I'm not really afraid of 2012. I would be, but I can't fear that far ahead. Right now I'm just afraid of snow. Remember how Christmas dinner got disrupted last year by a blizzard? Then, if 2012 arrives and we do make it around to spring (a friend astonished me last weekend by making plans for March; as far as I'm concerned March is still hypothetical), I will then be afraid of tornados.
But my point here is it doesn't do any GOOD to be afraid. It's not so much that it's virtuous to be brave; it's just that we might as well.
“Armageddon” Tired Of All These Doomsday Predictions:
Wherein the Gardener Marches Bravely Into the Future In Bazooka Joe Panties
By Robin Ford Wallace
A turtle, badly shaken, walked into the sheriff’s office and reported he had just been mugged by three snails.
“What did they look like?” said the sheriff. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I don’t know,” said the turtle, shaking his head dazedly. “It all happened so fast.”
That’s a joke from an article I read recently about a scientist who researches the nature of time. The guy’s a regular riot. He gets his test subjects to go on scary carnival rides because he’s noticed time slows time down when you’re falling to your doom. That’s why survivors say things like, “I saw my life pass before my eyes,” and also, presumably, why action movies use a lot of slo-mo.
Me, I feel like the turtle. My life is whizzing away in fast-mo. I must say, though, it doesn’t worry me like it used to. The way time flits by, how am I supposed to take it seriously?
This is my least favorite season, with its bleak gray weather and blink-and-miss-it days. But I don’t bother going into black depressions anymore. I can’t react that fast! The last few years, it seems like before I’m through sussing out which winter clothes will still do and which I’m too fat for, bingo, up come the jonquils.
But as this particular year rollercoasts to an end I’m frankly a little worried. It’s not so much that I’ll pine for 2011. That would be like missing gangrene, or junior high school. It was a good year for growing tomatoes but otherwise? Tornados and tragedies! Good riddance to 2011 and the horse it rode in on.
What we have coming up instead, though, is: 2012. Those who follow such things know that according to the Maya Long Count Calendar, time will reset itself to zero in 2012. And astronomers point out that at the 2012 winter solstice – Dec. 21 – the sun will be aligned with the exact center of the Milky Way for the first time in 26,000 years.
What does this all mean? Some people say nothing, others that we will enter a new age of love and enlightenment, and still others that the earth will colide with a black hole, a passing asteroid or a planet called "Nibiru," halting our planet’s own rotation for 5.3 days, displacing the earth’s crust and destroying civilization as we know it.
All right, that is mostly being said by a woman in Wisconsin who says she is receiving the information through a communication device implanted in her brain by aliens during one of the periods they had abducted her.
And she originally announced Nibiru would hit Earth on May 27, 2003. About a week before that day she got on the radio and advised people to euthanize their housepets in preparation. "A dog makes a good meal," she said helpfully.
When Nibiru kept its distance, the Wisconsin woman admitted her story was a “white lie, to fool the Establishment.” The Establishment, she said, had planned to impose martial law when the catastrophe did strike, trapping us in the cities where we would be crushed like eggshells.
Now that 2012 is upon us the Wisconsin woman has trotted Nibiru back out. There is no accounting for Yankees. I expect it’s got something to do with the winters up there. But there are a lot of people, mystics and conspiracy theorists and Mel Gibson, who are saying even weirder stuff about 2012.
There is no accounting for Mel Gibson, either, but what happens if we do survive 2012 is: 2013. I was worried about 2013 before I even heard about Nibiru.
“Triskaidekaphobia” is the word for the fear of the number 13. It’s a ridiculous superstition that victimizes the ignorant, the primitive and certain Dade County Sentinel garden columnists.
I developed triskaidekaphobia during the unhappiest period of my life: when I had a real job. I had trained as a court reporter to support my writing habit only to learn that after a day of grinding out transcripts I was as capable of writing as I was of pinpointing the arrival of Nibiru.
The work oppressed me. I would pray, “Please, don’t let anything terrible happen to me today.” Because terrible things happened to me all the time. Equipment failed! Juries hung! Once I got the top of my skirt caught in the top of my pantyhose and walked into a deposition showing my panties to a roomful of attorneys so reptilian their membranes nictitated.
But I don’t suppose there was much to see really. Cowed by life, I dressed in clothes so repressed somebody once asked me if I belonged to a sect, and even underneath I wore conservative black or dark gray “deposition panties.” (It was only much later I realized I should have called them “legal briefs.”)
The panty incident happened on the 13th of one month, and so did the time my car slid down an embankment, and so did the time the tape recorder stuck and the steno battery went out on the same day. It got to where I refused to go anywhere at all on the 13th.
But we can’t all stay home the whole year of 2013! Even supposing, of course, we survive 2012.
So what to do? Well, what can we do? If there’s one thing that life, especially this annus horribilis, has showed me, it’s that whatever is coming comes anyway. How does it help to wear depressing underwear?
So let us march into the future with courage, cheer and panties the defiant pink of bubblegum. Time does anyway fly, so at the very worst Jan. 1, 2014, will find us lying amid the post-Nibiru rubble muttering:
“It all happened so fast.”
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
Robin, this is the most enjoyable thing I have read in ages. I laughed out loud at least twice and smiled the entire time. I just love you and your words.
ReplyDeleteSusan