Well, the world didn’t end like the Mayans said it would. It’s good news for us as a human race, but it’s pretty bad news for the betting ticket I had — $500 on 10,000-1 odds that the Mayan prediction would come true.
Oh, well. I hadn’t quite figured out where I was gonna cash it in anyway. Or what I would have spent my winnings on. It’s a funny story how I got that ticket, though.
It was back in 2007.
I was 16, even more foolish than I am now and at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes morning meeting.
They had a projector in the high school auditorium with the lights turned off. While everyone else was making out, I watched a YouTube video on the big screen.
It started off normal: hellfire, brimstone, apocalypse.
Then they dropped the Mayan knowledge bomb on us — a bunch of high schoolers, the children of the ‘90s who didn’t become skeptical until later thanks to MythBusters and snopes.com.
I grabbed a doughnut as I walked out of the meeting, feeling woozy, as if I’d just given blood. I snacked slowly and slipped outside to catch some fresh air before my first class.
There was a guy out there. Scraggly, lost, scary.
All beard and no face.
“Is this 2007?” he shouted at me.
I think I nodded. I was almost scared enough to go back inside.
He started toward me, waving a small ticket angrily in my face. He said he was from the future, from January of 2013, and he hadn’t liked the post-Mayan apocalypse world as much as he thought he would.
He had stocked up on all kind of weapons and storage items to keep himself alive in the event of apocalypse. He’d even gone out to a very sketchy bookie and laid money on the world ending that day; the bookie gave him 10,000-1 odds after he promised to put $500 on it.
Then they took his money and laughed. The day came. He walked around with ears pricked, listening for a humongous “boom” or even a teeny one. Nothing.
He lay in bed all night like a kid waiting for Santa Claus, but not a creature stirred, not even Zipacna, the son of Seven Macaw, to unleash vicious earthquakes on the Earth.
He said he was very depressed the next few weeks.
I really had no desire to hear about his emotional problems, so I cut him off and challenged him to prove he was from the future.
“How?” he asked.
“Tell me who’s No. 1 in college basketball.”
“It’s Duke. They’ve got a really good white guy.”
“That’s actually pretty believable. Tell me something I won’t believe.”
Then he told me some of the most bald-faced, ridiculous lies I’d ever heard.
First, he said Barack Obama was elected to his second term, but Hillary Clinton was leaving her post as secretary of state. Then he told me about a couple with some K-heavy names that I didn’t recognize who would be all over the news: this rich girl with a sex tape and a reality show and Jay-Z’s beat-maker. Supposedly they would be having a baby together, and this would somehow be a big story.
He offered me the ticket.
“I’ll give it to you for 10 bucks, kid, I just need some food.”
Of course, I didn’t believe him about being from the future, but the ticket was real-looking enough.
I thought his predictions were funny, though, so I asked him what would happen to Florida football after the world didn’t end.
He said Tebow would be in the NFL backing up Greg McElroy and Mark Sanchez, and the Gators would lose their bowl game to Louisville.
That was the final straw. I thanked him for his advice and then bought the ticket. Happy 2013, everybody.
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His columns runs on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
