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The First Time I Met God... Joel Harper
The first time I met God was way back in 1986. A very peculiar experience. You see, when you really meet your maker, one feels, perhaps to preserve one's self-importance, that certain expectations should be upheld.
Instead we met in the Casino Royale, in Vegas. Over beer and warm, but stale nachos. I asked him "How's things?"
And he replied, "Pretty good, 60 bucks up and been playing poker for just nigh under 3 hours".
When I asked him what I was here for, he replied, "to have a good time". He shuffled the deck, splitting the stack again and again with one hand, lazily hypnotising his opponents with a grace which looked natural (technically, man-made) and beautiful.
It turned out that God's chosen creatures were cats (I had five), and that mankind was present only to look after them in his enforced absence. We looked after the cats well, he mused to me once, a service rendered that we had not yet received thanks for, but would continue to provide so long as none was forthcoming. "Vain, man" he said, and I still wonder the meaning of this. "Downsizing", was the term he used pondering his dismissal, frowning into the rising bubbles of his amber beer. Too much middle management, not enough workmen. God had since become a stockbroker, semi-successful and predictably well paid, life was good, he reasoned. The grass-green felt hisses against his fingertips, the cards spinning across the table, each one swiped from the table and fanned into a shield for the four players to hide behind. Keep no pretensions; God was an excellent dealer. And this was Vegas. And we were gambling. The nickels and dimes shone like round diamonds beneath the floods, with an aura of over-confidence that would have made me smile if I hadn't know that it would crack into laughter, and the moment would be lost in lives full of them, mostly overrated and poorly remembered.
To my right, and to play, was Sammy. A friend (but not a relative) of God, and a terrible player and prone to cursing his bad hands, sooner than learn how to win. A man who worked with the unskilled because it didn't pay to hire those more qualified or experienced, and who berated their incompetence all the livelong day. What they went onto, God only knows. Nevermind the mistakes, just one more reason not to hire graduates. Sammy was a bigot, an atheist, and one of Gods favourite drinking buddies. As the game progressed, evolving with a broken, but natural grace of which Darwin would be proud, Sam's money would bleed through his pinkish fingers as surely as he would silently accuse the rest of conspiring to cheat him. But because the accusation was expressed only in silence, nothing could be done to soothe him.
To my left was Jones, and God was prone to call him Jesus when drunk and in favourable humour. Jones would sometimes blush, and sometimes tell jokes, and they were funny enough for him to be good company for serious poker despite his haphazard playing style and tendency to purr when losing. Jones was married and happy and should not be considered a metaphor for the authors incursion of moral causality in a world marked by its absence. God would sometimes joke with Jones, laughing over a peculiar religions desire to bribe his will with prayer. But there really was no need as for the most part the cats were well looked after.
I triumphed at the table that evening, and God still resides in Vegas. There is no one in heaven now, a solution to most of humanities problems that God and I, feel more than comfortable with.
READER'S REVIEWS (1) DISCLAIMER: STORYMANIA DOES NOT PROVIDE AND IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR REVIEWS. ALL REVIEWS ARE PROVIDED BY NON-ASSOCIATED VISITORS, REGARDLESS OF THE WAY THEY CALL THEMSELVES.
"Sounded kind of sweet to me, I like your 'soft' narrative. Nice to read something easy in such hard times, though i believe the only way to a true softness is via an understanding of the differnt ways in which we live across the globe. We all have our own definitions of what 'GOD' is and we need to try to understand and incorporate the veiws of others. After all I know as well as you do that our idea of God is, is the same as the moslem view of Allah, i.e they are one and the same, we all have to defend ourselves and our veiwpoints, but we need to try harder to accept that ANY viewpoint, no matter how silly it may sound, needs to be respected." -- Iain D. Spittles, UK.
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