Bad Human

I knew it was going to be OK to climb Chief Mountain to watch the sunset on the winter solstice. Coming down at night would be a cinch under a cloudless moonlit sky. The packed snowshoe tracks would be easy to follow even without headlamps. What never entered my mind was the trouble my dog was going to have with ice collecting in his paws. People always laugh when they see a dog in boots, but in certain situations they are indispensable, like climbing snowy mountains. Unfortunately, we left the Fido Footware at home, and since our guy did alright on the way up, we figured there was no cause for concern.

On our descent the temperature dropped just enough that ice balls were forming in the thick fur between my dog's toes, which made it painful for him to walk. We'd stop every few dozen yards or so to help him de-ice, but with a couple of miles to go this method was becoming untenable. After a while it occurred to me that I should try to carry him. I gave Kae my backpack, and she helped lift our 60 pound pooch onto my shoulders. I carried him "fireman" style, which left him free to knee me in the head once or twice, but he rapidly figured out what was going on and settled in for the tippy ride. At first I was pleased with how much ground were able to cover quickly. Gravity was on our side. Soon, however, we came to a dense section of woods with low hanging branches. After misjudging their height and banging my buddy's snout a couple of times, he lost confidence in me and began to squirm. We collapsed in a soft patch of snow as I protected my face from his flailing claws.

We resumed our rhythm of paw cleanings at 20 yard intervals for the remainder of our ordeal. Once or twice the moonlight through the trees caught my attention, but only later was I able to recall how beautiful that had been. Somehow we made it back to the trailhead, and I can say I've never been so happy to see our car. The moral of this story is self-evident, so no lectures, thank you please. Suffice to say the dog boots are in the car now, ready for our next adventure.

At home in the yard my dog leapt against me and almost knocked me down. He loves punking me like that when I least expect it. Leaping is a trait most people like to train out of their dogs, but because it has something to do with expressing delight, I'm lenient with it. And last night it's how I knew I'd been forgiven.

The Dream Argument

José Argüelles' Rainbow Bridge

I have no idea where my wife wants her ashes scattered.

I'd wake her up to ask, but even in my insomnia-addled brain I recognize this isn't a good idea. So I lay there and mull it over quietly. Soon it occurs to me I don't know what I'd do if my dog bit some kid and the Aurora police came to take him away. It doesn't matter that I don't live in Aurora. Somehow those dog-snuffing cops would show up on my doorstep anyway. I'm giving this some serious thought when I realize I have no plan whatsoever for when the planet Nibiru swings around from behind the sun and slams into planet earth, ending life as we know it, only a few days from now.

If you suffer from both insomnia and any sort of anxiety disorder, you will know that the place they intersect is not a pretty one. Tiny seeds of fear, left unattended by the demands of the waking world bloom at night deep in your amygdala. They take on texture and substance in vivid dreams, alerting all areas of your brain to the presence of a real problem. Soon you are awake enough to give these cascading worries your full attention, and no matter how still you lie, or what sort of mental exercises you practice, you will not be going back to sleep. Never mind that all of these troubles are laughable by the light of day. There are just enough threads of reasonability tethering your phantoms to reality that they will make you their servant for the remainder of this otherwise quiet night.


In full disclosure, it probably was a bad idea to watch a documentary on 2012 Doomsday Cults directly before going to bed last night. I had not known there are so many people hiding in caves and bunkers all over the earth right now getting ready for something big to happen on December 21. Some of these people have quit their jobs, withdrawn their money from banks, and bought cheese and beans and ammunition. But not all of them are the kind you see wearing camo at the Walmart when it isn't hunting season. New Age author José Argüelles, who brought us the Harmonic Convergence, is organizing a simultaneous worldwide meditation event that will use the combined power of all the like-minded meditators to literally deflect apocalyptic solar flares away from the earth and channel them into a rainbow bridge that arcs from pole to pole. And if that's not your style, there's even an Arizona developer building fully stocked underground condos in a converted MX missile silo at 900K a pop. If things are about to get really bad, those folks are set to ride it out in style.

Cultural variations aside, these Doomsday clubs have a lot in common. Their thought leaders are all relentless self-publishers, whose source material typically includes aerial photos of crop circles, secondhand interpretations of Mayan tablets, and wild reinterpretations of ancient Sumerian astrology. What they lack in scientific rigor, they make up for with passion and imagination. These groups also share a reliance on social media to organize, raise funds, sell survival stuff to each other, and generally keep the fear fires burning hot. But the shared trait that surprised me most is their utterly pragmatic approach to the end of the world. This isn't your grandfather's Armageddon, where Good and Evil have it out one last time in a cosmic Battle Royale. This is going to be an entirely secular cataclysm, where only the prepared survive. Sure, some of these folks will quote the Bible or some other sacred text, but they aren't concerned with righteousness, they simply want to outwit the prophesies.

It's easy to assume 2012 survivalism appeals primarily to the socially marginalized. A sense of estrangement from the natural order would add even more to their numbers. But that doesn't explain the mass appeal of this latest end-times scenario. The search term "Doomsday 2012" returns over 72 million pages on Google. I can't help but wonder if the desire for disaster isn't a projection of a culture that yearns for global catharsis, even if it came at the expense of millions of dead people. Visit any doomsday website, and once you get past all the predictions of catastrophe what you find are twisted messages of hope. Many use the word "rebirth," fully acknowledging the word implies lots of blood and pain.

I find the obsession with 12/21 to be a culturally constructed "straw man" that facilitates us fantasizing about surviving an instantaneous cataclysm, while distracting us from the mundane and depressing effects of things like global warming, which is its own sort of slow-motion apocalypse, but much more hopeless in its way. That said, there is something to be admired in the folks who get hands-on when responding to these potential world-ending scenarios. Agreeing on which are the real threats is the hard part. Some of us stockpile food and weapons and head underground. Others drive hybrids and put solar panels on their roofs. Either way, it's doing something that makes the Bad Situations seem a bit more manageable.


There is an ancient philosophical conundrum concerning the illusory nature of reality called the Dream Argument. Plato and Aristotle both took it on. The crux of it is that since we do not know we are dreaming while we are in a dream, and yet our dreams are filled with the same sensations we experience when we are awake, how then can we trust those senses to tell us when we're awake? Or said even simpler, how do we know we are ever awake? French mathematician-philosopher Descartes said that while our senses are not particularly trustworthy, reality itself is separate from us and to some degree knowable. Later philosophers focused on the social construction of reality and the practical necessity for a consensus on what is real. So it seems that to this day the jury is still out on reality. What is certain is that our anxieties invade our dreams, and our dreams in turn create images that haunt our waking world. What separates dream from reality is less a door than a passage through fog.

If the Doomsayers turn out to be right, then it won't be canned provisions and weapons I'll regret not stocking up on. It will be sleeping pills. At the end of the day, I have enough trouble outwitting my own petty demons, and staying on a predictable sleep cycle.  I can't trouble myself with phantom planets. Besides, I'd rather rest in peace with the skeptics than spend the rest of my post-apocalyptic days roasting rabbits I snared myself on the bonfires of Ikea furniture while fending off marauding bands of feral suburban teens. You can have that world. If I can trust anything at all, it is that the NASA scientists are dead-on, and they all say not to sweat it. So I'm not sweating it. There may come a day when they let us know we can start to worry about this or that comet or solar flare, until then my money is on December 21st being an entirely ordinary winter solstice. The chilly, partly cloudy kind, with a killer sunset. So to speak.