12/22/99. It’s my eighteenth birthday. I’m a scrappy, melancholy goth-girl who is sure she isn't going to see her high school graduation. On 1/1/00, either Jesus is coming, or the computers will transport us all back to 1900. In hindsight, oh well…there would have been plenty of dark lace and Victorian velveteen for my wardrobe, and I thought I was still innocent enough that Jesus might swoop me up onto that white horse, black nail polish and all.
Not much happened.Now I’m within two semesters of receiving the next degree that I should have gotten a timely eight years ago. There are new Armageddon options.
The first few emergency texts from the University on my phone were bizarre, anecdotal. By the time I had missed three classes due to evacuations, two of them in a row, one of them after I had already paid a $10.00 parking fee, bizarre turned into bullshit.
It’s an hour into the Cathedral of Learning evacuation, approximately 11:30am, 4/5/12. I sit down in a benched quadrant on the opposite side of Forbes, in Schneley Plaza, just as a bulldog-jowled security officer comes by, peeking briefly into a black garbage can. Directly to my right, a gray-haired professor in corduroy sports coat is sitting on a wooden chair he must have borrowed from the food kiosk area, holding an impromptu class; he is addressing half a dozen students, his dress shoes hooked around the metal chair legs, his words carried away by the breeze. His students are catching and holding down flapping pages of their notebooks. Over my left shoulder, another small group of students are giving presentations. A thin girl stands poised, her right leg planted in the sandy substrate in front of her, reading from her notes about healthy BMIs.
Blinds are dangling out of a half-open window on approximately the sixteenth floor of the emptied Cathedral. On the vacant lawn, an island of red and yellow tulips looks as still as a landscape painting. On the corner, University service workers have gathered, stretching and moaning in blue uniform pants and clouds of cigarette smoke, trying to stay limber.
“Music building? There’s ‘bout three people that work in that building!” one of the guys scoffs. To my left there is limpid applause for a decent presentation.
A pigeon is slipping down one of the Cathedral’s neo-gothic cornices, flitting its slate-green wings to catch its fall.
A whistle blows, twice. The service workers return towards the mouth of the loading dock. A member of security personnel has just detached one end of the yellow caution tape, letting it go casually, as it lulls to the left behind him, like a kite tail.
4/10/11, 10:45ish am, my first time in the Cathedral security check line. I hold nothing but my ID, parking ticket, and debit card. The shuffling line stretches out into the intersection. The crowded island of tulips is swaying, blown open, the petals about to fall away.
Exiting after class, I pass a girl at the front of the line, dropping her book bag on the examination table like an anvil. “No lions, tigers, or bears here” she announces, with great confidence in her own humor. Behind me I hear the security officer respond,
“Nooooo? No gazelles, no lemurs…?”
Oh my. Everyone’s sooooo clever at the University level.
Mark Lee Krangle was the first publicized, possible suspect. Krangle’s incomplete manifesto, Revolution or Evolution, self-published on Authonomy,http://www.authonomy.com/books/28290/revolution-or-extinction/read-book/?chapterid=272959 details his belief that he has channeled prophetic knowledge about the fall of America in the new millennia. His first mentor was a Mafioso teenager, “Frankie”, who foretold the mortgage crisis and 9/11 to the then 5 year old Krangle in 1951. The pinnacle of Krangle’s life was his supposed meeting with Jimmy Carter at the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel, “on/or about April 11, 1976.” Krangle claims to have then discussed his 1972 doctoral thesis, “A Framework for Freedom of Speech”, applying it as a model for Middle Eastern Peace and other policy matters.
His thesis centered on a conceptual model based on Harold Lasswell’s Question of Communication Theory, “Who says what to whom through what channel with what effect?” Krangle posits:
“Who can say what to whom through what channel with what effect?”
He bragged endlessly to then current Pitt Professors and Chairmen, insisting on the gravity of that meeting’s dialogue. Krangle calls his eventual termination in January, 1977 from his teaching position at the University of Pittsburgh his “sour grapes.”
According to NBC affiliate WPXI, Krangle was escorted off a plane in Pittsburgh and charged with harassment and terroristic threats involving recent emails to Pitt professors. He also claims to have met the person(s) responsible for the recent bomb threats. He was detained at 1:30PM, April 11, 2012, exactly 36 years after the Carter exchange.http://www.wpxi.com/news/local/someone-connected-to-the-bomb-threat/nMXR
In chapter 7, Krangle outlines his belief that he is a victim of “brain-programming” by US government operatives/cooperatives, some of whom he thinks are also faculty and administrative members of the University of Pittsburgh. According to his unidentified government sources, high school massacres such as Columbine are often a direct result of “brain programming” by federal agencies eager to institute martial law.
So, impetuous acts of the brain dead aside, I should have that diploma, right around my birthday. Oh, yeah, but then there’s this issue of the Mayan Calendar stopping the day before my birthday. The world could end then. On a more banal note, the Mesoamericans also anticipated that earthly existence may halt anytime 2 of their 3 cyclical calendars coincided, which is every 52 years.http://survive2012.com/index.php/mayan-calendar.html
Krangle’s first Doomsday mentor, “Frankie”, told Krangle that the human species was only capable of planning fifty years in advance, max. Krangle’s chapter 11, “Utopia or Oblivion”, is one of many in revision.
Why worry. If it is the end, I’ll wish I would have tip-toed through those tulips on the Cathedral lawn more. And wherever I have to go, I hope that place is devoid of the seemingly eternal vibrato of ENS.
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