I Want to Become a God Again

I want to become a god again. Yes, again. Okay, it’s true, we’re all gods in our youths, filled with rage, hormones, and a general sense of immortality. And yet, I am not the same as you. I was a god. 

Gods are not as you imagine them. They are not perfect beings with perfect hair, straight teeth, abs you could sharpen blades on. Rather, they are varied, even more so than humanity.

Humanity, of course, has created imaginary distinctions like race, but underneath your flesh you are all pretty much the same.

Gods…gods are different. We come in all sizes and shapes, sometimes changing within our own lifetimes. If humanity is like clay being molded over time, we are water, we are fluid.

Take Dionysius, for example. To the Greeks he was young, virile, leading frenzied orgies of alcohol, sex, and violence. Yet by the end of the Roman Empire, he’d changed his name to Bacchus and become a balding, portly alcoholic. An embarrassment, although even now he lives on. You’ve met him, you’ve seen him on TV. Not quite handsome, not quite ugly, booze always in hand and somehow scoring beautiful women (and, if you believe the tabloids, probably quite a few men).

Don’t get me started on some of our other relations, who can be anything and everything.

Hell, our ancestors were abstractions, approximations of what humanity imagined as they tried to conquer the ideas of the universe.

But I digress.

This isn’t about them, this is about me. About who I am and who I have become, and the static preventing me from becoming who I will become.

Not to be cliche but, once upon a time…

I was perfect. I stood erect, proud, never doubting myself. I reeked of confidence, and I knew how to use it to get what I wanted. It was simple to do, actually. By the standards of gods, I am relatively young, only a handful of human generations old. I was born right around the time that Manifest Destiny began to become less of a dream and more of a nightmare. There were a lot of us being born at that time, the so-called Perfect Americans. Each one of us took on a regional character. Some of the Northeastern beings were born tall, lanky, proud and forward-thinking, others were perfectly pious, blond, barrel-chested, and out to conquer the landscape.

(The biggest irony, there of course, was the image of piety in beings who were themselves gods.)

Many of us marched into the west, living inside the heads of our worshippers as they conquered the land, fought to survive where there was little water, and braved the territory of the “Red Man”. Truth be told, we reveled in it. We were primarily pure id at these stages in our personal development. The constant war of raging emotions as Americans battled the lands, themselves, and their own morality made us cocksure and stupid.

We populated the land even while brothers fought brothers in a war. We merged with the folk heroes and tall tales, making them stronger. We helped the lumberjacks and cooks lay down their utensils and take up the gun, and by the mid-20th century, with the rise of Westerns and War movies, we really began to shine. The pious adventurer began to form into the All-American Boy or Girl: blond, athletic. But there was a rebellious side, too. For every Aryan wet dream, there was a Jazz musician, a poet or a beatnik, a flapper. 

And in the 60s, as humanity began to openly try and expand their own consciousnesses, we became everything all at once.

Being a god is about balance: if one god is born a blond-haired jock who says “you must listen to authority,” then the next god is Jim fucking Morrison. It is nature. Then as one shifts, the other shifts as well. It is more complicated than that of course–like I said we are water, which has no opposite and is always changing. But whether it was the Olympians vs the Titans or the White Knight vs the Black, humans need to feel a sort of balance and control, even though they realize that neither knight is truly one color but more of a gray. (Then there’s Janus, but he’s kind of a dick, so let's move on.)

There I was: young, and filled with a lust for life, I had the form of a teenager at this time in my life. It was easy for me to be a teen, because in many ways I was one –only I was a teen with several lifetimes’ worth of knowledge. Kids would come to the woods at night to make out or have fires and parties, and I’d be there. Everyone would know me, even if they never saw me in school. Even kids from out of town knew me. I was just kind of there, but in a way that made them feel more dangerous. 

I was the kid who would show up with a twelve pack, a bowl, and a great story. In winter I’d miraculously have a truck with sleds tied to it, and I’d take them on dangerous rides through wooded paths. 

I let them be their most alive, bringing them to the very precipice of death and mortality…then I’d let them go. 

The funny thing is, whether it was instinct or perhaps a subconscious need, they would leave things wherever I usually manifested for them. Whether it was the large boulder that hid their fires, or the cave where they could hide their sins. They would leave things, items, baubles mostly, but they would leave them. I had quite a collection of lighters, hair ties, and clothing just left there for no reason. Most of all though, I had their tears.

 I must have fathered quite a few children, in spirit at least. When they were alone and at their most vulnerable to the world, I came to them, entered their minds, their bodies and let them be free. Each orgasm, each broken condom and promise, I was there, but I was also there for them when they were finally standing up to their oppressions and generational expectations. I helped many of them find their voices.

Then one day, they’d feel the urge to leave something at one of my sites, a last gift of childhood. I would see many of them return, years later, bittersweet looks on their faces as they tried to remember what was so magical in their youths. Then they would turn and leave, more hollow than before.

But parts of them lived there with me.

Teenagers no longer came and offered up their innocence and butane to me, and my old stomping grounds were replaced with condos and mini marts. 

I am not sure if my leaving caused the decay or the decay caused my leaving, but I eventually moved on from those places. The kids had new gods, new ways to sacrifice. So I did the unthinkable, I got a job, then another, then another. I was still always there, that person everyone in the area knew, but no one could remember where from. I could be seen at every water fountain conversation, at every raucous Christmas Party, and every Union Strike, but it wasn’t the same. 

Adults lack magic, they lack the ability to create fully; as angry and emotional as teenagers could be, there is almost an innocence in their imaginations. Adults are jaded because none of what they ever imagined ever came true.

They instead became enslaved to the ideas that they thought represented freedom.

The funny thing about it is, from what I have seen at least, many adults try like hell to remember what it would be like to be youthful again. They color themselves in make-up to look younger, go see tribute bands, pretend that they still like cheap alcohol, hold onto affairs from twenty years past. But then when reality and hangovers set in, they continue marching, not towards immortality, but their deaths.

It saddens me.

Humanity should be free, but still they create more and more oppressors for themselves, new gods to worship, and then they surrender.

I do not want that.

I want to be a god again.

For them.

For myself.

Can you imagine if humanity had the gods on their side once again? To feel that hunger and lust for life and to get as close to death as possible to prove you are immortal? What great wonders you would make again, what great pieces of art and social movements you could make!

And I would be there, with you, a part of you.

Burning the old world down so that a future would grow.

The truth is, I tried, I really did. but I am young as far as gods go, and we are fewer and fewer in number compared to the gods of old, the ones who survived:

Greed.

Control.

Waste.

Consumption.

Apathy.

And here is the thing: I think that these gods want humanity to fall. I think they are tired and want to stop existing, but have to endure as long as people keep sacrificing to them. They are old, tired, and sick but the life support just will not quit.

Humanity has to cut the cords, pull the plugs, move on–otherwise nothing will exist.

Except maybe whatever gods the other gods have created.