by John Rixey

Created on: December 05, 2008

God is a possum that lives in the dumpsters behind my apartment. Sometimes when you're walking down the alley back there, you can see God before he scurries away. Aside from it being God, the possum - all possums are filthy-looking creatures. Their tails are all slick and meaty, they've got that hairless big-eyed face.

It's a shame possums aren't able to understand language. Even if the possum could hear all of our prayers, it wouldn't know what they meant. I don't think we should fault God for materializing as possum. He probably knows what he's doing. Or she, possibly. It's got to be hard to tell with a possum.

Where has God been during all of our troubles? In the dumpsters behind my apartment. It doesn't seem right to catch him or take pictures. Do you really want to trap and photograph God? We couldn't do what we'd naturally want to do - hook electrodes up to the possum's brain to read its thoughts and then clone him. It's probably best to be tasteful with God. Just leave him be. He seems to be enjoying the trash.

Interestingly enough, God the possum survives on the trash that we throw away. They might be disgusting for eating trash, but we're producing that trash. In a crowded city, there are a lot of dumpsters where God could live. I believe he chose this particular alleyway because of the excessive pizza boxes. The possum is a nocturnal animal, so its best to pray at night if you believe a possum can understand you. Though even if he could, he's just a single possum and he doesn't seem at all interested in people.

Like all possums, God is going to die. It may be after eating a cup of paint or it may just roll up into a filthy little ball and stop breathing. When that time comes, we can give God a proper burial - in the dumpster that he loved so well. After that, however, we don't know what will happen. Will God form as something else? Or will God just be dead?

If God ends up not reappearing, we'll all have to figure out a way to behave without him. For a while, we'd have to make that our first priority instead of our three-hundred and twenty-seventh. After that, we could look harder to see if God reappeared as a bird or a rock or a person or a Yamaha DX-7 Internal Memory Battery or as every single thing that exists, all at once, over and over again, being all of us and everything else all at the same time, as good and bad as everything is all together.

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