When I was little, my mom would take me to get donut holes early on Saturday mornings. Our donut shop was right on Main Street and had been there since 1949 or something. Anyway, every time we\'d go in there I\'d see this old man drinking coffee and just sort of staring at the walls. He was of about average build, didn\'t have a beard, but wore enough lines on his face to tell you that he\'d been around for a while. For years, every Saturday this old guy was there, sitting and staring. I never saw him talk to anyone or even stand up. It was as if he existed for no other reason than to sit there and drink coffee while I watched him on Saturdays.
I don\'t remember why now, but for the longest time I thought he was God. I guess in my seven-year-old brain I had decided that even God had to take coffee breaks, and that since the donut shop was where all the other old guys went for coffee, that\'s where God would go too.
Years later, I would work at a furniture store delivering shit and basically ruining any and all hopes of ever bending over past the age of forty. Since it was only a block or two down, we\'d take our breaks at that same donut shop I\'d gone to as a little boy. On one of our breaks I found out that God had just been some farmer. And that he\'d died. By then I\'d already had my crisis of faith and decided that religion wasn\'t really my bag of tricks, but it still sort of shocked me that he\'d died. God was dead. I mean, he\'d been dead to me for a while, but now it was real. The God that had been God for me when it really mattered had shuffled off this mortal coil and gone somewhere else.
I still think about that old guy a lot. I\'ve even come close to asking around to find out where he\'s buried. The least I can do is go put some flowers on God\'s grave, right? But I always get afraid and change the subject right before I ask someone. It\'s hard enough to know in my head that there\'s no God anymore. I don\'t need to actually see the body.