Too Much Time on my Hands

I definitely have too much time on my hands this morning. All my students’ papers are graded for the moment – til the next batch is collected, anyway. I just finished a commissioned painting for a customer and don’t have an idea for the next one. I’m not golfing today because I have class tonight and don’t want to wear myself out too much, not to mention that I don't have that extra $20 bill in my wallet.

So I was sitting in my easy chair watching the History Channel show– The Next Nostradomas. Some guy has developed a mathematical formula for predicting world ending catastrophe. You know, the heretofore unknown asteroid or comet crashing into the planet and destroying all life as we know it. Or a gamma ray burst from distant exploding star deep fat frying everything on the surface of our planet. Or Yellowstone National Park’s supervolcano erupting and wiping out the entire Midwest and changing the world’s climate for thousands of years. Or the New Madrid Fault cracking again reversing the flow of rivers and disrupting our lives for decades. Or terrorists with some new fangled biological weapon of mass destruction doing a trial run on Omaha. Or some new super flu virus pandemic (I have to come up with a contingency plan by tomorrow for my Creighton classes in case the campus is closed due to the H1N1 flu virus). Or for some mysterious reason the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy goes bonkers and we all get “spaghettified” while being sucked to the center of the galaxy. Or global warming throws our planet into an overnight ice age with mile high ice sheets blanketing our continent and minus 9,000 degree wind chills. Or when they flip the on-switch on the Large Hadron Collector in Sweden or Switzerland or where ever the heck that is, they create a black hole which sucks our entire planet into a vacuum cleaner the size of a pin-head. Or, the most likely scenario, a time-traveler from the distant future returns to his past/our present and initiates some action that negates our very existence in an alternate universe time-line. Not that I worry about this stuff, of course………

But here’s the thing: the Mayan Calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012. The Mayans had a 52 year recurring cycle to their calendar according to my reading which I speculate might have related to a healthy Mayan’s life span, so I’m already living on borrowed time at 58 going on 59 later this year (which I will return to in a moment). And the Mayans for some undiscovered reason ended their calendar on Dec. 21, 2012. I’ll speculate that there was a “calendar committee” getting ready to come out with their new one when the Spanish invaded and killed most of the Mayans and replaced the old calendar with the new one with the blessings of Pope Gregory – the Gregorian calendar – which we still use today with the adjustment of a Leap Year and every so often, a Leap Second or two. And so the "Mayan Calendar Committee" was officially disbanded and never got back around to it.

And so now all the Apocalyptists are gleefully jumping on the Dec. 21, 2012 bandwagon and including the Rapture, the Bible Code, and every other goofy-assed "end of the world” as we know it aliens from outer-space are coming to take us away, schizo-maladroit, nutball theory out there and taking over the History Channel. The History Channel used to be about history.

So, anyway, back to Dec. 21, 2012. That’s my birthday. I'll be 62. I am eligible for Social Security on the day the world ends. Just my luck. I’m working five part time jobs right now, and barely eking out my living, and the one date in my life I can look forward to is now when the world may end. Damn. I’m going to have a party on that day anyway. We’ll see what happens……….


Apocalyptically Yours,
Bud