The Morning After

"And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him."
- Revelation 12:9

Is it truly the beginning of the end or just another dry run?

Right now, we seem to be sitting squarely in the eye of two catastrophic prophesies; or in delicious terms, we're in the fluffy white middle of the dark Oreo wafers that signal the end of time.

Some, including Columbia Pictures, have sided with the ancient Mayans, predicting December 21 as the end-date of a five-thousand, one-hundred and twenty-five-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. 

Or who knows, maybe the guy jotting down the calendar put down his Bic after hearing that a couple of dudes down at the temple had just invented basketball using the enemy chieftain's head for a ball.

Calendar shmalendar, game on.

Others may feel that the events which ensued last Thursday in my home state signaled the death knell for a hopelessly sinful human race. At the stroke of midnight on December 6, two groundbreaking Washington statutes linked elbows and dos a dos'd onto the shiny parquet of the square dance floor.

We, the citizens of the Evergreen State, may now marry whomever floats our tug. How about that?

Oh, yeah, we can also possess an ounce of weed. I wonder how many Seattle's two-hundred fifty couples that received their licenses at midnight opted to take advantage of both new laws shortly thereafter.

King County's courthouse overflowed with giddiness; these people have been waiting...and waiting...some as long as thirty-five years, to tie the knot all legal like. For all intents and purposes. most of these pairs are already married anyway. With or without this new edict, people are still greeting each other after a long day at work, figuring out dinner and discussing whether or not they trust their daughter's new boyfriend or how that woman at work who never washes her hands after leaving the stall did it again today. 

And then there's the weed. A fairly sizable throng gathered for this one, too, but these folks thought it might be cool to swarm around the Emerald's City's largest hookah—the Space Needle—to usher in Seattle's new status as the sticky icky capital of green America. If you'd like, feel free to pick the moniker which most accurately portrays our little city of smoke on the water:

- Clamsterdam
- Eutokia
- The Big Apple...pie with ice cream.

Since the Needle's home, Seattle Center, sits a mere roach clip flick from most of the city's newspaper offices and TV stations, photo ops abounded for those willing to smoke openly early last Thursday morning. I say, well played, red-eyed renegades. After all, when are you ever going to get another chance for your mom to see you on ActionNews8, your bloated purple face choking and heaving trying to contain massive huff from a tar-speckled Bart Simpson bong?

Lately, public apprehension has reminded me a lot of the mood around that whole "Y2K" thing back at the turn of the millennium. We agonized and prepared tirelessly for the likelihood that our digital toasters would think it was 1900 again and wouldn't work since toasters hadn't been invented yet.

And nothing changed.

Or remember when Bewitched got a new Darren? I didn't think there was any chance that Dick Sargent could have the same carnal magnetism with Samantha nor the raw emotional connection to Larry Tate that Dick York had.

How dreadfully wrong I was.

So here we are, four days out, and everyone still seems to be okay. Perhaps a few states will follow suit in the coming years and gradually wear away the stigma of both issues, much as the civil rights movement and repeal of prohibition assimilated paradigm shifts which we now take for granted.

A few states will surely hold out, believing that allowing same sex marriage will only burst open the floodgates of permissiveness toward legalized plural and bestial wedlock.

Ironically, those are the states where that behavior is most prevalent.