The heat goes on, breaking records. Time has become a slow-motion blur that flattens everything I say and do. Incidents that should matter are like river flotsam, here one minute, gone the next. But the river, visible from the dirt path next to the Tinicum swamp, just keeps on rolling. Its progress would soothe me if I wasn’t so maladaptive.

“What’s maladaptive?” says my neighbor Swamp Rabbit. “Where’d you get that word?”

I tell him it’s a buzzword from one of those self-help books that well-off Americans are drawn to. Eat Doze Rinse Repeat, et al.

Such books are all well and good, and the media love them, but what if existential catastrophe is imminent? What will happen to us if the levees break?

I’ve been researching these questions, but online popup stories keep impeding my progress. What were Nazi German soldiers like in person? Why didn’t Don Knotts return to the Andy Griffith Show? When I start lingering over dispatches like these, I realize how badly I’m procrastinating. Maybe I really don’t want to know what’s up.

Swamp Rabbit says I’m too pessimistic: “You gotta kick this end-of-days obsession. It ain’t healthy.”

All is not lost, he tells me. Russian scientists are growing watermelons in Antarctica. The American government is spending $1 billion on a giant carbon-extraction machine. Philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, has crunched the numbers and thinks there’s only a 1-in-6 chance of an existential catastrophe occurring within the next hundred years. (Only the gods know how he arrived at that figure.)

Thoughts and Prayers, my housecats, seem unimpressed when I relay the good news as I watch the skies for wildfire smoke. “I don’t trust Ord’s estimate either,” I tell them. “Then again, I’m not a numbers guy… and I’m maladaptive.”