As expected, the past 12 hours have been intense, in all sorts of interesting ways; sometimes painful, sometimes marevelous. Probably nothing quite as glamorous or "out of this world" as it may sound. I haven't hallucinated (or at least I don't think I have), nor have I spotted any UFOs. However, I do believe I may have heard the voice of God tonight.

It came around 21:45, though I did not recognize it as such immediately. I felt exhausted and weary. It was a busy night. Customers had been coming in constantly, preventing me from getting my cleaning done on schedule. Beyond that, I was just sick and tired of dealing with people. Period.

I kept hoping it would calm down, but every time the flow of people seemed to taper off, and I would walk back over to pick up the mop, suddenly, another one would appear, and I would have to go back and wait on them. Ugggh!

I wondered if I was about to crack. I knew my fuse was getting short, and I had started to fail at even the most basic precepts of quality customer service. In fact, if any of them were paying attention and looked in my eyes, they might have been able to pick up a note of contempt. But nevermind. I was determined to make it through without screwing this up horribly. If only they would stop coming, and we could have five minutes of peace and quiet. Is that too much to ask?

My wish was denied. A group of four or five noisy teenagers entered the store, and began to peruse the aisles. Before any of them had even walked up to the register, another car full arrived. Then more. I began to ring the first of them up, but for ever transaction completed, a bunch more entered.

Within five minutes, the store was literally buzzing with crowd. I have NEVER, in the entire time I've worked there, seen that many people inside that station at one time. They were buzzing the cappuccino machine, running around the aisles, hollering at each other, going in and out of the bathrooms, laughing and joking. It was utter pandemonium.

I didn't have time to ask myself if I really had gone crazy, because I was too busy ringing up person after person in the wall of people that had formed a line from the register to beyond the front door.

Now I should note that though they were loud and bouncy, none were particularly destructive or nasty. They were just there to buy snacks and do what people normally do at a convenience store. It's just that there were so many of them all at once. Also, quite a few also had parents along. (If I were to guess, I'd say most of the kids were junior high age.)

The chatter of voices was utterly overwhelming, as were the movements of people throughout the store. I decided it was pointless to even try to see if any might be shoplifting. Some of them might have walked out the door with unpaid merchandise in plain view, and I wouldn't have noticed at all. But technically, security is not in my job description anyway. So I did my job, and rang them up, one at a time.

I wondered how long I was going to last before I wretched, fainted, or crumbled due to the stress, but as I worked, I did my best to find my mental center in the moment, and kept ringing up person after person in the line.

One woman, who had simply come in to buy a cup of coffee, and wasn't in the mood to wait through a line of over a dozen people, ran up to the register while I was helping somebody else, plopped a dollar down, and said "Coffee. Keep the change." Then she ran out of the store.

I put the dollar aside to handle later, and continued to work through the line. From the talk of some of the customers, I gathered that a football game somewhere nearby had recently finished, and everybody leaving had the same idea at the same time.

Eventually, the crowd thinned out, and the line shortened. Within what was probably 15 minutes (but seemed much longer), it was back to normal. A mostly quiet store, with maybe one or two customers wandering in at a time.

As I rang up a few of them, I thought, "Ah, what nice peace and quiet." Then I realized that the conditions now were exactly what they had been before the crowd arrived. Earlier, I had felt like I was nearing the end of my rope, but now, I was relieved and calm.

I'm reminded of a story my mom used to read when I was little, about a man with a tiny little house, a family and a dog. He goes to the rabbi, complaining about how crowded his little house is, and asks for help. The rabbit tells him to buy a goat, and let it live in the house with them. The man does this, and the goat makes things even more crowded and chaotic. He goes back to the rabbi, and says, "That didn't help at all, it made things worse! How can I make it better?" The rabbi tells him to get a cow, a pig, a horse, a chicken, and so in. Every time, the result is predictable. But at the very end, the rabbi tells the man to get rid of everything except his family and the dog he had at the beginning. And on that night, the house sleeps soundly and peacefully, and all are content.

It was as if, in that moment, God said to me, "You really think your sanity is so fragile that a few silly customers can shatter it. Wanna bet?" And with a laugh, God proceeded to prove the point by sending something that forced me to exercise my own strength.

Eventually, I started to see real lulls again. (Though it certainly took later into the night than usual.) This allowed me time to mop. I went double fast at it, both because I wanted to get done in time, and because of the renewed energy gleaned from this lesson.

I'm sure the questions are lurking: How did I know this was really God? Do I really even believe in the existence of "God" at all? Or, "I thought you were an agnostic pagan or something."

I'll answer by saying that in this case, I use the word "God" only as a placeholder for what may be an unknowable greater consciousness. So yeah, the skeptics are probably right. It wasn't God. It was just a random string of events that happened to fall on a night when I found myself in a mental state outside the ordinary.

Whatever. Call me Fox Mulder. I want to believe.

...

The drugs I took before I began this rambling are having precisely the intended effect. Even though I felt wide awake and energetic as I started, I could barely keep my eyes open toward the end. So now, I will relent, and rest happy in the knowledge that "God" has proven me fundamentally, irrevocably sane at the deepest level. As if.

That's all folks. Signing off.