it wasn't the end of the world. tho it sure felt like it, a little bit.

see, yesterday was Cinco de Mayo, a holiday associated with warm weather and the onset of summer. but the weather has been cool and rainy, a bit like fall. a bit out of season, and the day's date was 5/5/05.

I'm not normally superstitious about sequential dates or weird weather, but yesterday my buddy and I had lunch at the mall across the street from the office. it is a large outdoor shopping center, and like all shopping centers it has a central PA system that plays a kind of new age musak.

but for yesterday, my friend noticed a change in the volume of the music, and the piece that was being blasted at an industrial pitch. it was Barber's Adagio for Strings. Huh? so we sat there eating our sandwiches while being cosmically depressed. the music was presented to us as if the person in charge of the mall knew it was the end of the world, like the end of the movie The Elephant Man where John Hurt, as John Merrick, makes the conscious, and sober, choice to end his life by suffocation from his own betraying body. and when he does that by the simple act of going to bed the camera pans from Hurt to his window, and the stars above while Barber's music swells toward the end credits.

but then things got back to normal. the music was replaced with the new age stuff. the sun peeked from behind the clouds. and no one seemed to notice that the date was 5/5/05. we survived, again, somehow.