel. Chernobyl without the radiation. It was reminiscent of a very grim day in 2001, though still unlike anything any of us had ever seen. The smell of charred wood was so thick you could taste it, as if the neighbors were hosting an unventilated barbecue. The air quality had been polluted to the point where the mayor urged everyone to stay inside and keep the windows shut.
Within 48 hours, the smog was gone and the world went back to normal. Or at least some version of it. That being said, a return to normalcy isn’t the theme here. The point here is that once again, for the ump-teenth time, we as a society were dragged into collective chaos.
Yesterday just so happened to be the 20th year of The Blackout of ‘03. I’ll never forget it. It was a sweltering August day. The dust still hadn’t settled from 9/11 less than two years prior. I was leaving the beach around 4 pm, crossing the Robert Moses Bridge, when I noticed all the radio stations were dead. The car radio produced nothing but static. In unison with the static was the cacophonic roar of fire truck sirens in the distance. A foreboding apocalyptic vibe all too familiar from the horrors of September 11th.
Once I reached the mainland, I was informed by a traffic cop that the entire eastern United States was in a blackout. One could argue that we couldn’t catch a break. First the twin towers collapse. Then an ex-sniper-turned-psychopath and his stepson drive around Washington D.C. gunning down random people with an AR-15, without any rhyme or reason. Then Uncle Georgie decides it would be a good idea to invade Iraq. And now this: the return of the Summer Of Sam.
Americans were built for this shit, especially by that point. And in yet another example of collective chaos, our machinations of destruction subsided and we took this for what it was. Just another crisis.
Despite our resilience, there’s still no stopping anarchy. You see, there are two things that happen during a state of Code Red. The first is that the freaks come out of hiding. All the misfits, outcasts, outlaws and what-have-yous take a break from hibernation and come out to play. Anyone reading this likely still has the surrealism of 2020 fresh in their memory, so this should come as no surprise. The second thing, however, is a more troubling phenomenon. While the thugs come out of hiding, so do true colors. When ordinary civilians give in to hysteria and let their emotions get the better of them, things become unpredictable. If a bunch of patients escape a psych ward or a group of convicts breaks out of prison, your first instinct is to run, hide, and lock your doors (and maybe grab a gun). But when you’re out and about amongst Bob the furniture salesman and Karen the soccer mom, you have no way of knowing what you're going to get.
I saw some interesting things that night. A married couple took it upon themselves to impersonate police officers and make their own checkpoint at the entrance to their block. I wasn’t there when the real police showed up. Though from what I heard, the verbal exchange alone would’ve been a viral hit had YouTube been around at the time. While that was going on, about a half dozen friends and I crept up the driveway of a house where we knew the owners were on vacation. We pushed their 25-foot motorboat on top of a trailer out of the driveway, across Montauk Highway toward a boat launch and eventually into the Great South Bay, only to discover that even though the key was in the ignition, there wasn’t enough gas and all the gas stations were shut down due to the power outage.
It seemed as if the entire tri-state area was having one big block party. When the radio stations came back on, we could hear FunkFlex dropping the bomb in the background, encouraging the world to celebrate like it was the end. Everywhere you looked, people were leaving their cars on the side of the road and getting out on foot. My boy Si lit a bonfire on his front lawn and threw a Blackout bash. Over 200 people pulled up. Then his neighbor around the corner tried to copy him by starting his own bonfire, except it spread across the lawn and burned the poor bastard’s house down.
People were turning vigilant. A lot of looting broke out. I remember walking up to the Mobil to get beer. The owner, Pakistani Dean as he was known, was sitting on a lawn chair right out front, armed with a Mossberg shotgun along with an arsenal of pistols patiently waiting--just waiting--for somebody to try something.
To stoke the madness--as well as to get to the point of this post--there were a slew of outrageous, ridiculous, hilarious, and sometimes terrifying rumors passed around. The most common one, understandably, was that it was terrorists. As for the rest: aliens, sea monsters (I shit you not), a biblical plague, Japanese payback for World War II, and this one dude who told me he thought his brother-in-law did it.
That’s what you call collective chaos. And it was this collective chaos that swarmed the network around me while I was in the hospital after getting shot. The rumors. The suspicions. The never-ending medical revelations pertaining to how they’ve managed to keep me alive so far.
“Who shot Alex?? Who would do such a thing??”
“It was the mob!”
“Nooo it was his ex-girlfriend dude. She set him up!”
“It was the Italians. I told him to stop hangin’ around those guys by the cafe!”
“It was that crackhead I always see around.”
“Had to be someone he was in jail with. Mark my words.”
“It was those gangsters from Jersey. It was them.”
“It was Mikey Botz. I don’t know how I know. I just know. I’m calling his mom.”
“Are we in danger?”
“Do we not know Alex as well as we thought we did?”
“I thought he was a good guy.”
“Is it possible this guy’s a gangster? I heard he was mobbed up.”
“I heard he’s braindead.”
“Half his face is gone.”
“He’ll never talk again.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yeah, man. He’s dead.”
“Oh my God! He’s dead??”
And so on. Once again, it was the same contagion that takes place during a national disaster. Collective chaos. Family. Friends. Enemies. Acquaintances. Strangers. Cops. Gangsters. Lawyers. Doctors. Nurses. Everyone who encountered me in some way, shape or form over the years. They were all affected, or I suppose infected, by the same mass hysteria we experienced during 9/11, COVID-19, JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, Y2K. Here to stay. It goes for you. It goes for me. Our lives are no different. A crisis is a crisis. A war is a war. And in a war there are heroes and villains. Some survive. Some don’t. I survived. And I intend to keep it that way.
