I don't want to get too dramatic about this, but this might very well be my last Atomic Dog column.

Believe me, it's not a decision I take lightly. It's not like I woke up this morning and discovered my once semi-fertile brain was now as dry as John McCain's prostate.

Rather it was a combination of events, a perfect storm of psychological awakenings, historical events, and economic factors.

First the deep dark psychological stuff. I don't remember if it was Monday or Tuesday, but it was a perfectly average weekday morning. I was eating breakfast while watching Regis and Kelly and — this I remember clearly — I'd just used my toast to soak up the last bit of runny egg yolk that had pooled into the naked blonde-hooker's belly button when it hit me:

I am soooo turning into my father.

That's right. I'd become an average, predictable, ho-hum guy. That's all I could think of as I watched Tawny squeegee the remains of my breakfast from her taut belly and then stretch her red Pleather pants back over the red panties that delineate and highlight the fleshy lobes that I've affectionately nicknamed Phobos and Deimos as an homage to the red planet Mars.

Much sobered by my realization that I was turning into my father, I gave Tawny a perfunctory goodbye grope and got on with the whole-morning-intro-to-Dexter-ritual with the blood-tinged shaving, the flossing, and the getting dressed.

Then came the historical storm front I alluded to.

I left the house to walk my dog, taking much the same route we always take. In between my house and the open fields he likes to frequent is a busy 4-lane street. Sometimes we can make a mad dash across the street, whereas other times the traffic is so busy that we have to make our way towards the intersection and wait for the signal.

Traffic wasn't too bad on this particular day so we chose the mad-dash route, only my calculations were knocked off kilter by some pudknocker zipping along well over the speed limit.

T-Dog and I were frozen in our tracks like a couple of frightened squirrels, not sure whether we should turn back or continue crossing the street.

Although I couldn't make out the driver's features, I could see he was a black man. Just seconds before he would have flattened us (or sent us back to 1973, which, according to the TV show, Life on Mars, is what really happens when you're hit by a car), the black man, miracle of miracles, slowed down a little.

You can think what you want to think, but I know he slowed down a little because Barack Obama won the Presidential election. Sheee-it, I could feel the love that black man and I now shared coming right through the windshield of his Chrysler Lebaron.

He made some sort of gesture at me and prior to the election I might have, in my naivety, thought he was giving me the finger, but now, in these love-soaked Obama days, I'm convinced he was just giving me a long-distance fist bump.

I was so emotionally moved that I decided right then and there to go work for the Obama administration.

I excitedly told one of my friends at the office, a Systems Administrator, about my plans but he shook his had sadly as he showed me an article from yesterday's New York Times that explained how anyone applying to Obama's administration be prepared to reveal everything about themselves, including "any e-mails that might embarrass the president-elect."

"TC," explained my friend, "the man-hours it would take to scrub our servers of all your references to your penis, hoo-hahs, panty diving, and the thousands of other references to your sexual quirks would be roughly equivalent to the man-hours spent building Hoover Dam."

He was right. Regardless, the experience merely fueled my desire to change my life.

Then came the last contributing factor to my perfect storm: the troubled economy.

Tim Patterson called me into his office and asked me to sit down. He said he had some bad news and some good news, the bad news being that the economic downturn has hurt all businesses, including Biotest.

As such — this was the "good" news — he had no choice but to "restructure" my salary. Rather than getting a flat rate every month, my income was now tied to the sales of MAG-10 and I would get a "hefty percentage" of every bottle sold.

When I mentioned that MAG-10, as a prohormone, was now illegal and that we hadn't actually made, let alone sold any MAG-10 in three or four years, he started coughing like a horse that had just swallowed a peach pit and excused himself from the room.

Later that night while wallowing in self-pity and watching reruns of The King of Queens on cable and nibbling on my dinner, I saw something that might very well change my life. I'd just dipped a bit of my Salisbury steak into the A-1 sauce pooled in Tawny's belly button when a commercial for AOBA came on.

For the unenlightened out there, AOBA stands for "Alpaca Owners and Breeders of America."

Maybe you're not as worldly as I am and hence don't know what an alpaca is. They're wool-bearing animals, for crissake, and they're now "Being successfully raised and enjoyed throughout North America and abroad."

They reach a height of about 36 inches and they live about 20 years. They weigh between 100 and 200 pounds, eat grass, are gentle and easy to handle. They require minimal fencing and 5 to 10 can be pasteurized on one measly acre, and apparently, at least according to this picture on the AOBA website, you can stack them like soup cans.

More importantly, they produce the world's finest and most luxurious natural fibers.

You get where I'm going? I can raise alpacas and make fleece loads of money! Screw the supplement business. Screw Obama's administration!

Exit the Atomic Dog, enter the Atomic Alpaca.

With apologies to George Clinton, "Why must I, chase the cat? Nothin' but the dog in me," is now, "Why must I, knit that sweater? Nothin' but the alpaca in me... ."

Or maybe I'll just be Alpaca Man. Sing it Ozzie!

I... AM... ALPACA MAN
Doo-doo
Doo-doo-doo
Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo

Ah, who am I kidding? I made all that stuff up, well, except for the parts about Tawny's dinner-plate-like belly and the realization that I was turning into my dad and the part about being spared from being turned into roadkill by an Obama love-infused black man and the part about wanting to raise alpacas.

I guess the only thing I made up was the fact that the shaky economy had hurt Biotest.

Amazingly, the cluster-bombed economy hasn't really had any effect on Biotest. I didn't want to look a gift horse in the supplement chomping mouth, but I really wanted to figure out why we'd been, at least to this point, impervious to the financial shit storm hitting the country; why men were skipping expensive cars and vacations but not skimping on supplements.

I consulted Matt Sanders, a clinical psychologist and "evolutionary sociopsychologist" to make some sense of it for me. Sanders explained that it's almost predictable. "When work doesn't create wealth, men seek inner worth."

He drew me a comparison using Charles Darwin's theory of short-term "maters" and long-term "maters". As best as I can understand it, short-term maters are those men that aren't monogamous and who tend to have very short-lived, day-to-day survival strategies, whereas long-term maters are the more monogamous types who tend to have evolved strategies for coping with the future.

Typically, long-term maters are mature, whereas short-term maters tend to be selfish.

Similarly, according to Sanders, the two groups have telltale approaches to crisis. The short-term mater, in these rough economic times, sees doom and gloom but wants to buy frivolous things, e.g. expensive cars. He might even steal food during a famine.

The long-term mater, however, invests in himself, keeping himself intact and prepared for battle. He realizes he's his own best natural resource. The former is delusional, the latter isn't.

"If he's not intact, he has no future," explained Sanders. "But if he continues to work out, to invest in those things that help him reach his physical goal, like supplements, he'll be ready for any harsh environment. This type of guy won't throw money away at ephemeral things; he'll invest it in himself. By doing so, he allays his fears and insecurities about a financial environment that he can't control."

A survey of 783 men and women conducted by the American Dietetic Association seems to add weight to Sander's observations. In 2008, 40% said they were actively seeking more information on nutrition, up from 19% in 2000. Fifty-six percent had increased their consumption of whole grain foods; 50% had increased their consumption of vegetables; and 48% had increased their consumption of fruits.

Clearly, people are hunkering down, taking stock in the situation and finding that the really valuable stock isn't found on NASDAQ. Instead, they're investing in themselves because economy or no economy, trappings of wealth or no trappings of wealth, 401K or no 401K, it's the one thing they can control and the one thing that will continue to pay dividends.

That alpaca thing might work, too, but I'll have to get back to you on that.