God is in Charge

I was in line at the Post Office the other day, sending off my goddamned taxes, when a lady stepped in front of me. She said that the clerk told her to get to the front of the line and, when I looked over at him, he nodded. Okay. Whatever. She turned to me, all crazy-eyed, and said, “I hope I’m not putting you out.” I replied that, no, she wasn’t. Then I said, indicating the clerk, “He’s in charge.”

She laughed, looked up at the ceiling, and replied: “Actually, God’s in charge.”

God’s in charge of the Post Office, is he? I guess that explains why he’s never fucking around, and appears to be such a bitter motherfucking cunt. Does that clerk answer directly to God? Because what the fuck is with upping the stamp prices all the time? Is that some sort of message from God? When stamps cost fifty cents, will that be a sign of the rapture?

The burning bush speaks! “Tony…send her to the front of the line. Encourage them to buy Forever stamps.”

I hate that fire and brimstone God is my pilot bullshit. I always associate it with the black protestant thing, not the vapid-eyed child molester god of the white people. That weird Bible Belt “God gave me cancer” Appalachian attitude. No, the blacks have a whole different sort of God. Not only did he give you cancer – amen, glory to him – but he runs the Post Office – praise be his name, hallelujah.

I make a racial distinction here, but it’s not that one is better than the other. Blacks may treat Christianity like a cargo cult, but whites use God as an excuse for genocide. Tough to say which is better. On the one hand, cargo cults can be strangely comforting in that ‘I’ll never grow up’ way. On the other hand, genocide’s an awful lot of fun. I don’t mean the messy part of genocide – camps and ovens and mass graves and so on. I’m more a fan of the administrative side.

I could go on about my plans for committing genocide – in my case, I won’t fool around with any particular subset of people, I want to kill everyone – but I’ve become distracted by a phone call I just received at my idiot day job, where I’ve spent much of the day planning how to murder a certain co-worker who just gave me extra work. Fancy-pants doctor calls, writing an article about another fancy pants doctor for a magazine, and he wants to know if his subject is still alive.

Round and round we go. The person is not in the member directory, so I have nothing to contribute. But that seems to enrage the customer and he starts ranting. Which is when I should have said: God’s in charge!

He tells me that it’ll be an awful fuck-up if he says the person is dead and she isn’t. How can he find out! Oh! Woe! (He’s writing an article on her.)

Something was nagging me, as my finger hovered over the button that would release the call. I asked when the person in question was born.

Not even a pause: “1889.”

After a verbal spit-take, where I had him repeat the date a couple of times, I told the customer that it was safe to assume that the person was deceased. But then he really flipped out – You can’t assume that! Many people have lived to be 120 before! (I looked it up – only two people on record have made it to 120. Some lady, who dropped at 122, and a Japanese guy whose age of 120, when he died, is disputed because he was using a fake birth certificate.)

I get calls like this all the time. Not that particular topic, thankfully, but certainly of that same level of stupidity and/or insanity. Another call I get all the time (along with several of my co-workers) is a hang-up/heavy breather. And because I don’t like psychopaths calling me up and breathing into the phone, I’ll tell you who he is. H. Wilson of Washington, DC. Yes, Mr. Pervert, we have caller ID.

He’s probably some 120 year old guy who is breathless after dialing our number 17 times a day. And praise our great Lord for letting him live so long. Perhaps God will let me live that long. I asked the postal clerk, but he just told me to buy Forever stamps.