The End of The End of the World

[reprinted from an entry in my Myspace blog in 2007. I apologize for any references to The Sopranos, the writer’s guild strike or Gerhard Ertl’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry.]

I was never really worried about Y2K. I figured in the eyes of a computer, 1900 was as good a year as any to abstain from launching all the missiles. And I had long since outgrown Nostradamus’ predictions, which turned out to be accurate only insofar as you agreed to let “sandwich” mean “Nixon.”

Me, I was always more of a “Mayan Doomsday” buff. Back before Y2K, 2012 was the punk rock doomsday. You had to be doomsday hip to be exposed to it, because it wasn’t what was selling. It was a Sex Pistoly apocalypse, not some cheesy bullshit based on wizards or Jesus.

By the time the legend gets to our ears, here’s how it goes: the ancient Mayans, a mysterious clan of agricultural math club savages, had a calendar system so accurate that it could predict an eclipse 1,000 years in advance. This calendar is segmented into a handful of larger eras, or “suns,” one of which ended on the day that the Spanish exterminated them. But the calendar keeps going, because the Mayans, like Tolkien’s elves, knew of the eras that would come after, or at least knew when those worlds would begin and end. And they knew when everything would come to a complete end, which is why the very last of their “suns,” the last empire, the last era, and the Mayan calendar itself, ends on the winter solstice of 2012.

And then comes the “according to astronomers” kidney punch: That day, December 21st, 2012, is the day of an event which only happens every 25,000 years. The sun, which bobs up and down across some “galactic plane,” ever so slowly, will be right smack in the middle of it, and the earth will be lined up with such and such at the exact same time, which “theorists” say could cause a shifting of Earth’s magnetic polarity, an event that has already happened in the past, which results in the entire planet going Katrina and wiping most species out, especially certain species who can’t make it to noon without a non fat latte, not to name names.

So. Anyways. It was 1999 and the 2012 Doomsday rocked. And I always figured that 2012 would become the new 2000, after 2001, and I had always intended to google it and do 5 minutes of reading in like 2002, after which I could switch to the role of debunker, keeping my ironic street cred. But then, you know, 2001 happened, and we lost our craving for doomsdays because we were sort of feeling like the world was actually ending. I got sidetracked like the rest of you.

But it’s 2007, now. 9/11 is hilarious, we have redefined “ordinary world” to include massive acts of unexpected violence, we’re bored, and we’re ready for a new doomsday.

And here comes 2012, the Aguilera of Armageddons, seizing the charts from Britney. I watched a special on it a few weeks ago and it’s as scary as ever, magnetic pole shifts and all, and now there’s all this new stuff, because it turns out that if you add up all the chings in the I Ching and then reverse them, you get December 21st, 2012, and if you arrange the tarot deck in order and assign each card to a day, and then use the internet to decode the book of revelations, it all points to December 21st, 2012.

And the books are flying off the shelves, and the conventions are booked, and 2012 is either going to be the best or worst Christmas ever for children, depending on whether their parents use the end of the world as a reason to retreat to the forests of Montana, or just give them a shoebox full of gold.

So I’m switching to debunker. I googled it for 5 minutes this morning, and now I’m an expert skeptic. Don’t read any further if the 2012 Doomsday was making your dick harder or your meals more delicious.

The Mayan calendar was, in fact, so well designed that it could predict an eclipse 1,000 years in advance. However, the Mayan calendar doesn’t end on December 21st, 2012. The Mayan calendar, much like our own, never ends. It’s just a different system for measuring time.

In the Mayan calendar, a k'in is a day, 20 k'in make a winal, 18 winal make a tun, etc. The shorthand for a Mayan date, instead of looking like 01-03-1973 (the third day in the first month of the 1,973rd year since Jesus), would look like 12.19.19.17.19 (the 19th k'in in the seventeenth winal in the 19th tun in the 19th k'atun in the 12th b'aktun since the Mayan equivalent of Jesus).

Correlating our calendars is hard because we don’t know “when” they started keeping track of time. We ASSUME that they were obsessed with the moon and the sun, and designed their calendar, unlike us, to make round numbers happen on solstices. This is already a huge fucking leap, but that’s our cross to bear because all we can see when we stand where they were standing is the sky, because we kind of raped and murdered them and then burnt all the books that said things like “Dear Diary, it’s 115 Flim Flam, the Mayan version of Die Hard 2 was great, but then there was a big flood when Orion was 2 degrees west of Venus and it left a stain three meters up on the temple wall.”

In the absence of any scientifically validated correlation between our calendars, IF you accept the most popular one, here’s what happens on 12-21-2012:

Their calendar goes from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0.

As in, the next day is going to be 13.0.0.0.1, and if it was Ancient Maya, you might have to deal with a bit of a hangover while cleaning up the human sacrifice/lacrosse field. Other than that, a day like any other, or at least like 13 previous ones and infinite number to come.

Yes, they have higher b'aktuns than 13, and yes, there are higher places than a b'aktun. The ancient Mayans made references to dates way, way, way beyond that. Just like I can say, “hey, let’s get together in the year six million.”

The rest of it loses steam once you stop worrying about 2012. They “predicted their own demise?" What does that even mean? They demised slowly, just like the Romans and us. The Mayans had dynasties that rose and fell, they fought with each other, they had a peak and a decline, and at a certain point during the decline, Spanish people started showing up and giving them Spanish AIDS. It took a long time to wipe them out, and there’s still some around, and there’s no more a day that they disappeared than there is a day we killed the Native Americans. Wounded Knee? The Louisiana Purchase? Thanksgiving of 1492? What’s the day the Indians died? Maybe 12.0.0.0.0 is the day in 1511 when Gonzalo Guerrero washed up on the Yucatan. Or if that doesn’t work, maybe 12.0.0.12.12 is the day in 1517 that Cordoba got there, and if that’s not poetic, maybe we can fudge around with the year 1519 when Cortez "started exploring the area." What’s the day the Mayans collapsed, and which calendar correlation will you use?

The one that sounds best in whatever book or TV show you’re selling.

As for the "astronomers” and “theorists” that say there’s something special about the winter solstice of 2012: there is. It’s the only day in the last 25,000 years of our calendar that has caused as many idiots to call themselves astronomers and theorists. Nothing is happening on that day that doesn’t happen at least once a year.

The Earth’s magnetic fields may one day switch their polarity, causing everyone to die at the same time all of our VHS tapes finally become obsolete. Add it to the list of reasons not to take your life too seriously, along with super volcanoes, bird flu and the fact that your heart is a ticking fucking time bomb with no clock on it.

Of course, those things are scary because we don’t know when they’re coming. Not knowing is scary. No control is scary. And we cope with it by knowing. We write religions of different sizes and use them like screwdrivers. I don’t want to file my taxes, the CIA is flying helicopters over my house. Yes, the lady and I will have another order of potato skins, it’s almost 2012.

In fact, there is an event of catastrophic significance happening on December 9th, 2007 in Hollywood, California. The Ancient Armenians, who have lived there since the beginning of time, predicted that Steve Agee would be hosting the fifth annual Channel 101 Channy Awards. They predicted that even if you couldn’t make a reservation for a table, you should still show up and watch the pre-show and the awesome exclusively made videos from anywhere in Cinespace, and party with us. Doors open at 7, ceremony at 9, party til 2.