The End of the World. Again.

I bought a bag of peanut M&Ms this afternoon, opened it and started to eat. I bit into the first one. It had no peanut inside, just chocolate! Bit into the second. No peanut! Same with the third!!

“F**king Mayans.” I said. “So this is what it comes to.”

You’ve got to hand it to them. They were on our minds. Off the radar for a thousand years but they still managed to craft some serious millennium-bounce buzz to pop up on us – if you can call the end of the world “serious”.

I can imagine them sitting around a stone table there sometime around 1104 or 5 somewhere in the Yucatan and they’re talking:

Main Mayan: “Well guys, we’ve all noticed the wheels are coming off the wagon around here and we gotta do something about it.”

Some other Mayan: “Maybe we should invent the wagon.”

Mayan next to him: “Maybe we should start with a wheel.”

Long pause.

Then another Mayan (no point in naming names here out of respect for the dead) says:

 “Look boys,” he says, “Ain’t no wagon or wheel or any other dumb idea is going to work for us. I move we prank our way out. Gimme a hammer and a chisel and I’ll rough it out for you.”

So the perpetrators, all world-class stonecarvers and the finest comedy minds of their time, worked up a calendar and closed it out with an expiration date.

The expiration date.

Fast forward to now, to where most of us can take a joke, having survived several ends of the world ­with some of them on the same day. Some ends were predicted by "experts". Some of them anyone with brainpower equivalent to poultry could have seen coming like the time I nearly ended my world on a motorcycle topping a blind hill too fast on a hot day on the road to St. Omer trying to insert myself into the cooling system of a French potato truck. That would have been IT for me, but as I recall, the irony did not escape me.

But it wasn’t IT then and it wasn’t again this time. The world may well end in a fireball or a big flood. It can also, on a personal level, end in a tsunami of stupidity.

We all have different endings. We just have to keep a sense of humor about it, like the Mayans.