I should have known.

I’ve seen it many times.

Hell, I’ve swerved out of the way often enough that when I hit that turkey late one rainy afternoon I felt like I ran over an old acquaintance. Amazed at its heft, I moved the bird off the road and walked down the only driveway around.

Have you ever knocked on a stranger’s door to tell them you killed one of their animals? I did, and it’s not fun at all. The door was answered by an elderly couple who warily looked at my wet self through the glass door.

Not having the words, I just turned and pointed at the road.

They opened the door and I explained what happened and the man was quite stoic and muttered something about it being inevitable. I already suspected the bird was a pet and this was pretty much confirmed by the old woman. She looked like someone had just run over her…dog.

I was invited inside but I had this horrid feeling that I would see framed photographs of the couple along with their turkey. I apologized once again and offered to fetch the bird from the end of the driveway. They declined and I was relieved because I was not sure if I could carry it that distance in a dignified manor. I left feeling lousy.

The brain works in strange ways. It was spring and the sun was shining and that always brings out the best of people in Oregon. I had completely forgotten about the turkey incident from weeks before and therefore was quite surprised when I found myself whipping into the Wilco feed store parking lot. If I was surprised, then my girlfriend Rhonda was a bit freaked. Did I hit something? Is it car trouble? “No,” I said, “I have to check something out. C’mon in,” I waved.

Behind us, out in the parking lot, the sign read Spring chicks! Turkeys!

It was like I was on a mission and knew exactly where to go; weaving through the isles at a brisk pace, Rhonda close behind. I could feel her getting ready to question when I suddenly stopped, turned, and pointed. How smart and purposeful I felt when I uttered that one word: “turkey.” Rhonda’s eyes followed to where my finger was pointing and asked, “what the …?”

That was a question I had a hard time answering.

My knowledge of turkeys was quite limited. Growing up within sight of the Boston skyline, I had made turkeys out of colored construction paper and paste, I had participated in many wonderful thanksgivings, and I knew the Wild kind made the bed spin. Beyond that? Ziltch. I only identified the turkey to which I was pointing by brilliantly deducing that it was bigger than a baby chicken (about twice).

There was a lot of activity around the other racks, all of which contained day-old chickens. Chickens! Who needs chickens? I just needed a turkey to give to that nice old couple. Price tag: $2.00.

I was hunched over, studying the small bird while waiting for a salesperson to free up. What’s wrong with these salespeople? Don’t they see that I am purposeful and ready to buy? Around me I keep catching bits of conversation about chickens. What a bunch of freaks, I thought. Do they gather at Wilco and just stand around talking about chickens?

Then I noticed the sign that read “FREE CLASS! The Care and Feeding of Chickens. Sunday, 1:00pm.”

Hmmm, 10 minutes. I turned to Rhonda and talked both of us into staying for the class because, after all, the old couple might not be home and we might end up having to care for a turkey for a day or two. I like to think she was trying to absorb these new events but I suspect she was contemplating the depth of my insanity. So either out of love, or fear, she agreed.

I thought it was mildly hokey that they had bails of hay for benches set up in the back of the store. I thought it was extremely hokey when the 25 or 30 people started to clap when the speaker came out. I mean, c’mon! It’s not like this guy wrote a book or anything.

My cynicism has a way of biting me in the ass. It turns out the book he wrote was a tome that documented about 2000 diseases that can afflict chickens. This was a man who was seriously concerned about the safety of our food supply.

He began with “Yep, this is the book”, while hefting the tome off a table. “This is the book none of you will ever have to buy unless you purchase your chickens by the millions.” (Laugh). “If you have a few chickens and let them run around and eat bugs in your yard, then you will more than likely never have a sick bird…”

Hey, this was going pretty good! He was dismissing worries I didn’t even know I had. I figured the same must hold true for a turkey, after all they taste similar.

Then Wilco did something truly evil.

Those bastards sent a couple of kids, presumably slave labor, around the room passing out paper bags that contained “One Free Chick, Compliments of Wilco.”

I didn’t see it coming and I’m sure that was the plan. Oh, yeah. Here’s your free chicken, and by the way it needs food and water and heat or it will die, killer.

Heat? Where the hell do I get heat? How much heat? It turns out they sell lamps that heat up baby chickens. Cost: $10.00.

What the hell do you feed a chicken? My guess was bread. Bzz, today is “you’re wrong” day. The feeding options for baby chickens are real simple. You feed them Chick Starter and they live, or you feed them nothing and they die. They are not picky; you can feed them Starter in the morning, and then Starter for lunch, and later, feed them some Starter for dinner. Or you can just put Starter in a dish that they can reach and let them eat whenever they want.

They also need water. Chickens like fresh water. They don’t need nearly as much water as, say, a horse but they appreciate it just as much.

I’ll give you one guess how I know all this about baby chickens. That’s right, I ended up leaving Wilco with:

Before you go running out and doing the same, there is something very important I have to tell you. It concerns turkeys and their survival. It is crucial that you understand that baby turkeys are very ugly. All of them. Mine was and yours will be too. They are hideous, and you will have to cultivate that paternal or maternal bond and resist the urge to put it out of its misery.

