Mike Pearson's Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot

 Beetlebottom’s Last Gleaming.              7 pm on a Beetlebottom Wednesday evening.  The sun is a low hanging orange ball in the valley haze. Paula Pissypants and her sister Always Right Rose have just finished a dinner of instant mashed potatoes with lots of butter, boiled weiners with ketchup, and two boxes of macaroni and cheese. The pots are empty and the plates are cleaned right off. Paula complains about having to eat the cheaper brands of weiners and bargain shelf mac n cheese. “ Why don't you buy the good stuff, it tastes so much better?”That mac and cheese that they show on the TV ads, just tastes so much better….like , you know, luxury.” Always Right Rose was distracted by getting the old TV warmed up for the evening shows. The first show, a must see, really, was a talent show of sorts. Contestants from all the big cities, like Bumwinkle Falls, Busted Knee Flats and Big Bush, would perform musical acts in front of three judge...

Meanwhile, Lanky Pete and Slim sat on the ground below an old apple tree. Just off an old dirt side road,where nobody hardly ever drives by. Slim and Lanky pulled two beers out of the paper bag and fumbled with opening them. They toasted each other by reaching over and clinked the bottles together and then…took their first pull on the bootlegger's cheap, but pricey beers. Now recall, Lanky Pete and Slim Jim had been through a lot today, with the theft of the donation jar, the embarrassing beatdown by Monty, and the bold illegal purchase of alcohol. All this leading up to the reward of sitting under an old fruit tree, on a Wednesday afternoon, facing towards the warm sun.  The beer was warm. At first gulp, the beer mixed with dried blood from lips and loose teeth as it fell to the back of their throats. The taste was, hops, sugary sweet, some kind of citrus peel and arm pit sweat. Slim Jim and Lanky Pete didn't have much experience with beer, but somehow knew this wasn't go...

Always Right Rose and her sister Paula Pissypants were full members of the lifetime in Beetlebottom club. Always Right Rose was getting up on “ that” age. Married twice, divorced twice. She was kinda engaged to an out of town man for a spell. Carl, was his name. Good enough, well intentioned guy I suppose. Carl tried to end the relationship for whatever reason about five years ago. Apparently that didn't go over well with Always Right Rose. Carl has never been seen …anywhere since that Saturday afternoon. The Beetlebottom gossip generated down at the HazBean Cafe, murmured about a wood splitting axe and a midnight dropoff at the backside of the town dump. Others suggested that Carl just saw the writing on the proverbial wall, and drove out of town for distant points unknown. Lili Swivelhips, owner operator of the HazBean Cafe was fairly quiet about the whole Carl mystery, mostly because she slept with him twice.  Well, truthfully, nobody slept, and one of the times was a rolling an...

The Town and People of Beetlebottom  [ images by ChatGPT and Mike Pearson ] Installment 1. These people and this town are unknowingly affected by small amounts of noxious gas emanating from a fissure in the earth. Where once upon a prehistoric time, hot volcanic fury poured out of a crack in Mother Earth...now just a silent trickle of stupid juice ( a blend of nitrous oxide, methane, carbon monoxide, radon and the gas from partially rotted dinosaur teeth) oozed out and settled about ten feet deep in the atmosphere of a small town called Beetlebottom. It took about 10, sometimes 15 years for a resident of Beetlebottom to be fully affected by the low concentrations of mind altering emissions. But for sure, after 15 years of exposure, the DNA and brain fibers of all humans in the area were forever altered...and not for the better. The residents of Beetlebottom were completely unaware of the effects. They had no clue that the long arc of increasing stupidity and dense thinking was caus...