OMG. It's 2011.
The recent news stories about the birds falling from the sky have really been bothering me. I'm not one of those Dear-God-It's-a-Sign-of-the-Apocalypse folks (more power to them), but ya gotta admit: those were some freaky happenings. One of the game warden guys in Arkansas said that mass bird deaths weren't all that uncommon. Really? I've never seen that before, and I live in West-by-God-Virginia where I could believe it would happen. If they're not that uncommon, wouldn't you think you'd hear your neighbors saying, "Oh, yeah, we were down at the river last weekend and the birds were just crashing out of the sky. Scared the fish."
If you follow that sort of thing, you know there's a theory based on the Mayan long count calendar that the world may end on December 21, 1012. Or if not end, some BIG event could happen. I doubt it, seriously, but it still fascinates me in a shivery kind of way. I watch those shows on the History Channel, I admit it, all the ones about end-of-the-world scenarios and the nature of the beast. And they scare the living hell out of me.
When I was a teenager, I loved horror movies and books. Loved the way they could freak me out, all the while knowing that monsters like that didn't exist, that I was safe.
Maybe it's a factor of getting older, of realizing that monsters do indeed exist, but they're not like the old movies and books. They're scarier because they're here, and they're just like us on the outside, so you can never be too sure... and by focusing on just the mortal everyday monsters, we don't pay attention to the bigger, universal stuff. Maybe, just maybe, those poor dead birds were a slap upside the head: Pay attention!