As they get older something incredible happens. Simultaneously, they get both uglier and shockingly beautiful. From the neck up they look like they had a real bad case of acne whose cure was attempted by dunking their heads in boiling water. Vivid, angry colors and wattles – that’s what their heads look like. But the rest of the turkey? Well that’s another story. A Bronze turkey, especially a Tom, has outrageous plumage. Sometimes I didn’t know where my turkey began, and where it left off.

The turkey never did get over to see that nice old couple. When you take care of something living, you become vested in it. That little turkey would respond when I talked to it and if I took it out of the box and held it in my hands, it would hop up onto my shoulder and then onto my head of curly hair where it would go right to sleep. Rhonda would look at me with that ugly little bird on my head and say “yep. It’s a definite improvement. I’d go with it.”

Rhonda cracks herself up all the time.

As the days went by I found out that when a turkey rubs his head on you that means he likes you. It’s good to have them like you because turkeys grow very large, very fast. My turkey was not aggressive but he did startle me sometimes. He had a thing for the rivets on my jeans and would occasionally try to remove them with his beak. It didn’t hurt but it would give you quite jump if you didn’t know he was behind you.

Another thing to know about turkeys is that they are monumentally stupid. My turkey was known to waste the better part of a day just staring at himself in the bumper of my truck. On Monday mornings I’d always find him out by the road sitting next to the bright blue garbage barrel. It was trash pickup day and my theory was that he thought the yard had moved out to the street because that’s where the bright blue thing was.

Alas, it was my stupidity that did him in. I work from home and sometimes I’d work late into the night and not get up until 10:00 or 11:00, which is too late to keep the birds cooped up. I got to leaving the door open on the small shed that I used for a coop. I was aware that predators like to sneak into chicken coops for a meal but I rationalized this by thinking that Turkey was big enough to scare anything off. The problem is, chickens and turkeys become very docile at night and can be handled quite easily. More than once I’ve had to pick a bird up after dark and carry it to the coop. This usually happens on nice evenings when the bugs are plentiful and there’s maybe a piece of watermelon to peck around the yard. Just as when we were children having fun in the summer, I think the dark just sneaks up on them.

Predators are a fact of life when owning animals. This is especially true of fowl because they taste so good. You like chicken, I like chicken, Mr. Raccoon likes chicken, Mr. Fox likes chicken, and I suspect one of my neighbors dogs likes chicken.

Which brings us back to chickens.

I told you that I purchased half a dozen Rhode Island Reds but actually I lied. I only thought I did. I’m going to be talking about cocks and sex-links but rest assured I am staying on subject. The Reds I got were actually sex-links. Don’t Google it because you will be getting chicks of a whole different kind – mostly without feathers. Sex-links are hybrid birds specifically bred for better performance and easy sex identification at hatch time. The males and females are either a different color or the feather patterns are different. This is important because, unbelievably, roosters don’t lay eggs.

The first few weeks after bringing home the birds was somewhat uneventful. I kept them in a large box on to which I clipped the heat lamp. I would have to regularly change the water and I would take them outside to run around so I could replace the lining in the box. Unlike Turkey, who learned to jump out of the box after a week, the chickens didn’t do much of anything. Not even grow much. At about week four, they decided to double in size in the span of an afternoon. At least that is what it seemed to me. I figured like all birds, they need to be helped out of the nest, so one last time I brought them outside and tipped the box over and away they ran.

I figured the chickens would follow Turkey around and look to it as their protector but just the opposite happened. As I said, turkeys are monumentally stupid and my turkey must have been impressed with the very busy agenda the chickens had. He would follow them around as they darted about the yard, always running, always with some purpose only known to them. I thought about strapping a proximity detector on two chickens, multiplying the resulting vectors together, and posting the answer on the Internet as a perfect random number generator, but I didn’t want to intrude on their affairs. For all I knew they would start to run in regular patterns and then I’d look like a real jerk.

Soon, I got to thinking, “where the hell are my eggs?” I gave them the benefit of the doubt for about another month but at this point I was buying chicken feed in 50 lb. sacks. Fifty pounds! It was the high-protein Starter mix and it cost $9.00, or about $3.00 more than regular feed.

I started to get pissed off at my lazy chickens. I bought them “surrogate eggs” if you can believe it. Fake eggs that are supposed to stimulate laying wherever you put them. I figured “stimulate”, hell, I’ll just show them the real deal, so I chased them around the yard with a frozen chicken completely naked. The chicken, that is; not me.

I had heard that weather can influence egg laying so I used that as an excuse to mention my egg laying problem to the cute little know-it-all smart-ass behind the counter at the feed store. Because I was buying starter she asked how old my birds were and I told her about 10 weeks. She gave me that your-an-idiot look I was getting used to and told me they start laying at 20 weeks.

