" … it's just sometimes sorely needed."

Eventually, even the better-behaved gods tire of omniscience, which can become quite pedestrian even if one takes care to avoid constantly lording the ability over everyone else. It's a tricky balance, because omniscience isn't one of those senses anyone can deliberately turn off. It comes unbidden, filling in any threatening cluelessness before it can sting. But this sort of cluing in carries a sting of its own, eventually accumulating to just beyond the Dull Throb level. Then, even the most cultured god needs a break. "How about a vacation?", the ever-helpful omniscience asks, further amplifying the need for the god to take a vacation by merely asking the question. "Where to?", the god quietly wonders. "Someplace where your omniscience can take a well-deserved rest," a beleaguered omniscience wheezes.

There, the language should violate every principle of written and spoken communication. Social customs should be so mysterious and contradictory that you cannot properly parse them. People should, for instance, drive on the right, but walk down the sidewalk on the left sometimes, not consistently, but frequently enough so that even an unusually careful observer cannot anticipate which side he should be walking on to avoid being perceived as a disruptive asshat. Food should take curious forms and be referred to in completely unfamiliar ways, not beef-fish-chicken-lamb-veg, but according to some totally indecipherable categorization principle, perhaps one roughly logarithmic or zodiacal. The time zone there should also be al least a third of the way behind or ahead of the god's normal body clock zone.

Now our god has a better than decent chance of experiencing DisOrientation, the only known respite from relentlessly omniscient all-knowing. The shock should prove subtle yet also curiously severe. People will walk around upright, probably putting on their pants employing the familiar one leg at a time technique, but similarities sharply drop off from there. Every daily activity should quickly devolve into even more unknowables, leaving every plan floating and dislocated from its resolution. Every label and sign should seem the product of some random letter combinator. Each destination's name should seem antagonistic to even a distant hint of onomatopoeia. Angels trading in mercy should periodically appear, and will, but even their gracious interventions should leave the DisOriented god puzzled as well as grateful. By some incomprehensible miracle, everything will turn out pretty much okay, but not due to any god's pre-knowing or all-knowing, probably just the opposite.

A proper get-away should take away more than the vacationing god from his home, but also disable the clever and rational mind which otherwise would continue working overtime so a god won't have to stretch out of shape to get along. A proper get-away should stretch everything out of shape, or at least give a good shove in that direction. The getting-away god, then, re-experiences genuine grace of the sort that everyone else long-ago grew accustomed to experiencing from the god's beneficent hand. He will also immerse himself in the great mysteries, those puzzles already repeatedly and successfully completed at home, but which appear in fundamentally unopenable boxes here, prominent among them, where to find breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and how to simultaneously unlock the three front door locks employing only one key. The successful get-away should properly feel disorienting all the way down and halfway back up again. Nuthin particularly Special about this, it's just sometimes sorely needed.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NuthinSpecial, #PureSchmaltz