Bathroom Monologue: His People’s Story, OR, Listening to Desmond Tutu does this to me, and I’d like to apologize to him

Right? So God wakes up from this fantastic Technicolor dream full of ideas. Peace. Velocity being distance traveled divided by time. Angels and comets and waves that are simultaneously particles. Things that make no sense in the real world but are so coherent in sleep.

God really likes this dream, so He makes people and tells them what they did in the dream. He sends angels and comets across the sky and lets light illuminate them. Whole universe, constantly expanding just like in that dream.

People have all this overhead and in their heads. Peace. Velocity being distance traveled divided by time. Tolerance and witch-burning. But the people can’t even understand their own dreams, let alone those above. Soon they’re tugging on each other’s scalps and setting things on fire, always yelling, “Why God, why?”

God comes over and asks what the fuss is about. One little human goes, “Why did you make the warlord kill my brother?”

God goes, “Don’t give me nonsense. I was out giving Saturn rings.”

They say He filled the world with evil, so God takes all the humans over to a rainbow. He points at it, names all the colors and says, “See? Very nice.”

The people look at it a while, develop a theory of optics and say, “See, God? It’s just a trick of the light. It’s not really there.”

And He says, “Yes, just like in the dream.”

They don’t get it, kill each other some more and blame Him. God thinks what from the dream would fix this, and goes, “Ah-ha!” And He goes to bed.

That’s how the creation story goes with my people. I like it better than yours, but that may just be the familiarity.