Pinky's Book Link

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

What would you do if you had 30 minutes left to live?


What would you do if you found out the world was going to end in half an hour?

This is the sort of silly question Pinky ponders when she’s on school holidays with far too much time on her hands and an idle, adolescent brain firing random electrical impulses at whim.

One thing I’ve always thought I’d do (if I was unable to congregate my loved ones together in time to sit underneath a pyramid holding hands and doggy paws whilst chanting something Gregorian) is to zip up to the nearest Donut King and scoff as many of those cream-filled chocolate éclair things as humanly possible. I’ve never eaten one, only lusted after them from afar, but Armageddon would be a good time to start.

Or maybe raid the closest pizza parlour gluttonously devouring the stringiest, cheesiest most fattening item on the menu until my trackie-dacks split.

Or perhaps bust into the liquor shop, nick a carton of outrageously expensive French Champagne to be taken home and drunk in a fragrant bubble bath with truffles and caviar and make wild passionate love to my husband.

“So… what you’re saying Pinky, is that you’d go on a looting rampage?” I hear you ask in an outraged tone.

I suppose…

Another idea I had was that I’d locate the local drug dealer, buy some smack or crack and go out on a high, stoned to the eyeballs. The only trouble with that is I don’t know any drug dealers and I hate needles (although the house three doors down does have quite a lot of comings and goings if you know what I mean).

I wonder how I would react to the news of impending extermination. Would I go crazy-mental, strip to buck naked except for a pair of Doc Martens and run around the streets ripping up flowering garden beds screaming, ‘Kuckoo! Kuckoooo!’?

Would I jog barefoot to the nearest church, throw myself at the feet of the statue of Jesus and confess all my past sins? That might take longer than the allocated thirty minutes… Besides, I’m sure it would be standing room only.

I suppose the actual form of annihilation would factor into it as well.

If it was an alien invasion I think I’d just walk out with my hands up in the air. I couldn’t stand the suspense of all that ‘hiding in basements and running through dark tunnels evading long, purple tentacles’ business.

An approaching tsunami might motivate me to run for the hills but what would be the point. When the flood dried up there’d only be tinned dog food and rusty cans of soft drink to eat and drink. That’s IF the floods dried up. You could end up stuck on top of a hill for the rest of your life. I think I’d rather go out with a bang than a whimper.

How about a snap Ice Age like in the movie, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’? My fingers turn blue in the freezer section of Coles so I wouldn’t last long in that sort of catastrophic event.

Zombies would be my favourite disaster set-up I suppose. Even though you get bitten and you die, you then ‘come back to life’ and get to travel around with the other zombies eating eyeballs and entertaining stuff like that. Not so bad really.

Now you may think these are the ramblings of an old mad woman but I’ve just done some research on the net about what people would do if the world was about to end and you know what the overwhelming response was.

Eat. Most people said they’d just eat.
What about you? What would you do?