The Last Testament: A Memoir (48 page)

¹⁸
Moreover, I began placing an unseemly focus on my physical appearance.

¹⁹
For example, when I visited Phreculea, and wished to impress the Nivian Brandallaxes, I would emerge before the altar of the Balrythioid Quorngrankers in the guise of a beautiful worby; yea, even in the middle of their zabwynx.

²⁰
I know, I know; ridiculous.

²¹
I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; yet I followed the path taken by every 50-year-old CPA with a pre-owned Porsche, male pattern baldness, and a pseudonym at ashleymadison.com.

CHAPTER 12

¹
A
ll this renewed Creationary activity reenergized me for a little while; in earth time, roughly from the reign of the Medicis to Plymouth Rock–ish.

²
But then the problems grew worse: for juggling a multiversal harem of this scale became increasingly stressful; the stress led to bouts of anxiety; and these in turn led to the most troubling symptom yet:

³
A certain lessening of my . . . omnipotency.

⁴
Mirth not at me!

⁵
I assure thee: nothing like this had ever happened before.

⁶
I am all God.

⁷
Yet it grew ever more difficult for me to summon the will required to perform the creative act; and this affliction soon impacted my relationship with each of the other universes, until they all grew dissatisfied and angry.

⁸
Yea; by 1700 just getting the sun to rise in the morning felt like a miracle.

⁹
As for thee, my new habit of keeping a disdainful distance from thy affairs grew steadily worse.

¹⁰
I limited myself to only the most essential intercessions, such as the Spanish Armada, the Salem Witch Trials, and, in response to an emergency, the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

¹¹
(For he was a conscientious dentist; and a fishwife along his route suffered from a toothache, and would have demanded he cease his mission to treat her; so I knocked on her door, guised as an itinerant apothecary, and pulled her tooth, and even provided a complementary cleaning; which, by the way,
nobody
did back then.)

¹²
My behavior was classic passive-aggression; which from thy standpoint was at least less lethal than my usual behavior, aggressive-aggression.

¹³
Yet despite this I could not help but watch with wonder and growing dismay, as human history proceeded apace; indeed, its pace seemed to quicken in my almost-absence.

¹⁴
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, mankind continued to colonize whole new continents, and invent whole new technologies, and enslave and exterminate whole new races;

¹⁵
Wondrous accomplishments one and all, and all (unbeknownst to thee) performed entirely under thy own guidance.

¹⁶
Did I feel threatened? Yea; yea; maybe a little.

¹⁷
And gradually did I fall into a spiral as massive as that of the Milky Way galaxy; only the name of the supermassive black hole around which I orbited . . . was shame.

¹⁸
Finally, inevitably, my trouble began affecting the one aspect of my life I held most sacred: my family.

¹⁹
I started asking Jesus and H. G. to take on more and more of my responsibilities; small things, at first; a Great Awakening here, an Egyptian capture of Mecca there; then larger and larger tasks; then whole sects and countries.

²⁰
Some of ye may be familiar with the doctrine of consubstantiality, first formally expressed in the Nicene Creed of 325 A.D., whereby Jesus, H. G., and I are all of one substance, with Jesus being eternally “generated” by me, and H. G. eternally “proceeding” from me.

²¹
Lo, before I knew it I had a full scale consubstantiality-abuse problem on my hands.

CHAPTER 13

¹
F
ortunately, Jesus and H. G. really took their divine game to the next level, organization-wise; under adverse managerial conditions they steppethed up to the plate, and verily did they hit it out of the park.

²
They were also wise to delegate more and more responsibility to my prophets, archangels, and large network of wingmen and wonderlings; who proceeded to administer earthly affairs with the kind of service thou wouldst expect from a celestial company of over 80,000 cherubs, 250,000 seraphs, 750,000 archangels, and one Xerox machine.

³
But there is a fine line between delegating responsibility, and enabling; and my sons crossed that line many times.

⁴
None of us wanted to confront the truth of the situation; so when the French Revolution arose—with its explicit endorsement of atheism—all of us looked away, and Jesus said, “It is only a phase.”

