Let Us Drink to the Apocalypse

So in Beijing’s lantern-lit alleyways, beneath garish awnings, friends and I raise paper cups of cheap Chinese beer and drink to the unreasonableness of the world; we cast playful, animated shadows with our rhetoric. We joke about the missiles this country aims at Taiwan, even as our friends in that country run frantically under the white noise of preparatory air raid sirens. In this vacuum of terror, we laugh at it all.