This will be appearing in my next collection of columns. It was printed recently by both CoastViews and Funny Times. Enjoy!

We have a neighbor who’s convinced that God is coming back (Which begs the question, where has He been?). That God is coming to punish the evil (which she believes is most of us). She believes the end of the world is in sight. While she is a devoted Catholic and goes to church everyday, the main reason she believes the world is coming to an end is because she watches daytime TV. If this was where I got all my information about the world around me, I’d be convinced, too. An afternoon spent watching “The View” and Judge Judy should convince anyone. However, I don’t watch daytime TV. I’ve had more ominous indicators of The End. The following are my own personal Seven Signs of the Apocalypse.

First Sign: A friend of mine who has been a lesbian for the past thirty years is getting married to a man. When I found this out, my mouth dropped open and stayed there. For real. Frank had to manually shut it for me. This woman loved women. Yet, recently, she met a “big dude named Dave” and suddenly, he became Mrs. Right. He calls her his “Has-Bian”. I call the whole thing SCARY.

Second Sign: The Education Center of St. Louis, Missouri is using one of my columns in a Bible lesson plan workbook. The Education Center combines Jungian psychology with religion and provides materials for pastors across the nation to help them prepare their sermons. They cull out newspaper and magazine articles and pair them up with bible passages to update old bible lessons. And they chose my piece Consumerism is the New Religion as one of their “bible lessons.” How these people managed to interpret one of my articles as fitting in with actual religion or Jungian psychology is beyond me. I can hear the pastor’s sermon now. “And now, we go to Mark 10:22 ‘And the young man went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.’ Writer Janet Periat has made the same point in this essay…” Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

However, this has inspired me to create a new religion. The Cult of Janet. All my followers will be expected to donate large sums of money so that I can afford my stupidly over-priced California rancher. My Holy Eucharist will consist of slamming some beers followed by chowing down on a can of Pringles. I mean, hey, what’s the difference between wine and beer? A couple percentage points of alcohol. What’s the difference between Pringles and those little strange Styrofoam-like wafers they feed you in church? Pringles taste better but are still chopped, pressed and formed wafers that bear little resemblance to actual food. I won’t have a church because they make me claustrophobic and my sermons… well, you’re reading one. And that’s it. That’s my religion. You send me money and drink some beer and eat some Pringles. Done. You are guaranteed a one-way ticket to Heaven. Money back, guaranteed! If you die and find you didn’t end up in Heaven, just send me a letter and I’ll gladly refund your money…

Third Sign: I just got a job offer of $ 85,000 for writing. This is an astounding amount of money for a normal writer. Journalists are hard-pressed to come up with that kind of cash. If you write literary fiction, you make about 10K for a book. First time romance novels pay between 3K and 10K and this is for a whole year of work. Only the big names in fiction and non-fiction make 85K and above. So what kind of writing pays this extraordinary amount of money? You guessed it. It’s for a porn website. I would be writing copy to entice horny men to contact surgically enhanced women. I would be writing as if I were the surgically enhanced woman. “Hi, my name is Angel and I love puppies, daffodils and fat, middle-aged bald guys with plenty of room on their credit cards. My breasts are so large, I can’t reach the keyboard, but I can reach the credit card machine. I’d love to meet a hormone-addled, empty-headed guy on Viagra with Barbie fantasies who actually thinks someone attractive would love them for their limited personalities, not their big-ass saving accounts. Please contact me now, I’m hot and (my bank account is) lonely and I’m waiting for you.” I would like to say that I was not tempted in any way by this offer. But my God, 85K??? For writing stupid crap??? Why? Why does any kind of respectable writing pay zilch and this porn stuff pay so goddamn much? I can’t believe I just asked that question.

Fourth Sign: Frito-Lay is working hard to make their junk food healthy. As in as healthy as a cup of carrots. This is their goal. To pack their chips with fiber and nutrients. I can’t imagine a more frightening scenario. Junk food is called junk food because it’s made of junk and trashes your body and makes you fat and has no nutritional value whatsoever. It’s actually anti-food; the complete opposite of what food is supposed to be. Which is the entire reason we eat it. If they take the junk out of junk food, then the stuff will just be food. Which we have plenty of already and ignore it so we can get to the junk. Think, if Frito-Lay has its way, there will be no more junk food. No. More. Junk. Food. Just the thought of that makes my palms sweat. This is so far my scariest sign of the end of the world.

Fifth Sign: My parents are moving to San Mateo. I live in San Mateo. Need I say more?

Sixth Sign: Thomas Kinkade: The Movie will be released this Christmas. As in Thomas Kinkade, “The Painter of Light”. Painter of Blight, more like. So those saccharine freakin’ trite nasty stupid little houses that adorn everything from manufactured canvasses to toilet brushes will star in their own feature-length film. For real. The movie is called The Christmas Cottage and stars Peter O’Toole and Richard Moll (Bull from Night Court). It’s the end of Art and Film as we know it.

Seventh Sign: I turn fifty in two years. This may not seem like the end of the world to you, but I’m pretty freaked out about it.

So take cover, fellow Apocalypse believers. I will be in my bunker with fifty cases of Heineken and fifty cases of Pringles. It may be the end of the world, but it’s no reason to stop the party.

©2007, Janet Periat

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Humor Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.