A year from today on Dec. 21, 2012, time in our world is going to end.  This is attributed to the Mayan astronomers and priests who are not around to explain themselves, much less to defend their letting us in on the secret of an attendant possible demise.  What a really nasty thing to do, letting people know months ahead that the end is near.  Like knowing that your beloved pooch is going to get run over by a car next year.  Hurtful and insensitive.

The Mayan calendar was not exactly a leaked memo either.  They carved the end of time in stone.  Good grief.  It is one thing to post something on the Internet and have it circle the world in a second.  However embarrassing some of our posts, they will fade, except for those pesky search engines.  But to etch it in stone.  With crude knives and stone hammers, they pressed their beliefs onto solid igneous rock.  I guess they knew what they were doing.  These rocks, after all, ignited from a previous fiery upheaval.  These Mayans, they knew what they believed and fought for it.  What a few Mayans in Congress and the White House could accomplish today!

I am no genealogical expert but I presume to have some Mayan blood in me as do many HispanicLatinos.  That said, I wish the Mayans had been a bit more circumspect and taken wimps like me into consideration.  They erroneously assumed that their progeny would all be warriors, not worriers.  They might have been fierce fighters, the end of our time for them but a challenge to be met bravely.  But that particular gene never made it through the generations and into any of my cellular walls.  I look away from replays on television of football players’ knees being crushed or their legs being twisted round, well, like Legos.

So, okay, now that I know, how am I going to handle next year’s Christmas parties?  I do not participate in Christmas much, so over the years I have received fewer invitations – achieving precisely the results I desired.  But next year at least one party invitation will come my way, and I am sure to accept it, what with the end so near, who wants to make enemies at a time like that?

But forget about me, pity the heavenly authorities who will be faced with a rush of judgment for billions of people.  I am sure they have a task force working on it not unlike the hundreds of task forces that kept us from being plunged into oblivion at the turn of the millennium when the Y2K computer-date bug was going to erase our accounts at Macy’s.

It is said that Washingtonians packed lunches and took buggy rides to see the battles at Bull Run and Gettysburg.  I do not cook much but I do want to see where the apocalypse starts, when the first flames shoot through the ground to consume us all.  I am pretty sure the convulsion is going to begin in Alabama or in Joe Arpaio’s office in Arizona.

Having to go to either state is truly the end.  In addition to being inconsiderate, the Mayans had a really bitter sense of irony.

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