I bike through the swirling dust. The dust pinches my skin. The dust is cinematic. It seems, nowadays, everything is cinematic. Novels, TV, reality, cinema … dust. We have become cinemanesthasized. We are in a trance. How long will it last? One hundred years? One thousand? A trance is a trance is a trance. However long it lasts, I’m not worried. Even though I won’t be here, I’ll be here. Know what I mean?

   We are bewitched by the gods of cinema. That are not gods at all, in a cinema that doesn’t exist. Which makes the bewitching even deadlier.

   These are the things I’m thinking as I pedal through the dust storm, winds blowing furiously, thirty forty miles an hour, the sky the color of dust, the clouds a smoggy reddishbrown, and I must confess to casting myself as cinematic with my turned backwards baseball cap, aviator glasses, and blue surgical mask, a girl on a bike braving insurmountable odds.

   Apocalypse, as a genre, has become primary cinema within us. Viewer discretion advised.