I’m not an easy person to love. Not one to experience things like I’m expected to. I’ve never cried with a movie. Never shed one tear for The Giving Tree. Like a popular Barenaked Ladies song. I’ve cried at funerals. I’ve grown attached to people, or maybe just the idea of them. I don’t have a soul, apparently.
Emotions
You treat them as if they’re voluntary. Well, aren’t they?
The discussion is probably not one we should have in the work place, but we have it anyway. I don’t believe in god because I don’t have enough evidence. I don’t discredit his existence for the same reason. I’m coward for this. I see nothing cowardly about it. I just don’t care. If there was a god up in the sky, he wants nothing to do with us anymore. If he did, he’d have the power to intervene. Instead we’re left waiting until we destroy ourselves until he does something. Dr. Manhattan. He has no stake in our existence. Nothing to lose and nothing to gain. No, if there was a god, he’s either dead, dying, or not a god at all. Because nothing as benevolent as he could let his children persecute each other. Nothing that good could let so much evil spill over and flood us.
If there is a god, I imagine him a little more like me. Detached. Divorced from everything. We could stand idly by or help, and our emotions would not change.
No, if there were a god, the GOP would’ve fallen under a plague. Locust would fly out their mouths everything they opened it. The sign of the beast would mark their foreheads. Politicians would fall under. Disease would run rampant across the United States. The empire that has gotten too big for its own good, without any merit.
We bomb nations and state we’re protecting our freedoms. Freedoms no one has challenged. We write the history books and state that we won wars. That the bad guys were beaten. When the bad guys just wanted to protect their homes. Or an evil steps up and attacks us, and rather than attacking back, we punch the little brother.
Annoyance
I’m annoyed when people bless me. When they accredit their god for something I worked on myself. God didn’t give me this gift with words. He wasn’t there when I sat in corners reading book after book. He wasn’t there through the bad poetry. Through the mindless prose without agenda. He sure as hell wasn’t there when I was shoved around. Pushed down. Shut out. Beaten up. Knocked about.
I’m the type of person who thinks people are free to believe what they want to. I don’t mind a “god bless you,” or a “pray for you” every now and then. It’s in your nature. It’s the only way you know how to be polite, but when it begins to feel like tiny personal attacks, I grow weary. I grow annoyed.
There is no logic behind god. And there is nothing heroic about it, either. I see nothing more cowardly than hiding behind something like fate and destiny. Things happen because you make them happen, not because some higher power motioned you toward it.
Faithlessness
A shard of glass. An empty bed. Ballet dancer missing a leg. Cue Skeeter Davis. Fade to black.
….don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love…
Chapin City Blues 