Roger Boyce Paints: Rock to Hide My Face

Having gotten high-octane Appalachian eschatology stirred into mother’s milk, I’ve come to see apocalyptic imagination as a birthright.

I have no memory of time before nagging signs and wonders elbowed their way into everyday matters.

I do remember when duck and cover came to school. And how tickled I was at that maneuver’s mime of self-preservation – which, even to a child’s underdeveloped powers of reckoning, felt little and late.

Insignificant and tardy when measured against the magnificent filmstrip terror of blossoming mushroom clouds.

To say I was, and am, predisposed to final-event prognostication - wont to prematurely hear four horsemen pacing in the paddock - pretends only to mastery of the obvious.

Lately I see Gog and Magog squatting in bone-dry voids of emptied fossil-aquifers. And watch, with fascination, as slow-recharging water tables are outraced by devilishly quick deep-well oil-drills.

Now and again I note the ice-shelves’ alarming retreat toward earth’s centermost poles, and drought bred bald spots crawling out from the middle of every continent. It follows that these recalibrated end-time feelers seem much like similarly man-made forerunners. Forerunning familiars from old precincts of apocalyptic imagination.

There’s something to be said for, and comforting about, the surety of one’s own sighted end. And all the more familiar and comforting when considering that a significant portion of earth's human cohort may provide company for what would otherwise be a solo benediction and exit.