Please, PLEASE bear with me on this one/ or/ Who wants to be the next Jesus Christ?

Looking for House reruns on Antena 3 (a non-cable network channel, cuz Spain's ghetto and hardly anyone has cable) I got sucked into a documentary that I'd seen commercials for yesterday during CSI (something really worth watching!!!). It's called "The Real Tomb of Jesus" or something tacky and sensational like that. It's one of those documentaries made for histrionic network TV where they find something really, really old somewhere in the middle of Jerusalem and say, "HEY! This MUST be Jesus's tomb"... or Jesus's brother's tomb, or Jesus's son's tomb or whatever and then you're sitting there thinking, 'well duh, it must be!' Or at least you're supposed to think that. They find the tomb's opening in some blind Israeli woman's back yard (no, really, blind - like lacking the sense of sight). She's had it closed up with concrete and steel because her nieces and nephews were playing in it and they were afraid they would get hurt. The whole thing ends with a giant question mark (which is as expected) as the Jerusalem Ancient Artifacts society makes them re-seal the tomb before they've finished. Really, unless you're sitting at home crossing yourself every five seconds, even a slug would have half a brain to see through the maybes and probably nots of the show. I keep hoping a Geraldo moment will fall on their heads, but that's not the point.

So I'm sitting there thinking about Jesus and how obsessed people are with him, even agnostics like me who don't spend too much time thinking about religion in general. I'm watching and they're explaining how sketchy 2,000 year old evidence is (if you want good evidence, you watch CSI), and I'm thinking "well, duh". I know about DNA and forensics because I've been educated by CSI and Court TV and a fair amount of Law & Order; I'm clearly not going to buy some forensic evidence without a plot twist at the end! But, I mean, it's Jesus! Who can look away? So then I got to thinking about Jesus; not the legend, but the dude. No one can disagree that there was a guy who lived a long time ago (2,000 years ago, give or take), who was a pretty cool guy and made a lot of people really happy, but then made a lot of people really mad. Then they killed him nailed up to two slabs of wood. These facts no one's going to argue with, right?

And this whole time I'm watching this reenactment where Nondescript Guy with Beard is playing Jesus and thinking about Jesus or Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, Quetzacuatl, or even Constantine, Charlemagne, Alexander the Great, Monteczuma... all these people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago who are still pretty important names today even though we barely have any direct evidence (contemporary writing or direct forensic evidence) of their lives. And still, how many people know their names? How many times have movies and books been written about them? How crazy is that to be famous 2,000 YEARS after you die? That everyone in the whole world knows your name?! Paris Hilton doesn't even have that and she's only been in jail for about a week!

...and here's where it all ties in...

So then I got to thinking about the giants of our sports: Mark Allen, Dave Scott, Paula Newby-Fraser, Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, Greg LeMonde, Lance Armstrong, Paula Radcliffe, Steve Prefontaine... and the others: Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Tiger Woods, Diego Maradona, Mia Hamm... These people are huge, they're people that we'll be talking about for generations to come, right? But who's going to know who they are in 200 years, let alone 2,000?

And then I'm watching and thinking about how this whole documentary, and CSI are all mostly based on evidence from dead people. Then you have to eventually get to the realization that we're all going to die someday and we're only going to have a legacy in how people remember us... and yes, now I'm waxing nostalgic, but stick with me here...

... On a long enough scale every one's going to forget us and we're all going to be reduced to dust and a few etchings on stones or something. Right? And even if I were to reach Lance Armstrong's fame and symbolism, on a long enough time line I can't even hope to reach Christ-like proportions, nor would I want to (it sounds like a sucky way to go). And here we come to the final conclusion:

If there's absolutely no way that I can reach the world class standards of Mark Allen, Dave Scott, Paula Newbie Frasier, Lance Armstrong, etc., and all those people will be forgotten in a few generations... then why am I getting so caught up in all this? Why worry about the fact that I can't live like a monk like Lance, or channel a shaman like Mark, or simply be a pioneer like Dave and Paula? Why am I getting so caught up in these virgin-again anxieties of starting up triathlons in a new (and more competitive) country and chickening out on C races? Why don't I just enjoy myself and come in dead last smiling a shit-eater's grin? Because, why be remembered like Jesus? Jesus's life kind of sucked for Jesus himself. So why don't I just chill out a bit and have some fun? Who cares if I'm not in the best shape ever at my next race, or if I come in dead last? I'm not trying to be the next Messiah here... I'm just trying to live my life right by me.

...and, hey, isn't that what Big Guy was trying to tell us all along?