Let me be perfectly honest with you. I’m one of those guys who used to skip all newspaper headlines that did not contain keywords such as “baseball,” “beer tent” or “strip club.”

If a news story did not pertain to something that would enrich my life, I had no interest. The Dow Jones? Until a year or so ago, I thought it was the name of a basketball player or possibly some kind of boat.

Today, I know that the state of the financial infrastructure is something to which I need to pay attention. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t know exactly who or what the Dow Jones is. When some gloomy cuss convulses over his paper and groans that the Dow dropped 700 points, my first thought is: Well, why doesn’t someone go out and pick it up again? And use more nails this time.

Back in the early 1990s, around the time of the first Gulf War, gloomy people were everywhere. They’d approach you in the streets or in bars all pale and trembling, talking about a recession. I’d try to pluck the newspapers from under their arms and get them to join me in another pitcher, but they were stuck fast to their pessimism, like flies on sticky paper.

I lost my job at Waterville Custom Kitchens, where I had the important task of holding pieces of lumber for other people to cut. Lord knows how far up that corporate ladder I might have climbed if the economy hadn’t gone bulimic.

But I never made a connection between unemployment and things that happened in far-off places like Wall Street, with their bull markets, their bear markets, their deer-tick markets and such.

And I might skip this current round of panic, too, in spite of all the people who corner me in parking lots to scream things like: “We’ll lose our jobs! We’ll lose our houses and freeze in the night! Rioting in the streets! Global unrest and starvation! Head for the hills!”

I want to give them shots of Nyquil and send them out into the streets with sandwich boards. After all, our great leaders attained their positions for solid reasons and surely they won’t let us fall into this great state of disrepair.

I will pause here while you laugh at my optimism.

Or I should say, former optimism. Because lately, I’ve been feeling the same unease as the rest of you doomsayers. Only for me, it’s not any one component of the pending disaster but all of them lined up together, like some cosmic configuration that foretells doom.

The economy is bad and getting worse by the hour. A long war rages in the Middle East with no end in sight. An unprecedented battle is on for the most important position in the world, in a nation that others have come to hate.

A smooth-talking newcomer has mesmerized the world and he wants your vote. An Old One with a mysterious vixen at his side demands that he is the way to salvation and he wants your vote.

Half the population is at war with the other over the matter of global warming. Abortion clinics are still being blown up. Advances with stem cells may save millions of lives but millions are determined to keep it from happening.

Those on the right battle with those on the left and it is beginning to feel more like civil war than a simple American difference of philosophy.

Look at any of these signs of unrest individually and it’s just more unrest in a world of passionate people. Look at it collectively and it looks – or more importantly, feels – like a confluence that may have been foretold in prophecy.

Think too hard about it, you will start to presage a planet of smoking ruin, a savage place where men have been reduced to their primitive selves, living in caves and running from thunder.

I’m not alone with this apocalyptic itch between my shoulder blades. I know several who sense that something grim is upon us. They have descended into real depression because of it.

The Four Horsemen are riding in and man, are they pissed.

But what are you going to do? It’s just a hunch, like the one you get when the phone rings and you know it’s bad news on the way. Older folks will scoff and tell you long stories about the Great Depression, the big wars, the assassination of great leaders.

And they’re probably right. We’ve made a mess of things and the bottom will probably fall out at some point. Will it truly be apocalyptic? Will the Anti-Christ rise up to reclaim the ruined earth?

Or will we suffer through it and survive, working two or three jobs to pay for half-tanks of gas and keeping our thermostats set at 50 degrees all winter?

Beats me. I have hunches, not logical predictions. And because there’s nothing I can do single-handedly to stave off the chaos, I’ll do my best to resort to my former ignorance. I’ll just look beyond what I can and go on whistling past the graveyard.

Apocalypse? What apocalypse?

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].