Well, it’s 12/12/12, and I’m still here. I assume you are, too? I wonder what all those people with the one-way tickets to the Riviera are going to do?
All of the end-of-the-world hoopla this week reminded me of one of my all-time favorite bathroom reading books, “Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse” by Jason Boyett. It is an extremely helpful survival manual that also causes the spewing of hot drinks due to unexpected guffaws. Read carefully in public. Especially the “Know your potential Anti-Christ” bit.
Turns out LOTS of people have confidently predicted the end of things, sold their baseball card collections, and headed for the rooftop to wait for the trumpet call. Which is really funny when you read the particulars, and also kinda sad.
It reminds me, too, of something Anne Lamott said in “Bird by Bird.”
“I remind myself nearly every day of something that a doctor told me six months before my friend Pammy died. This was a doctor who always gave me straight answers. When I called on this particular night, I was hoping she could put a positive slant on some distressing developments. She couldn’t, but she said something that changed my life. ‘Watch her carefully right now,’ she said, ‘because she’s teaching you how to live.'”
Seems the end IS all kinds of nigh, if not in the way the Mayans might have thought, at least in the usual, slow way. So how do you spend the days you have? What do you do with the tick-tock?
Catherine's Letters 
WOW I somehow missed that in Bird by Bird. Probably because I read it ten years ago before my own friend died from breast cancer. This time around, the quote made me catch my breath and sob a little.
Someone asked me at a party the other night if I thought the world was ending on (whatever-day-the-hysterics-on-Facebook-are-predicting-this-year), and before I could remind myself that he was a stranger and might take offense, I started laughing. I grew up in a Second Coming sorta household, so I spent my entire childhood Believing that the End was Nigh. Terrifying. It managed to not happen for a good 18 years straight, and that is why I Am So Over It.
But this: The end is, indeed, nigh… in the usual, slow way. So true.
LikeLike