Nosing around heaven and hell

I remember a long boozy evening when a friend of mine was expounding on the mundanities of heaven and hell.

By that he meant we all sort of agree on what to expect from our afterlives. Heaven will be paradise. No war. No loneliness. No disease. No Ashton Kutcher.

Hell will be hell. It will be endless torment. Pain. Isolation. And everybody will get stuck with at least one really bad roommate, and by bad I’m talking about someone like Hitler.

That’s the big picture stuff. But my buddy was talking about the little day-to-day things.

In heaven, he said, there will be no frosted toasted oats in the boxes of Lucky Charms. It’ll just be Lucky Charms.

I just love this. I devote nearly 75 percent of my time spent eating a bowl of Lucky Charms to hunting down the brown, tasteless oats with my spoon and and getting them out of the way so I can indulge in a candy feast of crunchy marshmallows.

Just think if you could wake up everyday and pour a big bowl full of the colorful little charms. To hell with the nutrition!

Yes, back to hell. Hell, he believes, will be a place where all the boogers smell really, really bad and all the boxes of Kleenex are empty.

Think about it. Our mortal boogers give off no discernible fragrance. The damned would endure eternity with awful smelling nasal debris constantly assaulting the organ devoted to detecting scent. It’s a kind of torture that would give Dick Cheney the warm and fuzzy feelings people like you and I get when we watch E.T.

I know it’s risky writing anything that includes the word “booger” because Dave Barry sort of seized ownership of the topic about 20 years ago, but I’ve been thinking about my buddy’s hellish mundanities a lot lately.

We have an 8 year old and she has a lot of 8-year-old friends. Eight might be the golden era of boogerdom. It’s not uncommon to walk into our living room and see three or four darling girls with their digits jammed so far up their noses that you worry one might embed a fingernail in her brains.

It’s our duty as parents to stigmatize this behavior. Stop it! Gross! Bad!

But my heart’s just not in it.

If I’d purchased my nose from a department store, I’d be contacting a cheap lawyer about suing the manufacturer under some kind of olfactory lemon law.

It’s just a malfunctioning product. And I don’t think I’m alone on this. We all share the same problems and embarrassments.

The nose is the gateway to herding delightful aromas into our senses (good), but it round-the-clock produces an excess of gross wastes (bad). If given the option, I’d never inhale another whiff from a fragrant rose or some aromatic soup if I could simply do without ever having to worry about something disgusting dangling from the old booger barn.

It’s just not worth it.

The Swine Flu has us all justifiably jumpy about sneezes and slime. Common nasal disposal methods are too archaic. I believe the next breakthrough in plastic surgery will be a procedure that will allow us each to, in the privacy of our bathrooms, efficiently and sanitarily remove and dispose our nasal wastes without the indignity of having to shove fingers up the middle of our faces.

It should be more like removing lint from the dryer screen, which I always get a little domestic kick out of doing.

So that’s just something to ponder as you go about your day and are given a choice of being good or evil.

Your decision matters. How you behave could lead you to the land of milk, honey and magically delicious Lucky Charms.

Or you could wind up in a realm of evil where the boogers smell like hell.

And that would really stink.