Something I Once Wrote

This is an excerpt from a novel I was working on and never finished. The book was based upon an extremely negative guy. He had experienced nothing but heartache from every girl with whom he was involved. He was also an in the closet atheist who falls in love with a girl from church. I find it quite appropriate to post this small quote on my blog:

Christ.
There he hangs in front of me full of woe. A wooden caricature that probably looks nothing like the real extremist who thought he was the son of a god. Not just any god, but the god that for some reason deserves to simply be called God with a capital ‘G’. It’s this god that compelled me to be here. It’s this god, the supposed triune joining of Yahweh, his son, and a holy spirit that I guess is composed of superglue and holds the trio together in an imaginably ugly mass, that compelled me to come every Sunday morning. It’s this unjustly just monster that gave my grandmother cancer, my grandfather heart disease, my would-be nephew a stillbirth, my cousin down syndrome, and gave me a head full of knowledge. I sat there in that back booth so many years knowing all of this. I worshipped his name; I sang it, I spoke it, I prayed it, I said God God God. Good good good. There I was staring at his wooden face caked with wooden tears and wooden blood and wooden sincerity. There were his wooden arms outstretched upon a wooden cross. There also was his wooden truth. Wooden love. All I had was this stick pasted to a wall to trust. My life is going to be eternal because of this stick. Eventually, the only reason I went to church was because of the smell. Fuck the stick on the wall I would think. I wanted to simply smell the wood of the pews, the wood of the ceiling architecture, the wood of the stick.

“The Lord states every good Christian should tithe. Naturally, the human beings blessed with large amounts of money can give more, but that’s why we base our fellowship’s tithing practices on a percentage. Every good Christian should spare ten percent of their income to the good of the Lord. For the good of our church.”

Mmmmm…the sweet smell of euphoric bliss. The chemical imbalance in my brain, the imbalance that gives people faith, the imbalance that makes the human euphoric, it for me was no longer based upon the inspiring words of a preacher or the downtrodden verse of the Bible. Instead, it was that damned sweet smell. The only reason I knelt for prayer was so my nose would be that much closer to the wooden bench in front of me. I would take a deep breath and let the succulent lumber enter my lungs.

“It’s for the good of God, fellow Christians. Nothing should hold us back. Satan tries, but he should never succeed.”

And so here I sat again on an early Sunday morning that should be spent sleeping to get rid of my hangover. On this day, I started to get angry and fed up. I can’t describe the initiation process of this anger, but it happened and I tested God’s existence. Why am I here? Not in this church. In this life. What the hell kind of madman would create a stage as screwed up as this planet? Am I nonsensical? Am I deranged? Or am I the only one thinking clearly around here? Dear God, give me a friggin’ sign of your being. Let me know you’re here.
Nothing.

Nothing.