I Am God, Zach (pick your favorite last name) [great book club books .TXT] 📗

I never believed in God. Until the day I became God.
Before that I never had any sufficient proof to suggest anything other than we are all alone, living lives of chance, a tornado of unknown possibilities and downfalls, completely divorced from luck or fate. Luck and fate. Two words that aren’t tangible. Aren’t real. At least that’s what I use to think.
When I was growing up I knew my parents didn’t believe in God. But, sure, for the sake of my innocence they went to St. Anne's over on Wacker Dr. A place my father’s parents had gone, so, I guess what was good for them was good for him.
Even as a child I could tell my folks were disconnected from this big churchy church celebration going on in front of us. Half the time my dad never even came up with me and my mom for communion. My mother never sung the songs or said the prayers. My dad, standing there with that monotone look of surrendering acceptance, checking his watch, dying to get home to catch the beginning of the game. But to their credit, they did try, for me. Or whatever.
When I hit high school that was it for me, and them. Actually I think they let out a long sigh of relief when I started to stay out late on Saturday nights, bitching and moaning the next morning about how I didn’t feel like going to stupid church. Or some nights I never even came home at all, waltzing in Sunday afternoon, having to hear their complaints and objections about curfew and church and blah, blah, blah. No, they put on the good show, for me, their baby. Nobody’s saying they were bad parents. But deep down I know they welcomed the excuse to sleep in, not having to dress up, and drive, and sit, and stand, and kneel, and so on and so boring forth.
I kept dipping my foot into the no-church pond little by little until Sundays became just another day. Ha. Me-one, church-zero. Take that church.
Sorry.
And so here I am now. The biggest hypocrite around. Your God.
Back when I was human I was a girl, or a woman, or a walking baby-maker, whatever title you see best fitting me. God did that suck. Whoops, I mean, Me did that suck. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad. It’s just once you get the eternal everything, anything else seems second-rate.
But, this story isn’t about me as much as it’s about the whole world. Earth. My domain. My kingdom. My people. Well, more truthfully, my puppets. My much loved puppets. My favorite toys.
I know what you’re thinking. How can God be talking like this? How in the hell did you

become God, the almighty. What’s the process. Who do you have to know or blow? Well, I’ll tell you, you ignorant little children of mine. Sorry. I meant to say I love you all so, so much. Blah.
So how it works is pretty simple. The role of God is something that gets given to a new person each year. Once every three hundred and sixty five earth days a fresh soul is chosen to come on up to the big seat to try and give it a whack. And you all probably thought God was some eternal, miraculous cloud of power, or an all knowing old man who looks like father time or something, or a duck billed platypus with seven eyes or whatever you picture inside that skull of yours. Nope. It turns out who God is is just another election. Who the ones are that vote on this sort of thing, I have no idea, but, still, here I am. Somebody somewhere out there sure did love me a lot. They loved me enough to make me the big shot. Thank you to whomever. I really appreciate it. Sort of.
The first day of being God is obviously pretty nerve-racking. It’s definitely a very intimidating situation. One second I’m petting my purring cat, Mr. Fister, waiting for the sleeping pill to take full effect, and the next I’m surrounded by a hazy mist. The color of it was something that’s nowhere on the spectrum of colors that you regular humans know. This was some sort of new color, a never-before-seen tint, incomparable to anything in a 120-count box of crayons. There’s no way to describe it, which means there’s no way for you to envision it, but trust me, it was a completely new invention of color. Only us Gods are allowed to see it, one of the perks I guess.
So anyway, I get engulfed in this crazy mist. And a sensation goes through my body. It was the same way I felt when I had went bungee jumping, a feeling of weightlessness, but more intense. It was like I was floating in mid-air, my body being denied gravity. I looked down to see nothing, my eyes danced, trying to find my arms, my chest, my legs, anything, but all I saw was more mist. It’s then I tried to move my arms, my legs, only to realize that I no longer had them. In fact, what I thought was my eyes really wasn’t that, in reality I no longer was made of anything. My vision was just that, vision, not coming from pupils or corneas, but just a solid ability to see.
And it’s odd. I didn’t have to be told anything. No instruction manual needed. All of a sudden I just… knew everything and anything. I immediately knew I was The Almighty. A complete download of all the history in the world straight to my mind in a matter of a nanosecond. No words, no questions. I just was.
Then I felt it. The feeling of forever in the very essence of my soul. I am God. Hear me roar.
Time to get to work.


PART 2
I see the world.
I see the world and it is good. And bad. Both right and wrong. All of it serving it’s own kind of unique purpose with the excellent and the horrible.
Oh whatever. It is what it is. I control it all.
Being God is like having a hundred different sets of eyes with a thousand different brains backing them.
When I’m looking over the world it’s like a collage of different movies all playing at once, and my undivided attention is concentrating on all of them.
In Kansas City a man and a woman are dating, the man has herpes and he doesn’t know how to keep avoiding sex with his partner. I give him the strength to tell her. She leaves him. He cries.
In Brazil a mother has to decide which of her children to abandon because she can't afford all of them. I make her leave her six year old boy who will one day commit a series of vicious murders in the jungle to die.
British Columbia, I make sure a certain rheumatologist with a hankering for little kid’s privates gets paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident.
These are the easy ones. The ones with obvious justice behind them.
Then there are cases like the woman living in Paris. I have to make sure she keeps on getting shitty luck, losing her job, three different loves, her car to the creditors, having to trade her house for a studio apartment, I have to make sure her mother dies the day before Christmas, and her only sister the day after New Years. All of this so that one day she will start a shelter for dogs that will be the inspiration needed to help a man volunteering there to go back to his family that he left, the inspiration that makes him realize he will only ever be a service to humanity by raising his daughters instead of moping at the bottom of a bottle about how he never got to live his dream of having his own restaurant. Sometimes to do good you have to first do a little bad.
Or the man from Australia. How I decide to give him cancer so he can finally start living life. Instead of making it to ninety-one as a depressed recluse.
Oh, and I think we need to get this out of the way. One of the main questions people might ask me is what happens to all of you when you die. Well. Sorry. That’s not my responsibility. I know, I know, you’d think it would be, seeing as how I’m the controller of everything. But, nope, somehow that’s not my department. Those kinds of things get handled by another agency entirely. Don’t ask me why. I’m only God over here.
You see, there’s a lot of Gods out there. Me, I’m only the God for this planet, Earth. There’s a good five thousand other planets out there with intelligent life, and each one of those places has their own private God overseer that looks after them. Each planet gets its own original deity, plucked like I was from the vast population of regulars, chosen to take the reigns and lead them on. Or destroy them, however they’re feeling.
One thing about being God though, is there is no take backs, no going reverse through time to change something I might have screwed up or not decided rightly on. Like the time I wanted to have some fun by creating a havoc of waves in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, forty foot high arcs of water thrashing and ripping around. I accidentally capsized a cruise liner with that stunt, killing over three hundred. There was nothing I could do but curse myself and remember not to be so careless again. Even we Gods make mistakes you know. We’re far from perfect.
I see to it that a wealthy, crooked oil tycoon from California gets to steal thousands of people’s pension funds, along with polluting the water of four different towns because of a toxic run off from his two large