How do we know the rapture didn’t happen?

It seems a little egotistical to say the Rapture didn’t happen because I’m still here. I could also point out that none of my friends are missing but it’s not like I have a lot of saints on my buddy list.

On top of that, nobody’s looking in the right places. Washington? New York? Paris? London?

Jesus himself said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. So metropolitan Western cities where even the homeless people have 100 times the income of the average Nigerian villager probably weren’t in danger of losing a lot of population.

Rural areas with simple, agrarian citizens, through. People who live close to the land and their families. Palestinian orange growers. Shepherds from Outer Mongolia.

One number being tossed around was 200 million people would be raptured. That’s less than 3 percent of the world’s population. Three people out of every hundred and, lets be honest, the kind of people who could pass the spiritual litmus test of the rapture probably aren’t party animals. They’d be quiet, unassuming, peaceful types who often go unnoticed even when they’re right in front of us.

Maybe all the good people are gone. I know I haven’t run into any of them today. After all, Jesus did say anyone who called his brother a fool would risk the fires of hell. All that finger-pointing and laughing probably cost a few people a seat on the shuttle.

So what if the Rapture happened?

What if there were just far fewer people worthy than expected and they were so meek and mild and gentle and quiet that the rest of us didn’t even note their passing?

Where does that leave us?

I suppose it leaves us in the midst of the Tribulation. Seven more years of living on this earth and our only punishment is the same as it ever was … we are surrounded by our own kind, locked in a prison where the worst punishment is to be with other people who are just like us.

Oddly the Bible offered hope. During those seven years of the tribulation, people would be saved. All they had to do was become better people before it was too late.

Let’s say the rapture happened and that’s where each of us stands today.

You … yes, you … are the best person on earth today. Everyone on earth who was better than you or less of a sinner is gone.  You, as miserable and cowardly and hopeless as you are, now know for a fact nobody is better than you.

It’s all on you now. From now on, there are no saints, no heroes, no good, kind caring people to save the world or make it a better place. There’s just you and other weak, broken people like you.

I guess the question would be what are you going to do with the rest of your life?  And more importantly, why should it take the end of the world to make you get off your ass and start doing it?

I went to Wal-Mart with my mom today. She needed a 25-pound bag of cat food. Yes, cat food. That’s how many she has. But that’s a different story.

Naturally, cat food turned into eye drops and drink mix and a vast array of other items and it took forever. The whole time I’m walking along with her, pushing this giant metal beast with wobbly wheels through a crowd of Wal-Martians, I can’t help thinking something’s wrong.

Then I realized what it was. The experience of real world, brick and mortar shopping feels barbaric to me.

Everywhere I looked there were heaps of food just piled in stacks. Walls of cereal. Great frozen glaciers of milk and yogurt. Forests of pants and shirts fluttering in the artificial breeze of the A/C. And running through it all, hopping and skipping and scampering are the Wal-Martians … huge, hairless apes touching everything. Pawing through the clothes, picking the food up and putting it back down.

My mother kept asking where things were. You know how you find out? You walk around physically looking, jostling through the Wal-Martians, looking for some blue-smocked guide who, it turns out, doesn’t know much more than you do about anything more than 10 feet from where they’re standing.

It was horrible.

I can’t believe there are people who shop like this. I can’t do it. I like amazon.com and drugstore.com and all the other dotcoms. Where are the eye drops? Well, according to the little search box, they’re right here in my shopping cart.  The invisible cart that doesn’t have to wait in line behind a dozen other Wal-Martians so that some blue-smocked arbiter of the public goods can go through my purchases passing judgement and assessing value.

Then, this guardian of the aisles stuffs everything you’re buying into plastic bags … as if they haven’t already been pawed over by half your fellow citizens. And this is the part that really gets to me. This is truly barbaric and amazing and yet nobody seemed to have a problem with it. After you give them your money, they make you carry the bags of crap out to your car and drive it to your house.

What the hell?

No. Not in my world. Not in the civilized realms.

Here’s how normal, civilized people shop. You open your browser. You click on what you want. It gets packed into a single, nice, neat box and then it gets delivered to your house. And if the shipping isn’t free, you’re doing it wrong. You bring one box six inches from your porch to your living room.

That’s how you do it.

But not my mother. And not the Wal-Martians. They continue to battle their way through piles of germ-infested crap where metal baskets squeak beneath the flickering fluorescent lights like giant foraging rodents of doom.

Thankfully, I can rest easy in the knowledge that my great-grandchildren will grow up in a world where this horror no longer exists.

Steve Jobs announced today that Apple will introduce it’s newest device next week.

Dubbed the iSketch, the tablet-size device will revolutionize the graphic toy industry.

Rather than the two knobs used by the old-fashioned Etch-A-Sketch, the iSketch will feature a touch screen in which magnetized iron filings follow the users fingers around the screen.

“Why should children be chained to using two knobs to draw lines?” Jobs asked. “Have you ever tried to draw a diagonal line on an Etch-A-Sketch? It’s freakin’ hard.”

To make things even simpler, Jobs said all drawings created on the iSketch must conform to patterns downloaded from the iTunes store.

“Children may browse from the thousands of available images, download them to their iSketch and then trace them,” Jobs said.

The iSketch will only be available in black, although a source at Apple suggested a white version might be available in five years. The employee also hinted that a version with a color screen is also in the works, under the name iBrite.

“The screen will have 16 colors instead of black and grey and instead of tracing the lines, you’ll just kind of poke the touch screen where you want to put colored dots,” the spokesperson said.