The End is Near, and other things you don't care to read about.

I suppose this should not bother me—I’m a big boy now, after all, and on a scale of one to ten of life’s little annoyances this should not even register as a blip—but I am not sure when Christian eschatology became an appropriate subject for men’s room graffiti. I am a firm advocate of the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and religion, but I also believe that there is a time and a place for everything, and reading that ‘THE END IS NEAR’ while I am standing in front of a urinal relieving myself is, to my mind, neither the time nor the place for such a message. At such a time, I do not want to think deep thoughts about the Day of Judgment nor do I wish to pass the time it takes to pass water contemplating my sins; I simply want to finish the business at hand and get out of the men’s room, especially the men’s room that is the star of this particular screed, which is unnecessarily noisome, even by the very low standards that most people judge rest rooms by.  If I didn’t absolutely positively no—two—ways—about—it did not need to use this rest room, I wouldn’t, but nature has its own purposes, as it is wont to do, and while I am attending to those purposes I do not wish to think about eschatology or the soteriological train of thought that inevitably arises from it.

This was not always the case, of course. In the history of Christianity, there are any number of great theologians who have thought their greatest thoughts while attending to the necessary. The great fourth century heresiarch Arius, unless he was the great fifth century heresiarch Arius—I’m not sure if I’ve got the right dates here—first thought that Jesus was not consubstantial with the Father while sitting in the men’s room, and no, I don’t have any idea what Arius was talking about, either. Understanding the details of his theology was apparently not a requirement, as Arianism became wildly popular without anyone really knowing what Arius was going on about. Arius was sort of like the Stephen Hawking of the fourth (or fifth) century; everyone bought his books but no one really read them. But fashion rules all, as someone much smarter than me once said, and back in the day everyone who was anyone wanted to be an Arian, and so Arius started spending a lot of time in the men’s room trying to think of the next big theological thing.  This was unfortunate, because one day while Arius sat doing his business and thinking deep thoughts about the nature of the Trinity, some non-Arian Christian—I have not ascertained whether this person was Orthodox, Catholic, miaphysite, or Nestorian in his theological orientation—ventilated Arius’ guts from below with a sword. Besides being an extremely painful and more than a little embarrassing way to die, one cannot help but wonder how the assassin knew which of the rumps above his head belonged to Arius. All human faces are different, but everyone’s backside looks pretty much the same. There are differences in size and shape, of course, but the basics don’t really vary that much. Butts are butts.

Martin Luther was another habitué of the theological outhouse, a man who suffered from such severe chronic constipation that he tore Western Christendom apart trying to relieve the gastrointestinal pressure on his body and soul.  Why Luther suffered from such chronic constipation is lost now to medical science: as an Augustinian friar he may have suffered from the poor monastic diet—bread, water, and wine do not a balanced diet make, no matter how positively biblical this trinity might otherwise appear—and so it is not difficult to imagine that Luther’s guts revolted when confronted with the occasional bratwurst.  Indeed, given the vehemence of Luther’s denunciations, it is not difficult to imagine that Luther found Johann Tetzel’s selling papal get out of purgatory bubble gum cards less objectionable than Tetzel’s lack of laxatives in his peddler’s sack. Getting out of purgatory is all well and good, but it is sometimes difficult to contemplate the mysteries of the divine when your guts are in a knot. Something had to give, and in 1517, something finally did; Luther posted the 95 Theses, beginning the Protestant Reformation. Whether the Reformation did anything for Luther’s need to relieve himself is unknown.

Still, the most interesting of the plumbing theologians was, to my mind, St. Edwin of Nobbish, an English saint who wanted to be a desert hermit like Simeon Stylites, an Egyptian saint who lived on top of a pillar for forty years. This posed a bit of a problem for St. Edwin, given the lack of suitable pillars, posts, and deserts in his native England, but not one to give up easily, Edwin compensated by standing on top of a chamber pot on one foot while he contemplated the nature of free will.  St. Edwin, an otherwise orthodox Catholic theologian, held the view that God must exist simultaneously at all levels of possibility, in what happened and what did not happen, reconciling, he thought, the question of free will with the omniscience of God. The Church found his theory more than vaguely heretical, but could not come out and say so without denying the omnipotence of God, which is not vaguely heretical at all; it’s the real thing. People who know about such things tell me that while St. Edwin of Nobbish’s theory may not be entirely orthodox theology, it is fairly good string theory, and that the story that he died because he turned an ankle and fell off the chamber pot he’d stood on for fifty-two years and cracked his skull is exactly that, a story. St. Edwin died in the late 1340's, yet another victim of the Black Death that killed nearly half of the population of Europe.