I was obsessed! Week 20 was hell and I’m sure my behavior didn’t help my nervous chickens at all. I had built nests of straw everywhere around my yard. It was like something out of a nightmare. I figured “one more nest, that’s what they need!” So, of course, it was in a box of rags that I found the first egg. It was small, misshapen, and had two yolks! That little lady continued to lay double yolkers for months, each one bigger and more perfect than the last.

I had never had a fresh, free-ranged egg before and all I can say is I’ll never buy store eggs again. The yolks of store eggs look sickly and yellow compared to the bright orange ones I was getting. How many eggs was I getting? Five or six a day. Rhode Island Reds are known as prolific layers. They lay brown eggs. Rock hens are another great laying breed and they lay white eggs. Do you know what a male Rock chicken is called? That’s right: a Rock cock.

Speaking of roosters, chickens don’t need one to lay eggs. That’s right, no roosters. If I don’t need one, I won’t get one.

Life is tenacious. If you have chickens there is a great chance you will end up with a rooster. For me, it happened while I was looking at a horse to buy. I drove up to a farmhouse not far away and when I got out of the truck the strangest looking bird came running up to me, stuck out its chest, and belted out a loud cock-a-doodle-do. That bird cracked me up and I said so to the man that eventually sold me the horse.

Here is what I think happened: my chickens somehow made me convey to that rooster that they were alone. In turn, the rooster conveyed to his owner that he needed to be given to me because when that man delivered my horse, out came the rooster from the trailer. He said “I know you liked this guy, so here he is.” To the best of my recollection, I never mentioned owning chickens to him, so just giving someone a rooster is a strange thing to do.

Never name your chickens. They come and go, and too many look too much alike, so when the man told me the name of the rooster was Rock-a-Doodle I laughed because you could not find a more apt name for this bird. It looked just like a punk rocker. Polish chickens have an outrageous mop of feathers on top of their heads. This one was a Polish variation called a Top Hat Special, and he was special all right.

Roosters are loud, funny, and aggressive. I could carry Rock-a-Doodle around like a football at night, but forget about doing that in the day. It seems I was sporting fun for him in the morning before feeding them all. Hell, I got to where I’d carry a trash lid with me to bash that little bastard in the head. The have short memories so I’d have to bash him quite often.

If he wasn’t attacking me, he was trying to nail one of the hens. You don’t know what sex drive is until you’ve seen a rooster. They say you should have one rooster for every ten or so hens and I’ll testify.

You know how in the cartoons roosters are always portrayed as crowing when the sun comes up? Bullshit! Don’t believe everything you see in cartoons. How about 3:00am? How about 3:00am, 3:01am, and 3:07am? How about whenever they want and often enough that you completely get used to it. My neighbors did too – eventually.

The neighbors minded less when I started giving them cartons of fresh eggs. The cartons are the problem now, since I don’t buy eggs. My neighbors are good about bringing back the empty ones and of course they linger around long enough for me to fill them up again. My original six birds, those lovely ladies, were giving me 5 or 6 eggs a day and that adds up fast. Rhonda suggested we plop a sign out at the end of the driveway announcing a dozen eggs for $1.00, but I told her I didn’t want a bunch of egg-eating freaks crawling all over my property for the sake of a buck. It’s tough enough watching out for the neighbors.

How many eggs am I getting now? Today? Let me first tell you about some more BS that is being foisted upon us. At the beginning of this I mentioned buying a heat lamp and accessories to grow chickens. They (it’s always ‘they’) also were pitching an incubator as required goods to successfully hatch your own birds. Again, a big hardy Bullshit! I have to work at NOT hatching chickens because all that is needed are some fertilized eggs and a chicken to sit on them. Things in great supply in my back yard.

The work to NOT hatch eggs involves finding them. Chickens are sneaky! They will start laying eggs in a well hidden place and once they have enough, they will start setting. Even if not hidden all that well, they lie perfectly still and, I believe, assume other shapes such as a can of paint.

The very inspiration for this story is because, for the second time now, the morning feed was enjoyed by eleven new chirping balls of fuzz. Eleven!

Besides the Reds, I have acquired the odd other chicken here and there, and I do mean odd. I don’t know what these chicks are going to look like when they grow. One of my Frizzle hens was the one setting but that doesn’t mean she’s the one who layed them. They are very communal in that way.

The one thing I haven’t done yet is cook up a chicken. Rhonda is against the idea on the grounds that they live on our property and therefore are part of the family. Me? I don’t have anything against the idea on principle, I mean it’s just like fishing, right?

Oddly enough, I always catch and release when fishing in the river behind my house.

Anybody want some chickens? Anybody want some eggs?

Note: I cheated, and I feel bad. This essay is a substitute for a sciency/philosophic essay about man and beast that I am still putting together. It was supposed to be done on Saturday, but it keeps demanding research. I originally posted this diary about 2 years ago at DailyKos using a different moniker.

Last Saturday, we met on the state capital stairs to enjoy some music and a little walk around town.

“In four short years he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the President of the United States, and you’re not. Love it or leave it.” -Hunter S Thompson on George W. Bush

“Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?  Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for — but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.” –Hunter

It was a great day for a march.  We wound catepillar style around marching up 6th Street where the South by Southwest Festival was just getting wound up.

