THE END
★★★★★
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the end.
This is my 250th review, and marks the end of five years of reviewing the world. It’s been an amazing five years. In part because of my reviews, but also because I started doing Pilates.
Endings can be sad, tragic things, or they can be celebratory events which fill one with renewed spirit and a zest for life. For me, it depends on what thing is ending. When my late wife Rosie’s life ended, I didn’t like that one very much. But when my neighbor stopped stealing my newspaper I was pretty excited. Then less excited when I opened the paper and learned the reason he stopped taking it was because he was in prison for murdering. I had a lot of mixed feelings about that.
I like to try to think of the end as the beginning of something new. Like a worm transforming into a beautiful butterfly, or a cow transforming into a delicious hamburger. And then what happens to the hamburger. There are no endings, just an endless string of new beginnings. That’s why when I met a man on the side of the road who told me his car was broken and he couldn’t afford to fix it, I congratulated him on his new house!
Movies are famous for their endings, like the ending of Se7ev [sic] when the mannequin head Brad Pitt ordered finally gets delivered, or in Fight Club when it is revealed Brad Pitt is a ghost. (Mr. Night Shyamalan made Bruce Willis plagiarize this ending in the movie The Sixth Sense.)
One of my favorite endings is the end of a train, which is called the caboose. That’s a funny word!
The real end will be when God shows up and decides that whatever this whole thing is is over. I believe in God, I think, but not in any of the ones people have thought up. I suspect when God arrives everyone will be embarrassed by how many details they got wrong. Whoever came the closest will claim victory, like a contestant on The Price is Right.
I wonder how God will end everything. It could be a big finale where he pulls out all the stops with lots of light and screaming and things people will want to put on U-Tube. Or maybe it will be more anticlimactic, where everything just fades away slowly and there will be no one left to remember any of it.
