The Sunday newspaper has a date of May 22nd this morning. From this I’m guessing that the world didn’t really end yesterday. For further confirmation, there don’t seem to be any second-coming sized headlines above the fold of the first section. We did get some dime-sized hail after dinner last night but that was as close as we came to earth shattering, life-as-we-know-it ending natural disaster type shit. No earthquakes, no floods of biblical proportion, no cracks opening up in the back yard and swallowing up me and Miz Susan and all of the trappings of our sinful and decadent middle class life style. It's been kind of a letdown.
Not that I was actually expecting much in the way of Old Testament fireworks. I walked over to Great Clips for a haircut at about two yesterday afternoon and on the way home I stopped at Super America to buy a couple of quick picks on the Powerball. Not exactly the actions of someone who was planning on starting in on the eternal burning in hell thing within the next five hours or so. And of course I took a swing through Cheapo (both sides of the street) on the way home. I didn’t buy anything but if I had, it’s unlikely that I’d have rushed home to slap it into the CD player or onto the turntable to give it a spin.
On the way across the Cheapo parking lot, I found a crumpled up dollar bill. Taking this as a sure sign from one god or another, I walked back to SA to buy another Powerball ticket. What the hell? If I was doing the heretical non-believer schtick, I might as well jump all over it with both feet. I could have run home, popped the buck into an envelope and then run back up to the mailbox to send it off to the Harold Camping Ministry. I think that I probably could have made the afternoon pickup. But that’s not me. Even staring into the fiery depths, I’m not about to prop up some 90-year old quack who thinks he can count up to 7,000.
Good sweet Jesus above, Miz Susan told me that some of the more anxious of her 4th graders had said that they were a little worried about the potential for unpleasantness. Don’t these end of the world nut-cases have anything better to do than frighten 10-year olds? If they’d wanted to do some worthwhile doom and gloom predicting, why hadn’t they warned me well in advance that the Twins would get bit by the injury bug big time and suck as bad as they have? That would have been something I’d have paid attention to. For a tip like that, I might even have sent a few bucks Camping’s way for his predictions on individual game results. Hey, no harm in laying a little off, just in case, is there?
I suppose that it’s possible that the world truly did end yesterday and that I just didn’t notice the transition from my previous hell-on-earth existence to the real live fire and brimstone stuff. But I’m not buying that. My life wasn’t (and still isn’t, apparently) anywhere near a hell on earth. I’ll admit that a few others might have believed that theirs were, just from the effects of having had to deal with me on a regular basis. But as my old friend Laura Prail used to say, “F--- ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”
No, friends and family, there aren’t going to be any easy outs for us courtesy of some wack-job who’s spent a little too much time staring at the small print in his Bible. We’re in it for the long run and we should try to make the best of things. Keep up the good work.
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