Did you know that the world is ending today?

You could be forgiven for having missed this news, though depending on what circles you travel in, there’s been no avoiding it. Biblical prophecy foretells it, don’tcha know.

What’s that? Biblical prophecy has also foretold the end of the world several times in the last decade?

Well, they were wrong before. This one’s for real. This one’s backed up by science. Planet X. You know? NASA recently discovered a new planet waaaaaay out past Pluto, didn’t they? Yeah, that thing. That’s Planet X. Gonna destroy the world. How? Well… Probably it’s gonna smack into Earth. Yep. Gonna knock us off our orbit and into the sun like the eight-ball, corner pocket. Or maybe it’s gonna fly by and zap us all with interplanetary radiation, you know, turn us into a bunch of crispy human-shaped hot pockets. Or maybe the planet is just loaded down with lizardmen bearing superior technology who will descend upon the Earth and enslave us all. Force us to make them chef salads at every meal of the day and watch nothing but reruns of The Bachelor until our brains turn to mush. (Joke’s on them; my brain has already been mush-ified by two months of teaching after a summer without rest.)

Or maybe not, you know? Maybe Planet X is just an omen and not the cause of our eternal demise. Prophecy is funny that way. Like, it might seem to say that the weather is gonna be 74 degrees and partly cloudy, and in actuality it’s four below and hailing frozen frogs, and you’re all upset at first because you wore shorts that day, but then you go back and re-read the prophecy and then, somehow, it all makes sense. And no, I know what you’re thinking. That’s not post hoc justification. We just didn’t read the prophecies right to begin with. We make the mistakes, not the bible, after all.

So maybe Planet X only tells us the apocalypse is here, and the apocalypse is actually going to come in the form of nuclear war brought on by the two mad boy-kings of the world, or a superbug unleashed on the population when a sheep farmer in New Zealand gets a little too familiar with his livestock, or a global flood or something. What’s that? Well, sure, the flood happened once before, but it worked then, didn’t it? Why fix what ain’t broken?

You say there’s not actually evidence for the global flood? That flood myths are an inevitable byproduct of cultures that spring up around rivers, as nearly all cultures did originally?

Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

You believe what you want. But the rest of us? Us, over here, with the doomsday bunkers and the year’s supply of food-paste and toilet water?

We know what’s really coming.

And even if it doesn’t come?

We’ll know when the next thing is coming, too, before it happens.

Because if the world doesn’t end pretty soon, we’re all going to look really silly for believing in all these prophecies. Currently, doomsday prophecies are something like 0 to 72,000 against reality. We might have to start questioning our holy books and the people who interpret them for us.

Then again, all it takes is one.

So, brb going to read Revelations again and search for tenuous metaphors suggesting the present day. And I’m going to put on my tuxedo t-shirt in case the rapture does come. You know, so that when I meet Jesus, he’ll see that I wanted to dress it up for him, but keep it casual at the same time.

Stone-cold classy.

This post is part of Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday.