End of Days, Hurricane Irene

Dear Hank,

I know you’re busy burning down a man and all that but we got problems. There was this hurricane called Irene. We live on Hatteras Island and when a hurricane comes everyone scrambles to put their vehicles and trailers on high ground. Problem is this time most of the high ground got flooded. The highway to the island is “breached” in four or five places. So you know what that means? It means unless you have one of those James Bond cars that can drive on water you ain’t getting’ here from there.

From what I hear people are still dazed. We, personally, were lucky. We took our cars and our bodies off the island. We’re not allowed back on. They’ve got a curfew and ain’t lettin’ anyone on except emergency personnel, which is probably a good thing. Up north in places like Duck and Nags Head, funny names I know, they got tourists wandering around. Some of them are even going to the Red Cross relief centers to eat! Gives tourists a bad name.

We’re trying to figure out how we can help. Trying to organize efforts and locate stuff that can help. It’s hard because you don’t know where to start.

Someone suggested I write something using my “dry wit.” Soon as I wring it out, I’m going to do that.

But let me do what I can right now. There might be a much bigger problem looming than a hurricane. I’m talking the end of the world. Yeah, that’s right. Lots of folks have been saying the Mayan calendar says the world will end on December 21, 2012. Then they typically show an Aztec calendar. Makes you wonder how much homework they did. If it’s a reporter doing the story they then ask an “authority” that means someone who wrote a book. The “authority” then expounds.

Hollywood has had quite a field day with this stuff, as have the new age folks, the mystic folks, the spiritual folks, the “they must be aliens or visited by aliens” folks, and who knows who I missed. Oh yeah, people who have actually studied what the Mayan said.

Turns out most people who have written books on the subject seem to have read or understood little on the subject. Maybe, at best, they latched onto a small tidbit and ran with it. There is a fellow named David Stuart who has written a book on the subject. (The very fact he wrote a book on the subject makes him a expert, right?) Stuart also has a few other bon fides. He’s lived in Mayan villages as a boy. His dad’s an expert in the field and took David on trips to Mesoamerican sites ever since he could crawl. David was the youngest person ever to receive a Mac Arthur genius grant for his research. He put the last piece in the puzzle to solve how you read the Mayan glyphs. (80 to 90% can now be read.) He’s read and studied more about this stuff than probably anyone else. So what’s he say?

The Mayans mentioned the date in passing, once. There are no doomsday predictions. In fact, it’s not a total reset of their calendar just one part is reset of a much, much longer sequence. It seems that people are using this calendar and tidbits they’ve scraped up to say a lot about themselves and their beliefs – not the Mayan or what the Mayan said about the world.

Don’t worry, my next post will be much more self indulgent.