“I’m tellin’ ya, Dope, this is gonna be a mess like no one here has ever seen,” he said. “And like they ain’t ever gonna see again either.”

He took another slurp from the bottle, dribbled some, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and went on.

“And don’t go rollin’ your eyes at me neither,” he said. “You know how much that bugs me.”

Of course I did know how much it bugged him, but I figured it was the least I could do if I had to endure another one of his rants.

“He,” by the way, is Elmo “Shaggy” Sherman, The Sage of Santa Clara.

His nickname is literal, based on a huge clump of tangled and disheveled hair on his head, shoulders, and partway down his back. He also has a beard down to his mid-chest, at least as tangled and disheveled as the mess on his head. They’re both so unkempt and uncared for that if you told me he had a family or two of rodents who called them home, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

His unofficial title, “The Sage of Santa Clara” is purely ironic. While he opines on everything and has never suffered a moment’s doubt, he is plain and simple, as the Brits would say, an eejit. Easily Santa Clara’s village eejit, but since there’s not a lot of competition, it does no justice to his thickheadedness. In my humble opinion, the lad could be nationally ranked and competitive with the eejits of, say, Cleveland or Baltimore.

The “this” he was talking about is, of course, Monday’s eclipse. And the “here” is My Home Town.

Shaggy has never met a conspiracy he didn’t like. The JFK assassination, the faked moon landings, the sinking of the Thresher, 9/11, the murder of Ptolemy XIV — you name it, and he knows all the sinister forces behind it. Like all conspiracists, he has a huge number of sources to draw from — nary a reputable one among ’em.

“Just think about it,” he said. “They’s gonna be 15 or 20,000 people coming here. Where they gonna put ’em all? Where they gonna eat? What about the crappers?”

“What about ’em?” I said, hoping to either slow him down or derail his train of thought. But no such luck. “I heard it’d be 10,000, not 15 or 20 anyway.”

“Yeah, right, 10,000,” he sneered. “And where’d ya hear that — liberal media? Buncha commies, and as if they’d know anyway.”

Implying of course they don’t … but he does.

“Plus, all them people here is a perfect cover,” he said.

“Cover?” I said. “For what?”

“For what?” he said in a falsetto. “For terrorists and gangbangers, that’s what. Whole damn area’s gonna be an armed camp.”

“Hate to tell you,” I said, “but it already is.”

He gave me a dismissive wave and went on.

“This place is gonna get overrun with perverts, pedophiles, pickpockets, porch pirates — you name it.”

“Good alliteration, Shag,” I said.

“What’s good about an illiterate nation?” he said.

I said nothing, knowing trying to explain to him the difference between alliteration and an illiterate nation was futile. Plus I figured he’d just keep on rambling like Old Man River, detailing every possible disaster that’d accompany the eclipse, except maybe volcanic eruption. And for all I knew he mentioned that too, but when he did, I’d blessedly spaced it out.

Shaggy’s eclipse rant reminded me of another one he had, and one when he had tons of fellow paranoids to keep him company. It was Y2K.

Y2K — or as I fondly think of it, The Apocalypse That Wasn’t — was a humdinger of fear-based folderol. In a nutshell (emphasis on “nut”) it was perfect Millennium Mishegas. The closer the world got to the year 2000, the more freaked out people got on End-of-the-Worlditis.

It had happened in the year 1000 (at least the year 1000 according to the calendar Europe was on at the time). Predictions of the Apocalypse, or worse, were rife and made everyone shake in their boots — provided they were lucky to have anything on their feet, other than callouses and hookworms.

But the predictions of doom and gloom conjured up at the first millennium were small spuds compared to Y2K. The reason for that was in our world, as compared to the Dark Ages, every Tom, Dick and Raheen is wired up globally.

With our current media, an earthquake in Peru or a plane crash in Cambodia are as immediate as a gas main explosion in Tupper Lake. Except the earthquake and plane crash will have a lot more impact because they’ll be covered in glaring, morbid detail, in real time and reruns, in HD and God knows what else. As for Tupper? They’ll get a front page in the ADE, for a couple days or so.

Anyhow, back to Y2K…

The only thing more outlandish than the predictions was the predictors, and foremost among them in our neck of the woods was Shaggy Sheridan, hisself. The linchpin, at least according to Shaggy, was computers. Not that he ever used one or could’ve told the difference between a keyboard and the motherboard, but he KNEW as sure as Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent patsy, the world’s computer systems — all the computer systems — were, at 0000 Zulu time 2000, gonna hit the intraplanetary skids and plunge Terra into doom and disaster of unimagined, and unimaginable, horrors.

Trying to dissuade him of his Cosmic Nightmare Scenario was futile. He knew it would happen and that was it. And beyond that, he would emerge from the carnage unscathed due to having stocked his “fortress” full to the brim with food, drink, clothes, medical supplies, AR-15’s, SIG-Sauers, C-4, flare guns, flame throwers, K-Bars, protein bars, and knowing his weakness for PBR and other high-end libations, probably a wet bar as well.

I tried to avoid him as best I could, but inevitably we’d run into each other and he’d treat me to an interminable diatribe about the end of the world as we knew it, his genius in being able to survive it, and my stupidity for not taking it seriously. Then he’d end it by making sure I knew, because I was a slacker, when everything hit the fan, there was no way he’d let me stick so much as the tip of my pinkie in his Blue Line Berchtesgarden.

Of course he never considered that if I was faced with surefire obliteration in a world gone mad, or spending even a few days with him in a bunker, obliteration seemed a more pleasant option.

But, obviously, none of the nightmare scenarios came to pass. In fact, nothing came to pass. Midnight Jan. 1, 2000 came .. .and it went, just like it did, and does every year.

Because of widespread fear of computer malfunctions, travel was way off, due to peeps thinking of 747’s in mid-flight suddenly dropping from the firmament like anvils. Thus airfares could be had at bargain rates. And so the Amazon Queen and I took advantage of them and spent New Year’s, and the rest of the week in sunny Spain.

So now, with the eclipse a few days away, how do I feel about the possibility of madness, mahem, and monsters in My Home Town?

Honestly, I haven’t thought about it at all. But I will say if Shaggy’s skill of prognostication is as sound as ever, we’ve got nothing to worry about.