The End is Near and other Dire Warnings

I guess there are no other dire warnings. I mean, the "end" is the THE END. It can't get worse than that. On the other hand, one might say, I might even say as a practicing Christian, that the end is something we look forward to. Mind you, we're not in a rush. But we understand what is the gift to be received at the end of the world, that is the Judgment of God, and hopefully, a "Well Done Good and Faithful Servant". No guarantees of course that this will be the result---unless I/we set our footsteps on that righteous path. I know I'm trying. Most people I know are trying.

What brings up this cheery-ish line of blogging? Well, last night I was with my cronies, Len Speaks and Mr. Anonymous of the Deluxe Furnished Barbara Judith Aparments seeing a really interesting movie called "The Boys", the story of Richard and Robert Sherman, the men behind pretty much every famous Disney song there ever was and a couple of others you'd be surprised about ("You're Sixteen" by Ringo Starr). It being about Disney guys, it was screened at the El Capitain, literally, in the heart of Hollywood. It is across the street from Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where we would learn in watching the film, these brothers screened a film or two back in the heyday. After the show, we walked a few blocks east toward another renovated movie house of days gone by, the Egyptian, and dined at the Pig and Whistle next door. The walk to and fro felt like it might be what running from Sodom and Gommorah might have been before God wreaked his destruction. A cacophany of sound and sights, the tourist, the streetwalker, the panhandler, the locals, the sleezy. Crowded. Loud. On the way back to our car, where Hollywood crosses Highland, outside the Guiness Book of World Records store (I don't know what else to call it), was a religious Don Quixote and his equally religious Sancho Panza, the man on the box reading from the Bible and suggesting in very strong terms that we, me, were not likely to be saved. As we stood on the corner waiting for the light to change, I found myself alternately angry at the chutzpah of these individuals to assume that I was not as religious as they were, as concerned for my soul, as they were, and wondering what the hey I was doing there in the middle of that babble, or was it babel? And maybe, just maybe, I needed to do a little more soul searching about the saving thereof.

Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night is a crucible of good and evil. The movie houses. The people taking pictures of the stars on the walk. The mothers taking pictures of their kid next to Mickey Mouse in front of the El Captain. The short man with the greasy hair smoking a cigarette and looking like he is stalking the resit of us. The gang bangers with their backward hats and falling trousers and bling kissing their girlfriends amid the mother F--- intonations for emphasis. And the three of us on the gum strewn gray brick road that is the illusion factory completely gone Quentin Tarantino.

And whether I am saved? I'll have to pray in the quiet of my backyard, amid the jasmine and the hummingbirds, where I can think, and beg for Grace. Maybe I'll pray for that annoying guy on the corner of Hollywood and Highland and is sidekick, even though he made me very mad with what seemed to be a smugness that seems to me to be a bigger danger than the obvious evil around us. We are all a second from falling into the fiery pit. Equally.