Happy New Year of the Mayan Codex (scripts of an ancient civilization that remains among the earliest to domesticate cacáo and transform its seeds into chocolate). The end as we know it.

Perfect timing for the prescient Adam Curtis, the ultimate pre-Sim examining simulated worlds within worlds.

He is the true paranoid heir to the early genius of Pynchon's V, Crying Of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, except that Curtis uses documentaries instead of postmodern fiction to dissect humanity's delusions as we shoot ourselves like quantum wavicles thru the millennium... out of History with a capital H & into an apocalyptic void that can only be filled up with more simulacra (including zombie people without souls but only brains), where the screens rule us thru our own enforced habits of thought & behavior. Check out his genius BBC documentaries that include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, The Trap & his latest All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace inspired by Richard Brautigan's poem of the same title:

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Even if you believe that the world will end this December, have a nice 352 days before that happens, okay? Go for a walk in nature if there is any of that sort of thing left "near the Google-mapped street where you live".

Along the way, maybe you'll feel the rush & the wrath of the Shark in this Redux Review (originally posted Spring 2011; updated here today) in sync with the true spirit of the Mayans.

A portent of impending doom?

Actually things are looking up.

True History of Chocolate author & preeminent Mayanist Dr. Michael Coe spawned the 2012 Deadline – back in 1966 – when he relayed that the Mayan calendar resets its odometer clock in reaching the end of a 144,000-day cycle called a b’ak’tun (roughly 394 years). Then, in a Nietzschean-like ‘eternal recurrence’, this wheel of time rewinds according to their cyclical nature of it.

Picked up since by the likes of Terence McKenna, Novelty Theorists, Timewave Zeros, & now a galactic-laxative in the mufti-science called ‘New Age’ as a scenario for a doomsday shift, 2012 in their purview would ruin chocolate as we know it (not to mention your whole day).

But, for those so enamored, should this be the end, remember our privileged position in all of creation: we were the very last of the humans.


“Creation Vase of the 7 Gods” (found at Naranjo & now housed in the Nat’l Museum of Archaeology, Guatemala) discusses the beginning & end of this Epoch which implicates an Armageddon-type deity — the underworld warlord Bolon Yookte’ K’uh, set to rock the planet on December 21, 2012 — a new day that could live in infamy. The accompanying script narrates “on 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk’u it was set in order: Black-is-its-Center” (Chan Ahaw Waxak Kumk’u tzakhi Ek’-u-Tan). The named location – Ek’-u-Tan – refers to the universe in a blacked-out state as the Sky awaits to be lifted away from the Primordial Sea.