FOUR BLOOD MOONS

WHY ARE WE SO OBSESSED WITH

THE END OF THE WORLD?



A friend lent me her book on the Four Blood Moons.

She wanted me to read it, so I did.  It made my teeth throb, but I did.

Echoes of Harold Camping murmured to me as the author Mark Blitz basically spoke of the Jewish festivals.

It took him to page 143 to even begin to talk of the Blood Moons.

Only 8 tetrads (4 consecutive blood moons in a row) have occurred in the past 2000 years.

This one will be the 9th.

Then, Mark transformed into Harold Camping:

9 is the last of the single digits.

It marks The End, the conclusion of the matter.

It is akin to the number 6 ... why he doesn't say, but he goes on to say 6 being the sum of its factors

(3 x 3 = 9    3 + 3 = 6 

 and $15.95 is what you just lost by buying his book!)

Mark furthers muddies the prophetic waters Camping style:

9 is a factor of 666 ( which is 9 times 74)

and it is one less than Bo Derek (that last is mine.)

Mark writes that the sum of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet is 4995 (5 x 999). 

It is stamped therefore with the numbers of grace and finality.

(Italics his/ the head scratching all mine.)

Why all our fixation with The End of the world?

Writing strictly on a not-for-prophet basis, here are some of my thoughts:

1.) WE BALK AT OUR WALK-ON PART IN THE WORLD'S STORY

For many, the world doesn’t only revolve around us – it stops around us too.

1 in 7 people in the world right now believe it will all end during their lifetime.

2.) THERE'S A SENSE OF MEANING TO BEING THERE FOR THE RINGING DOWN OF THE CURTAIN.

The idea of an apocalypse pushes all the right buttons at a psychological level. 

Our minds have always tried to create some kind of framework of meaning to give history and our own personal lives some kind of significance.

3.) IT'S ABOUT POWER

Apocalyptic predictions are a way for people to try to control the way their (and others’) world works.

What you get during times of particular discontent – war, famine or general bad times – is a rise in apocalyptic preaching and ideas.

And at those times we seem to lap it up like there’s no tomorrow. 

4.)  IT'S GOING TO HAPPEN SOONER OR LATER

Robert Oppenheimer had a bet going with other members of the Manhattan Project as to whether the first atom bomb

(that they were about to set off) would start a chain reaction that would destroy the earth’s atmosphere. 

It does seem as if Man has a built-in Death Wish, doesn't it?

5.) THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES IF THERE IS NO TOMORROW

The same thought is the basis for the popularity of the movie, GROUNDHOG DAY.

When you’re mortgaged up to your eyeballs, hideously in debt, overworked, underpaid,

totally depressed about the global financial meltdown and climate change,

a little apocalyptic event might seem like a breath of fresh air, right? 

WHY DO YOU THINK WE ARE SO FASCINATED WITH ALL THESE SCENARIO'S OF

THE END OF THE WORLD?

A WHOLE NEW TWIST TO REALITY_PART 3 OF 4_TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

{Wolf Howl, the last Lakota shaman, has apparently been captured. Or has he?

Or has the wolf merely cornered his hunters?

He is trying to tell Shadow, the Mossad assassin in his hospital room,

that world politics cease to mean anything at the end of the world ...}



Shadow said, "2012 is just another year.'

I shook my head. "The Aztecs thought different. It is October of the last year in their calendar. We have until ...."

"December twenty-first. I know, I read those phony tabloids, too."

The blank cyclop eye of the television blurred. The screen began to bubble and boil. And me without a remote to change channels.

This put a whole new twist to "Reality TV."

No longer shiny and black, its surface grew gray and smoky. Faint tendrils of mist breathed from it as if from Hell.

"Check out time," I whispered.

I blew upon the handcuff restraining me. It flared bright, then slowly faded as if only an after-image from a flash bulb. It made a low sputtering sound to disappear completely.

I rose from the bed with a grunt. Damn right knee. It would never heal completely. Good. The pain would help keep me centered.

Shadow pointed her gun at me. "Hold it right there, Wolf Howl."

I smiled grimly. She was trying to distance how she felt about me by using my Sioux name.

She kept on, "You know me. I won't hesitate."

The glass of the barred window began to splinter. I backed up. Not that way.

I turned to the door. A blackness seemed to breathe and grunt softly from beyond it. Not that way either.

Shadow muttered, "Ben Zonah (and no, you don’t want to know what that means in Yiddish.)"

I followed her eyes. Steaming, bubbling blood was seeping towards us from under the closed door. Above me the foam ceiling started bulging and creaking.

"Time to think sideways," I murmured.

I tapped my chest, and the hospital gown that had never truly been there wisped away to show my old flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots.

And yes, I had been in bed with my boots on.

John Wayne's ghost would be proud of me. I had wanted to die with my boots on. Wayne had had a good heart ... for a white man.

