The closest I came to a 4.0 was my Blood Alcohol Level." I saw this on a T-shirt the other day, as I was preparing to take a shower in my charming dorm bathroom. No doubt you've seen this T-shirt, too, and numerous variations on that witty theme -- "Dartmouth: King of Schools" logos that otherwise are facsimiles of Budweiser cans.
Friends, if this isn't proof of the imminent Apocalypse, I don't know what is.
Let me regale your tender ears (or eyes, in this case, since you're probably not reading this column aloud ... though if you are, kudos to you!) with another felicitous anecdote, this one concerning that most overrated of celestial spectacles, the comet Hale-Bopp.
I was walking with my most cheerful friend somewhere within the vicinity of the Hop one night last week, when suddenly my companion cut loose with a hot-blooded string of superlatives: "Magnificent! Exquisite! Exceptional! Divine!"
"What's got you all giddy?" I asked, almost interested in his answer.
"Look!" he cried, pointing one bony, jutting digit skyward. "See that bright spot over there?"
I looked in the general direction of his pointing. "Which bright spot? There seem to be dozens of them."
"Not the stars, Brainiac," he retorted, his tone sullied by festering sarcasm. "That one!" He pointed more fervently, now with both hands, doubling his emphasis like a McLaughlin Group regular.
"Oh, I see," I said casually. "It's that bright spot with the littler bright spots next to it. That's something you don't see every day. So anyway, is 'The Single Guy' going to be on Wednesday nights permanently now?"
My friend clutched his head from both sides, as if he were Fred Savage mugging on the season finale of "The Wonder Years" (that's three TV references -- I promise there'll be no more).
"You idiot!" he shouted. "That's Hale-Bopp!"
Ah yes. Hale-Bopp, that poor, unfortunate hunk of ice hurtling through space at incomprehensible speeds that accidentally encouraged thirty-nine social miscreants and loners to off themselves with a few pills and some plastic bags. Hale-Bopp, that harbinger of Doom, that emissary of Eschaton, that ... plenipotentiary of Armageddon, or something.
I'll admit it -- I, too, thought Hale-Bopp was merely a media creation, a fabrication of the scientific community to help them get some of their funding back. Once I saw it with my own eyes, however, the ineluctable truth dawned on me: the End of Everything has arrived.
John Horgan knows this truth. In his daring book "The End of Science," published last year by those wizards at Helix Books, Horgan hypothesizes ON PAGE SIX that "the great era of scientific discovery is over." He then goes on to interview a number of prominent scientists, among them Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose and Francis Crick, as well as philosophers like Paul Feyerabend and Noam Chomsky, and manages to dismiss them all as a bunch of noodleheads, on account of the fact that none of them agrees with his hypothesis. Nevertheless Horgan's drastic thesis is another telling portent of our upcoming denouement, the cul-de-sac of our consciousness, if you will.
What with Hale-Bopp and John Horgan, not to mention, as Tricky puts it, the "Pre-Millenial Tension," it's no wonder the thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate cult upped and committed suicide. It's about time to hop on board that UFO -- who wants to be around for final judgments? Even that Ralph Fiennes movie of a couple years ago, "Strange Days," envisioned an apocalyptic near-future. What more can we do?
You may be wondering where all this is going, why someone of at least mediocre intelligence like myself would be so willing to buy into unverifiable theories of The End. Well, it's certainly not because I'm to be graduated in two months, and have no idea what to do the first five minutes after Commencement, let alone the next five years. Sure, the inexorable snuffing out of galaxies a thousand at a time would no doubt forestall any decisions I ought to make over what to do with my life, but that's merely coincidence, dear friends. And although my irrational obsession with a Doomsday about as likely as a Hanover spring that starts in March may appear to be the last desperate straw of a raving madman, don't let that seemingly airtight deduction fool you. I'm perfectly happy to graduate. I'm not afraid of real life at all.
Ha ha.
Ha.
Help.
