Life is a Gothic horror story now. We have to anticipate terror-filled things even more than we did the last time the Pumpkinhead King took up the scepter. The government may actually collapse this time when you consider the 2025 plan and what the evil minions have planned. The economy will collapse from tariff-fueled price inflation and the deportation of so many of the people who actually do the work in our society. The FBI is going to be overseen by a wild-eyed hate goblin with a mandate to hunt and destroy the Pumpkinhead’s enemies and critics. The secret factory will be run by a woman who delights in giving the poisoned tea to our friends and the goulash to our former enemies. The Department of Defense will be run by a drunk rapist who knows nothing about leading a squad, let alone an army.
We will be walking blindfolded into a future where another pandemic is lurking with the worst possible people in charge of protecting the nation’s health. The head of health is going to be an anti-vaxer with no medical education of any kind, one who not only doesn’t want to develop vaccines for the next pandemic but wants to invite POLIO back.
Elmo Muskmelon, a South African immigrant who appropriates other people’s inventions to make himself the richest and most important man in the world will take the role of viceroy regent who runs the country by fiat while the Pumpkinhead King farts around playing golf all day. The government will literally be looted by minions enriching only themselves.
Of course, climate change has the Doomsday Clock counting down to death by storms, death by wildfires, and the eventual elimination of breathable atmosphere at temperatures that will burn the birds and the bees right out of the sky.
The world will be filled with monsters, survivors who can afford underground bunkers and domed villages under the acidic sea, growing fat by eating everything they have stolen from those of us who did not survive, and probably eventually each other when resources run out. Or they will become mutants, gill men, wolfmen, and snake women. Hunting and hunting and then eating the luckiest of the rest of us who happen to last the longest as non-monsters.
Having read the Bible completely three times, I am well aware of the end of the world as predicted by the Book of Revelations. It is nowhere near as awful as the reality we will most likely be facing… If we don’t burn it all down ourselves before it can happen via nuclear war. Everything is gone or poisoned in a few flashes. A more horrible way to die? It’s quicker.
I fear there is not enough love left in the world to keep all this from happening. Sometimes it sucks to be a true pessimist.
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the Spider Kingdom
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
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