Oh Myyy! (16 page)

I admit, I had to look up who Snooki was when I saw this, and I still don’t get it.

Fans were also quick to point out that Hostess Twinkies were supposed to survive even a nuclear holocaust, but went out of production just weeks before December 21, 2012. Again, well played, Maya.

I also blame “zombie-philia” in part for our collective end-of-the-world mania. I’ve found that people under 30, in particular, have a keen sense of the undead and how to deal with them in the event they rise:

In 2012, zombies leapt off the big screen and into the headlines with news reports of a homeless man who had his face chewed off by another man — truly the stuff of horror films. Rumor was that the assailant had been hallucinating on some kind of drug, dubbed on the street as “bath salts,” but this was never corroborated. Nevertheless, the zombie apocalypsados pounced on the news as evidence of the “impending ending.”

Right on cue, memes sprung up all over the Internet. My personal favorite poked fun at Carly Rae Jepsen’s cloying “Call Me Maybe” song that seemed to be everywhere:

A popular related meme had Yoda singing this song, in his signature syntax. “Met you I just did, hmm? Call me you will maybe, hmm?” It goes to show, you can’t go wrong with a Yoda post.

During that week, everywhere I looked on the Internet, there were zombie doom references. Fans compiled news stories from around the country that they swore corroborated that flesh-eating creatures were rampant. Mom chews off husband’s penis. Boy bites off own arm. Man chops up roommate, stores in fridge to eat later. My own Facebook wall was full with fan images of zombie inspired attacks: peanut people devouring one another, stick figures dismembering their own, even gentle garden gnomes zombified into a rampaging pack of the undead.

There’s something about zombies that fascinates us beyond what the movies have shown, a morbid fascination with, well, the morbid.

Gross indeed. Other popular 2012 predictions include disturbances within the heavens, everything from unprecedented planetary alignments to massive solar flares destroying our little blue home. Cults predicted the coming of aliens to destroy us, or of the true Second Coming. I began to wonder, what accounts for our collective affinity for the apocalypse? What is it about “the end” that makes it always seem just around the corner? And why do lawns in post-apocalyptic always appear freshly mowed if there’s no one around to do it but the zombies?

It’s one of the few areas in which science and many religions come to the same basic conclusion: We’re doomed. The end is heralded in fire and brimstone, whether it’s the return of the Savior or our sun going supernova in a few billion more years. Man can hasten The End of Days, whether through terrible wars, catastrophic damage to our environment, or even playing at God. Indeed, even some in the scientific world were unnerved at the news that CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) would attempt collision of particles at near light speed, all in service of the search for the subatomic particle known as Higgs boson, which the press dismayingly has dubbed the “God Particle.”

© valdis torms - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission

Here’s another favorite:

© perfectmatch - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission

Our musings about our own destruction in some ways marks us as self-aware and separates us from other species on Earth. Our own attempts to defy our own temporal and physical limitations provide ample fodder for apocalypse watchers.

Many point to humankind’s bold but, some caution, foolhardy attempt to unlock the secrets of the physical and natural world, unleashing devastation and misery instead of enlightenment. The atom bomb, a man-made super virus run amok, robot armies taking control — all are cautionary tales, where our technology vastly exceeds our collective social wisdom, allowing our discoveries to turn upon and destroy us. It is the ultimate evolutionary irony that our own overdeveloped brains may be our undoing. Perhaps it is no secret, then, that it is the brain that zombies find so delectable.

© Steve Young - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission

Perhaps our obsession with the apocalypse stems from the now irrefutable evidence that It. Has. Happened. Before. The sudden disappearance of the mighty dinosaurs, many posit from a huge meteor strike, is now part of our common understanding, affecting our own sense of vulnerability.

In late 2012, Apophis, an asteroid the size of two football fields, was predicted by astronomers to travel fairly close to the Earth. There is a chance, however small, that it could be deflected just enough by our own gravity to come zipping back to smack straight into us, some predict in 2036. Now, that probably won’t happen, but the point is, for the first time we are keenly aware of celestial doomsday rocks and how close they will visit. Our delectable brains get fired up about it, and Morgan Freeman has to save the Earth again.

What is clear to astronomers and doomsday predictors alike is that we do have to figure a way off this planet, for one day the party will end. Happily for our species, it was never going to be 2012. We still get a very long time to figure out space travel, or come up with the antidote, or dig ourselves giant cities underground to protect against the radioactive clouds. I can’t help but postulate that there is something oddly comforting in imagining an end we share together, rather than alone, and that this feeds our mutual obsession with Doomsday. The apocalypse that wipes out 99.99% of us doesn’t discriminate by race, class, or geography. As it turns out, everyone’s brains do in fact taste the same.

Getting My Facefix

Over the past year and a half, I’ve come to develop a unique bond not only with Facebook, but with some of the folks who work there. As an avid user with a fan base populated by many nerds and geeks, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that techies who work at Facebook actually follow my page and, as a consequence, might prove responsive to my concerns. In fact, I recall reading an article that claimed my page is more heavily trafficked by Facebook employees than Mark Zuckerberg’s page (sorry, Mark, if that’s true).

I first began a direct line of communication with “Facebook Engineering” in early 2012. At the time, I had been noticing that some of my posts seemed to “disappear” after I posted them, only to reappear minutes or even half an hour later, as if emerging from a wormhole. I was never sure whether the picture was truly “back” — i.e. actually appearing on fans’ newsfeeds — or whether it was simply appearing on my wall and not anywhere else.

The same thing was happening to certain fan posts. Many fans would attempt, as I did when my own post failed to upload properly, to repost the image. And repost. And repost. This had the effect, after some time, of generating multiple copies of the same image on my wall, like so many movie posters on a construction site barrier. In my own case, images often would all upload at once but appear as an “album” rather than individual pictures. (Here’s a Facebook tip: If you want people to actually see your photos, don’t upload them all at once as an album. Upload them one by one, preferably more than two hours apart, otherwise Facebook may lump them
together, and nobody will bother to flip through the album. Think about it — don’t you brace yourself when someone sits you down on a couch to flip through their “album” of pictures?)

It was even more unfortunate when fans concluded that their posted images or links had disappeared because I had deleted them, as if I somehow was offended that they had used my wall to promote their cause. I would receive many of these types of angry wall posts after people went back to my wall to review their posts: