In the movie “Forrest Gump,” Gump and his friend Jenny were at the old house where she grew up and where she was molested by her drunken father. She became angry and began throwing rocks at the house. Then she just sat down on the ground and started crying.
In his astute observation, Gump said, “Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.”
Now “Forrest Gump” is one of my favorite movies. I’ve watched it several times. A lot of it has to do with the soundtrack. Quite often I will confront an issue or a subject that reminds me of something said or depicted in that particular movie.
So today in my email there was this question: “Does the world end in 2012?” The reference is to all the hullabaloo about the ancient Mayan calendar, which ends on Dec. 21, 2012.
Somewhere along the way, theorists of various flavors have read between the lines and suggested that since that is where their calendar (numbers carved in stone) stopped, then they were projecting that time will end there.
My thought sort of parallels Forrest Gump’s. “Sometimes, there just aren’t enough rocks.”
Bottom line: Maybe the guy carving the numbers just ran out of rocks that day and didn’t come back after lunch. Or to quote another line from “Forrest Gump” where he was jogging across the country, “I’m tired. I’m going home now.”
I haven’t really studied up on the Mayans, so I don’t know what inspired someone to find hidden meaning in their calendar. Maybe the guy carving the numbers got to thinking, “Why do I need a calendar for hundreds of years from now? It’s not like I will have appointments to meet.”
Of course when you watch the Discovery Channel, all sorts of theories get thrown out there. Some people think that there is an extra-terrestrial connection with the Mayans.
And while these programs do make one look up at the stars and wonder, not everything has to be mysterious and complex. It might be just as plausible that the guy carving the numbers got into a yellow jackets’ nest that day and just refused to go back to the site.
Been there and done that.
Through the centuries, a lot of people have been obsessed with predicting the end of time. Some tie it to Biblical references and others may find some message in tea leaves or burnt toast. Or it might be something they are smoking.
Typically I don’t pay any attention to any of it. Let’s face it, time ends for a lot of people every day. As George W. Bush so appropriately noted, “Someday, some of us in this room will die."
Of course what the theorists like to  ponder is the idea that a big apocalyptic event will take us all out at once. Maybe another “big bang” theory.
Apparently those Mayans were really good engineers and astronomers. So were the Egyptians. They all performed feats in the realm of construction that impress our most learned people of today.
But as smart and as far thinking as some of them were, no one has ever found anything scribed in stone or on papyrus that resembled or predicted the 1957 Chevy. You would think that if they could predict something as significant as the end of time, then something almost as significant — a candy-apple-red, two-door hard top convertible ’57 Chevy with white leather upholstery — would have also been a foreseen event.
I’m betting that on Dec. 21, 2012, there will be a lot of news stories that say the Mayan calendar did not predict the end of time. Of course there will be other stories as well — political corruption, government ineptness and bombs going off in market places in the Mideast, which I can predict now and I’m not even Mayan. I’m Irish.

Walden is the editor/publisher of the Moultrie Observer, dwain.walden@gaflnews.com.