The End Of The World As We Know It.

As many of you know, according to those wacky Mayans, the world is scheduled to end in about nine months.   Naturally, for many reasons, I’m hoping the Mayans are wrong.  To begin with, the end of the world sounds like a messy, potentially painful affair that at the very least will bring down property values and at worst would seriously impact my somewhat lengthy To Do list.  (Here, it should be noted that I’m not talking about one of those bucket list type things where people don’t want to die without ever having seen the Pyramids or something.  I’m all for bucket lists but unfortunately, creating such a list is currently in 453^rd place on my To Do list and nine months hardly seems enough time to get the 452 things ahead of it done.)

Another reason I want the Mayans to get it wrong is pizza.  It seems that if the world were to end, my favorite pizza place (that would be Wilson Pizza Palace) would probably be gone as well.  Even if I were to somehow survive, would I really want to live in a world without Wilson Pizza?  What’s more, I’ve spent the past three months depriving myself of pizza and other fun things to eat in an effort to shed some of the excess pounds I’ve picked up over the years.  While I’m happy to report that I’ve now lost 25 lbs., I’d hate to think that I could have been eating pizza all this time.  After all, if the world is going to end, why bother getting into shape?

Still another potential worry that the Mayan prophecy might create involves homework.  It’s hard enough to get kids to do their homework now.  But can you imagine the difficulty involved with the addition of an impending Armageddon?  I can already hear my kids saying, “What’s the point?  The world is ending,” which would most certainly be followed by “Can we get pizza?”

I will admit the end of the world is not without it's positives.  For one thing, it would certainly put an end to any worry about social security running out of money.  And, if December 21st really is our last day on Earth, think of the money we'll save on Christmas shopping. 

Not everyone subscribes to the doomsday theory however.  In fact, just today I learned about an upcoming documentary film concerning this very subject.  According to the producer, the Mayans did not forecast the actual end of the planet but instead predicted that about three-quarters of the Earth’s population will be wiped out in the next 15 to 20 years.   I don’t know about you, but 75% less Kardashians sounds like a good thing to me.

The filmmaker also goes on to say that the survivors would need to quickly colonize outer space, “just as the Mayans did.”  The Mayans colonized space?  This brings several things to mind, one of which is, I wonder if Newt Gingrich is perhaps part Mayan.  And, it does seem a bit far-fetched to envision the Mayans achieving space flight before inventing at least, say, the blender (Can you imagine a long space flight without the ability to make margaritas?).

I suppose it's possible that rather than building their own craft, the Mayans were whisked away by extra-terrestrials. But even that seems unlikely.  After all, if you were an alien, would you want to get stuck on a long space voyage with a bunch of doom and gloom types who are always going on about the end of civilization, and, who have yet to invent a blender?

I don’t know if the world will actually end this December. Apparently, we'll all have to wait until then to see how this story ends.  In the meantime, now that this column is finished, I can check one more thing off my To Do list.  Next up:  I think I’ll order a pizza.  I guess I might get to that bucket list yet.