“I’ve got an end of the world story,” says Dag, finishing off the remainder of the iced tea, ice cubes long melted. He then takes off his shirt, revealing his somewhat ribby chest, lights another filter-tipped cigarette, and clears his throat in a nervous gesture.

The end of the world is a recurring motif in Dag’s bedtime stories, eschatological You-Are-There accounts of what it’s like to be Bombed, lovingly detailed, and told in deadpan voice. And so, with little more ado, he begins: “Imagine you’re standing in line at a supermarket, say, the Vons supermarket at the corner of Sunset and Tahquitz — but theoretically it can be any supermarket anywhere — and you’re in just a vile mood because driving over you got into an argument with your best friend. The argument started over a road sign saying Deer Next 2 Miles and you said, ‘Oh, really, they expect us to believe there are any deer left?’ which made your best friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat looking through the box of cassette tapes, curl up their toes inside their running shoes. And you sense you’ve said something that’s struck a nerve and it was fun, so you pushed things further: ‘For that matter,’ you said, ‘you don’t see nearly as many birds these days as you used to, do you? And, you know what I heard the other day? That down in the Caribbean, there aren’t any shells left anywhere because the tourists took them all. And, haven’t you ever wondered when flying back from Europe, five miles over Greenland, that there’s just something, I don’t know — inverted — about shopping for cameras and scotch and cigarettes up in outer space?’ (more…)