our own J.M. Tyree on his novel in progress, Wandering Stars…
The huge anxiety of the day was the Y2K Computer Crisis, truly one of the great non-events of all time, recent history’s best joke. Remember how banks were supposed to fail, missiles would be launched by accident, airplanes would fall out of the sky, and all the rest of it? I picture people in pickups furtively raiding their local Sam’s Club throughout December (how many pallets of canned food would be enough?). I remember my own bathtub, filled to the brim on the night of the 31st, lying stagnant and warm on the morning of the 1st (what good would it have done?). The Rough Guide to the Millennium (1998) lists the following Things that might go haywire on January 1, 2000: “air traffic control systems, bar code readers, electronic bank vaults, cars, hospital equipment, military hardware, satellite receivers, telephones.” One prescient family I knew prepared for the apocalypse by investing in a stockpile of Animal Crackers, one enormous plastic barrel to get them through the end times. Nothing happened. Perhaps we really were invincible and perhaps David Bowie was right when he sang that God was an American.
Yes, everyone was dreaming of the wrong catastrophe. Of course we were all fools. But what an empire of sleepwalking! Gentle Reader, would you not take the chance to relive those days? It seems to me that such time travels might be similar to brushing past the proverbial angel with the flaming sword and gaining re-entry to the Garden. I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray…
more from Esquire here.