Here’s the thing about geeks and The End of the World: most of us are something of connoisseurs on the subject. Eschatology is pretty content-rich which means anyone with a creative bent towards concepts beyond everyday reality (sci-fi authors, comic book creators, etc. etc.) will likely start mining that conceptual ore eventually, and thus any fan of same will likely experience several takes on the last days throughout the course of their pop culture consumption. And some of them will be really thought-provoking and enthralling, some will be cheap and lurid (but still potentially amusing as weird reverse-escapism) and some will be hackneyed and forgettable.
The actual Book of Revelations from the actual Bible is not exactly great literature. Important, yeah, but shoot, so are tax codes. Revelations makes its necessary points as part of the underlying architecture of the whole theology which it arises from and feeds back into, but man, it doesn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense. And, again, that’s largely beside the point because John of Patmos (or whoever) didn’t have entertainment as his primary goal in mind when he wrote it. But to any geek like me, whose thought process is so keyed into understanding the world through archetypes and narratives and metaphors, it just comes across as less than compelling.
So I’m a little skeptical about tomorrow being any different from today, except that I will hopefully get a couple extra hours sleep in the morning and my only obligatory to-do will be getting the little guy to his swim lesson. Also maybe I’ll wake up having shaken off this feeling like I’m coming down with a cold. But I’m disinclined to think there will be a massive upswing in locusts or trumpet-blowing angels or dragons or anything like that. I just expect that if the world ever does come to an end and I’m around to see it, the whole show will be a little less non sequitor.
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