I’ve been getting serious about buying an El Camino lately. It’s stupid for so many reasons: I don’t have the money, or the space, or the mechanical aptitude. But microdosing Christmas morning by ordering dumb shit online isn’t working like it used to—terminal retail therapy for metastasizing consumerism. Replacing endorphins with fifty-year-old sheet metal. I don’t need such an embarrassingly visible and stereotypical embodiment of my millennial manchild crisis. Not to mention a big-block V8 running at nine-and-a-half miles per gallon in a world past the climatic tipping point. Microdosing two hundred years of industrial carbon emissions. A relic of our mid-century petrotopia, indefensible and irresponsible. On the other hand: there is no god.

At thirty-two years old, I am certain of two things: this is all we have and I’m squandering it. I type in spreadsheets and wait on other people’s emails five days a week for twenty-one dollars per hour. On my commute home, I honk at red light runners. I load the dishwasher and play video games. Microdosing brain death.

I’m not even a “car guy.” I’m too lazy to change my own oil. I prefer not to think about oil. But of course I can’t help it: that old man in Waterworld who lives down in the pitch-dark hold of the oil tanker, sitting on a boat in a lake of oil, and then eyepatched Dennis Hopper comes by to throw cigarettes at him occasionally—that’s me, that’s all of us. DFW’s famous commencement speech, “This is Oil”. One dead fish floats by another dead fish, says “how’s the ecological disaster today?” Send a screenshot of the dead fish to a group chat labeled “The Boyz”. Follow it up with a text that says “it me.”

Isn’t an El Camino a smart investment, really? The Mad Max times are coming—quicker than the Waterworld times, unless you’re in Florida—and what better war machine to haul your squad of bondage-gear-laden besties to the Thunderdome than a vintage muscle car with a truck bed? It’s the perfect apocalypse vehicle. Aesthetically, practically. Google “el camino biodiesel conversion”. Look up “urban survival skills” on YouTube. Watch more Doomsday Preppers, now streaming on Discovery Plus. To say it plain: The only thing that matters, really and truly, is our treatment of one another—and when the de facto arbiters of our reality place no value in any of us individually, the only tenable responses are hedonism or violence.

But I’m not ready to go full Luigi yet. I will be at home, in the house my landlord owns, pirating Netflix shows and drinking Costco liquor. I will sit in my El Camino and enter my head-in-the-sand era. “I’m going ostrich mode,” I will whisper to the musty upholstery and the faded plastics. I will crank the manual window lever and shut it all out. Maybe get the glass tinted for good measure. My friends’ children will grow up in a world I wouldn’t recognize, even from the movies, even if I did pay attention.