False Promises, Promises Promises

            The associate at Dunkin Donuts brought me a newspaper article he had been reading in the backroom. It was a small report about a man who invested his life savings, a good $140k, on marketing his premonition that the world will end next Saturday.

            May 21, 2011. It doesn’t really have an apocalyptic ring to it.  Too many 1s, a monosyllabic month, and the arithmetic is not at all impressive. Let’s see, 5 plus 2 plus 1 plus 20 plus 11 equals… 39! Ha! … ha? Nah. Then why did he, this man, this lunatic gentleman, conjure this date as one of final significance? It’s the same question I would ask of those who predicted 1999 to be the last year, or 1899, or 2012 or any of the decades between when there were consistently a dozen or so of these Agents of the Divine who plastered board to stick, with The End Is Nigh scrawled across it, and stood at street corners causing pedestrian traffic, and nothing else but that.

            Why? Could it be that some of us are so overworked and socially starved that we put a timestamp on “the future” (an exclusively human conception, mind you) and give ourselves permission to behave as those who have nothing to lose (except Everything). Next Sunday, when the lunatic gentleman is sitting in his messy or immaculate one bedroom house or apartment, wringing his hands in anguish masked as confusion he will wonder what he’d done wrong in life that God would punish him this way. A storm will rack inside his brain, as he comes to grip with his life, comes closer, closer to the sanity he had spent $140k to escape from and in a last ditch effort to remain in social oblivion he will realize that… he must have had the year wrong! It must be next year! Foolish man, too eager, but even better that there is now more time to warn the masses, to be a prophet, to be special, to be the one, next year, dancing between fiery rubble falling from red skies, scolding a stampede of immolated Americans because we didn’t listen to him. “I was a man, deserving of respect, but nobody ever listened to me, no matter what I had to say.” Maybe that’s the root of it.