I started writing this particular post way back at the start of the pandemic, while living in Taiwan, and I had every intention of picking up blogging again - but as you can see from the time stamp on my recent posts, that clearly didn’t happen. Needless to say, any promises of consistency at this point are meaningless, so I’ll just dive right in by adding some things to this already written blog post and then we’ll see where we end up.
I published Days Too Dark back in December of 2017, and since that time I moved to Taiwan, to teach English, and subsequently moved to Germany… then back to Australia… and finally back to Germany, where I’m doing my Master’s degree in Literature! I’m a far cry from running about the Post-Apocalyptic ruins of Brisbane, Australia, but you’d be surprised at how many similarities popped up over my years abroad. Enough to weird me out, and enough to write a blog post with such a title, at any rate.
A Stranger in a Strange Land
Days Too Dark - Mars makes a comment that he’d like to move to Japan, or China (eww) and just live in a world where nobody could ever talk to him. He had a desire to see the world, just without the people, but ended up getting stuck in Australia after the world ended.
Reality - I actually ended up moving to Taiwan (which is a country) and loved walking around not being able to talk to anyone. All the other foreigners I started teaching with went through home sickness or culture shock, but neither really hit me. Obviously I had lots of conversations at work and with friends I’d made, but there’s something to be said about people just leaving you alone.
Brown Outs
Days Too Dark - the power grid is crumbling, and even if this weren’t the case there’s not enough power plants to power all the houses of those who remain. Brown Outs are a common occurrence in the early days of the story… before the lights shut off for good.
Reality - I don’t know what it was, but a while back I was walking home and all the lights along the street were strobing, and the power boxes were just humming and churning. Pretty weird night, but uneventful in the grand scheme of things. Along with this, my building was grand but old, and elevators dying was a frequent occurrence. Having to walk 28 floors down an abandoned stairwell, and ending up in a random construction site is about as post-apocalyptic as it gets.
Keeping My Distance
Days Too Dark - Mars has lost a lot of people, some have left, others have died, and a way of coping with this is by not getting to know anyone until they’ve been around for a while. He plays it off as having high standards but really he’s playing it safe to avoid getting hurt.
Reality - During my three years teaching English, we had four foreign teachers flee the country in the middle of the night without warning. A fifth decided that it wasn’t for him, and broke contract and left early. The situation was pretty grim for a while, and it got hard to trust people to stick around. It’s the nature of the business though, bringing in native English speakers and hoping you can entice them to stay… it’s certainly not a life for everyone. Needless to say, it’s not often the best and brightest that leave their home country and culture to live abroad, and so I met a lot of “interesting” people. Even without the people who flee, most people just stay a year or two and so you’ve got this constantly changing social circle, and it was certainly a lot easier to just stick to myself…
Cleaning Up Other People’s Shit
Days Too Dark - Mars is called in to deal with other peoples problems all the time, mainly because he’s the reliable work horse who can go and fix problems or just rough someone up if they’re hassling a friend.
Reality - People don’t show up for work, I get called in to go to their apartment and find their naked drunken ass staggering about the apartment. Girls sitting on the side of the road shitface, I get called in to get her home. Drunken foreigners being dicks at a bar, I have to go handle them. Drunken assholes screaming at student’s parents or teachers, I had to go out there. There’s certainly a lot of times where its just me going around dealing with other peoples shit.
Wild Dogs
Days Too Dark - Dogs have gone feral and reverted back to their wolf (dingo?) ancestors. They roam around in packs and have a habit of attacking lone travelers and killing them for food.
Reality - There’s a lot of feral dogs in Taiwan, I don’t know why. Maybe people get sick of owning them, but there’s a lot that just run the streets. One night I was walking home and this pack of dogs circled around me and I started yelling at them, but then I realized that they’re Taiwanese and not Australian and so probably didn’t understand English. Strange night, but luckily nothing happened.
Walking Everywhere
Days Too Dark - Cars aren’t really a thing after the end of the world, and so Mars has to walk everywhere.
