Proof Positive

The sun must have been up today for two or three hours longer than usual. I couldn't believe it at first, but all the clocks agreed. No wonder the globe is warming. And where will it end? In a few days or weeks, will there even be any night at all? The planet will bake like a clay pot in the kiln. Mankind is doomed.

What could cause this? It may be that the earth is slowing in its rotation. If the nights are longer too, then this will be the likely cause (although the planet could be getting larger -- this would also explain such a phenomenon). We'll learn the terrible truth tonight. Perhaps the planet will stop rotating entirely, and we will be stuck for the brief remainder of our lives in a single moment, be it eternal midnight, perpetual noon, never-ending twilight. Will the end come suddenly? Will the globe come to a jolting stop all at once, like a car crash, and we'll all be hurled at a thousand miles per hour into the atmosphere and into the frigid vacuum of space? How long would an hour last, if the world just stopped turning? Or maybe the planet would just wind down, like a top that lost its spin, and then it would tumble over. What would that be like, if the world tipped over? Can a ball tip over? What would it tip over onto?

Or maybe the sun is getting brighter, and when it gets too bright all of space will be filled with light and there will be no night or darkness, so that the planet won't be able to cool. And there won't be any shadows, and anyone who had one will be killed as a mutant monster. And light will be so strong that it will shine through walls and stones, so that everything is transparent and we'll all be invisible. Then we'll only be able to find each other by sound and touch, and we'll develop into cave creatures with sonar, deep in the bowels of the earth to escape the searing heat of the baked surface of the dead globe.

Or maybe the sun is getting bigger, so that its light is in the sky longer so that the days are longer. And light bends around the curve of the earth and when it meets from east and west at the exact point of midnight all the atoms and electrons of the universe will undergo a mystical transformation and become aligned in a quantum harmonic convergence, and a shock wave of chi-power will radiate from the exact center of the universe which is the earth out to the farthest reaches of outermost space and the universe will collapse in on itself and become a singularity from which a myriad new cosmoses will explode, each one identical to the others yet unique unto itself. And the grande ballet of creation will take up its melody once more and play out in exuberant codas the unending variations of its infinite themes.

Or maybe the cosmological constant has deteriorated, and light is slowing down, and with it all the heretofore invariables, like Planck's constant h and avoirdupois units. And this is all happening suddenly, in a great lurching convulsion as of a retching universe disgusted at the eco-sins of humanity that has turned its back on wisdom and loves itself and its greed more than the planet and all the growing things. And Gaea has pleaded with the Universe to rid itself of the parasite that infests it, and the Universe has made a decision to mutate itself with punctuated disequilibrium so that it is slowing down until it freezes, and the first signs are of long days, until the whole universe is a frozen moment of light and crystalline possibility, the way you freeze termites. Then it will restart itself and we'll all be dead because we didn't listen to Al Gore and mikael moore, or as we like to say, Goremoorah for its pleasing assonance.

Before the end comes, I feel it necessary to attribute proper blame for the destruction of all life on this planet, as proven will happen by the recent and unscheduled inexplicable lengthening of days. The usual suspects, of course. Halliburton. The legacy of Bush-Cheney. SUVs. America. Organized religion. You.


J