What do the chickens know?

Weird stuff has been happening lately. I'm not really sure how to explain it, maybe it's always been happening and I'm just noticing it now. I will share a couple of incidences with you and let you be the judge.

The last several times I have visited my in-laws, we've had to stop the car because there were, I shit you not, chickens crossing the road. Yes, chickens. The first time, I just looked at my wife and we both chuckled a little and she said, "well, are you going to ask them?" The Red Tornado, who is seven, didn't understand why it was funny, so we explained it to her and now, every time it happens, she starts yelling, "It's the joke! Look, it's the joke!" His dudeness just gets excited because, hey, chickens! And for the record, no, I have not asked them yet, for the simple reason that I am afraid that if I ask them, they will tell me. Who needs that kind of responsibility?

One thing many people don'tt know about me is that I am obsessed with the end of the world (ok, nobody report me to the school district now, PHIL) and the main reason for this is that when I was a young teenager I began to dream about it. I do not know why, maybe it was the apocalypticc Baptist sect preaching about the END TIMES! Gah! That I grew up in (for a detailed explication of this philosophy, see the Left Behind books), or the fact that I grew up in the tail end of the Mutually Assured Destruction Era, but I have dreamed about the end of the world for a long time. Not necessarily about Nuclear war, but about endings, madness, etc. It's infused my writing, even, to the point that there's s an apocalyptic bent to it, which is probably something worth examining someday. In therapy, but whatever. But after an absence of about ten years, the dreams are back, and they are weird. Everything just shutting down. Storms. Disease. Weird, helmeted, super-villain-esque armies in orange jumpsuits and black motorcycle helmets. You know, weird. I know the psychologists are saying this is happening a lot because of 9/11 and the whole terrorist thing, but still. It makes every day seem a little surreal.

And it makes me wonder, what do the chickens know? Maybe I should listen to their cackling as they move across the road, maybe it's a song "So long and thanks for all the seed."

And perhaps the weirdest thing, which is apocalyptic in its own way: my wife called me at school the other day and said that she had to bring the kids by right at three because she had to take her grandmother to the doctor because , and here is a sentence I never thought I'd be typing, in any context, she'd sat on a needle and now couldn't find it, so had to go and get her butt x-rayed. Yes. And then, when she'd had her butt x-rayed and they'd reported, "hey, no needle!" she made them do it again because she wanted to make sure They'd compensated for her fake hip. I'm just going to leave that one as it is, because really, what more could I say?

I am, however, reasonably sure the chickens had nothing to do with that one. Reasonably sure ...