I regret to inform you the End of Days is upon us.

Yes, yes, I’ve declared many things to be the apocalypse. Climate change, COVID, an intentional proliferation of guns, one major party going full fascist and the other being so committed to neutrality that it’s allowing and sometimes enabling it, the sequel to “Top Gun” being nominated for Best Picture. We can have multiple apocalypses at the same time. It’s apocalypses all the way down these days.

But the real sign the end is near? This past week there was a blizzard warning in Los Angeles. There was snow in the Oakland hills. There was snow on the beach in Santa Cruz! You’re not supposed to get snow on a beach, let alone in a tourist town renowned for its perpetually temperate weather! Utter madness. The Mayans were 11 years off.

Snow at the Beach Boardwalk and Hwy 17 closed in both directions. Fun, Fun, Fun for friends there! pic.twitter.com/tYtCLQZg10

— s sciarrino (@Sher1Sc1arr1no) February 24, 2023

Like that string quartet that kept playing as the ship was sinking in “Titanic,” all we can do is play some music about the apocalypse and ride everything down.

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R.E.M. — “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”

Yeah, obvious pick. I got the cheap one out of the way.

The thing is, I’m not sure this song is actually about the end of the world. Have you read the lyrics? It’s just stream of consciousness nonsense. I guess Michael Stipe intended for it to have a feeling of dread but it’s actually just catchy and a bit peppy, which makes me wonder what scares Michael Stipe.

Also, I’m not feeling especially fine at this end of the world. It’s too cold.

The Clash — “London Calling”

This is, in fact, a song about the end of the world. Specifically, about all the ways the world could end. Nearly all of them are either happening or are looming just over the horizon.

The one that’s absolutely not happening is the ice age coming. Back when the song came out, there was a dip in global temperatures from the 1940s until the ’70s and a bunch of uneducated reactionaries started a mild panic about global cooling leading to an ice age. Meanwhile, actual scientists were raising the alarm about global warming due to the greenhouse effect causing climate change. They were ignored in favor of the reactionaries. Because some things never change.

Ironically, global warming has caused a destabilization of the polar vortex, which used to tightly circle the north pole but now occasionally dips down much farther south than on record, subjecting more area to arctic weather. Like, for example, now.

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Prince — “1999”

If you youths think the 2012 apocalypse hysteria was a bit much, you should’ve seen 1999.

Not only were people thinking the world was going to end for fringe theological reasons, there was also a widespread belief that computers that use a two-digit year would just shut down when those two digits were 00. The financial system would collapse! Communication would shut down! Planes would fall out of the sky! They sold Y2K-compatible bathroom scales and pencil sharpeners for some reason!

In actuality? If a program had a start date and an end date, and the end date had to be after the start date, and the start date was 99 and the end date was 00, there would be an error message. So nothing happened. It was fine. The worst effects were that some old ATMs stopped working and the Maine DMV classified 2000 model year cars as horseless carriages.

But this apocalypse is real. Hoard gold.

Creedence Clearwater Revival — “Bad Moon Rising”

This song is extremely about the apocalypse. It’s another one that’s catchy and upbeat but, man, it is not subtle about its subject matter. Just check out some of the lyrics: “Hope you got your things together/ Hope you are quite prepared to die/ Looks like we’re in for nasty weather/ One eye is taken for an eye.”

The members of Creedence Clearwater Revival are from El Cerrito here in the Bay Area, and in their decade as a bar band making it big, they played all over the East Bay, often in Martinez and Concord. John Fogerty, the creative force that wrote most if not all CCR songs, lives down in Thousand Oaks now. But one wonders if he’s looking at what can charitably be called nasty weather this week and remembering this song. It’s gotta be weird to have called something like this.

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Metallica — “Trapped Under Ice”

This song is, admittedly, not about the end times. Well, it’s about the end times for one specific person, but not society or humanity.

“Trapped Under Ice” is the story of someone who’s cryogenicly frozen, wakes up, but can’t get out of the chamber. He’s pounding on the glass and screaming for help but nobody can hear as he slowly freezes, this time to death. It’s pretty existentially terrifying, like many early Metallica songs.

Anyway, this song goes out to Santa Cruz, Mt. Baldy in Los Angeles, Mt. Diablo and its foothills in the East Bay and everywhere else that was suddenly and unexpectedly trapped under ice. Here’s hoping you thaw out before the next apocalypse kicks in.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and tweet column ideas to him at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.