I walked to the closet door and opened it. I stopped in mid-stride. No clothes. No nothing. Just the deepest tar-pit of night. I shivered as a wave of icicles seemed to wash down my spine.

Shadow snapped, "A Broch (think of the Yiddish phrase as ‘Damn it!’ on steroids.) We're trapped."

My own throat was thick with fear. "It seems like sideways is the only way we've got."

The Spanish soldier Gil Perez in 1593 had lifted his right foot up from the dust in front of the Governor's Palace in Manila only to place it down on the cobblestones of Plaza Mayor in Mexico City.

In 1959 tourist Rick Stevens had stepped out of his car in Reno only to place both feet on the grass of Juarez, Mexico. Space can bend like fabric. It happens. Rarely. But it happens.

I had been born with the ability to do it on demand, along with other disturbing talents. Don't envy me. Because of that fact I have been hunted all my life.

Shadow thrust the muzzle of her automatic at me. "Make it stop!"

"Whites. You always think with your guns. Shoot the darkness, Shadow. See if that makes it go away."

"Stop it!, " cried Shadow in a husk.

"Fuck!," came a muffled voice from beyond the hospital door.

There had been terror, not anger, to that one word. The lights inside the room flickered, died, then the back-up light in the far corner came on.

My face became flint. It just kept getting better and better. Outside the door, the man tried for his one word epitaph again but was cut off midway.

I frowned. Fuck. That word had become the duct tape holding the White Man's conversations together. Without it, he would be helpless to communicate. Hell, even with it he was.

GrandMother was angry thunder above me.

She disapproved of profanity. Especially mine.

Man's language had acted as the prism to focus her awareness into clarity. And so she held words sacred as she did little else connected to Man.

How many times had she told me,

'Profanity is a weed that chokes the growth of words in your mind, GrandSon. What does that shrinks its grasp. Let the Whytes put chains on their thoughts. Let yours roam free to grow strong, for your mind is all that stands between you and the darkness that waits to devour you.'

Of course, the white doctors insisted I was only talking to myself when I heard GrandMother's voice. Maybe yes.

I chose to believe no. And in the end, what we choose to believe is up to us. Perhaps our first act of free will is to believe that free will exists at all.

The cheap wood of the door began to splinter, wisps of growling blackness squirming through the cracks.

Shadow looked at the gun in her hand. I hoped she wouldn't shoot through the door. It would only help the darkness get in quicker.

Her long black hair whipped about her face as she turned to me. "Do something, Drew!"

"Remember how to dance?"

"What? Are you insane?"

"You can have known me this long and ask that?"
***

TWLIGHT'S CHILDREN_PART 1 of 4_TESSA'S OUTSIDE THE BOX BLOGFEST

http://tessasblurb.blogspot.com/2010/10/announcing-outside-of-my-box.html


Tessa wants us to write outside our comfort zone. Oddly enough, so did my best friend, Sandra.

I complained to her a dozen times too many about Justin Cronin telling not showing his novel THE PASSAGE.

She challenged me to write a short story doing what did Justin did but better. Obviously, he was aiming at something he missed.

Could I do any better?

And so the short sequel to THE COLOR OF HER THOUGHTS {and my take on the end prophecised for 2012} was born. Here are the first three pages ....}


TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

From the cliff of our birth we keep falling, falling. Our fingers reach out for something to hold on to.

Money. Power. Sex.

But they are lies, mirages without substance. We are in free fall. Despite the lie we tell ourselves, we all hit bottom. Yet somehow it always feels like a betrayal.

You would think that we would finally realize the truth. But what is it that the white historians say? The past is prologue.

We First People knew better. The past is only a footnote. As Man is but a footnote in the ancient history of GrandMother Earth.

She existed long before Man peered with bewildered eyes out of his cave. She would be here long after his useless monuments to himself had crumbled back into her soil.

Darkness was descending. And soon would end Man's strange history. Would he, like the dinosaur before him, stare fearful and uncomprehending into the storm that swallowed all his preconceptions into oblivion?

The lights to the room flickered. An odd coldness settled upon me. I had been sensing it for years. It had to begin sometime. And now it had.

Night pressed in on the window. Wings, large and leathery, beat my death song in the darkness. I looked at my wrist handcuffed to the railing of the hospital bed.

White Men. They had always made my life interesting. Why shouldn't they make my death the same?

I looked out through the locked window. Nothing. Not yet. But I sensed a straining from beyond the glass, from beyond what the White Man foolishly called reality.

Man sought to explore that imagined reality as he struggled to roam the stars in ships. I shook my head. He was already on one.

The living planet who gave him birth.

She sailed through a sea of stars at speeds Man could only dream of attaining in his fragile vessels of steel.

Like the most agile of ballerinas, GrandMother Earth spins on her toes at just over a thousand miles an hour.

With the Northern Lights in her wake, she swims through the icy void around her father, Sun, in strokes of over sixteen and a half miles a second.

