We’re doomed. Yep. And that’s being optimistic. We’re so screwed that our threads have been stripped. 
Or at least according to the Mayans. And the Hopi. And those six skeptical dudes that I stayed up late one night to watch on television, only to retire to bed feeling uneasy and frustrated. Hell, even Nostradamus has us slated for beetle grub.
Or does he…?
Nope. All the Nostradamus 2012 specials are complete hype. There is absolutely no evidence that the creepy book of watercolors is based on his prophecies. In fact, his actual prediction of annihilation occurs in the 3700’s. We’re more than a couple years off from that. And the Mayans and the Hopi? Well, I’d be more impressed if they weren’t trade buddies. If the two societies had never met, never traversed each other’s paths, then fine. Lots of weight would come with their eerily similar predictions. But as history tells it, they met in the ‘Zone of Silence’ to trade goods. And information.
Am I wagering that they sat around getting shitfaced and decided to play a good joke on us all? Well, no. Although I don’t argue, that would make for a funny apocalyptic theme. Hmmm…
DIBS!
My point to this meandering is this: I have spent a crazy amount of time watching all these doomy shows, and it’s not doing wonders for my outlook. The world does indeed look significantly darker when you look at it with the realization that it could be gone in 2 years time. I have kids and I want to see them grow up to live long and happy lives. I have ferrets, dammit! I want to live!
Now… here’s where ‘enlightenment’ happens.
I watched Brad Meltzer’s Decoded last week. I’ve skipped most his shows because so far they’ve been just goofy. But I wanted to see what they came up with for 2012. Certainly they weren’t gonna mimic everyone else and say that we are indeed slated for extermination that winter’s solstice. Doesn’t every show need an edge?
Surprisingly, they actually had one.
One Nostradamus ‘expert’ pointed out that Nosty (…nice) predicted many bad things, but his end date is much later than the Mayopis. (See that? I just jammed those two together. I’m totally impressing myself!) And let’s face it. Nosty was a poet by necessity. Hey, dude didn’t want to get his block knocked off. Which means that none of his predictions will ever make sense until something happens. So they’re not very successful ‘warnings’, are they? To be honest, some of them are so generalized that they really could be multi-purpose quatrains. The “quicker picker-upper predictions”. So while I am always interested in Nosty’s views, I’m not betting the bank on them.
The Mayans made a big calendar. They based it on the planets and alignments. My guess is that like all calendars, theirs had to end too. I don’t know or completely believe that the end of their calendar is more than just that. And hey, yoo hoo! If they were so spot on, why didn’t they save themselves? It’s like sitting in the middle of the African bush, predicting the deaths of tribes that haven’t even appeared yet… and getting snuck up on by a herd of stampeding elephants. “Holy shit, where did those pissed off pachyderms come fr–“ SPLAT! Yeah. Nice try, guys. Let’s play again in a few thousand years.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m willing to believe that something will happen. Sooner or later. Magnetic shifting, solar flares… yeah, I get it. I’m not happy about it at all, but I know we’re helpless when it comes to the extra extra big picture. I could say, “Hey, let’s all jump up and down starting at 9 am on Dec 21 and keep it up for the next 24 hours and maybe all that jumping will push the entire planet down until we’re out of that dark rift.” But even I’m not that idiotic. We’re headed for something. But until it happens, no one knows what the something is.
So as Brad’s team tried to find holes that would save our collective asses, they came across one of the developer’s for the Web Bot. You’ve heard of this, right? It predicts future events by scanning the internet and picking up codes. It predicted 9-11, amongst a myriad of other events. And as I listened to them explain how it works, sheer genius was bequeathed to me. I’m talking genius like OPRAH genius. Yes, THAT fantastic!
Bear with me on this:
The Web Bot is predicting our future based on ALL the information on the internet. This thing is reading and analyzing everything we put here. Including this cockamamy post about how it is reading and analyzing everything we put here. Including this post!
Uh, where was I?
Oh yeah! Genius! Guys, it’s reading US. (No, not the magazine!) It’s predicting what happens to us based on what we say. So doesn’t that stand to reason that maybe we have some say in what happens in our future? It’s predicting doom and gloom cause that’s ALL we’re talking about!
Quick interesting side note before I make my proposal: It hasn’t made a real prediction about 2012. It’s just saying ‘cataclysm’. Which is really specific, thanks a lot, Web-ster. And the men monitoring the programs said the thing is, all predictions stop on Dec 21, 2012. And they don’t resume until May 2013. A-HA… but they DO resume. Isn’t that kinda like good news? Maybe?
Anyway, here’s what I suggest. We are in control of our so-to-speak destiny. It’s taking its cues from us and all the rhetoric and propaganda and bad Palin jokes that we plug in here everyday. Is all this pointless banter worth the inevitable demise that is being predicted because of it? Are these words of fear and paranoia worth a future of pain, desolation, and Larry the Cable Guy with a show on the History Channel? Do I remember what I was talking about?
Oh yeah.
What if everybody, for an extended period of time, picked one subject. Only one. And then proceeded to ONLY write about that one thing on the internet. Everywhere. From emails to dating sites to social networks to blogs to ‘BeatYourPorkChop.com’… If everyone only talked about one thing, doesn’t that invariably affect the data the Webot gets? And wouldn’t that be a funny as hell joke?
Say, just as an example, everyone just typed the word ‘Dook’. Nothing but billions of people, all just saying ‘Dook’. Do you think the Web Bot would get a dose of that and be like, “Holy hell! WTF does ‘Dook’ mean?” And is that future so scary? No. There’s nothing scary about ‘Dook’. Although in retrospect, they’d probably misinterpret it as ‘Doom’…
Uh.
Okay, scratch ‘Dook’. Lets come up with something fun and fluffy. Something we can all look forward to. Hell, it’s our future, peoples. Let’s get creative. And goofy. If nothing else, we’ll find out if the Web Bot is programmed with a sense of humor.
The bottom line is — we are in control. Maybe not over planetary alignment mumbo-jumbo, but when it comes to social conscience and compassion and knowing when the fuck to lighten up, oh yeah, it’s all us, baby.
So let’s turn this around. Any ideas for what we should all talk about?
Memoirs of a Midnight Masochist 