March 2010
 

THE TWIXTIES composed on the eve of 2010 moment

What do we call the the years 2010 to 2012?  What will happen to all the material about the Mayan calendar date?  Well, what happened to all that Y2K obsessive chicken-little mania?  Has anyone ever predicted anything that actually took place that  wasn't  encrypted in deeply weird metaphor and Bible-speak  numerology? Lots of people besides marketers and merchandisers,  snake oil pitchmen and makeover product salesmen saw this coming.  It's like sitting down to new year's dinner, having chicken quarantine,  you know, enough herbs to mummify a plow horse, when your stomach  is still getting the willies in wild moonlight just thinking about the future.  Suddenly, we're one thrive-ass community of exo-planet hunters eager  to name and claim a new earth to colonize, exploit and destroy.  You can't shock and awe me anymore. Besides,  I'm not the one gambling wild horses in the jade bedchamber.  Headlines may be waiting to announce the final winter solstice  gajigawad energy bolt from mama Hera's squirtin boob galaxy  that turns earth into a gamma-ray rotisserie dish du jour. Ye gods.  Like Lawrence Ferlanghetti, I wished I could meet the naked nymph   playing the saxophone upraised but I learned that symbols rarely  reveal  themselves naked or otherwise. But, it doesn't hurt to keep an  eye out for them whether Nostradamus did or didn't write it down.  Welcome, to what I shall hereafter call, the TWIXTIES.   Twixt nine and thirteen come the uncomfortable sci-fi numbers:  2010's  Arthur C. Clarke monolithic star consciousness babe telling us  where we can and can't go; 2011's well,  you know all about 11, that  number changed us forever and put us on emergency footing,  and 2012’s reminders of 1812's burning Whitehouse, 1912's Titanic,  but most of all another Y2K-like disaster that only causes a sigh of  relief the day after it doesn't happen. The Mayans may have had  something else in mind, after all, the stars are often wrong.  Next, it's on to the Teensters, and the Oh Teens, no name comes  to mind, though we'll still be in the aughties right up until 12/31/2109.   Hypnotic music will find us 13 steppin’ to wishful teen year  rededication  to global renewal, now that there is still a globe to renew.  Go hippy-fying the world, putting low tech miracles to work on high tech  problems that no one ever thought possibly could be THAT easy.  No, doubt we'll branch into two societies, one sod busting, recycle  mania, off grid moneyless eco-warrior group and one genetic  tinkering, micro chip implanting, perfectionist head-tweezing group.  After a sloppy search engine command the 'tween teeners are either  about zit cream products or teen-porn. Maybe we're headed for the  twittering tweenies or the twixty-tweets. There will be more people  following you than Russia's KGB in the sixties, Nazdrovia, here's to  sobering up from twixt and between, real or imagined global mistakes.