Day 1: God asked me to build an arc. Says He’s going to flood the world. Told Him I’m not much of a sailor.

Day 3: Wife has been laughing uncontrollably. “Christ, you couldn’t even build that cabinet for my sister. We’re fucked”. Listen, her sister kept changing the dimensions on me. Plus I didn’t have good wood. Should have good wood on this project.

Day 4: Told God we should use spruce and He’s sort of noncommittal on whether He can get His hands on that or not. Later, in making small chat, God says “you know what else is a good wood- dogwood”, which I’m 90% sure is a bush.

Day 5 Things get heated, when talking about the plan and timeline and I bring up the dogwood line. I ask Him, flat out: “how much do You really know about wood and boats?” and He LOSES IT. Keeps yelling that He doesn’t want to have to “micromanage” the end of the world, and that I just need to get it done.

Day 6: I tell Him the wood is handled and He says “Great, how are we doing on lyme?” and I just let is slide that He thinks lymestone goes into building ships and say “pretty damn good!”

Day 7: God tells me the full plan: I have to get two of every animal and board them on the Arc to continue life. I say, “what about the trees?” and He says “what you mean?” and I say “I’m pretty sure trees can’t live after being submerged in water for 40 days and 40 nights” and He says “you’re shittin me??!!”.

Day 8: We argue about how much water trees can take for the better part of the day, then He finally says “listen, they can fucking take it, OK- I created them and I know them. Now we’re DONE talking about trees”. I tell Him, “OK, but just remember all life collapses if there’s no trees for herbivores”. “WHATT???”, He yells back.

Day 9: I don’t think God understands the distinction between a herbivore and a carnivore. He thought you could just take all the animals and drop them in a new place and it would “just kind of work”. Keeps telling me, “I don’t get bogged down in details”. Says He created the whole place in 6 days and it’s still running and I should just trust Him.

Day 10: We start getting into the technical details of the boat. It’s daunting. Will need to be enormous. I say I’ll probably have to hire help and He’s real conspiratorial about it: “well don’t tell them anything!” and keeps pushing back with, “I thought you had a bunch of kids, can’t they do it?”

Day 14: We often fight over animals. First of all, I can’t tell if half these creatures are male or female. Sure, for a lion or donkey, it’s easy, but for things like an ant or a duck- I have no idea. I mean, we could have two male penguins on this boat.

He keeps saying “Listen, if one of these creatures doesn’t make it –the thing to focus on is– no one in the future will know!”, which has been His mantra from the get-go. Loves to say, “The Future Doesn’t Know, What The Future Never Saw!”.

Day 20: More animal fights. He can’t see where the real problems are and assures me He’s “gonna keep the tigers in line”, but I tell Him, “actually I’m more worried about the termites and skunks”. He doesn’t believe that termites actually eat wood and thinks its an urban legend.

Day 30: Lots of paper work. I ask God if He actually cares about capitalizing the ‘h’ in “He” when it refers to God and He says, “Yeah- huge deal to Me”.

Day 35: Out of nowhere He says, “Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about the dinosaurs- I’ll keep them in line too” and I say “what in the fuck are you talking about?” and He describes lizards that are as tall as a temple that eat each other violently and in talking about it, I start getting the impression He’s actually flooded Earth, like, 50 or 60 times and no longer has any idea what’s alive down here.

Day 40: One of my sons got on an ostrich as a joke and it ran him into the next town. Those things are fast.

Day 41: bats shit constantly.

Day 43: beavers ate the rudder. God says not to worry: “what ya, gonna hit some thing?- the whole planet will be water”.

Day 50: Went to what I thought was the supply closet and a gorilla ripped both my arms out of their socket. “What in the Hell are we doing here?”, I yell and a huge fight with God starts.

“Why can’t you kill just the bad people with lighting? Why do you need the flood the entire world??!”, I yell. “Do you know how many bolts of lighting that would be?”, He yells back, “… Zillions, probably!” and there’s kind of a pause there and I get the impression he actually has no idea how many people are on Earth.

“Besides, a flood’s great drama! We are ON for the flood. It’s a GO!”

Day 55: Launch day. We’re sailing. So nervous. To start with, I doubt we have more than 20%

of the actual wildlife on Earth. Second, I have no idea how to sail and, third, it turns out termites do in fact eat wood.

I share my concerns with God: “What if I fail? What if all life dies because I wasn’t strong enough?”



God tells me not to worry so much. How hard can sailing be in a world filled with water? Also claims fished learned to walk once and “they can probably do it again”. Keeps claiming “that’s the backup plan!- we let fish walk again”.

Not so sure about that plan.

I will say this for God- He’s got an infectious laugh.

by Sean Flannery

