2012

They are cutting down the jungle around my house.

They caught 11 wild boars in traps laid in the muddy patch behind the swimming pool, where a tree grows sideways and the duendes kitty and my dogs used to roam.

There are rubber trash cans placed along the designated (now) dog-walking route, along with hilarious and graphic signs of dogs doing the things they are supposed to do in the area near the rubber trash cans.

Backhoes and chainsaws chewed whole trees into stumps, cutting down all of what was a small, but still intimidating patch of overgrowth.

All this has been done by the enthusiastic and adorable new property manager, who just recently informed us of the successful pig trapping, and also the creation of a website devoted to the goings-on of Apusento Gardens.

The disconcerting clear cutting is needed because our foliage has been causing power outages in the village, he tells us.

The pigs are roaming dangerously close to the condos, infringing on domestic tranquility.

There are other things too.

There's a beach bar on my favorite beach. And some kind of "eco-village" that houses exactly one caribao, a deer and a shipping container halfheartedly disguised as a cultural museum.

The are parking lots along cliff walls that didn't used to be there.

It's hard to tell the new development from the old, as repair and disintegration happen at near equilibrium here. But the apartment complexes and SUVs seem to be proliferating, and the once epically dysfunctional government seems to be more muted  in its dysfunction.

The good-old days that I hear tell of -- and caught glimpses of during the last gubernatorial election -- when near-mafioso clan rulers relied on patronage and loyalty to get the consent of the masses, seem to have been expunged.

Layoffs and budget cuts playing to the taste of investment bankers and bond holders are more the order of the day.

The business community is eagerly anticipating the bounty of the military buildup to wash over them, despite the likely continued trampling of the few green spaces left.

Everywhere I go it seems like little pieces are being removed and the ground scrubbed clean -- inevitable, cliched in this hyper-developed world.

I did not watch Guam as it was cut apart piece by piece to make way for military barracks, bulldozed for the sake of square parking lots to house tacky strip malls, or witness the erection of new buildings that became old, and then abandoned, and then repurposed by squatters and developers alike.

That all happened before me -- like most of the damage in the world.

But this one tiny place still has enough wild to squander on concrete buildings and landfills, and to rearrange into paved highways to fit the commuting needs of the less imaginative gods we are.

This place is less destroyed than others I have been to, which somehow makes it worse.

I have come in at the end, watching the few good things disintegrate even further, seeing the tiny tips of the new I have discovered sink quietly into mundanity.

And as I watch, metaphorically -- or literally as I ferry my dogs' waste to designated rubber containers -- this panic hits me.

I want to exit before the collapse, which we all know is coming.

This is the year the world is supposed to end, according to the History Channel and grossly misspelled websites using neon fonts prognosticating the Mayan-inspired End Times.

I genuinely cannot find a sufficiently powerful synonym for stupid to describe this.

Still, I am fascinated, even consoled by the premise of apocalypse -- as many others must be given the proliferation of media cavorting in annihilation.

There seems to be a psychic cry that we are all emitting into the airwaves, as we beckon an unknown cataclysm from the heavens (or space, depending on your metaphysical persuasion) to save us from a world of cubby holes holding natural phenomena like shoes, and a neatly folded sky viewed between the rise of unavoidable buildings.

I hate folding laundry, by the way.

It seems like we are asking how to wipe things clean, and start over with a world not marred by our compulsive reordering.

Organization is its own kind of apocalypse.

And I can't help feeling like that is the one we are really afraid of.