This is how the world ends

If the world were ending on, say, Saturday, around 3:21 pm or so, would there be some kind of catastrophic leading indicators? And if so, would we be smart enough to notice? I'm only asking because, as your resident brainiac, I have to tell you, I'm seeing some pretty disturbing stuff out on the rough seas of the internet. In fact, I think I'm starting to see things, anomalies, virtual ghosts, bandwidth banshees. I'm seeing the kind of things you read about after the disaster happens and someones just happens to mention that all the dogs and cats ran away just before the volcano blew or 300 surfers mysteriously showed up the day before the tidal wave struck. Stuff like that.

The clearest leading indicator of our Apocalypse is the proliferation of Brit Lit. No, I don't mean all those Percy Bysh Shelley blogs. I mean literature regarding the imminent decline of Our Lady of Trailer Trash, Britney Spears.

This brief article will be the most attention I've ever given Spears during my adult life. She don't register. My mind is trained to edit my reality with excruciating prejudice. In th course of a day there are countless boneheaded micro-catastrophes it just blithely deletes. I never know they're there. It's like my inner child grew up to be a curmudgeonly aesthete and barely has the time of day for me much less the sheer billions of jaggoffs that walk among us, her calamitousness being one of them, being in fact, their queen. It's a gift from God.

But deep in the bowels of Death By Children's secret underground complex, the internet churns and wails and occasionally I have to go down and poke it with a fork and today when I poked it, it said "The end is near--Chart Britney's period."

We all know Spears went crazy when she married Kevin Federline. It's simple math: trailer trash + trailer trash = "Cops". And we're all guilty of paying attention to her mostly because we know she's bound to set herself on fire any day now and we want to be the first person in our Five to make the emergency conference "Dude" call and put the YouTube immolation video on our blog. Same reason we go to NASCAR. It's not the race that's exciting, it's the crash.

The thing is, Britney's crash is so inevitable that I can't see how it's interesting to anyone. In fact, I think her crash is long over but she's milking it. Or worse, it's all orchestrated by her Svengalian manager to drum up sympathy and support for a massive comeback to coincide with a new album and hit song. I don't know if it's better that I'm right about that or wrong. And I don't care that much. I'm just saying that she's one of the leading indicators of impending planetary destruction. She's THE indicator. In a bazillion years, they'll be referring to her and Nostradamus in the same breath.

How do I know? This is how I know. Celebrity gossip hounds have sunken pretty much as far as they can in finding Britnephalia to coat the empty insides of their blogs. It's not enough that she's just %$#@!ing crazy. That's not simple enough. And it's not enough that she's bipolar, or suffering from post-partum depression, or exhausted, or any of the ten thousand other afflictions that might explain the source of her ludicrous behavior (she makes Ludicris look like a Lutheran). NO, for the leading indicator of global deletion, Britney must suffer from something both noble and mundane, both ridiculous and rare, something divine yet disturbing.

She's on the rag.

But when Britney is visited by her leel frin it's she can't just be a little crabby. Her orc horde switches on her bipolarity, her post-partumality, and her panty-less-shopping-ism. Because she isn't human. She's a leading indicator and she dances on the upturned faces of her worshipful bloggists, people who watch her every move and would, could they afford the air fare, gleefully root through her garbage like feral pigs stumbling out of the forest into the grease trap at Arby's. People like this guy, who actually CHART HER PERIOD TO SEE WHEN SHE' GOING TO FREAK OUT NEXT! Gaze, as the planet teeters on the brink of disaster, on the wonder that i the menstrual cycle of Our Lady of Holy Sh--


(Red indicates . . . uh . . . that her "Cousin Red's" in town t help her with her "Grammar" . . . )

Please save me: my children are trying to kill me.