This Week for Happy Hour: Graduation and the End of the World

Two biggies are penciled into the country’s schedule for this weekend.  First, a great many of our nation’s young adults will be graduating from institutions of higher learning on Saturday, descending the big stage with a liberal arts education in-hand and striding out into the world to live rich, informed lives.  And second, the World is going to end.  That is really not good timing, is it?

That’s right, the World is supposed to end, again, this Saturday, May 21^st, according to yet another small group of American evangelicals.  Despite the obvious, I think the strangest thing about this apocalyptic prophecy is that we’ve heard so little about it.  Perhaps its’ been overshadowed by the Mayans’ 2012 extravaganza that’s sure to go down next Winter.  Yeah, that’s probably it.  Americans don’t like to believe other Americans.  The other ones are always dumb as nails or phony bologna.  Mayans, however, are exotic, and therefore may have some superhuman insight.  Flashes of Estelle Costanza and Donna Chang, the not-Chinese woman on the phone.  She was duped!

Maybe another reason this Judgment Day prediction hasn’t garnered much attention in the press is that the date is plain old inconvenient.  Y2K sounded scary enough to be true, but also we could plan for it, get hammered, light candles around JonBenet Ramsey’s grave and wait for industrialized society to implode upon itself.  Same with 12.21.2012.  Spooky numbers, oooh. 

But this one sucks because it’s freakin’ graduation weekend.  We already have plans, stupid Universe.

Anyway, I’m not too concerned that the World’s gonna end like that – some Irish-tempered soccer hooligan Jesus coming down and filling the graduation quadrangles with the blood of financially insolvent nonbelievers.  Partly because it didn’t happen on Y2K.  Partly because now Arnold Schwarzenegger is single again, so he should have free time to save the World, if only for a day.  (Wow, imagine that?  It would be just like the inverse of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)  But mainly because the banks have too much to lose in all those indebted young bodies.  It would be the banks vs. Jesus.  And apparently the banks are too big to fail.

But the whole idea got me thinking.  Not about the rapture and the furious vengeance of God, which would be – let’s face it – really interesting to watch, no matter what happened.  And what an awesome way to go, incidentally: by the fiery sword of Jehova. 

“Holy Shamwow, they were right!”  Whack.

No, it got me thinking about the timing of it all, about graduation as the potential end of not the World, but the end of a world.  A sort of microcosmic apocalypse.

College graduation is the end of a big party, for sure.  But it’s also, for the vast majority of graduates, the end of the liberal arts educational experience.  The late great David Foster Wallace spoke on roughly this subject (sans Irish soccer hooligan Jesus Apocalypse) in his 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech.  Here’s the little story he opened with:

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”

The story illustrates the difficulty in understanding some of the most simple and obvious aspects of our existence.  Those things, as the cliché goes, that are “hidden in plain sight.”  The fish didn't recognize the water because they were constantly in it.  For humans, the analogy is a bit more complicated, because we're not stuck in something external.  We're stuck in our own brains - the filter through which we have perceived everything.  And we're not alone in there, exactly.  We're stuck in there with that little ego fucker who pipes up time to time and causes trouble.  And I’ve always felt that was a great gift of a liberal arts education: learning how to try to overcome the default human setting, trying to get beyond the skull-sized centers of our own little universe.  Problem is, maintaining that “this is water” perspective takes lots of time and hard work.  And life intervenes, it fuckin’ does.

Still, the choice is there even after graduation, even post-apocalypse – the choice to think one way or the other, to work for and enjoy the simplicity of the human condition, or to be swept away by the institutions of our particular time and place.

DFW goes on, “... there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.  That is being educated.”

I’m not saying I’ve got any of this figured out.  It’s hard.  I’m no wise old fish.  On the contrary, I am young and spritely and nubile, and I’m still recognizing my mistakes, let alone correcting them.  But I appreciate the idea, I believe there’s value in the concept, and I’ve ranted about this kind of thing before in slightly less serious terms: being able to appreciate and enjoy life’s simple things, more or less.  Expressing romance and love in more frequent, less-than-grand gestures.  Finding happiness on plain dry land instead of inside a multi-billion dollar cruise liner.  Maybe even just some nice doggy style sex.  You get the idea.  And as long as I’m writing a drinking blog here, I should say that I strongly believe that sharing a drink with friends falls squarely in this category as well.

Buddy Christ

Ok, here's my Jerry Springer final thought: Maybe on Saturday, some kind of friendly, happy, fun time Jesus will descend, as predicted, and turn a thousand barrels of water into wine (or maybe whiskey or beer?!).  If that happens, I’m rolling a few of them into Rhino Bar and turning them upside down until they are empty.  And I’d encourage you all to come on down and join me for the fun, the drinks, and the graduation celebration.  The water, I’m sure, will be fine.

Cheers,

Finnegan

P.S. If you’d like to read DFW’s speech in full just click those three words in the middle of this sentence.