Maybe like you, I spent part of my weekend waiting for the Rapture.

Looking out the window. Searching the horizon.

I even went to the front of my house and stood on my tiptoes and looked directly east.

I felt like I should be doing something. Didn’t you?

***

The ocean was up. A big swell. The waves charged immutably toward landfall, a little more urgently perhaps, like the minions of a closely packed Spartan army, one after the other, heads and shoulders down.

The sky was a little weird, I’ll grant you that. Wan and pastel, vague and overcast … But then again, now that I’m thinking about it, it gets like this every May, doesn’t it? May gray, right? To be followed by June gloom. (When all the poor Tan Diegans fall ill from lack of Vitamin D; it’s like the whole town is PMSing.) Which hopefully dumps us into July with a little bit of sun so we can go to the beach without our hoodies on—did I hear that more Japanese fallout was headed our way? Maybe it has something to do with that. I’m thinking about cutting out tuna. You know there’s an eighty-mile deadzone around the original blowhole of the Gulf Oil spill? Shrimp anyone? Apologies to my peeps in Nu Orleans, but don’t ever show me a crawdad again.

I remember when people were saying that walking on the moon changed the weather patterns.

Other people said the moonwalk was a hoax.

I wonder what Oliver Stone did on Rapture day?

Ever think about all the space junk? Where’s it all gonna go?

***

As most of us know by now, according to Harold Camping, an 89-year-old scriptural scholar and televangelist of doom — who raised and spent $100 million to publicize his prophecy — the End of the World was supposed to occur sometime Saturday, beginning with “super terrible” earthquakes in New Zealand and continuing around the globe.

Had Camping’s prophecy proven true, some two to three percent of the world’s population would have been sucked up into God’s Kingdom, the golden ticket to life eternal. The rest of us would have been obliterated.

All in all, it was to be a “super horror story,” according to Camping.

Good journalist that I am, always hungry for a super story, and knowing full well that, in journalism at least, the worse the catastrophe, the better story it makes, I took a wait-and-see attitude.

I sat at my desk and watched out the window. The day was unusually quiet. I thought for a moment about the tsunami warning a few weeks or so ago. I thought about 9/11. That day was weird because they stopped all the flights out of Lindbergh. There were no jets in the sky. Like they say in the movies. Everything was too quiet.

Yesterday was like that, too. I didn’t hear a single leaf blower; there were no cigarette boats raging along the coastline, belching fossil fuel and testosterone, the sound dopplering from a mile distant. My son was sleeping late; a pair of doves was sitting on the fence outside, doing that plaintiff cooing thing they do—back when I lived in Washington, DC, we called them pigeons; another thing to love about Tan Diego.

Meanwhile, one of the resident hawks is making lazy circles in the airspace above my canyon, climbing higher and higher in a calm effort to evade a sortie of large black crows that is attempting to menace him into abandoning his claim on their shared territory, a struggle that has been continuing, generation after generation, since I first showed up fifteen years ago to take possession of this homey piece of land below. I’m sure it’s an ancient struggle, dating to a time long before me, or even before the guy who renovated this place before me, a man who happened to be an Iraqi-born Jew. (Walk a mile in that guy’s sandals why don’t you? Just keep him away from any household repair projects…please.)

Every couple of years, I’ll look up in the sky to find that a cohort of seagulls has appeared to take up the fight for the territory. Compared to the crows, the seagulls are formidable. Bigger, stronger, more advanced as fighting machines, they can fly as high as the hawks; they can also dive and maneuver like the crows; the hawks are hard pressed to evade them with their subtle wiggles and graceful banking turns. I always think with dread that the seagulls are going to win­—anyone who lives near the shore lives in fear of their copious poo.

Fortunately, the seagulls never fight for very long.

Inexplicably, they always leave as suddenly as they came.

Only to return another time.

***

Even my mother was waiting for the Rapture.

She texted, just in case, to let me know she loves me.

I love you too mommy.

I texted her back and I said I’d try to be careful and not let myself be swept away. I’m pretty sure I’ll be left behind, blasphemer that I am.

I guess that’s what everybody was thinking about this weekend. All over the world, where people consume media, they were talking about the crackpot and his visions… even as they were secretly drinking a deep sigh of relief. OMG. I’m still here.

Now on to the next problem: What should I have for lunch?

Wouldn’t it be funny if, while doing his computations, Camping got his math wrong?

What if he forgot to carry a one or something?

What if the Rapture is really next week?

***

Up until all this hooey hijacked my thoughts on Saturday morning, I went to sleep preoccupied—in that back part of my brain that is always trying to figure out what the heck I’m going to write about this week—with the idea of writing about President Obama’s rapturous super earthquake of a Middle East policy speech last week.

According to the experts, Obama’s address signaled a significant change in US foreign policy, especially on the subject of the ongoing Israel/Palestine homeland issues.

Of course, everybody hates it. The Israelis hate it. The Palestinians hate it.

And everybody hates Obama for opening his fool mouth.

But you know what? He’s right to shake things up. Nobody’s doing squat. I think a lot of people agree that solving the situation in Israel/Palestine is one of the keys to solving so many of the world’s problems.

Unlike the Rapture, peace is something that rests within the purview of humans.

It’s something we can control.