⁵
And when my absence led thinkers like Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche to openly question my very existence, H. G. would shrug and say something like, “It is only the European intelligentsia; no biggie.”

⁶
Looking back, I am unsure why not a single being in heaven had the courage to sit me, the L
ORD
their God, King of the Universe, down, and tell me I had a problem.

⁷
The only being to have even attempted such a thing was Raphael, who one day made bold to approach me and ask: “So, L
ORD
, how doth it feel to be ‘omn
imp
otent’?”

⁸
“Not so ‘omnimpotent’,” I replied, “that I cannot still banish thee to the lowermost circle of—”

⁹
“
Mirthing, God! I’m mirthing!
” he wailed, plunging to the ground in abject terror.

¹⁰
“It’s a m-m-mirth!

¹¹
I’m j-j-just mirthin’ around!

¹²
T-t-takest thou not a mirth?”

¹³
Lo, he was lucky he’s union.

¹⁴
None of this is to shirk responsibility; I do not blame anyone else for my conduct.

¹⁵
I am a strong believer in the doctrine of free will, at least when it comes to me; and
I
was the one who chose to outsource these assignments and remove them from my divine plate.

¹⁶
I am the L
ORD
thy God, King of the Universe; the buck stoppeth here, for the most part.

CHAPTER 14

¹
T
he absolute nadir of my recklessness, impropriety, and sheer personal debauchery was the Victorian Era.

2 I spent those 63 years having thousands of aborted dalliances with my bevy of comely totalities, and doing my best to stay out of trouble.

³
But paranoia had already begun to set in.

⁴
The vital God of the Old Testament; the all-forgiving Father of the New Testament; the mighty Allah of the Koran . . . all these personae of mine now gave way to a new one: that of the angry old man cursing at the neighbors’ kids from his porch.

⁵
I began (falsely) interpreting every major world-historical development as a personal message to me; much as many a religious leader (correctly) interprets every major world-historical development as a personal message
from
me.

⁶
I took the life of Mozart to mean, “Look what a modern man can do in the same amount of time it took Methuselah to take a dump.”

⁷
I took the life of Napoleon to mean, “We will only worship greatness if it’s really, really short.”

⁸
I took the Industrial Revolution to mean, “Anything you can do, we can do child-laborier.”

⁹
I took the invention of anesthesia as thou choosing to close off one of my favorite lines of communication.

¹⁰
I took the telegraph as a mockery of my penchant for cryptic messages.

¹¹
(In this I was perhaps not mistaken; for though many recall the first message Morse sent on his invention, “What hath God wrought?”, far fewer remember his second, even cheekier message:

¹²
“My butt.
That’s
what God wrought.”)

¹³
I took the Suez Canal as an attack on the very
idea
of mass drownings in the Red Sea.

¹⁴
I took the coinage of the word “dinosaur” as an insult in two different ways.

¹⁵
I took the Emancipation Proclamation as a rejection of the institution of slavery; which is about as explicit a rebuff to the Bible as one can make.

¹⁶
I took the rise of the British Empire—which by any objective standard was a positive occurrence for me—as a threat to my own empire.

¹⁷
(Lo, when I heard someone brag “The sun never sets on the British empire,” I spent three years trying to non-apocalyptically jigger the earth’s orbit to make that not so.

¹⁸
I could not; it made me furious; I took it out on Krakatoa.)

¹⁹
I took the unification of Germany as a positive step; yea, by this point I was truly out of my mind.

²⁰
I took the Eiffel Tower as all of humanity giving me the finger; would that I had taken it as merely the
French
giving me the finger; then I’d have known it was nothing personal.

²¹
And I took Impressionism as an indictment of my eyesight.

CHAPTER 15

¹
E
very entity struggling with issues like these reaches a moment when he hits rock-bottom.

²
For me that moment came on April 15, 1912; and unfortunately it also caused 1,517 innocent people to hit sea-bottom.

³
I got to heaven late that night, around 11:30 Heavenly Daylight Time.