I had to take out the trash today, but first I checked for bears. It doesn't take a lot of time to check for bears. Bears are obvious. Rats hide. Bears just stand there like big children's toys that can swallow your entire head.

But recently, the part of the state where I live is being invaded by bears who are coming east from their traditional forest homes to frolic among the garbage cans and bird feeders.

The guy around the corner from me owns one of the few single-family homes in the neighborhood. Under the delusion that he lives in the suburbs, he put a fire pit in his back yard. Fire pits are popular.

You know what a fire pit is, right?

As a lifestyle accessory, it's an excuse to get drunk outside. More concretely, it's a small round structure made out of bricks, maybe three feet tall, and you build a fire in the middle of it, and, well, that's pretty much it for fire pits.

So, in 2023, while the billionaires get in line for trips to the moon, a lot of us are sitting around a small fire, hoping the bears don't get us.

That is exactly what my ancestors were doing in the year 800, and for a few million years before.

We've reached the end of evolution. From now on, things go backward.

Thanks to high rents and drugs, people are living outdoors again, in "camps." There's a word out of the distant past.

"The Mishegossians were a simple people," the historians write. "They did not marry, but had a fluid family structure. They lived in camps along the rivers."

The historian is writing about a wandering tribe back in 300 B.C., but there are maybe 400 people living that lifestyle within two miles of my house. They live a simple life, foraging in my recycling bins for deposit bottles and returning them for money to buy heroin. Like the lepers of old, it is forbidden to marry them, touch them or make eye contact with them in the parking lot of the liquor store. They are unclean.

Some people think we can get them to give up their wandering, foraging ways if we build them all tiny houses.

You know what a "tiny house" is, right?

It's a hut. A hut is what your ancestors lived in before they figured out that the funny-looking rock at the edge of the clearing wasn't God. People used to come to America to get out of places where they had to live in huts.

So, we're sitting around a fire, watching out for bears, while nomadic tribes drift around us, and we're building huts. Sure. That sounds like the way forward. Witch-burning is next, probably in about five years.

Strange plagues. Weird religions rise and fall. Mad kings gibber in their palaces or have themselves declared gods. Crops fail. Borders collapse or lose meaning. Peasants storm the castle but cannot rule and fall back.

The hopeful in America think that the Revolutionary War will be reenacted, that the clean-limbed farmers and workers will take up their muskets and "clean house in Washington." And the peasants rejoice!

But it is an old world, with very old patterns, and we can only be sure of one thing. The peasants never get to rejoice for long.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Toa Heftiba at Unsplash