The last day of the Pompeii exhibit - and big spoons to be found at the Field Museum

So Saturday apparently was the last day of the Pompeii exhibit at the Field Museum, which was sold out by 11 a.m. Even so, the lines were like a Best Buy giving away computers on the day after Thanksgiving, meaning people were willing to wait hours to stare at stuff from a place where people were making mad, crazy dashes to escape from, lest they be covered in lava, thus eventually becoming part of a traveling exhibit.

Is irony the right word for this?

But despite the Woodfield Mall vibe and not being able to see petrified Romans, we queued up with the other moo-cow touristas. Make that cash cows, cuz it ain’t cheap to get into a museum. They hand you this confusing menu while you are making your way to the cashier explaining you have options.

Naturally, the thing looks like it was designed by an anthropologist on a bender. The general admission policy isn’t made very clear, but highlighted are packages where you can get one, two or three “special” exhibits or that $80 family membership. With one of the exhibits sold out, you could only upgrade to two, which means I am going into minute detail, much like my mom does during a phone call.

We opted for one special, a room called Dino Dynasty, a collection of prehistoric bones from China, which, by the time we got to them, pretty much made me hungry for barbecue.

General admission included the new hall on evolution, and, judging by the crowd sizes, there aren’t a lot of Doubting Thomases for the theory to be found in a natural history museum. Then again, the guys I saw taking notes could have been evangelical spies in the house of science, looking for evidence to dispute and refute and to rant about come Sunday morning.

True believer or not, I can understand why evolution can seem so upsetting. It doesn’t promise that cut and dried back-from- the-dead happy ending like most religions do. It’s the same reason people walk out of Eugene O’Neill plays -- for happy enders, it’s too depressing to see messy life and be inspired by such.

Plus, while I find it funny that evolution says we are here because bacteria created oxygen as a waste product (i.e. life, in a way, is literally shit), some just don’t have the same sense of humor.

And I am no intelligent design fan, but what might also scare happy enders is that they may be right about everlasting life, but just not how they imagined it.

Didn’t Einstein posit that matter can neither be created not destroyed? Couldn’t that mean there is a finite combination of atoms, which means eventually everything will combine again in the same form it is at the very moment you are reading this, like in that movie Groundhog Day, but over eons of time?

That could be how we live forever, which at the very least worst, means hearing I Go You Babe every morning for eternity - or worse, seeing Kay Couric on your TV while rushing the brats off to school and barely making the train.

Those are the kind of things that go through my Saturday afternoon kind of brain when I walk through an exhibit covering billions of years. Which is harder to comprehend, a god that allows horrible suffering in the world, or knowing you are only part of the mix for not even a nano? (Oh Freddy Mercury, nothing really matters, not even that you, the gayest of rock stars, has been replaced by a butch cock-rocker with an equally bad mustache.)

Actually, all this is more like hearing that Flaming Lips song, Do You Realize?, the one that sadly reminds that some day everyone you know will die, but as you are in a museum and not a bar, without anyone around for sympathy sex.

These are not happy ender kind of thoughts, which is why there should be beer stands in museums.

Alas, there are not. But there are still those dye cast machines where for $1.50 you can get yourself a wax dinosaur to cheer yourself up -- assuming you are not a happy ender, and you don’t burn your hand holding your new orange toy upside down while it cools off.

And you can always find something off the beaten path worth to take you mind off your insignificance, down one of those barely lit halls that seem like a romantic but empty restaurant.

Take, for instance, the giant wooden ladles of the Pacific Northwest, which indigenous peoples used for oil eating contests. Now that must have produced some serious gas.

Those original bacterial ancestors would have been proud.