Reality - I didn’t have a licence in Taiwan, and I’ll be damned if I start driving on those roads. Unlike Mars, I eventually got over my aversion to riding bicycles. It’s hard for Westerners to understand just how different the style of driving is in the East. From what I noticed, Westerners follow the road, Easterners follow each other. Or, to put it another way. “Westerners are pigeons, Easterners are bats” - they each fly well with their own kind, but if you throw one into a flock of the other, there’s going to be trouble.
Boiling Water
Days Too Dark - Mars and his fellow Strays need to boil and filter their drinking water, due to all the atmospheric pollution that resulted during the Fall.
Reality - Taiwan has really bad pipes, and bugs in the water. So if you’re a foreigner you’re probably going to get sick if you don’t boil your water. Also, just in general, if you don’t want a whole lot of lead poisoning, you’ll filter the water too. Having to go down 28 floors every week to carry back a pair of 6-litre jugs certainly makes me miss Australia.
No Water
Days Too Dark - The pipes have frozen over, Wivenhoe Dam has burst and the taps are all rusted over. The days of running water are a distant memory at this point in the story, and if you’re not carrying your own drinking water then you might be screwed.
Reality - Taiwan had a drought. The Australian goes to a tropical island and it has an actual drought, go figure. The city I was in decided to shut the water off two for days a week for a couple of weeks, which meant no showers for work, or the gym. For anyone. It was a tough time for all involved, but luckily I have a certain handicap that made me immune to the smell.
Overcast Skies
Days Too Dark - The skies were darkened during the Fall, and so there’s been perpetual cloud cover for near twenty years by the time of the stories telling.
Reality - Taiwan has some crazy weather, and you get Typhoons during the summer. And even if it’s not a full on Typhoon it’s still going to rain a metric-shit-tonne. Needless to say, the skies are blotted out by clouds a lot of the year.
The Plague
Days Too Dark - A series of plagues kill most Australians, and so Mars and his friends and family were safe within the confines of the South East Queensland Free Area. The rest of the world was dying, while they were relatively safe and just living our their lives (under martial law) while the shit hits the fan outside. Eventually SEQ-FA falls, and the virus got in, and Mars and co had to batten down the hatches and ride it out.
Reality - Taiwan was owning Covid-19 for a real long time, they were the first to warn the world and they went over a year without any kind of lockdowns. In May of 2021 though, we went into a half-lock down for three months. We all still went to work, we just had to wear masks all the time. Not a bad way to do things, and it was effective, too. It was certainly weird experience, having my family and friends going through hell, all around the world, and I was pretty much fine the whole time.
Wearing Masks
Days Too Dark - While the clouds of the Gloom were down at ground level, everyone was forced to walk around in a mask. People covered their faces to avoid getting any of the harmful particulates in their lungs… those that didn’t wear masks ended up with a nasty lung illness later on.
Reality - The air quality of Taiwan is not the greatest, mainly due to all the coal plants on the island as well as a certain neighboring nation that strategically places power plants of their own. Combine this with all the scooters, and you get a fair bit of air pollution. This means that people in Taiwan were wearing masks long before Covid-19 made it cool. They had a real rough time a few years ago with the last pandemic, and so they all learned how to handle it. Mask wearing was never the issue it was in Western nations.
Earthquakes
Days Too Dark - The whole world gets donkey punched during the Fall and everyone is slammed with this planetary earth quake that sends everyone tumbling to the ground. There are a few tremors after this as the planet settles into a new norm.
Reality - Australia doesn’t really get earthquakes - we’ve got enough shit to deal with, with just the yearly fires and flooding. But Taiwan does get earthquakes, lots of them. Considering my apartment was 28 floors up, even the slightest tremor had my building swaying back and forth. Which was just… great fun.
Ruins Everywhere
Days Too Dark - The whole world is in ruins; houses are abandoned and buildings crumble after years of neglect. Years of flooding, fires, cyclones, earthquakes and human violence have left the world a shattered shadow of its former self.
