Here we are on a rainy Ozark morning.  It’s Tuesday and another civilization’s end has come and gone.  Yesterday we survived the horrendous solar eclipse, the devil comet, a fatal planetary alignment, and a rapture in which no one was raptured.  Shame on all Christians who bought into that, and double shame on all the preachers who garnered You Tube clicks stirring up such claptrap.  Although the National Guard was activated, nothing noteworthy happened in all of those towns named Ninevah along the track. Apologies to Jonah.  As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, there was no Mayan calendar influence this time, nor did all of the world’s computers kill off all humanity as you remember happened in that Y2K event a few years ago.

It’s as though every time something odd happens these days, we’re supposed to expect Armageddon to materialize, and everyone should run to whatever underground facility they might have contrived to wait it out.  My family, ignorant of such necessary precautions, sat out in the yard and watched the Pac-Man sun gobble up the silhouette of the moon through those cheap cardboard glasses, and, oddly enough when the solar disc was blotted out, none of us were able to make out that mysterious planet that hides behind the sun, although it is nonetheless there, teeming with extraterrestrials – each undoubtedly with probe in hand waiting for the next ship to earth to practice whatever fearsome cosmic version of proctology is required nowadays.

Speaking of those eclipse glasses, I’m trying to figure out how to hawk mine on Ebay.  I doubt if I’ll be around to need them for another horror-evoking moon shadow, and they’ve only been used once, albeit for several minutes.  They’re in like-new condition, and If I can keep my kleptocaniac pup from stealing and eating them, they’d be easy enough to ship to a new user.  If someone would buy them now, they could avoid the panicked rush of the next end of the world, in which people would no doubt again find themselves groping about in another maelstrom of horror.  They could thus avoid extraneous pursuits such as trying to find glasses in the last few minutes of the earth’s existence once more.  It’s obviously much more profitable and spiritually rewarding to spend those moments poring through social media video menus for terror-inducing information such as the cicada invasion that was supposed to accompany this most recent termination of humanity.  As our Ozark farm darkened with the ominous and obvious conclusion of our earthy existence, I listened intently for the heart-stopping forest echoes that no doubt had scientists in a blind panic across the country, but as I’m old and kind of hard of hearing, I guess I missed it.

When end of the world events like that eclipse happen, people should always try to get plenty of video and record the sights and sounds, for there’s nothing like sitting around with the family later on in life sharing all the captured marvels of the most recent planetary ending. 

Hope y’all had a wonderful end of the world this time – maybe a better one next time!

MK