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It was any other day.  The plebs with their jobs and houses went on doing those things you do when you have jobs and houses.  Birds sang and flies buzzed.  The smell of sickening pollen poured through the air.  There was no sign of the terror that was to come.  No vibrations of doom you’d expect.   It caught us all off guard.

I was driving my rusted pile of bolts through lake country to get a sense of the the Walleye Extravaganza at Nitti’s Hunters Point Resort on the shorts of Mille Lacs Lake in the middle of Minnesota.  It was an annual event about catching and cooking on specific fish.  Why you’d pick just one species from a myriad of scaled sea creatures is beyond me.  Still, the locals were crazy for the stuff.  Entrants paid $1k just to try to catch the biggest walleye they could.  But like I said, it was an annual event.  Was.

The first thing I noticed was my suspension felt a bit floaty.  Odd since, my jalopy was running on the posts for the last ten thousand miles.  The next thing that seemed strange was the road descended beneath me.  This was especially concerning since I hadn’t snorted my usual breakfast Special K this particular morning.  But things became much stranger still.

A school bus, no doubt filled with rowdy boys on their way to some summer sporting event where they would sweat and grunt aggressively at each other like adolescent beasts, tumbled over me, end for end.  I could hear them screaming as if they were on some carnival ride that had run amok.

My car, devoid of contact with tar, flew at 75 mph into the forest a head of me where the road decided to needlessly turn away.  I was lucky, though at this moment I am considering luck to be a lost phenomena among mankind, because the cushion of breaking branches brought my car to a stop.  I looked down out my window to see I was still 50ft off the ground.  The sensation that something had gone seriously wrong occurred to me.

When I took off my seat belt, I was pushed off the seat into the musty fabric of the ceiling. Yes, something was definitely not right about this and I didn’t have the drugs on me to comprehend it.  I grabbed my phone spinning wildly next to me.  “Help!” I wrote, “I’ve learned to fly and can’t stop.”  I texted everyone I knew, including that bastard editor of mine.  No one responded.

There was no cure for this, I mused and set out into the weightless forest to find some respite from the nausea of not feeling what was was down.  I “jumped” from tree to tree like a space-age Tarzan and found my way to what was left of a gas station.  Cars and trucks and people floated, burnt and burning into the trees.  It was no good, the world was all like this.  I saw a woman holding onto a branch staring up.  She was unresponsive to my cursing, so I followed her gaze.

There were two moons.  One, the normal moon you don’t normally think about and the other moon.  Bigger, blacker and crackled with glowing orange lines.  That’s when I started writing.

Since then, the other moon, Harold I’ve named it, after my editor, has grown twice as large.  I watched a hill, pull way from the substrate and up into the void.  The air is getting thin.  I think the damaged woman I was with found some comfort in the low oxygen and has fallen asleep.  But this is certainly the end.  You don’t come back from losing your will to stay fixed to the ground.

It should be said with some relief however, that given the piles of nukes, toxic waste in our rivers, global warming and general distaste we have for everyone else, that at least we’re not responsible for this one.   In the grand scheme of things, trying to saving our planet from ourselves was an act of folly.  Strict hedonism, a practice I followed with the conviction of a dog with a bone, was the right answer after all.  Until next time, Cal.