“[T]his blizzard of mind-warping war propaganda out of Washington is building up steam. Monday is Anthrax, Tuesday is Bankruptcy, Friday is Child-Rape, Thursday is Bomb-scares, etc., etc., etc…. If we believed all the brutal, frat-boy threats coming out of the White House, we would be dead before Sunday. It is pure and savage terrorism reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”  –Hunter again

Being Austin, we even had floats.

Me….

We ended up at City Hall where there was more great music and moving tributes to our soldiers.

“All we have to do is get out and vote, while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.” –and more Hunter.

There are many pictures. Double click on any one and you will go to the album. Feel free to look around!

Thinking that it would drop kick me back into noveling action, I thought that I would step into the Book in a Month challenge set forward by Victoria Lynn Schmidt.

So off I went and joined the Yahoo e-group connected to the book (VBIAMClub), which seems to have garnered quite a number of members. While the current challenge is running from 15 March to 15 April, there appear to be any number of different challenges going on simultaneously. Or at least a couple seem to be couple different challenges going on…or starting.

Anyhow, I joined and set up my goals…or rather goal–continue/finish the novel I’d started during Nanowrimo this past November. I’d finished the 50K words. But I soooo wasn’t done with the novel. So I got down to brass tacks and read through chunks of the book to figure out what it was that I was supposed to be doing according to the book, which is great I suppose. After all, there are lots of things that I know my Nano novel was missing…including some more in-depth character development and such. (I’ve been wandering confused…back and forth re: character sketches).

Work, as usual, got in the way. But I figured that I’d catch up over the weekend. I wrote up the Log Line as well as the back cover description. I got the basics of the outline figured out. I even got the Story Idea Map going for Chapter 1 as a way of getting back into the story. And then I ran into the challenge…scene cards.

Schmidt mentions that there ought to be 10 core scene cards. One for the beginning…one for the end. The rest of the scene cards fill out the middle ground between the middle and the end. Some of them are related to the various plot points embedded within the three acts.

But that’s where my confusion begins. Where she advises that there not be that many actual scene shifts, I’m trying to figure out  whether or not those scenes are changes in locations or more overarching re: a particular story point that starts in one location and ends up in another.

The folks over at Scriptfrenzy (an idea I’m toying around with) have set up a scene worksheet that has a series of questions that might be helpful in developing the ins and outs of those scenes…once I figure out what is and isn’t considered a scene .

So I scanned that, and it looks very helpful. But it still leaves me with questions about what is considered a scene. Still confused, I found this article “Writing a Screenplay with a Full Deck.” In this article, there’s a discussion about how the storyline is divided up into about 40 different scene cards…some of which appear to deal with the Hero’s Journey (Joseph Campbell rears his head ).

Defining a scene would help…

The purpose of a scene helps achieve coherence in a short story or novel. The fiction writer should have a goal to accomplish with each scene. A scene lets the reader know that the setting has changed too. Common purposes of a scene include:

• Advance story – The scene must move the story forward. This could mean introducing a problem or making a problem worse for the characters.
• Show conflict – The conflict could be between two characters, a character and nature, a character and time, and so on.
• Introduce character – The reader needs to meet each character at some point. A careful writer does not introduce too many characters in one scene. This could confuse the reader.
• Develop character – Along with introducing a character, a writer can use a scene to show the character’s good and bad points.
• Create suspense – Suspense keeps the reader’s interest going, perhaps more than any other element of fiction
• Give information – The writer can weave information into a scene so the reader knows the needed background of the story.
• Create atmosphere – Using conventions such as setting, weather, and time, the writer can create a certain mood in a scene.
• Develop theme – A piece of fiction should have a theme. Each scene should bring out the theme to the reader.

Scenes that are memorable, the ones the reader remembers, will attempt to achieve as many of the previously mentioned purposes as possible. If the scene has no purpose — or even has a purpose, but not a sufficient one to justify the space it takes up — the writer should cut that scene out of the story.

Sometimes the scene is followed by a sequel…or aftermath…the fallout of what happened in the last scene:

The Sequel has the three parts Reaction, Dilemma, and Decision. Again, each of these is critical to a successful Sequel. Remove any of them and the Sequel fails to work. Let me add one important point here. The purpose of a Sequel is to follow after a Scene. A Scene ends on a Disaster, and you can’t immediately follow that up with a new Scene, which begins with a Goal. Why? Because when you’ve just been slugged with a serious setback, you can’t just rush out and try something new. You’ve got to recover. That’s basic psychology.

And that led me into the whole thing about writing the “perfect” scene:

As we said, the Scene has the three parts Goal, Conflict, and Disaster. Each of these is supremely important. I am going to define each of these pieces and then explain why each is critical to the structure of the Scene. I assume that you have selected one character to be your Point Of View character. In what follows, I’ll refer to this character as your POV character. Your goal is to convincingly show your POV character experiencing the scene. You must do this so powerfully that your reader experiences the scene as if she were the POV character.

Also found this: How to Avoid Chasing Paper As A Writer

So now I’m off to work out this part of the puzzle…hopefully, I can get that figured out.