Eli Kimbell
Every so often, there are moments in time that demand a critical mass of attention and can only exist with an adequate level of cooperation from the whole. In New York, the threshold for these kinds of monumental events pushes the border of comprehension towards the territory of insanity, and the meeting of these blurred lines can result in crises of faith that force even the most down-to-earth, dreamless entities to consider suspending their disbelief.
The thought for this week’s post came from Alex, who was reminiscing (this might be a kind word to use) on the blackout of ‘03 and the nearly immediate collective chaos that ensued. I was five and remember very little. However, there are other events in my lifetime that belong in this category of “when the world ends.” Whatever the defining characteristic is of the moment--in this case, a citywide blackout--it has enough horsepower to hog the spotlight, not just within the news cycle but nestled in the thoughts of every person that is affected in any way.
And the rest fades away, completely unimportant. You just went through a divorce? Too bad, there’s a blackout and we don’t have the capacity to truly care about that right now. You got a promotion at work? The smoke just rolled in from Canada and us earthlings are drooling, phone cameras at the ready, faces plastered against the nearest window to see what all the hullabaloo is about. You just got into law school? It’ll have to wait, it’s Election Day and Steve Kornacki is strutting his stuff in front of the interactive electoral map.
Sure, we all have our individual moments that can share the energy of a grade school snow day in the way catastrophic or monumental events tend to do, but rarely, particularly if you live in a city of 9 million souls desensitized to batshit, does an event that only affects a select few of those 9 million wield the same power of scale that a DeBlasio-era snow day does.
Our snow day was March 10th, 2023. For me personally, it was March 11th. I woke up late that day. I was half awake, hungover from a night out with friends, testing every odd bodily configuration from under the covers to see, unsuccessfully, which one would stop my skin from crawling. As I wallowed, I got a call from my mom, who as calmly as she could explained to me that Alex had been shot and was in critical condition.
At the time, I’d been in a creative rut and hadn’t written a word in months. And in times of change, uncertainty, catastrophe or triumph, I take time to process, so my unconscious mind can inhale, hold a breath, funnel it neatly towards a window and draw a smiley face in the fog. And hopefully that smiley face comes in the form of writing.
To others, maybe it seems like I don’t care when the world ends. I never freak out. I stay calm. But don’t mistake my meditation for insincerity or coldheartedness. I’m just thinking, or letting my mind catch up. And so if you look at me, everything seems normal.
What happened to Alex was not normal. Humans are not built to expertly process tragedy like this, especially when it comes in the unnatural form of a bullet. And when that tragedy does not result in death, the episode doesn’t end. How can you grieve someone that is still very much alive? Is grieve even the right word?
I can list a number of snow days in my life and tie their threads together. Often I react in similar ways, calmly, with differing objects of that calmness. During my freshman year of college, my roommate had a bipolar episode after skipping his meds over the week prior and proceeding to take roundabout 17 shots of vodka. Bad combo, my friend. As 18-year-old kids, I and my two other roommates did what we could to calm him down, and took the situation as seriously as we could despite the fact that he was hallucinating, speaking in a code only he could comprehend, and sparklingly clad in a full-body bacon costume and wayfarers. Sublime. His night ended when two public safety officers put him in handcuffs and whisked him away to the hospital. I smoked my first ever cigarette and then went out and danced my face off. What was I supposed to do, sit in my room and just think about it?
On Election Day 2020, I was in my first year of grad school at the University of Richmond. After we left practice that Tuesday, and because we had nothing better to do, and because there was nothing anyone should have been doing except watching the polls come in, I and my two grad transfer roommates invited our three freshman throwing partners over to sit out by the fire, make some hot toddies (the South had an immediate effect on me) and play some drinking games while we watched Steve Kornacki (a.k.a. Map Daddy) unintentionally seduce every straight woman and gay man in America with his pure, unfettered reliability.
There were three democrats and three republicans in that house on Matoaka Road in the old capital of the confederacy, and as the night crescendoed, we took to playing a drinking game called Civil War, which is essentially a free-for-all, chaotic version of 3v3 beer pong. What were we supposed to do, just sit on the couch in silence and self-flagellate? I’d rather watch all 220 pounds of my roommate, who we called Buck, go down like a sack of potatoes on our tile basement floor after slipping on a pool of spilled beer.
When you don’t know what to do when the blizzard comes, all you can really do is situate yourself in the eye of the storm and ride it out. You just do what makes sense in the moment, because nothing else matters. And on the morning of March 11th, 2023, I got my ass out of bed and went to the café down the street to write. It was the only thing that made sense. And it was oddly normal. And it was the only thing that could connect me to Alex in that moment. And I had to write about him somehow, some way, because everything in his life prior to that moment had led to this, and as a family, we rarely got into the weeds with any of it. I didn’t know what my thoughts were, but I had to put them on paper, even though I couldn’t see a smiley face in the window yet. Hell, I hadn’t even exhaled. What was I supposed to do, stay writhing in bed, shamefully perusing our family’s past to find an answer for why no one, including myself, forcefully dragged him out of the life that led him to greet death and offer an eye as rent for the remainder of his natural life on earth?
It’s probably more fruitful to smoke a cigarette, dance my head off, drink hot toddies, watch gravity move Buck faster than he’s ever moved before, and then write, and continue writing, until the therapeutic qualities of seeing my thoughts come to life leap off the page and form something from nothing; a familial relationship that has never existed like it does today. And in this case, I know it’s the thing to do because that café where I went on the morning of March 11th is no longer just a café, it’s Pirate University. See you there later today, Al.