It was weird watching the pandemic happen for many reasons. Mostly because it was my first one. Probably most people’s first one. But having written three books on the apocalypse, I thought it might be my last. The similarities were eerie.

I had written basically, or almost exactly, how the pandemic had started as the first wave of the apocalypse in my first book, and have since had people contact me to say something like, “Hey, this shit’s going down exactly like your book.”

Especially when, as the pandemic went on, and the governors were talking about closing their borders. It was getting strange. I thought, maybe I am a prophet. I may have called this shit because it’s going down exactly like I’d said. And that's what prophet's do.

Then people would send me posts from the news about different climate calamities, tornadoes in places where they hadn’t really hit before, or how the hurricane season was going to be more damaging than ever. Just like my book.

Here's a little taste:

A passage from Truncated: Apocalyptic and Loving it…

The plague that visited us wasn’t really a plague, but more of a severe and sometimes deadly flu and it had ravaged mostly the East Coast after some monkey in Southeast Asia fucked a mango or something and created a flu unlike witnessed since the Dark Ages. The spectrum of antibiotics and antiviral medications was dwindling like the ice flows were to global warming. What used to work, simply didn’t anymore, or at least not for everyone…

And…

Flights had stopped to curb the flu spread. States were setting up roadblocks to keep out the infected. And travel to and from countries was severely restricted…

There’s more, but you get the idea. I do too.

I. Am. A. Prophet.

This guy is a prophet.

It’s hard being a prophet. Always being right. You probably wouldn’t understand, because really, you’re not a prophet.

I had my suspicions about myself though. For years, I pictured the fall of man. How we would go out. And I knew, I knew deep in my being that it would start with a pandemic. And when everyone was reeling from the horrors of some viral infection, the other things would start. Things where we were less prepared and less equipped to handle because handling a plague is a lot to handle just in and of itself. But what if you added some natural disasters. Some of them on an epic scale. All of them were plausible. Maybe even probable at some point.

And there it was, right on my tv screen all day every day. Just as I had written it. The heavens had opened and revealed to me my true calling. Matt Orlando, prophet.

But deep down I knew the truth, which is, I’m not a prophet. The real truth can be summed up by the immortal words of, Kay, played by Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black, “There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!”

More accurate words were never spoken. But in the real world — not that there’s not Arquillians — is that there’s for sure a virus mutating especially for us, there’s a tectonic plate ready to shift, some air that forms some heinous weather patterns, and so on. That's right out there for everyone to see.

So it’s not that I’m a prophet, because obviously these things are going to happen eventually, and while the pandemic did take place, not all the other stuff did.

At least, not yet…