On the day before The End, I went looking for signs of the apocalypse, but all I could find were tattoos.
Rollerbladers wearing headphones were cruising the 16th Street Mall. A skateboarder talking on a cellphone was weaving between pedestrians; drivers honked their horns at crowds strolling through the intersections oblivious to traffic signals; and everywhere I looked, young men were walking around with their pants falling off.
Situation normal, in other words.
I paused outside the Hard Rock in time for the chorus of Death Cab for Cutie’s “Crooked Teeth”:
“And you can’t find nothing at all,
If there was nothing there all along.”
Purely coincidence, I told myself.
I kept walking.
After a few steps, I was engulfed in a powerful, unearthly aroma. It was coming from a Subway sandwich shop.
Omen or marketing tool?
You decide.
I stepped into an intersection where a man eating pepperoni pizza was heading one way while a sweaty, bare-chested jogger headed the other.
I walked past sidewalk cafes packed with people eating hamburgers, workers carrying giant coffee-flavored milkshakes topped with mounds of whipped cream, fussy children with dripping ice-cream cones and men sitting in wheelchairs holding signs.
Every little bit helps.
A lone trash picker pulled his head out of a wastebasket, put a can in his bag and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
The heat shimmered off the pavement. The temperature was punishing.
The forecast for 6/6/06 was just as hot.
Amy Johnson Frykholm isn’t worried.
The adjunct faculty member at Colorado Mountain College has spent years studying people who believe in a coming apocalypse. She’s been making the rounds with her book, “Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America,” and she said for her and most of her research subjects, 6/6/06 is just another day. “The more sophisticated dispensationalists believe in a more complex numerology.”
I asked her to translate.
Most dispensationalists – people who read the Bible as a collection of coded clues that predict the future – think construing 666 as a mere date is just too obvious, she said. Like code breakers obsessed with trying to understand the ultimate conspiracy theory, they see hidden messages in ordinary things in the world and relate them to obscure details in the Bible. “Most of them have really elaborate charts with complex symbols,” she said. “It’s kind of like an endless game.”
Jeffrey Mahan, professor of ministry, media and culture at Iliff School of Theology, said that apocalypse fantasies provide “a process for trying to make sense of the world,” especially when life seems threatening or the future looks bleak.
“People who have a sense that all’s right with the world don’t tend to be drawn to apocalyptic thinking,” he explained. But those who struggle to understand injustice or why evil exists take comfort in believing it’s all part of a plan.
“This is poetic thinking,” he said, “not critical thinking.”
By now, I had worked up a devil of a thirst, so I decided to go back to work and leave the omens to somebody else. I’d been walking the mall a long time and hadn’t found so much as a street preacher calling out sinners to repent.
Just lots people eating French fries.
Then, suddenly, several grim-faced soldiers in combat boots and desert fatigues surrounded me on the sidewalk, and a chill ran down my back.
Was this the sign I sought?
The light changed, and as the soldiers strode away, I looked carefully at the patches on their sleeves. They said: “U.S. Army recruiter.”
Just then, a seriously overweight woman in a green micro-mini dropped her sunglasses and nearly caused a fender bender. A motorcycle cop slowed down, just in case.
For an instant, I considered offering to help. But I realized nobody can prevent an apocalypse. Nobody.
So I just kept walking.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
