Maybe the Mayans had it right. Maybe there will be a giant alien finger in the sky hitting the CTRL+Alt+Delete button on December 21st. Maybe the earlier promises of the world being taking over by the Toronto raptors by that self-proclaimed prophet  guy in California is not necessarily a bad idea.. The world coming to a cataclysmic end would certainly would explain why “Gangnam Style” (if you can survive the thirty second ad in chinese you can find out the words to Gangnam style...in English)  has become so popular.I remember the halcyon days when “Gangnam, Style” was called “Josh , stop pretending to ride a horse and sit down and eat your dinner!”.

Much to the disappointment of many the world won’t be ending on December 21st and we will be stuck in  a  world still filled with senseless violence and untold tragedies but really it does not need to be that way at all.

I have spent much of my free time these days riding a bicycle. I found that it has been a bit of a refreshing experience , even if it has resulted in this truly bizarre behavior where I go to the fresh vegetable market and talk to the vendors and get food. Talk is perhaps completely the wrong word. They sit there and try and chat with me in Chinese and I reply to them in what I think is Chinese but most likely is nothing more than me repeating what they said pausing in the middle. With a shrug of the shoulders I almost say “I speak a little Chinese” although I think the only word that I correctly imitate is “ee dian dian” which means “a little”. It is a pity because these vendors seem a happy bunch, somehow they survive without the newest Ipad and spend a good deal of time talking with every customer over non-buying vegetable related topics. Some of them feel a great deal of pity for me and encourage me to try other vegetables to add to what will become my salad.

My journey to work is much better, namely because I get watch the cranes as they fly off together and go to do what ever it is the cranes do. I have always found it curious that I never see where the cranes go, or when these white winged beauties return to the small river near my home. I just see them fly away every morning at pretty much the same time.

Of course that moment of blissful zen is usually ruined by an electric bike. Electric bikes are dreadful contraptions that are too slow to drive on the streets with the cars ayet drive at seemingly break neck speeds when they are in the bike lanes. The timing is always exquisite and usually sneak up on me when my only choices are to ride into traffic or into a equally unappealing tree.  The soundless assassins, who sometimes want to have a pleasant little chat with me  (really some of them try and chat as they whiz away) are probably the only thing that prevent me from reaching my destination in nirvana..

In the movie the Matrix the antagonist Mr. Smith sums up what many people are thinking about the world right now he says humans are unique for mammals as we are the only ones who don’t live in equilibrium with out environment. We consume it, we destroy it, and we move on just to repeat it again in another place, it is essentially how we survive. He then likens us to a virus, another species that consumes it host , destroys it and then moves on to the next one. In a very big way we only have two choices.

 We have the choice though to focus on the bad, to think that a world filled with the coming of man eating, cartoonish,  basketball dribbling dinosaurs or some other apocalyptic ending swarmed by electric bikes is pretty much the best thing that could happen to us. Or we could do the other thing. We could take the blue pill (or , in my case the blue M&M) and enjoy our little world and by enjoying our little world making the world of the people around us a little more tolerable and hopefully, one person at a time, just a little better. 

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