The End of the World

Wednesday, 21st December 2022

On this date in 2012 the world ended. Or so it had been predicted. It’s an interesting insight into human nature and our belief systems. And that property called, when I was a kid, ‘Chinese Whispers’, a label I suspect is now deemed inappropriate. And it probably is, always was, even though I don’t know where it comes from. Lateral Transfiguration of Literal Meaning through Mishearing or Failure to Understand. Or LMMFU for short. There, that’s better. A phrase is uttered quietly to one person, say first person front left seat on a bus going to a sports event, then whispered to the next and so on round the bus until the message arrives at last person in the seat front right. The exit phrase is then compared to the entry phrase. The two never meet and shake hands.

Rather than the end of the world as we know it, 21st December 2012 was the end of the Mayan Long Form calendar. Unlike our modern uses of a calendar that are culturally specific (any idea why July and August are the only months in succession with the same number of days? Augustus Caesar didn’t want the month named after him to have fewer days than the month named after Julius Caesar. Two thousand years later we all just go along with it. [Why do we still put up with months having 30 or 31 days, but February having 28 which confuses the hell out of accountancy practices?]) Where was I? Culturally specific calendars rather than ones based on Physics …  the commonality of calendars being based on the revolution of the earth’s cycle around the sun; the Mayan Long Form calendar, however, had a cycle of 26,000 years. Longer than the span of a politician’s gaze. The date, December 21st, 2012, represents its own turn for the Maya, the slide from the ‘masculine’ age to the next 26,000 years of the ‘feminine’ age. Good luck with this mess of a world us lot have left for you, girls.

My own turn, move from one world to another, slide from one gendered mindset to another, comes with another visit to hospital. In 2018 I had 72 visits to one sort of medical practice or another in a single calendar year. Including four different hospitals, three different diseases two of which were architected to kill me. (One was a blood cancer.) This is a new one on me though: Urology. Familiar hospital, new territory. This guy’s a ‘Mr’ not a ‘Dr’ so has to have a serious game face. Another male finger up my arse, I might get a taste for this. I ask his oppo, who’s either learning or has a strange taste in spectator sports, if he wants a go. He declines.

Mr Tudor, which is a name, not the continuation of a dynasty, confirms that the soft mushy pulp of my prostate gland is now a tight knotty lump. 

This is not good news.

I am now the proud, lucky owner of a tumour, commonly known as The Big ‘C’. It’s probably not commonly known as that, but it is by me. The thing that does not speak it’s name.

Cancer.

The end of the world. But not as we know it, Jim.