Five Good Years

I made the mistake of DVRing a potentially interesting program on the History Channel last night, and now I'm wondering if it may change my life. The show was about the confluence of ancient prophecies, and you'd think it would give me the same chuckles as all the "Left Behind" and Y2K foolishness of the recent past. I am, as is evident in my volumninous rantings, a dedicated and irreligious skeptic, bound to observance of natural phenomena and documentary evidence.

But there was something particularly disturbing about this "documentary," which described several sources of ancient forecasting such as the Mayan calendar, the Chinese I Ching, the (ho-hum) Book of Revelations, and the purported writings of mystics of antiquity like the Roman Sibyl, the Oracle of Delphi, and Merlin (who knew he was sort of real?). That old-time crackpots would speculate about the End of Days is nothing new, but there was an eerie coincidence that more than one source pinpointed the exact Day of Destruction--December 21, 2012.

The Mayan calendar mention hit home in the most literal way, since I actually have a painted clay version of said calendar, purchased somewhere and some time ago, hanging in my den. Apparently it is a complex creation with some precise astronomical imbedded so that it can foreell accurately lunar eclipses and such. The documentary states that the projected dating on the calendar ends precisely on December 21, 2012. The I Ching, according to Chingists, also suggests this exact date as a termination point for current civilization.

I could pooh-pooh these findings by suggesting that a day of a solstice is hardly an arbitrary choice for an era-ending time frame. Yet (again, according to the documentary) that date is one in which the earth will be in a particularly precarious astral position vis-a-vis the sun, an orbital oddity that occurs every 25,000 years or so. Could this be a time when the magnetic poles shift or do some sort of weird dance, as they have in the past? The result could be massive seismic shifts and tidal disasters.

Well I live atop a seismic time bomb in Los Angeles, so I am intellectually, if not emotionally, prepared for some sort of upheaval. The San Andreas is so precarious (and overdue) that a little nudge by solar gravity could be very damaging to my abode, as well as my continent. And if nature does not take its inevitable toll, there is always the human factor, the Bush-instigated Middle East wars, the potential for nuclear terrorism, and the Bird Flu, to round out the Apocalypse.

After all the dire warnings, the program ended with a slightly reassuring reminder that end-of-the-world predictions are a mainstay of human blathering, and none of them have come to fruition yet. This did not help me sleep easier, or wonder whether I ought to consider maximizing my experiences on Earth just in case I (we) only have five years to go. To live life to its fullest is never a bad idea, but I now look at my IRA investments as possibly a tremendous waste of good funds I could use in Vegas.