When I think about all the changes my life has undergone in the past 2+ years alone, it's pretty remarkable. Granted, they've not all been good changes, but many have been. I think many other people would also note that their lives seem to have altered drastically in the past several years, also.

This may be a trite statement on its surface. After all, they say the one constant in life is change. But I think that's an ethic that probably wouldn't have been as apparent to people living in earlier times, certainly before the Industrial Revolution. People's lives were routine and uncomplicated, a state idyllicized by social conservatives and hippies alike. Now in this period of the Information Revolution, information describing our world comes at us fast and furious, and often is contradicted faster than we can process it. It's enough to make one pine for the simplicity of one phone, three channels and a single newspaper of record.

This increase in change, both personal and societal, may be as a result of something the late ethnobotanist and anthropologist Terrence McKenna called Timewave Zero. The jist is that throughout human history, there has been an algorithm, curiously corresponding with both the Mayan calendar and the I Ching, for the rate of novelty on Earth, which up until relatively recently was more or less in equilibrium. Starting with the Renaissance, however, this algorithm seemed to gain steam, and continued to exponentially increase in coordination with other major changes, ie, the Enlightenment, the birth of modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, etc. One cannot deny that our world has never been more in flux and full of potential, be it for good or ill, than it is right now. Recently there was a report issued that human evolution is markedly increasing in clip. According to McKenna's math, the algorithm will all reach a boiling point on the morning of December 22, 2012, five years from today. This moment is variously known as the singularity, the eschaton, or The End of History, among others.

Naturally, this is frightening to people. The more traditional types, unable to break from dogma, see this as auguring Apocalypse or Armageddon or Ragnarok or your choice of cataclysm here, at the end of which their choice of Messiah will return and reward them for being the very specific type of good people they think themselves to be and punish everyone else. Sadly, this is born out of both insecurity in their choice of faith in a system unquanitifiable beyond their books of circular reasoning as well as a stridently vicious mob mentality stemming from that insecurity that they are determined to be the ones finally proven "right" so no one ever will doubt them again, including themselves.

Lest you think I'm speaking solely of religious fundamentalists, it ought to be noted that An Inconvenient Truth is also a book.

Certain spins on this scenario have gained coin in the past couple decades, wherein no one holds anyone above or below whatever this singularity point may be. Either the seas are going to drown everyone, or Qetzalcoatl will return to give everyone lollipops; some nut will start thermonuclear war and annihilate us all, or Horus will ride down in his chariot, which is really an interdimensional flying saucer, and we'll all do bong rips together into eternity.

I don't pretend to have any further insight than anyone else into this situation, if there is one. Catch me one day and I'll assure you we'll all be flying jetpacks to the moon and functionally omnipotent through nanotechnology; catch me the next and I'll be convinced a massive compromise in our electoral process will put someone even more batshit insane in the Oval Office whose first order of business will be to burn us in our beds by breakfast (I'm lookin' your direction, Mike Huckabee). I'm no seer, and whatever happens could snowball in the next five years or be a fluke that happens in an instant.

Obviously, it's ridiculous to live one's life in anticipation of an event that one cannot describe and may or may not happen. There have been countless predictions of "the end of the world" that have come and gone with nary a peep, and there's little to suggest this time will be any different. Occam's Razor dictates that the more likely explanation is that people are massively unhappy with their lives and the world in which they live, and they're hoping that some deus ex machina event will free them of the personal responsibility of changing either. If the world is going to end anyway, what's the point of engaging in it?

Well, then, what's life? All our worlds end. I might die before I finish this blog entry, though the odds seem against it (and if you're reading this I managed to hold onto life long enough to post it). I could croak before I reach 2012, making this entire thought experiment moot, at least to me. A legacy is all well and good but ask any artist who's been acclaimed after his death whether he'd have preferred that recognition during life and I think you know what he'd say: Nothing. Because he's dead.

So let's just say that we will all cease to be in 2012. We know it for a fact, and there's no avoiding it. What do you do, then? Do you go on a killing spree? Do you write the novel that's been living in you your entire life, if within five years there'll be no one left who'd have ever read it? Do you travel the world? Do you strive against the inevitable in the belief that there must be something you can do to avert or at least mitigate this catastrophe? Would you have children, knowing full well that they won't reach their fifth birthday? Do you paint the walls with your brains? What do you do, hot shot?

Meditate upon that in coming days. Our lives are finite, and they are their own monuments. Epistomology says that once we close our eyes that last time, the world is no more and perhaps never was. In the words of one of the greatest losses of this past year, Robert Anton Wilson, "There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free." How will you build your monument? Is there one larger than that which just your life can produce to which you can contribute? Could you do it justice in just five years? Could you live ten lifetimes in that span? Could you make utopia in that time, and would you if you knew you'd only have it that long? Could you go into that unknown with the honest certainty that you'd given it everything you could?

I chose to speak on this today because I thought it made a poetic sense with the lyrics of one of the more talented and multi-lived artists alive today, David Bowie, in his song "Five Years." If you're not familiar with it, you can probably find an mp3 of it here. For the sake of closure, here are the lyrics. Do you know if you're in this song?

Pushing thru the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying
I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys electric irons and t.v.s
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there
And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought Id need so many people

A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children
If the black hadnt a-pulled her off, I think she would have killed them
A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine, dont think
You knew you were in this song
And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, youre beautiful, I want you to walk

Weve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
Weve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all weve got
Weve got five years, what a surprise
Five years, stuck on my eyes
Weve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all weve got
Weve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Five years, what a surprise
Weve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all weve got
Weve got five years, what a surprise
Weve got five years, stuck on my eyes
Weve got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, thats all weve got
Five years
Five years
Five years
Five years