Sol Invictus

Well, we're still here.

Another solar year has passed its longest night. We now enter the Dark Ages, the short, cold, wet days of winter that slog painfully towards the light of Spring. The winter is upon us, but the world hasn't ended.

This will probably come as a disappointment to some of the more woo-woo fringe here in Portland as well as those goofs at the National Geographic channel who made those ridiculous half-hour "specials". One hopes that, fueled by that sort of weapons-grade stupidity, very few of the rest of us took the opportunity of impending doom to take out large short-term high-interest loans on the ground that the impending doom would obviate the need to pay the money back.

Or, gee, anything else really foolish, either. Wonder what that could have been..?

Oh.

Yeah.

That.

But now we've dodged that slingstone the hard work begins.

That same hard work we do every day; get up, get dressed. Make food. Care for those who are too young or old to fully care for themselves. Work. Rest. Make love. Make war, or just make something. A chair, perhaps, or a painting, or a poem. Pet a cat, sing a song, filet a fish. Grow a crop or just grow older one day at a time.

Get on with living, in other words, the same way that people have done ever since there were people and will continue to do until the first flicker of the expanding corona announces the nova that really will mean the end is here.

And when all's said, that's the really difficult part, isn't it? Death and destruction and the End of the World are easy. It's living life, or at least living a decent sort of a life; being a good friend, a good lover, a good father or mother or son or daughter, that is hard. That's damn deadly difficult. Fairly amazing that so many of us manage it. I know that I'm going to need some more of this damn cold medicine if it's going to work for me tomorrow, and some more sleep. So I'm for bed, and hope you won't be reading this until the sun is up today.

G 'night.

But, hey, while we're still here - how about those sneaky Mayans with their stealth apocalypse?

Honestly. What a pack of jokers.