Ready for the Rapture

According to Harold Camping and his followers, the rapture will take place tomorrow with a ginormous earthquake. He cites his extensive research of the Bible and guarantees the date. He has since added the big event will occur at exactly 6:00 p.m., Eastern time.

Mr. Camping is a Christian radio broadcaster and President of Family Radio. Unlike the Westboro Baptist Church which is composed mostly of Reverend Phelp's family, Camping has followers across the United States and around the world. I searched but was unable to determine whether his followers number in the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

You don't have to be one of Camping's followers to be raptured. Good Christians and 144,000 Jews will apparently make the cut. Since I'm neither Jewish nor Christian, I'm absolutely certain I won't be among the elect.

I'm not upset. Having been excluded from all things Christian for most of the last thirty years, I'm used to being left out. I do, however, have some concerns.

How will I know which of my Facebook friends were among the elect? If the rapture occurs I'm sure several of them will go. If so, will they disappear from my list of friends?

Same for Twitter. I'm now following more than 1000 entities resulting in more than 150 followers who I'm sure read every Tweet. Will the elect vanish from Twitter, too?

I also worry about the impact of the rapture on my blog. I'm up to 33 followers, including several who never read it because I pissed them off a long time ago. Will the elect disappear from my list of followers?

Will the rapture cause a big drop in my blog stats? My numbers have dropped lately because I've been working on my second book, Addicted, instead of writing blog posts. A bigger fall-off in my numbers would make blogging feel like an even bigger waste of time than it already does.

What about my writer's group? We meet at 5:30 tomorrow. I submitted the first 5000 words of Addicted for review and discussion. I'll be totally pissed if at 6:01 the only person remaining is...

The Crotchety Old Man