Judgment day

Gosh, I really hope the world doesn’t end on May 21st. For one thing, I haven’t accomplished all that I’ve set out to do—still don’t have a Wikipedia page!—but I’d also be pissed if some nutty fringe group was right. Seriously, look at this billboard. The shadowy dude on the right totally looks like he’s pooping. I can’t live in a world where this is an accurate depiction of what’s to come. (I guess I won’t have to if it is!)

I don’t worry about the apocalypse, which is funny, because I worry about just about everything else. I’d say it has something to do with the fact that a big catastrophic world-ending event isn’t something I can control, but that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about nuclear war, asteroids, and solar flares (OMG, did you see Knowing?). Obviously, the fact that I’m not a religious person is part of the equation. Being an agnostic Jew doesn’t mesh well with The Book of Revelations. But boy will my face be red if Jesus comes back!

Even so, I’ve been dwelling on what it would mean if the world ended Saturday. You guys, what a bummer. I’m not even the slightest bit concerned about the veracity of the pooping guy poster (“Cry mightily unto God, for ye are constipated”), but that doesn’t mean I can’t get lost in the theoretical. Like I said, the fear of not accomplishing everything I wanted to is what gets to me most. Which is weird, because if we all died, our accomplishments would be pretty damn meaningless. (Unless my accomplishment was figuring out how to thwart the accomplishment. Y’all would love me.) Yeah, I’d like to publish a few books before I peace out, but getting burned off the face of the earth puts us all on an equal playing field—righteous losers aside. I am on par with Jonathan Franzen, basically. When all life has been destroyed, my blog posts will be exactly as important as Freedom.

There are other (relatively) less important things that concern me, like never getting to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 or finding out who killed Rosie Larsen. Do you think they get AMC in Hell? If they do, it’s probably just the same episode of Rubicon aired on a loop. I hate the idea of unfinished business, whether or not the business is really mine. When it comes to movies and TV and books, the conclusions have no bearing on my life—at least not directly. And yet, seeing how it all ends is bizarrely important to me. If the world ends, I’m not going to know if I’ll ever get married, but I won’t know if Leslie Knope finds love on Parks and Recreation either, and that distresses me even more. Maybe my priorities or off, or—more likely—pop culture is a lot easier than real life. I could pick that last sentence apart, but it could get kind of heavy. Feelings, gross.

Do you feel bad for the people who have sold their worldly possessions in advance of the apocalypse? I did a little bit, but they should obviously be held accountable for their stupidity. How do you ever get to that point of certainty, though? I understand faith, but I don’t get trusting anything that blindly—throwing your life away because you’re sure it’s all going to come to a screeching halt in less than a week. And what happens when the world doesn’t end? Odds are they’ll keep making excuses. The apocalypse is still coming. It went out for a pack of cigarettes, but it’ll be back. I don’t know. I guess I do still feel a tad sorry for them: they probably don’t have Wikipedia pages either.