Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Excerpt from CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND SATAN




“You know, God, you’re great at creating stuff,” said Satan, washing down the last bite of her big chocolate macadamia nut cookie, “but you’re not very good at fixing stuff.”
And when Satan said that, then God thought back over all the thousands of paintings and sculpture and pottery and drawings He’d made while He was Picasso and all the concertos He’d written while he was Mozart and realized that Satan was probably right. Never once had He ever gone back and changed anything to make it “better.” He’d just made His pieces, then stepped back and let them “live,” which was exactly the same thing He’d done with all the planets in the Universe that had life, as well as the trillions that didn’t, and the trillions of stars that had no planets, the stars that were now dead, and the great clouds of intergalactic dust.
God could not remember a single time that He’d ever gone back and changed anything in order to make it “better.” Instead, He’d just created it then gone on to another project and let His creations live out their natural lives, whether those be of a mouse about to be eaten by some owl or a giant star evolving into a black hole. Nobody ever called Him God the Fixer of What He’d Made Imperfect in the First Place. Instead everybody called Him just God the Creator. So now He began to worry a little bit about the Parallel Universes that He was thinking about creating, and wondered if Satan might be right about those, too, if they ever came to pass.
“I get up every morning early and try to create stuff,” said Satan, “but then I have to go back and fix it. I got pages and pages of stuff like that. They’re called Really Shitty First Drafts in this book I was reading about how to write books. Then I spend all night editing them, and moving sentences around here and there. Because I say I’m a writer, people think I’m a creative force, but really I’m only a fixer. That’s what I spend most of my time doing, fixing Really Shitty First Drafts. You’re a creator because you spend so much time building stuff. But I’m trying to be a creator and you’re sitting there wondering why all your creations need fixing.”
“There’s just something . . . something so incredibly satisfying about making a piece of art,” said God. Of course He wasn’t thinking only about “art”—literally—but about everything someone might call “art,” for example shrews and begonias and mosquitoes and paramecia and planets and solar systems and globular galactic clusters that gave out highly periodic bursts of strange radiation.
“There’s also something extremely satisfying about fixing things,” countered Satan. “I mean, look at all the stuff I could fix if people would just let me do it.”
“Like what?” asked God.
“Well, for starters,” replied Satan, “like the environments of all those millions of planets where You have dumb people reproducing like crazy and tearing the places up at the rate of 50 acres a minute, or whatever units they’re using to measure their space that ones who believe only in You think it’s okay to do that because You’re going to come take them to Heaven some day and they don’t need to take care of the places they live.”