Forgotten Beatitudes

Several months ago, a dear friend went through a particularly shitty break-up. The guy was just a total ass about it and it spun her off into a dark place. She’d sit at home and watch The History Channel obsessively. At the time, the History Channel was going through one of its “Doomsday Programs” phases, as opposed to its “Hitler Programs” baseline.

I got a call from her one evening.

“Have you seen this show on The History Channel all about the Mayan calender and the end of the world?”

“Um, no, I tend to avoid such things.”

“Well, apparently, the Mayan calender runs out on December 21, 2012 and that date’s also important because it’s a rare planetary conjunction and there may be a black hole or cosmic rays or something that’ll shoot out from the center of the galaxy and destroy the planet and you can find references to this date in the Bible and in the Torah and Nostradamus predicted it…”

It was hard to ignore the shamed, breathless glee in her voice.  She knew she shouldn’t want it to happen, but part of her really, REALLY did want it to happen.  My response?

“Well, on the bright side, I’ll never have to worry about turning 40.”

See, I’d been exposed to this before.  Back when I was a mere child, an aunt of mine was dumped by a whale of a man in the most spectacular fashion.  The went on vacation to D.C. and there, in front of the statue of Lincoln and surrounded by tourists, the fat fuck told her that they were breaking up because he had been seeing some mousy little bimbo from southern Missouri for the past eight months and was moving her up to Kansas City to marry her.

To this day, that bullshit fills me with such rage that I sincerely hope his morbidly obese policeman ass caught a bullet, that shit went septic, he went in the hospital and spent a painful six weeks recovering, only to be diagnosed with explosive cancer and told he only had seconds to live, so he had a heart attack and then his tumor blew up while the mousy little Southern Missouri white trash fuck was standing in the blast radius and was shredded by his fat shrapnel but wasn’t killed, just horribly scarred, disfigured and crippled, so had to live out the rest of her pathetic life in a twilight world, shunned by society and alone in the knowledge of what her country ass had done.

Now, I’ll admit, that fantasy is a wee bit violent for a Quaker, but it’s also contained and directed.  The only people I want to suffer are the idiots directly involved and responsible for hurting someone near to me.  My aunt, however, wasn’t about thinking large.

This all happened at about the time Nostradamus roared back into the public conscious with Orson Wells and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.  I remember hiding behind furniture in the house as my aunt watched this flick obsessively on cable.  I developed a perverse hatred of Orson Wells because of the terror I felt at these doomsday predictions; my hatred would only be dissipated when I heard his voice over for peas.

My aunt, however, wanted her suffering to be global.  Doomsday predictions and nasty human events became her favorite as she grieved for herself and her relationship.  The whole period came to a head one day while we were shopping in Gift Horse.  Remember Gift Horse and all its unicorns?  I had made some sort of statement about saving up to buy one of the stuffed plush unicorns I was holding and falling in love with (Yes, I loved plushes and unicorns as a child, so what?  I’m masculine enough that my macho can take that hit.  Fuck you, you gender nazis) and she remarked, jokingly I know now, that there was no point in saving money for anything because the world was going to end.  I don’t really remember anything after that, but am told I threw the unicorn at her and started screaming at the top of my lungs, “I’M EIGHT YEARS OLD!  I’M TOO YOUNG FOR THE WORLD TO END!  STOP IT!  STOP IT!  STOP IT!!!” and ran from the store to be found at the Woolworth’s store elsewhere in the mall, staring at the $1 live geckos they sold and were all the rage at the time because not only did they turn colors like green and brown (well, really they only turned green and brown, but still), but you got to carry them home in a white box that looked like a Chinese take-out carton.

I learned a valuable lesson from that period, though:  Women don’t fuck around with grief.  The corollary to this axiom is: dump a woman and the whole world is going to pay.

My aunt immediately cleaned up her doomsday talk, although she never dated again, politely but firmly discouraging any sort of attention that looked as if it might be traveling down that path.  She also tried to make it up to me by buying the unicorn I hurled at her, but it wasn’t the same.  I really had no use for unicorns after that but I did develop a healthy skepticism for doomsayers and their predictions.

Which brings us back to my friend.  I wasn’t able to join in with her emotions on quite the level she was hoping for because of that previous experience and because of my skepticism.  I do try, though, so I forwarded her information about the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, currently being built outside of Geneva, Switerland, by CERN which, according to some scientists, may produce black holes capable of swallowing the earth or ripping apart the fabric of space time and making time travel possible.  This sort of fuels her fire, but makes me again shake my head over vengeance and questionable predictions.
As I was looking through my RSS feeds the other day, I stumbled upon this little article, though, from Cosmos.  The notion of a “cleansing” of planetary life via a burst of gamma rays (or possibly conversion of all life on Earth into large, green monsters with a grudge against anyone named McGee) is not new.  For a really good sci-fi read sort of on the subject, check out Greg Egan’s Diaspora, although it’s really more concerned with transhumanism and posthumanism than culling cosmic rays.  He’s a great writer of hard science fiction, though, so I can’t recommend him enough.

I haven’t decided if I should forward this piece of info on to my friend.  She seems to be doing much better at dealing with the break up, apart from occasionally running into the man while out and about.  The last time being weeks ago at a showing of the movie Sweeney Todd which, you know, appropriate.  I’m concerned that showing her this would reignite her desire for a fiery end to all life on the planet.  I feel that if I should show it to her, I need to then take great pains to point out that even if this binary star does nova and even if the Earth is in the path of the energy release, we’re still talking thousands of years before the dangerous energy actually reaches us, so there’s no way it could be the culprit behind a doomsday of December 21st, 2012.

Although, I suppose the real question is:  It’s 3 am, a binary star 8000 light years away has just gone nova, a wave of potentially deadly energy is hurtling directly at the Earth…maybe…which will possibly bring total destruction to all terrestrial life in thousands of years…WHO DO YOU WANT ANSWERING THE PHONE?!?!