Eschatology

A Jeffersonian pervert, with interests ranging from legal prostitution to »how to make love,« to Moonies and DOS buyout conspiracy theory. Mr. Perkel claims to have written over 250,000 letters to periodical editors and has himself published 28 issues of Think Magazine, manifesto of the »Nerd Liberation Movement.« You can lease this eloquent and prodigious nutcase for only $250 an hour through Mr. Perkel's 'rent-a-genius' program.

eschatology is the science of ends, which is also the cut, the slice. The focus on the ultimate end, the end of the world, is an almost viral obsession that sets up signifigance into such a pure standing wave that it acts as a kind of strange attractor for a cosmic/species consciousness. An obsession with catastrophe is an obsession eventually with non-linear-ness itself. Many schizophrenics have the catastrophic expectation.

Some of the year 2000 worriers seemed to me to be simply longing for The End, or at least a good catastrophe. At least then, they seemed to say to themselves, we'd know why we were so upset, why we feel unreal, like tourists in our own realities. I'm sure some of them were disappointed when disaster didn't strike...

On the other hand I felt a lot of people had put things on hold to see if there would be disasters, and when there weren't, an amazing amount of energy was released.

I know there are places where life definitely isn't good, like Iraq (U.S. sanctions having unintended genocidal consequences) and the former Yugoslavia – where they have real catastrophes underway right now. But for a fat and spoiled Norteamericana like me, whose catastrophes are largely psychic ones, it's been a good year so far, basking in all the energy released when the end *didn't* come.