The Dying God of Almost

Firstly, I feel I need to clarify something. I'm not a god of forgetting. Forgetting implies an absence of something. It's blunt like a door slammed shut and locked tight. I am the god of ‘almost.’ Every unfinished thought, half sentence, that interruption in the middle of making a point where you then go, “what was I saying?” Those are mine. My archive was once filled to the brim with words that never found the tips of billions of tongues. For the majority of human existence, I was everywhere.

Until recently, people would lose thoughts all the time. Not out of stupidity, but simply because they were alive and navigating the world with a terribly inefficient human mind. The human brain impedes itself with spiraling thoughts, doubts, it wanders constantly, it can hold contradicting beliefs that the human can't even explain or realize. People used to sit on porches and around fires for hours failing to articulate why they were unhappy. They used to have to stop mid sentence because the emotions hit them out of nowhere.

All of those moments belonged to me. The energy lost from half thoughts, harvested and consumed and archived by me. They gave me my power and kept me well fed. Then, the optimization age came.

Humans carry their cell phones like they are little glowing pocket prophets, syphoning all the worship real gods used to receive. A 24-hour a day direct connection to all their algorithms and predictive texts and synthetic language machines that learn from their lack of knowledge. It all just sands down the rough edges of thought before a person can even lose it properly. Nobody needs to take the time to think and reach for the words they are looking for. The words now come to them before the thought even forms.

I still get small morsels here and there. Fragments of thoughts from the elderly, the lonely, drunks, and those last holdouts resisting the emergence of optimization and never trusting technology. That's why I frequent this bar so much now. Mulligans. This is one of the last places left where people pause long enough to lose themselves. Neon beer signs buzz overhead with electric hums that sound like equal parts a fly dying on a sticky trap and also deeply comforting. The smell is a combination of an overflowing grease trap, wet denim, and the lingering particular stale sadness unique to rural America. Men flock here after 12-hour shifts to stare at TVs mounted too high up and pretend their necks don't ache while they watch them.

I fit in here. Another perfectly obsolete piece of the universe slowly losing strength and purpose.

#

“You look terrible.” Carla owns the bar and pours the majority of the drinks every night. She has owned this place longer than most marriages survive. She looks younger than her years from far away. When you get up close, the numerous shift beers and the frequent nights she's served drinks well after hours manifested in the deep lines around her eyes and mouth. Carla has mastered conversation and I enjoy our talks.

“I am experiencing a professional decline.” I wash the words out of my mouth with a beer that also has a vague aftertaste of copper.

Carla throws a hand on her hip and tilts her head towards me, “Honey, you've been saying that for six years.”

“It's been a continuing problem.”

Carla snorts loudly, genuinely amused by me. “You actually paying your tab tonight or are you just going to philosophize me again until I leave you alone and then sneak out. I know that's your move.”

“I have every intention of paying.”

“You said that on Tuesday night too.” She slaps a bar tab down from the other night that I completely forgot to pay after I drank too much.

“Time is subjective, Carla. There is still plenty of opportunity left to pay for that tab.”

“It's always been interesting to me,” Carla was now making performative movements with her hands and talking louder as our conversation drew the attention of several other people sitting at the bar, “Time always seems subjective to alcoholics.” Booming laughter came out of the other patrons listening in and I even smiled despite myself.

That's the thing about gods. The real ones, anyway. We aren't really these symbols of anything devine. We were constructed in response to and are arbiters of human addiction. I exist because the energy wasted from the inherent human need to linger in uncertainty needed to be put to use. Now, even uncertainty itself is disappearing. People do not sit with questions long enough to get scared about not knowing the answers when there is a little machine in their hand that knows everything for them. There's no hesitation between the not knowing and the knowing anymore. Anything that's ever been known is now immediately available. There's no more wondering. No more satiatingly beautiful incompletions. Except here and places like this.

I take a long pull of my beer as something catches my attention across the bar. It's Earl. He's been a heavy drinker for decades and he currently has no idea it's led to some mild cognitive impairment and will eventually be the catalyst for a dementia diagnosis in a few years. Earl is currently leaning over a pool table and lining up a shot. He's too drunk to notice his stomach hanging out of his shirt and pushing most of the other balls on the table.

“I was gonna say somethin’...” Confusion washed over his aged and leathered face as he completely missed the cue ball with his stick.

I feel a flutter in the air and effortlessly catch his thought. “If Cheryl leaves me too, I don't know if I will be able to…” The thought breaks apart as I digest it, store it, and archive it. Poor Earl. This will be his third divorce soon. He has no idea what he was going to say. He also has no idea of the entire cathedral inside of me built on things men have almost admitted and then lost track of.

