Where Is The End of The Circle?
Egyptians had batteries, Delco makes batteries, therefore Delco is ruled by the Goa’uld!
Don’t even get me started about the Energizer Bunny a/k/a the true spawn of Satan.
As you can see, they’re pretty easy to conceive. In fact, if you want to kill some time, feel free to create some of your own and share with us. I’ll post some of the fun ones here for our readers. Since our readers are all intelligent and good looking I’m hopeful to get some winners.
In all senses of the word.
All you have to do is email me by clicking that link. Yes, it’s really my email address and not some bizarre scam to add you to a mailing list you hate. Speaking of which, if you do want to join our mailing list, just fill in the “Join Our Mailing List” box at the top right of the page. You’ll have to enter a cpatcha code to prove you’re a real person and not a spam bot, but the whole process takes less than 30 seconds so it’s not painful.
What is painful is listening to the end of the world theorists, and I use that last word very loosely, who keep informing us that our lives are forfeit and worth nothing so we may as well kill ourselves yesterday. These raving ignoramuses have been proven wrong so often that it stopped being funny, yet they keep popping up on the internet and my TV to warn of doom and gloom and basically put me off my feed.
The whack job favorite of the week is the Mayan Calendar. All life will end in December of 2012. All of the people who tell us this manage to be devoutly anything but Mayan. Tony Phillips, from AOL.com, decided to do something completely nutty and ask a real Mayan about their calendar.
The life of Luis Calderón de Huatapotliz y Barca de Madera is essentially identical to the lives of his distant ancestors (except that he’s fictitious). Luis, a Yucatec Mayan, wakes each morning with the sun’s first glow and enjoys a light breakfast of plantains and horchata. He then leaves behind his wife and 14 children, setting off on a 43-mile walk into the jungle where he plies the trade of his heritage — foreseeing the future.
En route to the fabled Vision Rocks of Tlacolopatatlanqatl, Luis follows the trail blazed by those venerable truth seekers whose stories are now lost to colonial history, kept alive only in the undying memories of modern-day prophets like Luis and the half-dozen other Mayan holy men who travel each day from their huts, some as far away as Houston, to summon the spirit mediums and invoke their sustenance of life on this fragile earth. Their ritual involves gruesome self-mutilation, ingesting live scorpions and channeling the harnessed energy of five-pinioned jaguars representing the five primary elements: earth, air, fire, water and crinoline.
Luis and his compatriots are among an estimated seven million Maya living in Southern Mexico and Central America (that’s actually true). Like most other contemporary Maya, Luis speaks a derived form of his people’s traditional language as well as a regional Spanish dialect. His life and culture exhibit clear evidence of his ethnic connection to pre-Columbian Mayan civilization, though heavily influenced by the encroachment of Hispanic society.
Having learned recently of the approaching end of time (December 21 of next year) marked by the end of the ancient Mayan calendar, we traveled on horseback several weeks through the treacherous, steamy growth of the subtropics to find Luis and learn once and for all what the Maya have to say about that ominous date.
Luis told us through a translator, “Get a life.”
A quick perusal of the most prominent 2012 pundits turns up a cast of international characters representing many cultures and many traditions save one, but no Mayans. There are self-styled spiritualists, hack meta-physicists, and this huckster. There are White Americans, Europeans, Scandinavians, a few Canadians and a Russian or two all invested in the End-of-Days industry. There are sites devoted to selling memberships in underground survivalist colonies and others to selling survival gear for do-it-yourselfers. There are handbooks and guidebooks and textbooks and rulebooks. There are testimonies, acrimonies and sanctimonies and the one thing lacking from any expert account of what’s going to happen to turn our globe to a cinder two winters hence is a single Mayan who might actually know what he’s talking about.
Back to the fiction …
Pressed for details, Luis addressed our queries about the supposed end of the Mayan calendar, saying, “The calendar is circular. Where is the end of a circle?”
He pointed out that other remnants of history have run their course — the Sumerian Language, British possession of Hong Kong, The Golden Girls — and the world has not yet ended. In the sacred, liturgical tongue of the Mayan priesthood, Luis proclaimed, “In k’aabae’, tikin oot’el, chi’il chi’ u chi’chi’al, u chá’acha’al tumen u dzay máako’ob. Dzok in pitik u nóok’il in k’aaba’ je bix u podzikubal kan tu xla’ sóol,” meaning, “No kidding. Get a life.”
At trek’s end we — my faithful cameraman Lars and I — found ourselves no closer to solving the mystery of 2012, Luis having chosen to keep the secret to himself. Such is the way of the Maya. There can be no doubt they know the truth. The wisdom of their ancients is evident from the record — human sacrifice, animism, putting up a heckuva good fight against a few hundred Spaniards with swords and funny hats. Luis himself bears a heavy burden, laden as he is with foreknowledge of the apocalypse but unwilling to speak it lest humanity be thrown into chaos.
One ponders and one fears. But should one instead welcome the impending terminus of all our journeys? Ought we to embrace the arrival of comets and sun blasts and tsunamis and volcanoes and earthquakes, birds, snakes and aeroplanes and John Cusack’s worst role in decades? To each soul falls the task of preparing itself for the end. To each life is given knowledge of the eternal and to each wallet, discretion. Should we rather seek in the purveyance of charlatans or in the wisdom of the forest our own path to Revelation or…
Seriously y’all — get a life.
I think that sums things up very nicely.
I was in college, back in the 80’s, when I first heard about the calendar. After being scared poo-less by a devotee of the arcane a teacher, who was of Mayan extraction, pointed out the same thing as Tony’s shaman; the calendar is a circle, it just starts over. What that means is anybody’s guess, but mine is that it won’t mean much.
Decemeber 22nd 2012 will be the day you’ll be out hustling to get all those last minute Christmas gifts you put off because you thought Armageddon was coming.
For today’s closing musical number, I’d like to thank my bud, Joshua B Ludzki for sharing this gem with me this morning. There just aren’t enough Klezmer/Punk bands in the world singing about the end of all life.
Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!