While Sun holds his daughter in his mighty arms of gravity, he speeds towards a dark destination in a gait of some twelve miles a second.

It is a wonder our noses don't bleed and our heads fly from our very shoulders.

The White Man had become arrogant in his mastery of science as the dinosaur had become confident their rule would never end.

But I had seen the rules of science grow dark with the dawn of quantum mechanics. In the microverse, the same rules did not apply. In fact, often they were reversed.

Why did the White Man feel it would be otherwise in the macroverse?

In my bones I felt GrandMother Earth was just now at the edge of seas where different rules applied.

The freakish weather pointed to it. Energy blackouts were on the rise. Insanity's bloody crimes were daily shouted from the headlines.

GrandMother had taught the First People how to survive in such a realm. The White Man in his arrogance and greed had succeeded in nearly wiping us from her shores.

Most of her teaching to us had been lost.

Was I the last to know it as she had taught it? If so, it would be poetic justice, for the White Man wanted me dead. He would certainly get death.

Killing me would signal the end for him and the rest of Twilight's children.

I stared into the alien depths between familiar stars and whispered, "Weep not for the dead nor mourn him. Rather weep for him who goes away, for he shall return no more nor see his native country."

They were the words of Jeremiah, speaking of another enforced exodus. Jeremiah. I made a sour face. Though the White Man claimed him, he was mostly forgotten ...

or dismissed out of hand as a relic from the past. He was much like the Lakota in that.

The Something beyond the window laughed. The sound rose, spindled, and twisted like icy smoke from the funeral pyre of Man.

The straining stopped outside the window. The cold presence swept away into the night. It was gone.

For the moment.

Death was both patient and impatient. The presence would be back. After all, it had all the time in the world. And Man? He had squandered most of his.

And me? I could not win. But perhaps I could lose more slowly. A darkness within whispered I had best try for this was my last hand.

What had Thomas Wolfe written at his last?

I said the words low, "Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year. Something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die. I know not where."

The door to my hospital room opened silent and quick. A chill filled the darkness within me.

The Mossad assassin, Shadow.

She stood in the doorway and looked at me with haunted green eyes. In her mid-thirties now, she had been a lost angel at twenty when I had spared her on the Isle of Skye. Now she was just a fallen angel, no longer able to remember the scent of lost innocence.

There was a solid finger-wide streak of moon-white at her right temple. GrandMother's Sign. Estanatlehi always marked those she chose to heal.
***

IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD ... AGAIN

The unknown.

Its allure is what gave birth to myth, legend, and tales told around the campfire. Man wants to know the unknowable.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Mankind can't abide not knowing. If Man doesn't have an answer, he will make one up. And that is why we have myths. And the desire to make up the answer is why we have science fiction and fantasy.

And the greatest unknown?

Death. Our own. Our species.

And that is why we have the explosion of end times movies :

LEGION, 2012, AVATAR {in its Think Green way.}

ZOMBIELAND, SHAUN OF THE DEAD

NIGHT, DAY, HOUR, SHOPPING MALL OF THE LIVING DEAD movies.

DAYBREAKERS, 48 DAYS LATER, 48 WEEKS LATER

SUNSHINE

RESIDENT EVIL, TERMINATOR, I AM LEGEND,

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, MATRIX

INDEPENDENCE DAY, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW,

SPLICE

Why so many end time movies? They are popular. Why? We look at the headlines and see we have a compulsion to destroy ourselves. And the heights of science provide a certain deadfall for the human race.

We as a movie audience need to work out the terror of our race committing ethnic cleansing on a species scale in a safe arena.

The comforting blackness of a movie theater, surrounded in the safety of fellow humans laughing, shouting out in surprise or dismay, and cringing from CGI horrors.

See, Martha? It's just a movie. No bungled science will wipe us out. It's only Hollywood. Only 3D and CGI and over-the-top writing.

It can't happen in real life.

We ignore the whispers from the news : Jamestown. Cambodia. North Korea. Iran. The Trade Towers. Haiti. Chili. Ever growing dead areas in the oceans. The shrinking ozone layer.

The smoke detectors are still going off. The rain forests are still burning. Entire species of life disappearing. Where did all the bees and butterflies go, honey?

We slurp our cokes, munch our popcorn, and cringe at the latest terror-of-science movie lunging out at us from the screen.

Are we all mentally ill as Stephen King asserts? We outside the asylums can just hide it better? Or do we do it to establish a bar of what is normal and what is not?

We are handed our baby brother who promptly pukes on us. We bat him on the forehead, and get one from an angry parent. So we learn to smile and chuckle, "Oh, look. How cute."

And when we watch on the movie screen an older brother put on a Halloween mask and chop off the head of a younger brother, inside we say, "That'll teach him."

We listen to doomsday economic, political, religious jihad news. We go to the theater and see the world end, only to go outside in the bright light of day, seeing the cars pass by and hearing the pedestrians chatting away on their cell phones. Just Hollywood.

We're safe.

Aren't we?

**********