I’ve had this dream for a long time about the end of the world. You could call it a vision, but people tend to get weird when you mention that you’re seeing the apocalypse. In this vision, the world ends right as this guy arrives home from an absolutely normal and mundane day at work. It’s not like he had a bad day, but it was just regular. Maybe he heard a song on the radio from the next cubicle or on his car stereo that reminded him of his first love, but it played so much in the background that he barely remembered where he heard it and that was the last good thing to happen to him.
Even his lunch was average — cold, leftover chinese food from a night earlier in the week, where the oil had finally seeped into everything and it all slid down his throat with a flavorless swish. It’s probably a Friday too. Nine out of 10 people polled said they’d prefer the world to end on a Monday because no one likes Mondays. It was just this guy’s luck that it happened on a Friday because even though he had no plans for the weekend, he now had 64 extra hours to sit with it while the world burned.
So this guy, in sensible brown shoes and business casual attire, he walks up the average neighborhood walkway to his average neighborhood front door, surrounded by average neighborhood landscaping and the faint sound of average neighborhood kids playing a few blocks over, and he enters his apartment building with no notice that the sky in the horizon has changed color. He heads into his unit, drops his bag on the floor and starts to slide a foot out of his cheap leather slip-on loafers when he remembers that he left his lunch tupperware on the front seat of his car and he worries that the late-spring heat will make his Honda smell like Golden Dragon Palace and then he’ll want to throw up on Monday morning. It’s funny if you think about it because he might have gotten to enjoy one extra minute of relaxation on his understuffed average neighborhood couch had he just stayed inside. Instead, less than two minutes after arriving home, this guy, in his normal everyday world, opens the front door to his place, steps out into the hallway, crosses to the front door of the apartment building, and opens that door on the end of the world. Kind of a bummer right? Some guys have none of the luck.
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So I was thinking that in all of the ways in which authors and screenwriters and playwrights have envisioned the end of the world, no one ever thinks about the guy in the shower. With my luck, the doomsday clock would tick to zero and I would be that guy, mostly because I love my shower and if I could, I’d live in there.
When we as a species picture the end of the world, we see buildings crumbling, landmarks vaporized and terrible fires with terrible screams and terrible pain. But we never think of the confusion for the guy in the shower. Here he is, maybe with a thick puff of shampoo bubbles massaging his scalp, when suddenly BAM, his building shakes, the floor vanishes and he’s unfathomably now in Mrs. Vonnegut’s bathroom while she’s sitting oblivious in her living room, with one hand mashing buttons on her channel changer and the other fiddling with her hearing aid. Would he have any time to even figure out his sudden transference from apartment 4G to apartment 3F or would everything go blank soon after? I guess I’d hope for the latter because if it was me in that shower, suddenly surrounded by debris and confusion…well I would really hope I wouldn’t end up with the proteins in my eyes getting aggravated by my cruelty-free, all-natural shampoo with 24-hour protection. I would really hate that.