Reality - Taiwan has this thing where buildings are overgrown with grass, bushes and even full on trees. If nobody is living in a building, it will just sit there and be reclaimed by nature. Add in all the humidity and you get buildings whose exteriors tend to look run down and crumbling. Considering the Ruin-Porn scattered all over the place, Taiwan really is a Post-Apocalyptic fan’s wet dream.
Mars + 9
Days Too Dark - Mars is short for Maralinga, and he has a fascination with the number nine.
Reality - My first class in Taiwan had nine students and one of them was a kid called Mars… go figure.
Looking After Other People’s Kids
Days Too Dark - Mars has a habit of getting stuck looking after other peoples kids. Which makes sense, because if you want someone looking after your kid after the world ends, you want it to be the psychotic berserker that will defend them to the death.
Reality - I was a teacher, so I was looking after kids all day, but I’ve also got friends in Taiwan who’ve had kids… and I get to look after them too. Great fun.
Anosmia
Days Too Dark - Mars has anosmia, due to an injury from childhood. It’s hard for people to relate to him, and vice-versa, since he’s missing one of the five senses.
Reality - I have anosmia as well, and it was always one of those lesser disabilities, never seen and never that debilitating. Well, Covid came along and took away a lot of peoples sense of smell… and suddenly I had people coming up to me, asking how to deal with it. The world goes to shit, and suddenly I can relate to some people better. Funny how the world works.
“No.”
Days Too Dark - Mars is one of those guys who will help you to the ends of the earth, but he’s racking up a tally in the back of his mind. He refers to himself as a dog who just does what everyone else tells him to do. He will put himself out to help others, often times to the detriment of himself. He can’t say no, because he’s been raised to think he’s only going to get love when he’s being useful. It’s all a transaction to him, and he gets shitty when he doesn’t get what he (thinks he) is owed.
Reality - I always knew I had this character flaw in me, I just didn’t realize the extent until I spent time teaching in Taiwan. Shit was always a second away from disaster, there were always fires to put out, someone always needed saving. I became the go to guy to fix everything, and it was only when a sociable party rat started working at the branch that I figured out what was going on. He did as little work as possible, left early whenever he could, but had an outgoing and flamboyant personality… so everyone loved him. Everyone came to me with their problems, and they went to him for fun. Needless to say, that was a wake up call that I needed. I’m still working on it, it’s not entirely fixed yet. Boundaries are important though, so I’ll keep at it.
Borders, Dehumanization & Strays
Days Too Dark - Those lucky enough to be in Brisbane were spared the horrors of the plagues that ravaged the rest of Australia. They threw up new borders and kept everyone else out. It’s a little hard to do this to your own people mind you, so the government came up with this gimmick of referring to those who were safe as “Maroons” and those who stuck outside as “Cockroaches”. Bingo-bango, the problem was solved with a bit of in-group/out-group linguistic fuckery. In the end, it all fell apart, and the Maroons didn’t like being betrayed by their government and left to die, and so thanks to a bit of propaganda and another bout of self-identification gymnastics, the people collectively stopped referring to themselves as Maroons and started calling themselves ‘Strays.’
Reality - Australia locked down its borders, and people couldn’t get out or in (mostly), for near two years. There were between 40,000 and 50,000 Australians stuck outside the country with no reliable way to get home. To cope with this, the media started referring to us as “Travelers” instead of “Australian Citizens” and we were the filthy outsiders who might bring the plague back with us. Eventually they lowered the borders, and plague invaded the country in full force.
That’s it, those are the similarities I encountered while living in Taiwan. It was reaching a point where I figured I had to write something because the similarities were just piling up. I mean, look at that list - that’s certainly not nothing. It’s a weird experience to write a story about a fictional version of yourself, then encounter the events that the other version of you encountered. Overall I loved my time in Taiwan, but I’m keen to see what happens next here in Germany.