4000 of our brothers and sisters in uniform.

100,000 of our brother and sisters in Iraq.

Always remember.  

or The Really Real Reason Why ’08 Is the Most Important Election Ever

I’ve been around this big orange block long enough to know that writing a conspiracy-theory diary ain’t a real good idea if you’re not hungry for donuts, but some things…well, they may be out on the edge of non-paranoid discourse, but don’t really fall under the category of “conspiracy.”  I’ve scoured the FAQ for any mention of “prophecy,” for example, and have found neither reference nor prohibition.  That makes me glad, because it’s to the arcane world of divination that I must now turn: it falls to me, it seems – your resident historioranter-cum-Cassandra – to alert our community to the most important hitherto-unmentioned aspect of the job facing whoever is elected in November.

The person we place in the White House this year will be the one sitting there, either as a lame duck or a president-re-elect, on December 21st, 2012.  This has special significance, since a great many prophecies seem to converge on that particular day – it’s been slated to be the End of the World by seers from Ancient Mexico to Renaissance France.

In short, the next President will be in office when life as we know it comes to an end.

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand? – Rev., 6:13-17 (tonight’s Revelations brought to you by the folks at Holy Bible, King James version)

I’d love to take a long, exhaustive look at each of the prophecies that foretell our doom four-and-a-half years hence, but this is too important not to have the candidates weigh in immediately.  As proclamations of ruination seem to be de rigueur around these parts lately, I think it’s imperative that we raise awareness of the looming apocalypse by demanding of our presidential hopefuls their End-of-the-World Response Plans.  Each and every candidate – I especially want to hear from Mike Gravel on this – should report back promptly with a detailed accounting of what he or she plans to do to ready our civilization for Ragnarok.  Candidates are further reminded that every vote counts (with exceptions for the 9 citizens on the Supreme Court who get to vote twice, of course) and that mine is riding on the quality of the answer s/he delivers.

Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!  – Rev. 8:13

As things now stand, it’s difficult to discern the candidate’s positions on which theory of the End of the World he or she believes the most correct, and even harder to tell what programs will be put in place to counter it.  As a Potential Left-Behinder, should I ready myself for a Plan A: Noble and Stoic Demise, a Plan Bush: Make No Plan, or a Plan Z: Panicked Exodus to the Stars via Improvised Spacecraft – or something in between?

Furthermore, consider the economic implications of a definitive date for the end of the world.  The next president, given a favorably terrified Congress, might be able to go on a spending spree the likes of which the world has never seen – after all, who wants to be the sucker that still has an available balance on his credit card on December 20, 2012?  On the other hand, should such spending even be encouraged – “The Stimulus Before the Silence,” or something like that – or ought the president’s role be one of urging frugality and caution?  

Speaking of pants-pissing Congresses, think of what the next President will be able to do with the Apocalypse as a talking/bullying point.  George Bush had them by the short hairs with nothing more than a handful of lunatic terrorists and a single Pearl Harbor-type attack – imagine the power a president could wield when the job requires one to protect the citizenry from nothing less than the full-on wrath of God.  

Perhaps equally important will be the president’s ability to look sheepish and reassuringly apologetic if it turns out some ancient Maya astronomer forget to “carry the two” and wound up getting the date wrong.  For those who follow the economic advice listed above, having the world survive to the 2012 Inaugural could be a disaster – think of all those Y2K-era bomb shelters that are still being paid off.  Will the Fed be there to back up all the bad investments we collectively make, or is end-of-the-world-based capitalism only the province of your Bear Stearnses and J.P. Morgans?

And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not – Rev., 2:21

Whatever goes down on December 21, 2012, we won’t be able to say we weren’t warned.  As far back as the time of Ancient Rome – and probably long before that – Maya astronomers were calculating eclipses into the far future and creating a series of linked calendars way more accurate than the clumsy Gregorian thing with which we’ve encumbered ourselves – and they saw the end of one of their Great Cycles of the Long Count as occurring in 2012.  According to some, this set of glyphs represents the “end” of the Maya calendar, and doom for us all:

This all gets a little mathematical for my taste, but if I’m remembering my Mesoamerican cosmology right, the Maya had two main calendars: the Tzolk’in, made up of 260 days (13 “trecenas” of 20 days each), and the 365-day Haab’, broken into 18 months of 20 days, plus five “nameless days” at the end of each year.  It helps to think of them as two gears with intermeshing teeth; the numbers are such that the two calendars share the same date only once every 52 years.

Maya Time Keeping divides huge periods of time into more manageable segments.  First, they had their Long-Count Calendar, which starts at a fixed point (August or September, 3114 BCE, for those keeping track), and works on a more-or-less linear fashion.  The Calendar Round system described above kept track of the years along the linear progression of the Long Count, and as it did so, it broke the years counted into something akin to decades and centuries – though the numbers involved are quite different, as the Maya mathematical system was, with a few exceptions, vigesimal, or based on 20.

