I must admit I’ve been a bit on edge lately. Jumpy. Like that feeling you get that somebody’s looking over your shoulder, but when you turn around, nobody’s there. I’m not quite sure why I’m suffering under this sense of unease. It may be that today is the winter solstice, which is the harbinger of more work on the micro-farm. It may be because today is the Last Possible Day to avoid the catastrophe of the dire Fiscal Cliff with its certainty to send the world spinning into an unrecoverable financial meltdown with all the attendant economic effects I have detailed over the past few years. Or, it may be that today is the switchover on the Mayan calendar long heralded as The End of the World as We Know It, Part II.

There were also the recent celestial events where not one, not two, but three sizeable asteroids snuck up on us and passed inside the orbit of the moon. That was close but they missed us, and, more fortunately, missed the moon. It would be one thing to have a kilometer sized piece of space rock splash down in New York Harbor, it would be a totally different scenario if the chunk of the Pacific Ocean that left us so long ago decided to pay a visit home.

I’m betting my malaise on the fiscal cliff. Or maybe the micro-farm because of all the possibilities those two would have the most dire personal impact.

Yeah, right. Just wait ‘til the gods of old reassert themselves. Say you Mayan Calendar theorists all snug in your cloud of patchouli, protected by your coarse-spun cotton and crystals. Won’t you be surprised?

Actually, I would.

Not that I’m not down with the whole idea of an imminent global catastrophe. They’ve happened many times in the past and they’ll happen many times in the future, I’m just thinking that a bunch of people sitting around in mud huts seven thousand years ago would be very lucky to pick today, out of all the possible days available, for the world to end. It’ll happen, someday, but my personal bias is that it will be a geological event and most likely not today.

Besides, the ochre-daubed savages who thought up the Mayan long-count calendar didn’t set up something which was designed to end at a specific date any more than the scented, toga-wearing dandies working for Julius Caesar did when they set the foundation of our own calendric system in 45BCE.

Basically, the current change of the Mayan calendar is more along the lines of our own recent millennial advancement, which, you remember, was itself the cause of the end of the world not twelve years ago. Back then it was the Global Computer Meltdown and The Second Coming, neither of which, as far as we can tell, actually happened.

So, the Maya, when they weren’t ripping the still-beating hearts out of their vanquished foes, did something similar. They came up with the concept of a day and a solar year, k’in and tun respectively. But the Maya counted a bit differently that we do, they did things in groups of twenty. I’m guessing that this is due to being able to run around barefoot in the warm tropical clime that graced their civilization and so could count on their fingers and toes. Our calendar would have been similar if our ancestors didn’t have to wear socks. In any event twenty tun formed one k’atun, twenty of which made one b’ak’tun, twenty of which made a piktun and so on through kalabtun, k’inchiltun, and alautun for a grand total of 63,081,429 years or tun.

The Mayan calendar is currently going from b’ak’tun 0 to b’ak’tun 1. The remaining, longer periods haven’t even come close to ticking over.

You’ll notice that there is no period in the calendar for the equivalent of twenty alautun. Once that number of years is reached the whole shebang would reset and it would really be the end of time from the Mayan perspective. However, in a potentially ironic twist, twenty alautun is very close to the number of years that multicellular life, AKA our ancestors, has existed on Earth. It may very well be that, because we really don’t know the starting point of the Mayan calendar, all bets are off.

But, since you’re reading this, it’s probably just anoth

Just joking.

Suppose for a second, that the doomsayers are correct and the calendars hit the reset button. Would Hunab-Ku awaken, look around at his creation, say: “Enough of this shit,” and send Ahpuch on a rampage of death and destruction? Who’s to say? And, more importantly, how would you know?

Which was the question put to me the other evening during a discussion of dreams. The subject had drifted to the difference between morning dreams and night dreams and how morning dreams were somehow more vivid. I mentioned that I had a dream a long time ago in which I had died, thereby disproving the folk-tale that if you die in your dream, you also die for real. A statement which led to the question: “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“That you died.”

Here was the dream. I was driving one of my Volkswagen Beetles, the old kind, not the new kind that are basically Rabbits with a different body, but the original. The interior was what was then known as “Deluxe”. In front of the driver was a hard plastic over steel steering wheel sticking out of a painted steel dashboard which separated the passenger cabin from the “trunk” – containing 11.1 gallons of gasoline, and a front bumper which would crumple like tin-foil if you stared at it too hard. In my dream, I was driving said SterbenWagen around a long, left-hand curve through green farmland when – through no fault of my own other than I had a habit of driving too fast even in my dreams – the car shot off the curve, flew through the air, and landed nose-first against an adjoining hill.

The bumper stopped. The firebomb-trunk stopped. The dashboard and steering wheel stopped. My body stopped.

But I did not.

That’s how I knew.

After the impact, I sailed into the dirt and through the hill but, sadly, as is the case with many dreams, I woke up before I got to the good part. Try as I might, I could not get the dream to restart, and I was left with no further revelations regarding death and dreams.

But the dream stuck with me, and, following the conversational inquiry the other night, resurfaced. How do we know? I mean when it comes down to it, how do we know anything?

That answer really is that we don’t; at least not in any meaningful, spiritual sense. Philosophers, theologians, and scientists have searched for the answer for millennia. And the best they’ve come up with beyond: “Life’s short, and then you die,” is a variety of belief structures ranging from Ayyavazhi to Zoroastrianism to explain what happens next. You may believe: “I know I will be resurrected and sit at the right hand of the Lord.” But if you stopped and thought about how it’s a struggle to sit next to Aunt Mabel at Thanksgiving dinner for two hours, then an eternity sitting at close proximity to the Hairy Thunderer may not seem like a good way to while away the rest of time. Or, like me, you may believe that, post-mortem, the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds sway and won’t that be interesting. But that’s just what I believe, what I knowis bupkis. I’m betting on the logic that because I know when I’m awake, I know when I’m asleep, I know when I’m dreaming, and I know when I’ve died in my dreams; so, I should know when I’m really dead. Right?

C’mon. I don’t even know what day it really is.

Nor does anyone.

Right now, there are some thirty-four different calendars in use in the world. Many of these are solar calendars based on our troglodytic progenitor’s perception that each time the sun came up he felt another day older and deeper in debt. As our observational and financial skills improved the calendars got better until now we have solar calendars, lunar calendars, and fiscal-year calendars. There’s even the business targeted Leap Week calendar of the International Standards Organization which makes almost no sense at all. None of these calendars even agree on what day it is.

So, at a very high level of confidence, it’s safe to say that today is nothing more than the third Friday of December, 2012, and the occasion of the winter solstice for this year. That’s good news because the amount of daylight will start increasing tomorrow, but other than that, the Earth will keep spinning through space, night will follow day, and you won’t have to cancel your nail appointment next week. I think.

Because really, none of us knows what’s actually going to happen. In fact, we might all just be dreaming.