Disclosure: Some names have had to be changed, locations not named, and an understanding was brokered with the subject that this piece would be submitted for the subject’s approval before publication. The subject did not ask for any changes.

“In the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

— Abraham Lincoln, probably

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It’s September 31, 2015 — or as the narrow-minded confiners of dictionary dates would have it, Oct. 1. I am alive. I am Sean Penn.

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New York City is big and warm in October, like a rat’s turd. It’s a madman’s trapezoid, a magic carpet ride of dazed miasmas and subtle brumes. Full honesty. I’m only one man, one series of alleles wrapped in skin and contradictions. I have many relationships inside the government and outside it.

I, Sean Penn, am on my way to meet with God.

Life, what is it? This thing we call, ever-so-complacently, being. This big nothing, this drunk wattle-and-daub of mind and matter, wrapped in a skin shell. Life, where a little boy plays chess or checkers, and who says that the game’s not rigged?

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God wanted to talk to me, he said, because he is a big fan of my writing. As it happens, so am I. I have never read a magazine article written by another person. Am I doing this right? Who [bleeping] knows? Trust. I have never read a book, except I read “On the Road” once, or maybe I just ingested a controlled substance and wrote a long letter to myself and read it back again when I was sober and it sounded like “On the Road” should sound. One of those two things definitely happened, but I am not confident which it was. These things cannot be weighed. We’re all complicit.

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Like God, I am a fan of my own writing, so I anticipate that we will be able to converse with one another honestly. Or am I imagining too much? My mind goes supernova: stars exploding, planets colliding, bangs banging. I emit flatulence. Ignoring its subtle brume, I push on.

I am sitting next to my friend Chupacabra. That is a name I gave him myself for the purposes of this article. He is a lord among princes, a millennium among falcons, a Sean Penn article among articles written by other people. Whether he’s in the midst of a barrio, a St. Cecilia’s Day parade, a rugby scrum, a shipwreck, a U.N. Security Council meeting, or a small old-growth forest of rustic redwood, there’s no mistaking his idiosyncratic mien, redolent of pine and frangibility. “Are we doing this?” he asks me, with his eyes. (I have asked his eyes whether they wanted to be quoted, and they approved.) “We are,” I say right back, with mine. We are young, or maybe we’re stupid and young, or maybe the dream has just seized hold of us, that big dream that sometimes whispers in the mind of a young boy and tells him: You’re just one more ineffable protuberance, or is that a lie too?

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I loved “On the Road” so much. If that was what I read.

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Much to consider before sleep.

Chupacabra and I whisper to one another in tongues. It is a welcome respite from the long concatenation of shibboleths that engorge this frothy vestibule of a world.

The two of us share a gaze. We dazzle. We parlay. We kythe. We are two souls abuzz with chthonic zeal. We wish for the old days, when walls were walls, hallways were hallways, bathrooms at the end of hallways were bathrooms at the ends of hallways, and you could work a sink yourself without a postgraduate degree. But maybe I’ve said too much. Maybe this isn’t your sandwich. Whose sandwich is this? Why am I holding this, anyhow?

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Could it be we’re all complicit?

Zeugma. Parcheesi. Transcendence.

Flash frame. Paradox. Latin: pair of doxes. Why? Because we are all gods. Or are we? We have necessitated a lot.

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What’s the point of this? Two words: God. I’m meeting Him – anytime now. I’m meeting the Man Upstairs.

It could be a paragraph away. It could be 80. It’s the journey, not the destination, as Nietzsche so famously said. I’ve read Nietzsche. It is important that I tell you this.

All men worship two gods: Sean Penn, and this other one. The Man Upstairs. The Chief Honcho. We are mostly the same, but this is a creature incomprehensible to most minds, absent the human algebra that may provide us with a communal vocabulary. When I was 4, I built a rudimentary man from clay. So did God. We’re not so different, He and I. When I was 8, I surfed. There, at least, we are not quite the same.

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His angel, Raphael, summons us into the conference room. The conference room is warm and dark, like memories of childhood, or the underbelly of capitalism. It is a clandestine meeting, the type of meeting that is clandestine and you have to organize clandestinely.

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Hence, this clandestine collusion, striving for a moment of transcendence. Or shall I pass on into the hyperbole of the everyday, where moments beat their little fists against each other and the night wind whistles like a poor man’s paycheck — and isn’t that the truth, if we weren’t so damn complacent.

Why am I writing this? Why am I here, even, in the first place? What is so transcendent about this frangibility?

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Flash frame: We’re doing this. We eat a snack: bangers and mash. I know what a banger really is. The slang of it. The carnage. I tell God no.

We’re all such frauds. Do you have the courage to see it? Trust. Only honesty. I’m in my flow. Respect that, if nothing else.

We travel in the mountains for 80 paragraphs. The descriptions are detailed, and I think of Hunter S. Thompson as I write them, effulgently, contumaciously, a gringo in God’s villages. The complicity — there’s enough to go around.

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We make our way up the crystal staircase to God’s conference room. God is a simple man. Simple like the child in my metaphor from earlier.

Why are you here, God wants to know. Why are you, Sean Penn, here to talk to me. God whispers in my ear, all light and effusion. It’s a conclave. Cut. Rewind. Freeze-frame. Wipe. Dissolve. I don’t understand a word. I whisper shyly to Raphael, who translates back. I speak to him in intuitive metaphors that translate to a litmus test of our bona fides. God is not here as some kind of a casual fanny pack on a vituperative neophyte. No. Not here. Not this.

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God, I explain, I have a lot of questions. As true as they are compartmentalized. Why do bad things happen to good people? Vice versa. What is truth? Who is really to blame for killers and paparazzi and whom should we thank for the whales — or is it blame? What’s ISIS? Do you have dreams? What do you dream about? Your mother, what was she like?

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God agrees to take my questions provided I am not in the room. I say okay. We shake hands and God offers me a huge bed or a huge floor.

I think you know which one I would prefer, I tell God. I have traveled too far and seen too much. God sleeps on the huge floor, and I sleep vindicated.

God’s eyes: Describe them. Two pinwheels on a slow computer. Two moths dancing toward pinprick stars. Charisma? Disputable. There is a doubtlessness to God’s facial expression. What is it that takes Doubt away? John Patrick Shanley, or is it my cowardice? Could it be all of our cowardice?

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What was I trying to see in him? Something, truth. I tried hard, folks. I really did. I reminded myself over and over again that this was no little teapot, short and stout, from the fairy tales they whisper to a little boy drawing pesos in his backyard. This was a simple deity, surrounded by simple truth. He conjures questions of complexity and context, or survivalists and capitalists and collectivists and dentists, of all the ilks, some say pewter, others bronze.

My God, this is deep.

I make no money for my journalism. I am Sean Penn. The only currency I seek is truth.

I saw “Scarface.”

We’re all just dead weight.

Do you have dreams, I asked God. What do you dream about.

But God only smiled, that mysterious smile that God has.

I’m you, God said. Don’t you see, Sean Penn? I’ve always been you.