A Tun, broken down into 18 Uinal of 20 Kin (days) each, was a year, or one revolution of the Haab.  20 of those together made a Katun, and 20 Katun, or 144,000 days (394.52 Gregorian years), made 1 Baktun.  Add 20 Baktuns together, and you get one type of full cycle of the Long Count called a Pictun, representing about 7885 Gregorian years.  The Maya, being the type of folks who saw cycles within cycles to (literally) the nth degree, also had words for 20 Pictuns (Calabtun, or 157,703 years), and for 20 Calabtuns (Kinchiltun; 3,154,071 years), and even for 20 Kinchiltuns (Alautun, or 63,081,429 years), though they usually didn’t have need for measures of time larger than a Baktun.  Most of Classic Maya history, for example, occurs within Baktun 9 (435-830 C.E.); our current Baktun – ole, faithful Baktun 12 – began in 1618.

It is that 12th Baktun that ends in four years, at which point the two calendars will reset to their starting dates, much like the digit changes involved when our calendar passes a millennium or century mark.  Baktun rotations may occur about 4 times less frequently than do changes of century on the Gregorian calendar, but the cycles of which they are a part churn on regardless.  The Maya calendar does not “stop” at December 21, 2012, any more than the Year 2000 “ended” the Gregorian calendar; it simply moves on to the next Baktun, with a Long Count date of 13.0.0.0.0.  We still have about 3000 years to go on our current Pictun, and Quetzalcoatl knows how many left before the current Kinchiltun and Alautun cycles roll over.

Today, by the way, is 4 Caban 0 Uo on the Calendar Round; 12.19.15.4.17 by the Long Count.  Folks signing and dating tax returns today will want to note that “March 23, 2008, can also be written 14 Cumku. 12 Cimi

Weird Historical Sidenote:  Those 5 “nameless days” of the Haab’, called Wayeb’ in the work-in-progress reconstruction of Classic Mayan, were a time of fear, superstition, and ceremony – not unlike a specifically haunted night in the Ancient European experience.  A citation in Wikipedia article on the Maya Calendar from David Foster…

In other WHS news, Maya Long Count dates are written like this: baktun . katun . tun . uinal . kin.  Think of it as you historio-cosmological IP addy.  Additionally, if you’re the type who digs playing with glyphs and dates, you might check out this Maya Calendar Tools site.

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts – Rev., 9:20-21

The Maya were far craftier about matching their math to their calendar than were, say, medieval monks, who considered the figuring of angel-to-pinhead ratios legitimate science.  Beginning with the Olmecs of deep antiquity, Mesoamerican astronomers watched and recorded the movements of the stars and planets, using the observations to develop their array of cyclic calendars.  They had a special fixation on Venus, but also noted the motion of the Earth in relation to the Ecliptic Plane, as well as the solar system’s movement relative to the Galactic Plane.  So it is that their calendars were matched to cyclically-occurring events along these lines – especially the really rare ones, like the alignment of the sun, Earth, and the “dark rift” at the center of the Milky Way that happens every 26,000 years.

The Maya called that “dark rift” Xibalba (Wikipedia entry), a search for which quickly leads to the New Age wing of the Internet, as well as some pretty breathless conjecturing about the relationship of the precession of the equinoxes to the Mayan underworld.  Indeed, if the Popol Vuh, a Quiche Maya text written during the Spanish Conquest and translated into Spanish 150 years later under the title Historias del origen de los Indios de esta Provincia de Guatemala, is to be believed, the underworld is a pretty crappy place: first you have to cross rivers of scorpions, blood, and pus before arriving at the city, then its 10 Lords publicly humiliate you before sending you on to any number of horrific tests of skill and feats of strength.

So it is that on December 21, 2012, the entrance to Xibalba is gonna be lined up with the Earth and the Sun, and all manner of solar flares, sudden changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, and vast paradigm shifts are being predicted as a result.  Given how the enormous alterations in consciousness foretold with the coming of the Age of Aquarius and the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 all came true, it’s little surprise that 2012 is being seen as a major interstellar event:

Scholar and author John Major Jenkins reports, “On 13.0.0.0.0, the December solstice sun will be found in the band of the Milky Way. We can call this an alignment between the galactic plane and the solstice meridian. This is an event that has slowly converged over a period of thousands of years, and is caused by the precession of the equinoxes. The place where the December solstice sun crosses the Milky Way is precisely the location of the “dark-rift in the Milky Way…’xibalba be’ – the road to the underworld.”

On the winter solstice of 2012, the noonday Sun exactly conjuncts the crossing point of the sun’s ecliptic with the galactic plane, while also closely conjuncting the exact the center of the galaxy.

Jenkins further proposes that this grand cross in time is symbolized by the Mayan Tree of Life, found at the core of Mayan cosmology.

