11 June 2008

A Calendar of Blind Dates

Gloom

I awoke this morning with that old familiar sense of dread, a lingering sensation of doom left over from some nonsensical dream I had in the moments just before the alarm sounded to rouse me from my fitful sleep. In the cold brutal light of day I was able to tell myself, "Just a dream. It was just a dream. It didn't mean anything." Sure. Dreams don't mean a thing.

Unless you're someone like Claudia Procula, who had a bad dream and went so far as to bother her husband about it while he was trying to work, urgently passing him a note which he promptly ignored. And so Pontius Pilate made it into the history books by killing Jesus despite the note in which Claudia urged him to "have nothing to do with that just Man, for I have suffered many things today in a dream because of Him." Very poor decision making on his part (unless you consider that the salvation of the world depended on the Crucifixion, in which case, well... there it is.)

Or the Pharaoh and his dreams about cows and the corn. I guess watching skinny cows come up out of a river and eat fat cows would be pretty disturbing, but at least he had Joseph and his amazing technicolor dreamcoat to pull his own fat out of the fire on that one.

So I did my best to put the dream out of my mind and go on with my day, but that nagging feeling of something not quite being right stuck with me all day long.

So far, it was just a dream. But the day's not over yet.

Doom

At work today someone was talking to me about patriotism and asked me, "Is it unpolitically correct to be patriotic these days?"

I said, "Do you mean politically incorrect? No, I don't think it's ever politically incorrect to be patriotic. I love my country. Without it, I'd fall into the ocean." Because we need land under our feet. We were not blessed with gills, after all.

None of which has anything to do with the rest of this entry, but I thought you should know. Love your country, because you are not that good a swimmer.

Gloom meets Doom. They have a drink, make small talk, lots of awkward silences. Doom doesn't even get a goodnight kiss at the end of it.

I wonder, now, having looked at the ol' Aztec calendar, whether my disturbing dreams only came a day early? Because it appears that tomorrow is Tonatiuh: 1-Miquiztli, or, in simpler terms, Death.

Some people put great stock in the Aztec calendar. Aztecs, for example. How else would they remember their kids' soccer games (except they would call it futbol. Or, more likely, ullamaliztli.) And then there were all the dentist appointments, the ritual sacrifices, secretary's day, and so forth and so on. And don't forget the really important dates, like the 13 Heavens of Decreasing Choice, and the 9 Hells of Increasing Doom; or perhaps the date of the last destruction of all human existence on earth: December 24, 2011. Don't spend a lot on Christmas presents that year!

But take heart. The Aztecs were apparently not as smart as people make them out to be. First of all, where did their civilization go? You never see the Aztecs representin' at the Olympics, and they've not been invited to the U.N. as far as I can see. No, I think they were pretty much scattered to the four corners of the world, their civilization left in ruins. Also, the final day of the last of those 9 Hells was supposed to have been August 17, 1987. It was a Monday, so it undoubtedly sucked hard. But look around. If we aren't smack dab in the middle of a Hell of Increasing Doom, then my name isn't Filbert McNutbuster. Which it isn't, but I don't think my name has anything to do with it, so stop changing the subject. Passive aggressive much?

The Mayans are also alleged to have predicted an end of the world, but they give us an extra year to clean out our desks: Sunday, December 23, 2012, is their pick in the pool. (Still not going to be the best Christmas ever.) The most compelling argument for this seems to be that this is the last date there is on the Mayan calendar (aka, the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, a non-repeating base 20 calendar which works by counting how many days have passed since August 11, 3114 BCE, Gregorian, or September 6, Julian.) Of course, the simple Gregorian calendar I have on my desk at work - it's a word of the day calendar - ends on December 31, 2008. So does the one on my wall. And the one on my deskpad. Does that mean the Mayans have been scooped? Will the world end on New Year's Eve this year?

Not likely. My calendar last year said the world would end on New Year's Eve last year, too. And before that, it was going to end on the last day of December in 2006. I think it's ridiculous that just because the Mayans got tired of counting the days since August 11, 3114 BCE, we should conclude that it's the end of the world.

But you can conclude that this is the end of this entry.

The Last Five:
I heard it on the radio - 27 July 2008
Happiness is... - 26 July 2008
Do bears shit in the woods? - 21 July 2008
Politics schmoliticks - 14 July 2008
words and pictures - 14 July 2008

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