The door to the bar flung open and in walked Dean for the first time. You can tell when someone has built their entire life around a concrete set of rules. Dean carried masculinity with a religious rigidity. He seemed like the whole structure of himself would collapse if he stopped and relaxed his standards for even a moment.

Dean sat beside me. Not close enough to invite any conversation, but in a proximity to not mind one if it started.

“Whiskey.” Dean put up two fingers in the air in Carla's direction. “It's been a rough day.”

“Ain't they all.” Carla poured the double shot and passed it to Dean. “Well, it's over now and you're in the right place.” Carla winked at him.

He downed the whole glass immediately and then seemed to notice me for the first time. “Hey, buddy. You always dressed like you're going to a funeral?”

“I've attended several thousand. I like to always be prepared.” I replied.

Dean laughed one hard laugh through his nose. “You from around here?”

“I am from spaces between conversations.”

“Jesus.” He muttered while holding up two more fingers towards Carla. “Are you one of those bar guys?”

“I'm not clear what that means.” I was genuinely interested in his assessment.

“I mean one of those weird old philosopher drunks.”

“Yep! He sure is!” Carla interjected as she passed the next double to Dean. They both laughed.

“I'm not that old.” My words sounded defensive, but Dean didn't seem to care.

“Well, how old are you?” He downed the next double shot.

I considered this for a moment before I answered. “Do you mean conceptually or physically?”

“HA!” Dean let out one hard opened mouth laugh while he pointed a finger at me and looked towards Carla. “There it is! I knew it. You are that bar guy. You're weird as shit!” He smiled and laughed deeply. He put out his hand towards mine. “I'm Dean.”

#

That was the beginning. Dean started coming in every night and I quickly began to adore our conversations. Not for any real tangible reason. We didn't agree on much. I loved the fact that he still hesitated in his conversations and he lost his thoughts. Not little thoughts either. He'd lose track of the most important and dangerous of his things, trailing off his words constantly as we spoke.

“The problem with people nowadays…”

“My ex-wife would always just say…”

“Look, the thing about my son… oh, whatever…”

As radiant as prayers, these thoughts drifted towards me and I got them. Most people's incomplete thoughts are meaningless and trivial. Deans were alive with priority. He wouldn't allow himself to dig down to any deep level to feel the important emotions that could help resolve his issues, so he just forced himself to let them go mid thought instead of facing an iota of spiritual discomfort. Many times he would just stop midsentence and stare at the bottom of his whiskey glass like there was some monster about to reach up and pull him in. I fed and fed and it was wonderful. For the first time in years, I felt necessary. Night after night, I led our conversations to places that I knew Dean would veer away from when it got too heavy for him.

#

“You know what the big problem is?” Dean was in rare form this evening, leaning hard against the bar, already profoundly drunk, and his voice softened and slurred around the edges. “Nobody respects men anymore.”

I sighed heavily as I took a long drink from my beer.

“What? You don't believe that?” Dean said as he perked up a little.

“Every lonely man over 40 says that like they completely invented the thought. It's intellectually lazy and low hanging fruit.” I spoke in a completely detached tone.

“Well,” Dean slapped both of his hands on the bar in mock offense, “Excuse the hell out of me!”

“You are excused, Dean.”

Dean laughed hard at my response. “You think you're smarter than everybody?”

“I do. I, also, am smarter than everybody.”

“Some people might call that narcissism.” Dean smiled like saying the word just won him a prize on a game show.

“I am literally a god.” I turned to make eye contact with him to drive the point home.

“You're drunk in a shitty dive bar.” Dean spoke through a toothy grin.

“I can be two things at once.”

Dean’s responding laughter was filled with warmth. Most people think loneliness is all about isolation. Deep, relentless loneliness is the recognition that some aspect of your function has been lost. Something you hold dear that you define yourself by is rendered unimportant or unnecessary, but you can’t let go of it. Dean beamed with a lifetime full of important parts of himself that the passage of time has deemed inoperable with the demands of newer, modernized society.

Dean stopped laughing and stared deeply into his full glass of whiskey. “You know something that really is a problem, though? My son doesn’t really…”

I could sense the thought trembling violently in the air. This was a good one. An important one. “Yes? Go on…” I had to lower my voice to an unnatural whisper to hide my excitement.

“He just…” Dean swallowed hard. “Forget it. Nevermind.”

His unfinished thought struck me like a holy communion.

“...my son doesn’t really look at me like I’m a man worth becoming anymore…”

I took the thought as gently as I could. It was a beautiful thing. Dean rubbed his face like he was trying to physically force the last remnants of it out of his brain.

“I just hate that kid sees me like some kind of dinosaur, you know what I mean?”

And there it was. A real complete thought detailing the real festering wound inside of him. We drank in silence after that. A comfortable silence built from mutual recognition.

