Dear Palinode:

I've been dating my high school boyfriend (I'll call him "Highschool") since high school. Last week he finally got down on one knee and "popped the question". I'm twenty-three now, fresh out of university with a Business Admin degree, but Highschool wants me to stay at home and raise his children. I know that I can be a "modern woman" and balance the demands of motherhood and career. I don't want to lose Highschool, but I don't want to sacrifice my chances for happiness and fulfillment in life. How can I let him know and not spoil the "special feeling" that we have?

Signed,

Really Nervous B2B

Dear Nervous:

After global oil production levels peak sometime in the next two to six years, the cost of energy, transportation and food will skyrocket. Anyone making less than a few hundred grand a year will find themselves utterly broke and unable to house themselves. Large government housing projects with substandard services, the last gasp of the welfare state, will spring up over the landscape, and your skills in business admin, that you thought would help you ride the crest of your life, will suddenly be useless. You'll have to get by on factory work, occasional drug dealing and prostitution. Your new husband and child will die of cholera. Free health care, once the calling card of this country, will be largely unavailable. As China and the United States grapple for control for the remaining supplies of (relatively) cheap oil, World War III will ensue, and you'll cross the border to join the military, which is the only paying job left at this point. You've also heard that the army is stockpiling the last reserves of penicillin, which you'll need because you suspect (with good reason) that you've contracted syphilis, which has been on the rise since the early 1990s. You'll discover that the US army is more than willing to sign you up, but the rumours of dentists and penicillin are cruel jokes. You're sent out in a military jumbo jet to guard the Trans-Afghanistan Oil Pipeline, but your plane is shot down by the Chechnyan People's Army over Uzbekistan. Somehow you and a few other draftees survive, joining up with a group of Karakalpakastani nationals who make a living by salvaging parts and partially combusted fuel oil from fishermen's vessels abandoned on the shores of the Aral Sea. For the sake of survival you convert to Islam and adopt the veil. Every day you and a group of woman wake up before dawn and scour the coastline, now receding more rapidly than ever as Russia illegaly siphons off the water for a misconceived hydroelectric project. After five years of this the syphilis finally hits your brain and you begin to go mad. The other women hide your madness from the men for as long as possible, but one day you walk out into the sea and never return.

Dear Advice Man:
I just saw all of the LOTR that i got off the internet and my uncle left me a ring a long time ago it looks alot liek the 1 in the movei that Frodo had. it is made of gold but does not have the writing on it's inside. maybe it is 1 of the rings of power though? i would use the power for good never fear. please tell me how i would know if this is a ring like those in teh movie.
thank you
lawarence

Dear Lawrence, or Lawarence,as it may be:
If that ring really is made of gold, you're in better shape than I thought. You'll need that ring for its magical power to buy security from the men that will come with guns in the night to take what's yours after the world as we know it has crumbled around us, and the street outside your door is teeming with monsters that walk in the skins of human beings. If you're smart you'll promise it to the weakest but hand it over to the most powerful, perhaps gaining a few more months of life that way. What will probably happen, though, is this: You take the ring and hide it under a shoebox in the back of your closet. One day you come home from school and find the house absolutely empty, except for some old blankets. Your parents, having gotten ever more drawn and twitchy these last few months, will have vanished. There is no note. You check the closet but the shoebox and the ring have been taken. You gather together some rags and make a crude mat in your bedroom. The first few nights are okay, despite the cold, but one night a stone comes hurtling through your window, and from then on your nights are a drafty misery of cold and fear. Cold air, sharp as teeth on your flesh, rips in through the hole in the glass. You are thirsty, but the water in the ditches hurts your stomach. You cry for the first time since you were six. A group of men hears your cries and breaks into the house. You have seen these men from the broken window at night and you know what they do to people. Their feet clatter up the stairs. You pick up a shard of glass and hold it ready, crouched in the shadows. You may even get a few good slashes in. The men pick you up off your feet, hog-tie you swiftly and efficiently, and haul you away. You are never seen again.

But before all that comes to pass, there's an easy test that you may remember from the first movie. Throw the ring into your fireplace and see if the dark language of Mordor emerges, limned in living fire. Get an adult to help you out. Use tongs.

Dear Palinode,
Cut that out.

parode - exode