Excerpt: Waynorth

It is written in a book of some importance that on the seventh day, God rested. This statement is roughly analogous to the statement that the Bay of Pigs invasion was aimed at toppling the Cuban communist regime. It is certainly factually accurate, but misses out entirely on delivering the context that is so important to proper understanding. What that book of some importance conveniently leaves out is that God did not so much rest on the seventh day as collapse, uncontrollably and without warning – a perfectly sensible thing to do for someone who had just pulled six consecutive all-nighters. It was nothing that anyone could really hold against him, certainly not if they wanted to look themselves in the mirror any time in the near future.
The events that led up to that seventh day, however, stand out for the critic or second-guesser like a mouse to a prowling cat, if that mouse had had a bit too much to drink at the party that night, and was singling loudly and horribly out of tune on the way back to its hole. It didn’t have to end up like that. All God had had to do was take the various parts of the code that had been put together by the other members of his team – his subordinates – and make sure that they all fit in with one another to create a unified, functional whole. Not all that complicated, really. The four weeks he had been given to do this were more than enough. The project could have been finished well before deadline.
And God’s plan had been to do just that. But God’s plans, as much as he hated to admit it to himself, had a nasty history of not working out all that well. It was only through his inspired public relations skills, and the fact that, when he put his mind to it, there was nobody better at what he did, that God was still able to secure funding for his work. With this in mind, one would have thought that God would devote full effort to getting the project done, and getting it done right.
There were, however, three major forces that governed God’s life. One of these was procrastination. He hadn’t gotten around to quantifying or qualifying the other two yet, though it did rank perennially at the top of his to-do list. Thus, as the weeks went by, the material for the project started to disappear under the mass of disorganization that perpetually built itself up on God’s desk. Inquiries from the other members of the team as to the status of the project were answered with “it’s coming,” or “I’m making progress,” or sometimes with voice mail when God found his tank of ambiguous updates running dry.
With two weeks to go, God was suddenly seized by the urge to get to work on the project, but this urge died a sudden and painful death when God discovered that the material had been completely buried under other things, and realized that going to the effort to dig it out would mean that he would probably end up cleaning his entire room, which wasn’t really how he wanted to spend that day.
With ten days to go, God, his energy completely drained by the stress of hosting numerous large parties in honor of something or other, decided that he needed a mental health vacation, and dropped out of sight for the weekend. Calls to inquire about the project’s status went unnoticed, partly because his phone was set on “silent” mode, but mostly because he hadn’t taken it with him.
With eight days to go, God suddenly remembered the project in a surge of inspiration, and immediately vomited out of sheer panic combined with the lingering effects of the hangover that he had picked up on his vacation. He spent most of that day in a frenzy, unearthing the materials from the nether regions of his desk and floor. This done, he came up with a schedule. It would be arduous, but manageable. Six days to do the work, then one day to go over it again and proofread for any errors he might have let slip by.
He almost made it. But God was never all that good at estimating the abilities of people – neither those of others nor his own – and he assumed himself to be capable of more than he actually was. He did, after all, have an ego. And it was quite a sizeable ego. But egos will only take one so far. And on that seventh day, God’s ego took him to the floor, where he sprawled haphazardly in an unconscious heap across mountains of empty energy drink cans and crumpled-up fast food wrappers. Resting.