It also occurs to me that the graffito ‘The End is Near’—remember ‘The End is Near’, it’s what I was complaining about before I wandered off into the tangles of Christian theological history, for which digression, I must beg your pardon; I know I shouldn’t go off-topic but sometimes I can’t help myself—that this might mean that the user’s end is near the urinal, in which case they are standing in the wrong stall. They should be sitting on the commode in the stall next to the urinal. This, though, sounds as farfetched as St. Edwin of Nobbish’s theory of simultaneous ubiquity. Why would someone who knows what a urinal is for attempt to use it while facing away from it? Even a woman compelled by necessity to use the men’s room would know better than to use a urinal in this fashion. So, whose end is near and why is this end in this particular urinal? I don’t know. What I do know is that there is a reason why tradition limits the subjects on men’s room walls to scatology, obscenity, profanity, slander, and sports, and this is it. No one wants to think about ultimate things while they are attending to the necessary. We just want to go.

ETIQUETTE AND THE WORLD OF MICROBES: I have cellulitis. I’m sorry, but as look at that first sentence I realize that I shouldn’t sound so sure of myself. I think I have cellulitis; that’s actually much closer to the truth. But whatever the actual truth of the matter is, I have some form of –itis and it doesn’t want to go away. If you’ve never heard of cellulitis then do not fear; from what I understand the conditions is not contagious and to be honest I’d never heard of cellulitis before this week either, assuming, of course, that cellulitis is what I have. Doctors are like computer technicians in that they think that because they understood what they just said, everyone else must understand what they just said too. This, as we all know, is not always the case, either with bacterial infections or fractious computers. Sometimes things are not as they seem, a condition that helps incumbents get re-elected on a fairly regular basis.

In any case, I disapprove of contracting diseases that I’ve never heard of. It seems more than a little rude to me for some microbe to take up residence in my left hand without so much as asking for an introduction or leaving a security deposit. I am not in the habit of imposing myself on others and I see no reason why I should permit others to impose on me. I am not running a hot sheets hotel for bacteria here. If I am going to be sick, then I prefer to give the job to local bacteria that I know and loathe, and whose death via antibiotic I can therefore savor with a clear conscience and maybe a small parade. Contracting cellulitis, and again, this is with the proviso that the condition afflicting my left hand at the moment is in fact cellulitis and not some other altogether disgusting and loathsome disease, seems the height of bacterial presumption, something on the order of my moving to Ulan Bator for my health and then demanding the Mongolian authorities conduct their official business in English for my convenience. I can see how my relatives can impose on me in this way…well, actually, I can’t see how my relatives can impose on me in this way, they just do impose on me in this way and with very little compunction, I might add, but I cannot see how a bacterium to whom I have no known familial or personal connection can demand the right to make an equal imposition. Charity, I think, only goes so far before it becomes onerous, if not actually socialistic, and then becomes physically painful, which are how things stand with me right at the moment.

I do not wish to point fingers here, especially not with my left hand, which is really not in any condition at the moment to point at anything except the floor, but there is something clearly lacking in the education of young bacteria these days. Once, here in this our Great Republic, the citizenry could count on the public schools to teach young microbes the basic etiquette required to infect the body politic on a truly epic scale, but those days are long gone, it would seem, leaving only the anomic young masses to wander in and out of the school buildings doing as they please.

I suppose that much of this bacterial anomie comes from their condition as bacteria in a world where everyone worries about viruses. After centuries of being the terror of the world, of affecting the course of history by simply appearing in one place or another and killing a million people here and a million people there, Nemesis struck; Sir Alexander Fleming and his orange molds reduced the common bacterium to just one more easily removed annoyance in a world full of easily removed annoyances, whereas viruses have, in their own truly stupid way, stumbled into the title of most feared killer. This must be galling in the extreme for your average microbe, who must wonder if viruses are really alive at all. This is a debatable question, I think, and I am sure of the position most bacterium would take: viruses are too dumb to be alive, as are most Red Sox fans. Frankly, I would prefer that this cellulitis, assuming that it is cellulitis, would infect those people instead of me; I have stuff to do this weekend.