The Living Prophecy

In fact, a cottage industry – a good bit of it is collected at The Mayans and 2012 – has grown around this ending of cycles, complete with prophets, sacred sites, and a body of “research” to back up the zeitgeist’s assertions.  In addition to the Popol Vuh, one of the more oft-referenced sources of prophecy is the Sarcophagus of Pacal II, a Maya king entombed within the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, in present-day southern Mexico.  As early as the 1970s, researchers were noticing that Pacal might be riding a Chariot of the Gods, but it took present-days Mayanists (sic) to unearth the revelation that the lid-carvers were in fact speaking explicitly to our generation:

This cosmic interpretation of the Maya Tree of Life is then compared to a map of the galaxy, with the result being something like this:

Map from Lord Pakal Ahau’s Maya Diaries, an interesting site – the proprietor is apparently in direct contact with Lord Pakal Ahau, a Baby Boomer reincarnation (b. 1952) of K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, a/k/a “Pacal the Great” of Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions fame.  He’s the guy that was buried under a sarcophagus lid that Erick van Daniken construed as “proof” that the great king (r. 615-683 CE) had ascended into the heavens in a spaceship – and omg, you must check out the t-shirt logo – makes one wonder if xochitl is really Nahuatl for “Have a Nice Day.”

All this math and astronomy and stuff are a fertile playground for people who like to make numbers do weird things.  Here’s an example of where 2012-related discussion can go, if you let it:

As Venus orbits closer to the sun and faster than Earth it will pass Earth so that a line can be drawn through the Sun and both planets. If Venus and Earth are on the same side of the Sun this is called an inferior conjunction; if on opposite sides it is a superior conjunction. Either way, the next one will be 583.9 days later, and both planets will be exactly 216 degrees around in their orbits. This is called a synodic cycle. Note that 216 is three times 72, and five times 72 is 360 degrees, a complete circle. A series of five of these cycles takes 7.99 years.  A diagram showing the orbits with lines going out from the sun at the conjunctions will have five lines each exactly 72 degrees from the next. If you then draw exterior lines connecting the points of intersection with Earth’s orbit, you will have a regular pentagon like the one in Washington, D.C. the latest addition to the sacred geometry of that city. Draw internal lines from point to point and you have that most powerful of magic symbols, the pentagram, or five pointed star. Note that the ancient Egyptians portrayed stars as having five points, and the human body has five major projections: a head, two arms, and two legs. Here is embodied the key idea of astrology, the connection between us and the stars. As above, so below.

This Age Ends in 2012 on the Winter Solstice

And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth – Rev., 11:18

The beauty of basing research on tortured interpretations of half-understood ancient cosmology and languages is the freedom it gives the “researcher” to “interpret.”  Here’s an example of such outcome-based investigations, courtesy of Lord Pakal Ahau:

…the reader will find our proposed match reading of the right-side section with the corresponding glyphs, after Stuart and Gronemeyer. In our revision, Lord Pakal Ahau included the syllable Ek (meaning dark or black) in the reading of the fourth row glyphs. (T89 glyph, FAMSI Dictionary of Mayan Hieroglyphs) to extend the translation and explain what will happen at the end of 2012: there will be darkness or a dark event presumably effecting Earth and transforming the whole humankind.

Did you catch that?  If part of your source material is unintelligible, simply insert a glyph that fits what you wanted the translation to say in the first place!  Man, this is some ground-breaking stuff going on here!

That sort of half-assed quasi-intellectualism, coupled with differences over the evolving New Age philosophy as a whole, has also led to disagreements around Sedona-area drum circles as to what the grand alignment actually represents: fire and destruction; a vast, sudden, transformation of consciousness; or some other kind of cosmic reset button.  Comforting, yet frightening at the same time, is the knowledge that this has, apparently, all happened before (and yes, everyone else who can’t wait for Battlestar Galactica‘s new season, it will all happen again), but fortunately – as predicted by the highly prophetic and vastly underrated Stargate: SG-1 – the Asgard have our back:

The simultaneous polar reversal in earth and sun will throw the solar system out of whack. That will cause massive upheaval in the earth. At that point of time, the extraterrestrials will officially show up and put “cosmic seat belts” around us as they apply the superpower of the Hyperspace to bring the solar system back to what it is today.

This has happened before. The extraterrestrials take care of the earth and the solar system whenever the solar system faces challenges like that.

December 21, 2012 – are you ready?

Indeed.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name – Rev., 13:16-17

The Greek root of the word “apocalypse” doesn’t translate as “death and destruction,” but rather to “lifting of the veil,” so perhaps our presidential candidates will be tempted to wait for revelation to come to them, rather than going out on a limb and getting ready for the doom of humankind.  If so, they may be pursuing a policy of grave miscalculation – publishers of the works of historical seers and modern would-be prophets alike have a vested interest in promulgating interpretations that have the potential to turn populations into either resigned, subservient slaves or hordes of frenzied mobs.  To wit:

