Yes Virginia, the World DID End Yesterday

Dear Virginia,

Yes, you called last night and gloated that no aliens landed, no volcano erupted, no meteor crashed, no new anything happened yesterday, and yes, haltingly I stumbled like an off-guard republican at a press conference, seizing up in my Martin Sheen Dead Zone arms all sorts of rationalization nation children shields against your Walken seer reproachment ammunition. I should have cried, or conveyed my sadness, which was even then too deep perhaps to voice. Ah, I said, but the change is within. The change is within us all. The 2012 event horizon is where the personal and the universal meet. This is, unfortunately what even Ancient Aliens (all new starting yesterday only on H2) doesn't understand. There was an AA marathon last night and they were talking of Nazi archaeologists using Buddhism's secrets of astral voyaging --going outside the confines of space and time-- as the foundation of some time machine they had created underground in Hungary somewhere to travel back and forth through time.

It's like bitches, why would the Buddhist means of astral voyaging, which is how 90% of alien travel is done to begin with (just as 90% of our communication now is via cell phones and Skype and email), have anything to do with actually lugging some physical body around outside of space and time? The ONLY way to do that is by going through black holes (1), so if you're planet's nowhere near one, you're never going back to anywhere, anymore than you can use a chute in Chutes and Ladders if you're not on that square. So it's only when earth is way way close to a black hole in the distant future will we be able to travel back to here, which is how I know, and I've said too much. Put down the gun, Virginia / Christopher Walken, we're all humans here.

But that's the gist, Virginia. Just as that enterprising columnist wrote you all those years ago about Sinter Klaus being in all our hearts, now too I write to you to justify the doomsday prepper mentality, the fear and woe that swept Hollywood, Ancient Alien theorist contenders, and even me up in its exaltation and dread. As I wrote earlier this week, the horror of facing an immanent personal apocalypse is what makes Xmas movies so cathartic -- i..e. Scrooge crying on his own gravestone while the ghost of Xmas future wags its skeleton finger, or Clarence showing the distraught Jimmy Stewart the dreariness his absence would portend in It's a Wonderful Life. So how could the impending doom of some long-ago predicted doomsday be anything but a guarantor of holiday cheer?

We should of course feel grateful nothing did happen, and find comfort in little everyday miracles. For my family it was finding the face of an alien (left) hidden in a bag of red potatoes! Or various jokes and wisecracks, at my expense, as usual. Or the sudden terror I felt when alone here in Arizona in Fred's house and the darkness of the desert night so sudden and ominous the way the pink ridge of evening just plunges straight to midnight made me think the aliens had come for me and had their ghostly trans-dimensional hands around my heart.  Maybe the surest sign of alien intervention is the relentless sameness of our world, where a minor disaster here and there effects only one side of one country, one power grid here or tornado path there, never enough to bring our status quo to a halt, never enough to wipe away our credit card debt in a huge burst of magnetic energy, or enough to wipe out all life through a super volcano eruption or massive meteor strike. Someone is surely looking our for their investment.

So yes, Virginia. In some ways the world didn't end, in others maybe it did. Now if any of those predicted calamities do erupt we'll be like too little too late. Even if we go down in flames we'll be like sorry apocalypse, you had your chance! Isn't that, in some ways, a triumph!?

Eckhart Tolle writes about working with inmates on death row and getting them to let go and embrace the light of pure consciousness through meditation. The change is so incredible that oftentimes the result is some sort of governmental pardon, but then -- since the void is no longer so close, the felon's new goes back to coveting, scamming, lying and bargaining. It's perhaps inevitable we'll do the same as 2013 roars off on whatever course it chooses. But we'll have 12-21-12 to remember us by. They'll never want to market all the 2012 documentaries or rerun them on History, it will go the way of Y2K. But we'll know, won't we Virginia? We'll know this is all a dream, a colored cartoon carnival, an exact duplicate, a remnant, a thought, a sound wave beamed from the inter-galaxial fractal connection and are now living on repeat, a holographic image projected over a wasteland world. It won't help, but it won't hurt, and if life is going on just as before and that's annoying the hell out of us, maybe that's on us this time. We just can't wait anymore for some giant heavenly hand to pluck us off into some new dimension, we have to carve it out ourselves. It sucks, but it's true. As the technician said in Close Encounters of the The Third Kind, "it's the first day of school, fellas." -- and I don't wanna go, mom. I'm sick. I just want to stay home and watch Lathe of Heaven til it all turns to black.

Love,
Erich

NOTES - 1) for the sake of brevity I didn't put "As ancient astronauts theorists contend" in every other sentence... or preface with perhaps, but of course everything I write here can't be proven, but then again explains things way better than some other paradigms I could name.