My Life as a Chaos God

I am a god.

 

Wait, come back. I’m not saying I’m THE God….only a god…the kind with the little ‘g’, and I’m not even a whole god…just part of one.  I’ll explain right after the break.

So a few million millennia ago, probably right around the time that Xenu was getting his Thetans on and Marduk, Yaweh, and Ymir where gathering for their regular poker game (3 World Minimum, Jobs are wild), there was a young god we’ll call Chaz. Chaz was a good enough guy, he liked to hang out, drink beers, occasionally enjoyed a little hacky-sack, but while all the other gods were out creating stuff, Chaz just couldn’t get out of his own way. Someone would build a nice mountain range. Chaz would trip over it on the way to the kitchen and next thing you know, massive landslide. They’d guide some lumps of protoplasm through a few hundred million years of evolution and create the dinosaurs. Whoops! Chaz’s game of cosmic hacky-sack gets out of control and he kills them all with an asteroid. The other gods avoided him, called him things like Chaz the Spaz, and finally one day, they just got sick of him, and blew him up.

 

 

Because Chaz is immortal, all this really did is spread him around. Bits of Chaz settled all over the universe, the places where a lot of him settled became those parts of the world that are batshit crazy (San Andreas Fault, the Middle East, Black Friday sales at Walmart). In some cases, he settled into people. That’s where I come in, because like a lot of folks, I have a little Chaz inside me.

 

 

Yes, I am a chaos god. And being a chaos god means a number of things.  For one, I’m a food magnet. Seriously, I once had a meatball roll UP my arm and across my shoulder, before it remembered that gravity still applied and merrily skipped down my tie. The resultant sauce trail looked like a grand prix racetrack. Pasta routinely flings itself from my fork and lands on my shirt, or my hair, or the wineglass of someone dining at the next table. I’ve taken to coordinating my shirt color to what’s on the menu that day, and I’m seriously considering donning Bradley Cooper’s workout gear before each meal.

 

 

I’m especially hard on clothing. Dress shirts usually fall victim to my food magnetism, but will also routinely succumb to random nails, unmarked wet paint, and (once) an over-eager stripper at a bachelor party. I’ve never had a pair of shoes last more than six months. They literally begin the disintegration process the moment I try them on: laces unravel, soles slip, gel comfort packs explode. One time, I lost all the buttons on my suit jacket to a tiny button-sized gap that opened in the seat in front of me. They slid into that 1/16^th of an inch space and popped off like…um…like…

 

 

Anything with moving parts is a goner. Watches? They stop ticking in three months. Cars? I’ve retired more mechanics than Mr. Goodwrench. After each repair, they always look at me with empty, shocked eyes and say the same thing: “I’ve never seen anything like this. How could God let this happen?” Every office chair is as risky as the roller coaster built for your Uncle Jeb’s back yard carnival. Just last week the wheels on mine stopped working just long enough to dump me on my back like a giant, albino turtle.  Tech?   If you ever need a hard drive erased, just let me sit at your desk for an hour.  I’m sure something dramatic will happen.

 

 

Thanks to my little bit of Chaz, the laws of probability rarely apply. My wife will not let me back in the kitchen without an escort since I knocked her digital timer from the shelf. The timer was fine after the first bounce, it was the three additional bounces and the immersion in the bucketful of mop-water that really did it in. As for games of chance, well I once lost 30 straight dice rolls in a game of Risk.  THIRTY STRAIGHT! That’s a statistical anomaly equal to winning three lotteries.

 

 

Yes, around me, the iron-free wrinkles, the rust-proof corrodes, and hassle free assembly means six phone calls to the manufacturer to replace that one screw that fell through a wormhole into whatever universe the non-chaos god version of me lives.

It’s not all bad, though. It’s helps me greatly at work because I’m never really surprised when the unthinkable happens.  It makes people think I’m cool under pressure.  Even better, because I KNOW something is going to fall every time I walk past a crowded shelf, I’m usually ready to make spectacular catches like this:

 

(actors reenactment of one of my spectacular catches)

And occasionally being a chaos god reaps benefits. I once made a gentlemen’s bet with my foreman that I could put a basketball through the hoop from all the way across the court. I closed my eyes, heaved, and accidently threw the ball into a climbing net pulled up to the gym ceiling. The ball proceed to roll the length of the court and dropped neatly through the basket 100 feet away. That never would have happened without my little bit of Chaz!

 

 

So I think I can accept my lot as a chaos god, especially as I start seeing signs of emerging Chaziness in my daughters. I mean if the number of phones I’ve replaced, computer hard drives I’ve cleaned, and the general state of their bedrooms are any indication….they may be the best little chaos gods ever!