Armageddy

"John got it all wrong." I said. "Well, not exactly wrong, but not exactly right."

El Cigarro Grande nodded slowly, not in agreement, but in wary politeness. Whatever I was about to say would probably offend him. The John I was talking about was St. John the Divine, author of The Apocalypse, or by it's more popularly known title, The Book of Revelation. As a child, it was the one book of the Bible I could really sink my teeth into. Those were my pre-teen years before I could get excited by all the begating.

"Yeah," I continued, "but you can't really blame him. He was chemically imbalanced. And the future isn't as big as it looks."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, mass-time ratio dislocation causes expansion of the event stream as the moments travel backward, so that small things in the future are grotesquely inflated out of proportion to the perceiver in the past. Combine this with a chemically imbalanced brain without the benefit of a localized time-space perception refractoring device, for example your average crystal ball, and you'll get your prophecies all wrong, or at least wildly over-inflated."

"I see..."

"Take John the Divine, for example. After an all-night bender combined with a severe personality disorder and fervent religious belief -- that's a heady cocktail for one brain to handle, you know -- his awareness slip-jumps out of his temporal continuum and into the future. Not so uncommon, anyone can do it with a little effort. So, he's lying on his back, looking up into the future, and he gets it all wrong. First, it's not armageddon, but armageddy. But that's just the most minor of his mistakes."

"Just the first? Please," El Cigarro Grande mumbles, "do go on."

"Yeah," I go on, "he got the name wrong, but that's nothing. He was really bozo with regards to where it occurs. It's not the middle east, but East Middlesex, in Massachusetts. They have a mosquito control project that's very interesting, you know."

"No, I didn't. Fascinating."

"Yeah. Anyway, that's not even the worst of St. John's mistakes. The whole end of the world thing, everyone burning up, dying miserably, rampaging armies, ecetera. In reality, it's just a really large, unfortunate brushfire."

"A brushfire?"

"Yeah. Started by the unsupervised and illegal burning of a pile of leaves. Pretty sad." I sipped on my tea.

"But what," ECG mused, "about the part about the anti-christ. And the number of the beast."

"Oh, that. Pure mass-time ratio dislocation. The beast? No such thing. It's just a bat, a myotis lucifugus, named Booba Bat..."

"A what?"

"A my-oh-tis loo-ciff-a-guss. A Little Brown Bat. Of course, perceived across a couple of thousand years of space-time by a woozy hermit without the benefit of a perception refactoring device, little Booba Bat must have appeared absolutely fucking monstrous. And the whole numbering thing, 6-6-6. That's just a temporal echo. It was only one 6, and that referred to Booba Bat's weight in ounces."

I let ECG think about this for a moment then I plowed ahead.

"Yeah, a bat's not much to base an apocalyptic religion on." I said sympathetically. "I'd tell you about what rapture was really about, but it'd spoil your day." I felt sympathy for him because ECG was a card-carrying, admitted Bible-Thumper with his own replica of the Gutenberg Bible, diligently taking part in the death throes of a subculture trying its best to drag the rest of us back to the 50s or the Middle Ages, whichever came easiest. I don't hold this against him; in fact, it makes him quite endearing to me, one of the many entertaining and seemingly contradictory impulses that guided ECG's life.

"Yeah, the armageddy really isn't all that terrrible. It's just rather smoky for a few days. A few people get some really nasty headaches, and the smell sticks around for a couple of months, but not much else. Little Booba Bat escapes with his life, even."

"So," ECG replies, getting into the spirit of the discussion, "it's really more about the singes of the flesh?"

"Yeah," I nod vigorously, "that's it. And you can see why it'd be hard to get the faithful all pumped-up and frothing at the mouth over a startled bat and a brushfire, no matter how unfortunately large. No, you've got to add inexplicable monsters, extremely vague kabalistic references, gratuitous splashes of Freddy Krueger-like villains, and people dying in droves to make a religion work, to get those juicy faith-based passions whipped to a boil."

By this time, ECG was more than a little uncomfortable with the whole vaguely heretical discussion, so I decided to go over the edge.

"The real end of creation, though. That's very disappointing."

"Ah, now this sounds promising. Do tell."

"Well, I only over-heard the conversation, but it goes like this..."

GOD: Jesus! Turn off the goddamn lights when you leave the room!"

JESUS: Ah, dad! Quit riding my ass.

The lights snap off.

"That's it."

"That's it?" asked El Cigarro Grande, a modicum of disappointment inflecting his question. "What a comfort to know the end of the world appears to be handled by Pauls Jr. and Sr. of Orange County Choppers."

"Yeah. Pretty dull stuff. Like I said, hard to get all religious over it."

"And how exactly did you come to have all of this knowledge?" he asked.

"It came to me in a vision. Fortunately, I wasn't recovering from all-night whoop-ti-do down at the Prophet Bar at the time."

"Get away from me, you heathen." he finally said, kicking backward as hard as he could in the relentless tidal pool of progress.