• Lost Book of Nostradamus – basing it predictions on numerology and rather grasping interpretations of an anonymously-written book that may or may not have been illustrated by Nostradamus’ son, the History Channel claims the great seer of Renaissance France set the end of time at December 21, 2012.
• José Argüelles, founder of the Thirteen Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement heavily promoted the Harmonic Convergence and ever since, has tried to direct as much attention as possible to his “Neo-Mayanism” and a 13:20 calendar that he thinks is more universally conscious than the Catholic 12:60 one.
• Gordon-Michael Scallion needs to be in every End Times president’s Department of Cartography, as he’s been selling maps of post-cataclysm America since 1993.  Several of his predicted doom dates (for pole shifts and such) have already come and gone, leaving him to explain, via proxy and in a very Bush-league way, “all (or at least most) of the maps “could” have been “right” when they were done, but our consciousness changes our future and potentially the shape of our planet in this future scenario.”
• A Magnetic Pole Shift, if the predictions are correct, would be disastrous.  Think of Y2K’s computer code glitch – millions of buried lines of code that had to be rewritten – only this time it’s the hard-wired (if you will) polarity of every magnet on Earth we’re talking about.  Thankfully, one is reminded (incessantly, in the case of reading New Age sites) that the Chinese character for “crisis” includes the one for “opportunity.”  Me, I’m putting my money on pre-reverse-polarized, apocalypse-ready magnets.

And what will our presidential candidates do when the phone predictably rings on that fateful December 21st?  Who knows?  They’re certainly not talking about it – which would lead any sensible person to conclude that the candidates all plan on keeping mum until the appointed hour, then riding out the apocalypse in a fortified bunker in an undisclosed secret nonredundant location.

Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time – Rev., 12:12

The Earth Changes theories and prophecies of destruction are one way in which the passage of our planet before Xibalba might play out, but there are others.  Some scholarly sorts are predicting that a least a few of us will be transformed into energy-creatures when the pole shift comes, but that the ride isn’t going to be easy:

According to prophetic and channelled writings, the pole and dimensional shifts are simultaneous (but this may not necessarily be the case-as in all things, discernment of all information is the key). About 5 – 6 hours before the actual shift happens, an extraordinary visual phenomenon should take place. The third and fourth dimensions actually begin to interface. Third dimensional consciousness gradually recedes away from us as we approach fourth dimensional consciousness. As the third dimensional grid begins to break down, synthetic objects disappear (say goodbye to your brand new Hi Fi & TV !!). This is one reason that even though there is a 500 million year history of advanced life on this planet, there is virtually no evidence of it. In order to survive a pole-shift, objects must be made purely out of natural materials like the pyramids and the Sphinx-natural materials that are in resonance with the Earth. Even then virtually everything on the planet will be blown away.

Want to Know what areas the Psychics say it will be safe ?

And so I ask you, Mrs. Clinton and Mssrs. McCain and Obama, what in the hell are you doing to prepare us for that?!  You were thinking you were just going to slip off into the fourth dimension while the rest of us dealt with our buildings, cars, and silicone breast implants disappearing out from under us, didn’t you?  Not a chance, pals and pal-lina – I want answers.

We’ve faced down the trouble of End Times dates before, and Americans have always risen to the occasion.  We survived the Second Coming of Jesus in 1844, described thusly by Library of Date Setters of The End of the World!!! (subtitled Over 200 predictions and counting!):

William Miller was the founder of an end-times movement that was so prominent it received its own name– Millerism. From his studies of the Bible, Miller determined that the second coming would happen sometime between 1843-1844. A spectacular meteor shower in 1833 gave the movement a good push forward. The build up of anticipation continued until March 21, 1844, when Miller’s one year time table ran out. Some followers set another date of Oct 22, 1844. This too failed, collapsing the movement. One follower described the days after the failed predictions, “The world made merry over the old Prophet’s predicament. The taunts and jeers of the ‘scoffers’ were well-nigh unbearable.”

I’ll bet they were.  And that’s the challenge upon you, Mr. and Mrs. Candidate: to enunciate an End Times policy that’s neither nonchalant, nor overly scoff-worthy.  Will you deal with the “end” of the Maya calendar as adeptly as John Tyler handled the Second Coming?  Can you rise to the level of William Howard Taft, who was in office during a Haley’s Comet visitation in 1910, and saw at least a few members of the citizenry buying “comet pills” to protect themselves from the toxic gasses?

We’ll see, I guess – but your hitherto reluctance to discuss this critical issue does not auger well.  It is time to step up to the apocalyptic plate, get your Noah mojo working, and boldly lead us into the Fifth Creation.  Speak to us of peace and harmony, if you wish, or give us the ole’ Bush-style fire-and-brimstone efforts to force the issue, but one way or another, your people need to be reassured in this time of imminent doom.

Historiorant:  

Greetings after a somewhat-prolonged hiatus – to paraphrase a great historioranter, the rumors of my GBCW were greatly exaggerated.  While I was off in the real world, the sagely klizard hosted a discussion on Sufis, poets, a messiah, and a dead parrot (thanks again, klizard!) here in the Cave of the Moonbat; your homework will be to review that one, plus as much as you want of recent DKos writings on Persia in preparation for next week’s discussion/resumption of the HfK: Persia series.

Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.

60’s Instrumentals

Bill Purcell:  Our Winter Love

Percy Faith:  A Summer Place

Herb Alpert:  A Taste of Honey

Booker T and the MGs:  Green Onions

Please do not recommend a Pony Party when you see one.  There will be another along in a few hours.