Apocalypse How

       The End is Nigh!  Perhaps I have the book of Revelation on the brain, or maybe the fact that visions of doom are superfluous in our media maelstrom, but I've been dwelling on the concept of "the apocalypse" the last few days.  While the subject of our fascination with our own demise is a worthy topic for another day, I am more interested in what type of cataclysm we're speaking of.  Are we speaking of some God-ordained cleansing of the earth he once loved?  I guess I never much liked this option.  And it doesn't seem to fit with the oft-misquoted opus of Christian apocalyptic literature: the book of Revelation.  That book seems much more concerned with portraying a symbolic world of good and evil where its readers can be offered some camaraderie and hope through their persecution and ostracism at the hands of the Roman Empire.  So if God isn't behind the end of everything, the answer lies elsewhere.
       Perhaps in light of the BP oil catastrophe it's more likely that we will author our own demise.  Let's say we further advance climate change and thoroughly fuck up our planet beyond repair.  What real end will come of it?  The end of all biological life?  This I find highly unlikely, considering the tenacity of carbon-based life, and our planet's ability to give the finger over geological time to the creatures who attempt to master it.  Perhaps its the end of ourselves that we fear.  The end of sentient life,  the end of our systems of order and hierarchy, the end of a reality that was never quite real...it's all quite scary to beings that want to retain the illusory concept of "control" over our lives.  All good (and bad) things must come to an end, and perhaps letting go is something we (me specifically) need to do more often.  Letting go of the way we want things reminds me of the works of Norbert Kox.  We have this tendency to make a golden calf of a system, a way of living, or even our concept of the divine.  That's what I love about Kox's mash-up of Sallman's Head of Christ and Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe: it's so irreverent to the idol.  I'm left wondering what things I have worshipped that were just the iconic Beast masked by a rosy exterior.  Technology?  Religion?  Music?  The Academy?  My particular vision of messiah?  As I transition to a new stage in life I feel as though i must hasten the apocalypse of those imaginary worlds and begin to start anew.  I must both mourn and celebrate the demise of my peculiar deities if I long for a new heaven and earth to emerge.