For those of you who don't closely monitor your apocalyptic prophecies, 2012 is said to be the end of the world, having something to do with the Mayan calendar or Nostradamus or astrology or something. Admittedly, as a cynical poker player, at first I was skeptical of these dire predictions. Make your amends fast though fellow sinners, I've found two incontrovertible signs of the end of the world, each more glaring and horrifying than the Rapture could possibly hope to be.

1. So my girlfriend is in the bathroom taking a shit this morning and I'm computerless and bookless and televisionless. Sipping my tea trying to wake up, I bleerily scramble for any reading material and find a Vogue magazine. I read the cover- Lady Gaga is releasing a new album and bright colors are in this summer. Ok, whatever. So I open the magazine, intending to find the table of contents in order to look at Lady Gaga in what I hope is going to be a fedora made out of octopi. Now, Vogue is as thick as a Bible, so I expect to have to wade through a few pages of adds in order to get to my table of contents and I have mentally prepared myself for this. I set the mental over/under on 12 pages pre-table of contents. There were fifty-four pages of adds. At which point I browse the table of contents and note that it starts on page 156. Naively, I decide that this must mean that I missed the initial page of the table of contents, as I have to confess that after the first 15 pages of adds I got a little trigger happy and skipped a few chunks of pages which were melded together and stunk of perfume. So I went back meticulously, pried the gyrating perfumed images off of each other but still could not find a table of contents. So I plunged forward after page 54 to continue the table of contents whose indexing stopped at page 273 of what was certainly a 600 page magazine and whose index did not include the heading for my Lady Gaga article- from which I concluded that the table of contents continued past page 54 on what I thought surely would be page 55. Much to my surprise, the index did not continue on page 55, Vogue decided to pleasure me with another 45 pages of adds before giving me the second page of the table of contents on page 99. Still vainly searching for my octopi fedora and taking a few sips of tea to calm my nerves I decided to take this adventure to its logical conclusion and continued to peel forward through pages of women in gold thongs and 9 inch heels peering at me seductively whilst posed spreadeagled on the back of a live tiger which was emitting a scent of artificial roses. Finally, I solved the mystery when the table of contents terminated on page 156, each page of which was separated by a 40+ page parade of adds. I hadn't missed a page afterall, there were just 156 pages of adds before any content!

2. The other day as I was walking to the streetcar stop on my way to class I spied a somewhat modest forest green Honda Pilot SUV parked by the side of the road. As I approached I noticed that carved into its side, likely with a coin, knife or small rock in foot high letters was scrawled "global warming". As I continued my walk to the streetcar I tried to reconstruct in my mind the scene and psychology which could have produced such an act. The only plausible explanation is that someone is so unbelievably angry at every car they see while walking/biking in their neighborhood that they eventually boiled over, and on this deserted street vented their righteous anger at this specific destroyer of the planet by quickly carving "global warming" as obnoxiously as possible on their Honda Pilot. I reflected also, on an incident which had occurred last winter where my own Rav-4 had been egged one night, an incident which I had chalked up to drunk people/teenagers and had not conceived of as retaliatory action against the symbol of my flagrant carbon emissions. Could it be the same Eco-Warrior? Possibly...

I don't really have the inclination right now to go on a rant against the environmental movement except to note two things. First, there appears to me to be a an almost religious dogmatism in environmentalists when they consider any act from their environmentalist viewpoint- the dogma being that any act which 'hurts' the planet is evil/immoral. I'd like to just note that as a proud holder of a developed central nervous system capable of experiencing a wide and varied spectrum of pleasures and pains as well as a cerebral cortex capable of reflecting on them, that I also am a part of this planet and to make my life better in any way I'm prepared to sacrifice a large number of, say phytoplankton or amoebae or mosquitoes or granite unless said sacrifice is disrupting the larger ecosystem of which I am a part. Secondly, these usually quite pleasant environmentally minded people seem to sometimes confuse metaphor with reality and then get mad at me for not feeling empathy towards their metaphor. The metaphor of thinking of the planet as a 'living thing' or as 'mother earth' can be a really useful metaphor when it gets us to think about the vast and varied number of complexly interconnecting systems which support life on Earth and how we should fuck with them at our peril. The metaphor fails, however, when idealistic environmentalists get angry at me for 'hurting the planet', say by emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Is emitting carbon a bad thing? Yes, obviously, we have way too many people emitting way too much carbon too quickly to support as much life as we want to support. Am I hurting a living thing, some ephemeral connection between all plants and animals with a centralized consciousness a la Fern Gully which people need to be agents of and defend? Hell no.