ArcaMax

Old guys like me always believe the world is getting worse.

You're young and strong and you're hell in a fistfight, and you figure if you lose your white-collar job, you can just go tend bar somewhere until you get another job.

Yeah. That's beautiful, but it doesn't last. If you're not careful, in your later years, you start being nostalgic for things that either didn't mean anything or weren't very good.

Penny candy. Payphones. Stick shifts. Really open racism.

Right now, at 68, my life is balanced on the head of a skinny pin. If Social Security goes down, I'll be eating grass out of my front yard, or at least I will until the bank takes the house. If inflation gets much worse, they might have to bring back penny candy so I can buy something with my skinny newspaper pension. I have investments, but they're hiding somewhere until the market begins to act sane again.

You get yourself in that kind of situation, you gotta get into the Alcoholics Anonymous frame of mind and say, "One day at a time."

I don't think the end of the world is coming anytime soon because religious people are always predicting the end of the world and it hasn't happened yet. If you bet against the end of the world every time someone predicted it, you'd never have lost a bet in your life, which is better than you'd do if you always bet the Red Sox to win the World Series.

To get ready for the at least semi-possible end of the world, I did six things this week.

I started by mowing my lawn. If anyone's left after the apocalypse, I want the first TV reporter in my decimated neighborhood to see I tried.

After that, I went to breakfast. Who knows how many more I get? And anyway, if it's not an apocalypse, if it's just a communist or fascist revolution, there's an excellent chance there'll be a shortage of bacon after the fanatics take charge. That never changes.

I went out and started anniversary shopping for my wife. It's a small act of faith, and I'm not sure she'd let me out of buying her presents just because the world ended. Besides, when I shop for her, I get to tell the jewelry counter lady, "I don't know about this bracelet. My wife has freakishly small wrists." I don't know why it makes me happy to say that, but it does.

I went to the liquor store. I did this for the same reason I went out to breakfast. The End Times ain't gonna be good times for craft beer.

I gave my diabetic cat one insulin injection every 12 hours. He's a little wiggly about it, but he's not gonna have anything to do with what happens next, so he might as well feel good right up until the sun falls, or I'm forced to eat him after the revolution.

After that, I sat down to read. I want the aliens who come after us to find my skeleton with a book in its hand, preferably a book of poetry. I want them to know we tried to fix things in every graceful way available to us, even if the poems weren't strong enough to save us at the end.

The poems never were strong. They had thin wrists, and they spent too much time looking at the moon's reflection in some dirty puddle.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.