'Ennuipocalypse' tries to capture the disconnected despair of climate change and a lasting pandemic

And so it is with delight that all English-language wordwranglers and wordmongers welcome the invention of the word 'ennuipocalypse'.

Online at the Bureau of Linguistic Reality where inventions of new words are celebrated we find this useful new word. One wonders how have we have managed without it till now, for it is indispensable to our discussion of how the horror of climate change stalks towards us at a pace we struggle to know how to react to.

The noun Ennuipocalypse, the Bureau offers, is pronounced Ennuipocalypse.

"Definition: While media often depicts the apocalypse as a sudden and dramatic event, the Ennuipocalypse, or Slowpocalypse (slang) offers the concept of a doomsday that occurs at an excruciatingly slow day to day time scale. Slow Ennuipocalypse, may occur in a geologic blink of an eye, but for the Homo sapiens in urban/suburban settings who are often disconnected from the natural cycles - it is painfully boring."

The concept seems especially appropriate in Canberra and for Canberrans. While the climate change apocalypse is already underway at a gallop elsewhere and is biting lots of the poorer peoples of the more low-lying world, here under Canberra's First World/sub-Alpine bubble the climate catastrophe is for now slow to impinge on our lucky, first world bourgeois lives. Canberrans yawn, bored, at the thought of what apocalyptic changes may be to come, one day far, far in the future.

Indeed, apocalypse ennui was seductively all about on the morning of last Wednesday's Australia Day as the beloved and I went to the wonderful Wide Brown Land sculpture high up in the National Arboretum for a reading of Dorothea McKellar's Core of My Heart, My Country, the poem that sings the praises of our drought-prone land's wideness and brownness. Wednesday's fabulous view was of a landscape upholstered, thanks to the freakish rains of recent months and as far as the eye could see, in what another poet has called shades of "astonished" green. Of apocalyptic global drying and withering there was not a sign although, of course, those of us who know the difference between weather and climate know that Wednesday's sublime astonishments must be marvelled at while we may for our dear planet's shrivelling apocodesiccation is fast approaching.

Of course everyone knows that the Moon controls and choreographs women's menstrual cycles but what of other possible under-researched influences the Moon exerts? Did it perhaps intervene to influence the outcome of the 2019 Australian federal election? And what questions would you like to ask the Moon, if you could?

The Moon and its mysteries have been much on my mind lately, for, sleepless in Woden, (the nightmarish possibility of the return of the Morrison government makes sleep elusive) the first full moon of the year and I have been ogling one another in wee small hours.

As well, coincidentally, for Paris Review and in her monthly column The Moon In Full Nina McLaughlin comes up, respectfully, with a questionnaire for this new Moon (called a Wolf Moon in her northern hemisphere and a Buck Moon here in the south) that was at its fullest on January 18. McLaughlin, like all thinking earthlings, yearns to know what goes on in the enigmatic mind of our Earth's crater-pocked only natural satellite.

"Please," McLaughlin begs to trouble the Moon, "we're right here, listening. All we're doing is looking for answers." Her questionnaire for the Moon has the kind of pollster format we are all familiar with and so for example asks "How did you hear about planet Earth?" and "On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being abysmal, 5 being transcendent, please rate your experience with planet Earth." The questionnaire wonders "In general, are you glad to be tethered by gravity to planet Earth? Please circle Yes or No."

Then come the sorts of questions we have all yearned to ask the Moon, such as "Do you identify (please circle) as Male, Female or Other?" The Moon is asked to circle Yes or No to answer the questions "Do you believe in werewolves?" and "Is the light you appear to shed made of ghosts?"

Ms McLaughlin is so sure (as is this columnist) of the answers to the questions "In general, do you have an effect on human mood and/or disposition and/or sanity?" and "In general, do you have an effect on the human menstrual cycle?" that she, McLaughlin, only bothers to give the Moon a Yes to circle.

Adapting Nina McLaughlin's brilliant idea for Australian purposes my pro forma questionnaire asks the Moon "Did you intervene in the Australian federal election of 2019, influencing enough voters' moods and sanity to bring about the otherwise inexplicable Morrison 'miracle' victory? Circle Yes or No."

I am giving the Moon a choice of responses since, for the moment, we cannot be as sure of the Moon's role in our elections as we are sure of its role in our menstrual cycles and moods. Meanwhile, though, I will never forget how on election night 2019, aghast at the outcome, I drove home from what was supposed to have been a rapturous pro-Labor election party beneath a surreally full Moon (several times its normal size and radiance) that seemed to me a smug Scomo-Moon puffed up with smirking Machiavellian satisfaction at having lunaengineered the election result.