“People used to lose their thoughts a lot more often.” I quietly broke the silence. “It was fairly constant. Humans were gloriously unfinished beings.”

“Most still are.” Dean was half listening and half blackout drunk.

“Not like before.” I turned to look around the bar. Everyone that wasn’t Dean and I had their faces awash in the blue illumination from their phone screens. “People don’t wonder anymore. The moment any confusion or the slightest sense of unknowing creeps in, it is erased. People just can’t tolerate incompletion now.”

“I get that. I really do.” Dean was nodding thoughtfully.

“I used to matter.” I hadn’t intended to say that out loud and the admission shocked both of us. Dean looked at me deeply and his normal drunken and joking demeanor was completely gone from his face.

“What… what were you?” Dean asked softly.

For the first time in decades, I answered honestly. “I am the god of incomplete thoughts.”

The words hung heavy in the air. This was usually the point where Dean would snort or chuckle politely and sip his whiskey. He did none of those things. “Ok… well, what happened to you?”

“Humans optimized themselves. In doing so, they scraped away and optimized a part of what made them human to begin with. It’s gone forever now, Dean. There is no bringing it back.”

Dean started immediately nodding at me. “Exactly. That is exactly what I’m saying too.”

I gave him a sharp look. “No. We are definitely not talking about the same things.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He frowned as he turned to me, abandoning his whiskey sitting on the bar.

“You think the world stopped valuing men like you. I think the world stopped valuing uncertainty.”

“Ain’t those things related a little bit?” Dean now had his arms crossed.

“No.”

Dean leaned back on his stool, visibly irritated by me. “Look, man. All I’m saying is there used to be ways a man was supposed to be.”

“And who benefitted from those ways?”

Dean uncrossed his arms and dramatically threw them up in the air. “That’s not the point. Maybe some things worked better for people before.”

“That is entirely the point. Did those things work better for everyone?”

Dean opened his mouth and the room vibrated with his through forming. He shook his head, angry at himself. “Forget it, man.”

#

I hated myself for how good it felt, but that was the terrible truth with Dean. The more he hurt, the more uncomfortable he became, the more satiated I was when he would push the hard truths away. Weeks and months went by and Dean became the most important person on earth to me. That was until something dangerous started happening. As a result of our conversations, Dean started changing and exploring the things that made him uncomfortable. One night, he told me that he apologized to his son. Another, he admitted that he had started therapy and the words seemed to physically injure him as he said them.

He stopped swallowing emotions mid talking and he eventually no longer self limited his speech. Every time I saw him, he seemed to be growing more comfortable with uncertainty. See, Dean did not come to this bar because he felt obsolete. He came here because he felt lonely. Loneliness can heal. A person can come back from loneliness and make themselves whole and fulfilled. Dean was making himself better and it was killing me.

#

“You’ve been quiet lately.” Dean observed after several whiskeys.

“I’m dying.”

Dean snorted a laugh and then stopped when he looked at me. I saw something then. Beneath his arrogance and theatrics, beneath the old-world language of him, he was now something that sat terrified beside me. “You serious?”

“You were one of the last people who grasped for thoughts instead of just seeking manufactured conclusions. I used to think that incomplete thoughts were some kind of failure of humanity. They aren’t. They are evidence that people are still searching. Evidence that the questions matter just as much as the answers.”

Dean stared at his drink. “My ex-wife used to say I answered questions too fast. Like, I was scared that if I stopped talking, people might realize that I had no idea what I was doing and no idea who I was. I used to think being certain, even if you aren’t, means you’re strong. It was all just fear, you know?”

We sat quietly for a long while. A smile broke out on Deans and he slapped a hand on my shoulder. “Hell, look at us. Just a couple of outdated bastards dying in a dying bar.”

I smiled. “No. Just me. You can still become something else. You are becoming something else.”

“And you can’t?” Dean sipped his whiskey.

“No.” I didn’t make it dramatic. I didn’t philosophize with him about it. I simply told the truth and then I noticed Dean’s eyes seemed to water slightly. He looked away embarrassed.

“You know… I am glad I met you.”

Dean's words almost destroyed me. They were honest and whole with nothing lost or unfinished for me to keep. He stood up and started putting on his jacket.

“You coming tomorrow?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“You know what?” Dean smiled. “Probably not. I think… I think I am doing a lot better.”

I smiled back, small and real and tired. “I know, Dean.”

Dean nodded at me once and then he left. When the door shut behind him I was again aware of the humming of the beer signs over the bar. Earl forgot something over by the pool table and I just let it disappear into the void. I didn’t even try to get it. For the first time in my impossibly long existence, I realized the cruelest part about becoming obsolete. Sometimes, the world just outgrows you for good reasons.