Editor’s Note: In keeping with this near half-way point in a momentous month, Marlow shares this on Friday the 13th. What could go wrong?

-Vic
13 November 2020

God for a Day

Author’s note: Yes, more thoughts from our viral incarceration.

-Marlow

During idle moments under the shadows of this year-long plague, I sometimes mused about what I’d do, were I God for a day.

All too late did I realize that I should have immediately dialed up my geezer friends for Zoom get-togethers, where we could have pondered this question (and drank unsparingly). This might have led to something insightful, had one of us thought to hit the “record” button.

Maybe, we humans aren’t truly capable of answering this question. As an intriguing response, Key West resident and author Shel Silverstein (I used to read his books and poems to my two girls as bedtime stories way back when) offered this:

“God says to me with a kind
of smile, ‘Hey how would you like
to be God awhile and steer the world?’”
“Okay,” says I, “I’ll give it a try.

Where do I set?
How much do I get?
What time is lunch?
When can I quit?”

“Gimme back that wheel,” says God.
“I don’t think you’re quite ready yet.”

So, I’d start simply and grant myself the power to lift rocks I couldn’t lift before or ensure great American presidential nominees for the next few hundred years. But these are not emblematic of THE God powers but more like those “clap with one hand” powers bestowed by the likes of Cadea, Matshishkapeu, Gozer or Zul.

Whirled peas — ugh, if you please.

Extend my personal tour of duty — perhaps but more days of old age’s pain and diminished health argues otherwise.

Ix-nay to smiting my enemies and hearing the lamentations of their women. Lame-o in the extreme.

Give every human “God Power” with the exception of being able to control me in any way? Naw — too much like asking the unbottled genie for endless extra wishes to the 13th power. In any event, even if we limited these powers duration to seven days, we’d still have to pick up the pieces, if there were any left.

Maybe we should implement free will for all mankind? Would that fix humanity, to know our issues through our hearts and choices? Cue Rush’s song.

To be more topical: How about wealth without work? Knowledge without character? Pleasure without conscience? Commerce without morality? Science without humanity? Worship without sacrifice? Politics without principle? Rights without responsibility or accountability? I could go on and on. So maybe, were I God for a day I’d make everybody have a clear conscience. Oh, and given my Old Testament predilection for Floods, Rats, Earthquakes, Plagues, and Sky Fires, I’d also implement a permanent Death Penalty for Penn State’s football program and then have a light snack.

How about learning from the mistakes of all comic book superheroes? Seems like a good idea. These all-powerful guys and gals started out by re-ordering the universe to their desires, making themselves invulnerable, etc. They should have started by giving themselves omniscience, using their God-power to do so in a way that wouldn’t drive them insane or overload the meat of the brain. And not hypothetical omniscience like “you know everything you bother to think of” — that’s implicit in omnipotence. At the very least they and we’d finally know for sure whether it’s all about the Hokey Pokey.

To be fair, this is kind of a crap question, since I’d more than likely get a Twilight Zone twist and step on my glasses. So, maybe we should ask for simpler things like rain occurring only at night or having $1,000,000 in a passbook savings account or knowing how to turn water into really great cabernet.

For sure, I’d let people know I truly exist, since most of us need burning bushes and other similar shit as proof. This is not some hypothetical exercise, since according to a new website I was directed to by some mysterious get-out-the-vote, pre-election day text, I am scheduled to be God next Tuesday. I plan on starting that day by eating some great baby back ribs. It is going to be a great week.

On a more-serious note, instead of curing cancer, I am going to ask to be appointed the world’s Driver’s License Czar. Simply by determining that certain people — solely by virtue of their driving performance — aren’t capable of driving appropriately and therefore will lose the privilege forever, I will solve a myriad of vexing social ills:

Deaths and injuries, especially the young, caused by auto accidents
Pollution and most of its related consequences
Billions of dollars required to build and maintain auto-related infrastructure

Why choose something so mundane? After all these plague months of utter dependence on our supply chains for life’s bare necessities, it’s time for all of us to pay our respects to those who made it all happen — truck, train, taxi, ship, tug, airplane drivers; road, rail, river & port longshoremen, repair and construction workers; pipeline, electrical line, and tunnel workers. And on and on and on. More than respect, pay ‘em. They are modern life’s single degree of separation that keeps us safe from utter chaos.

They shielded us from a slowly unfolding, disorderly terror and kept us from slipping out of our own skins and futures. Without them we now should know we would have died. And this was not some Netflix movie and they weren’t heroes. They like wartime soldiers and first responders were just doing their jobs. All we did was whine, whimper and wait for the doorbell to ring.

Consequently, in the coming holiday season I shall work hard trying to take daily pleasure in my remaining aliveness, its largeness, its small g godliness. I am quite satisfied to live with my occasional confusions and waxing and waning desires and conflicts, since in the end I’ll always have my frail hopes for life and living that have yet, never been completely overwhelmed, but continue strangely to nourish me even in the depths of the apparent despair of the moment.

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