[ WP ] You just survived the apocalypse . Now you 're dealing with some unexpected problems not seen in apocalyptic fiction .

I was addicted. It was my food, my water, my sweet air. It was there when I got home from work, after a stressful dinner at my in-laws' house, when I fought with my girlfriend. To go the entire day, if I even managed that, knowing full what waited for me behind that white chipped bathroom door down the stairs from my apartment kitchen was nearly as sweet as the act itself. That swell of anticipation was all that mattered. 
 
 I'm not an alcoholic, but I remember reading a statistic once about the percentage of people who go clean from AA meetings. It was twelve percent. I think they surveyed something like 8,000 people. In any other situation, and I mean any, I would not be part of that twelve percent. I would be that person who breaks down crying, cursing the very idea of addiction and solemnly swearing sobriety from that point on, but who then would go home and without a blink of hesitation use again. That's just me. 
 
 So why am I part of that twelve percent? Why the fuck am I three years clean? Because of this grey and lifeless world below me, that's why. We should have known after that Perses collision everything was n't going to be okay. Watching that dark blip fall from the sky, infinitely far off in the distance from where my girlfriend and I were camping at the time, who would have thought that that little stone from space would be the kicker. Supposedly 70 miles in diameter, Perses, the informal name given to the stone by the scientific community, cannonballed into Northern Seattle exactly three years ago today. One little shift off its axis later and Earth as we knew it began its plummeting descent to where we are now– an unpredictable wasteland of grey and infertility. 
 
 I always thought there was a beautiful sense of simplicity in all of this. One day I'm huddled over my uncleaned porcelain toilet like a pleasure-seeking gargoyle, a perfectly suitable state for me, and the next a meteor slams into earth. All the anticipation– the movies, the books, the shows, and that's that. 
 
 My first thought upon feeling the eery reverberations emanating from that small blip in the distance? It was n't `` Is my girlfriend okay?'' or `` I should call my family''. It was `` Will I still be able to use?''. And I did still use. For as long as I could. The most brutal blow was when the internet stopped working– about three weeks after the impact. No more 4K, 60fps, or gifs? Livecams, video chats... All gone. I began hoarding all the dvds I could fine, ransacking my street store after store, but it just was n't the same. I could n't simply click away when I got bored. The fast-forwarding, the switching of the discs, the reliance on the remote to work– it took away from the experience. With one final ditch effort I switched to magazines, but they proved worse than the dvds. 
 
 Not five weeks after Perses, our entire garage was filled with grimy beige boxes of failed addiction. Dvds and magazines overflowed down onto the hood of our 2008 Volkswagon. My girlfriend inevitably noticed, cursing me and my `` disgusting and degrading habit''. I did n't care. I was in a state of mourning. The world was collapsing around me, and the following year was marked by apathy and evading the questions `` How do you think that makes me feel?'' and `` Is that why you can never finish?'' 
 
 It has been two years since then. You would think that after such a long time the thrall of addiction would at least have subsided a little. It has n't. My girlfriend and I are together not because of love and passion, but because we have no one else. The world is a rotten apple shrivelling more with every day that passes and I ca n't bring myself to physically perform for the only person– the only source of beauty I have left. Thirteen years of relentless abuse got me here, and in my naivety I thought two years of sobriety would bring me back. 
 
 If it were anyone else I would be laughing my ass off right now– `` so it's the end of the world and he ca n't get it up'' – but it's not. It's me. Maybe this is God's way of forcing sobriety upon me. I hope not, though.... I'd hate to think that my whacking off ended the world. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

