Maybe we were expecting there would be fireworks?

This is not a real belief. This is not something that I subscribe to. This is a theory. I call this the Nacime Theorem, after the cameraman who first brought it up to me. He doesn't actually believe it either, at least I don't think he does. Nacime is a very normal, college educated, talented camera man, well known and liked in our community. It was probably a random thought fired off from a creative mind engaged a very usual day's work. He  and I were working on set, on a elaborate corporate talking head set up. It is remarkably manual labor, done mostly by people with too much education, and the discussions are frequently quite interesting. Sometimes they verge on the type that were popular in freshman dorm rooms, whilst clustered around a bong shaped like a hobbit or something. On this particular day, discussing the destructive and surreal turn of American politics, Nacime postulated the following, which he claimed to have previously heard someplace and it was this:

The Mayans had been right- the world really had ended in 2012, and what we are now experiencing was the residual consciousness of a dead world unable to fully grasp it's fate. 

It honestly seems to be almost as good an explanation as I have for the world at this time. This would mean that somehow we now find ourselves in a sort of world wide episode of "Lost", with guest star Donald J Trump as the Joker. It is tempting to believe, in order to relieve one of the burden of collaboration in the grand scheme of things to say that it's all a fever dream and we will wake up, or in this case accept our demise. We can chuckle at the dark humor of it, trying to forget the way the earth is heating up, and nationalism is running rampant and that we have begun to see how we could exterminate ourselves with out ever even intending to do it. I remember December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan long count calendar was set to end, very well- I totalled my wife's Honda Fit on a corner three blocks from home. Maybe, the jarring impact and inflating airbags were my sign that the end had come. Could Brexit, Russian meddling, the second term of Obama and most importantly the rise of the twitter demon Trump be just a sad misfiring consciousness leftover? Could all my personal depression and anxiety be the gasping last thoughts of a drowning soul? Are we all on this sinking ship?

I don't really believe this, but it feels shockingly right to me some days.