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Leaning against Dionysus while he watched a random nature documentary on the couch, I finished a text when I heard the god of war and chaos from over my shoulder snidely ask, “What do you mean we have short attention spans?”
I shrugged without looking from my phone and said it was a simple statement, but the brooding silence that followed told me that wasn’t an answer he was accepting. Sitting down my phone I tell him, holding out my arms to full width between my hands, “You gods have infinite power, big plans,” and then sarcastically dropping one hand, I hold up my thumb and forefinger right before his nose with only a small barely visible space showing and continue, “but you have teeny tiny attention spans,” quoting what I had just written. I could feel Dionysus chuckling behind me. He was the most laid-back god I had ever met, reminding me of a pot-head hippie as he was less about “Big Plans” and more about “In the Moment”. The mirth I could now hear was starting to match the giggles I could feel, pissing the war god off even more.
Standing to his full height, Set spats at the other god, “What are you laughing about Grecian? It is your influence that causes her manic moments as one of your Maenads,” causing both Dionysus and I to turn and look at the Egyptian. Our faces must have shown our cynicism about the exclusivity of his thoughts because he quickly shrugs sheepishly and tries to backpedal by telling us, “What? I might be a god of chaos and war, but I’m a strategist. And stating that, Egypt was one of the longest standing civilizations in the history of you humans.”
“Completely off the topic,” I smile at the indignant looking god, but I just couldn’t stop myself when I tell him, “And, and getting back to my point, have you ever tried to have a conversation with our other resident Egyptian? That boy is the epitome of ADHD.” Which sets Dionysus off chuckling again.
“I don’t know what you are laughing at Grecian,” Thoth scolds as he joins us, “Your nation wasn’t even a nation.”
“No, it was a bunch of tiny city-states that couldn’t get their shit together,” Set grins while crossing his arms and looking down on the two of us thinking this had won the conversation. Although he does admit, “The Spartans though, they were around for a bit.” I wasn’t sure which conversation he was having any longer.
I almost asked and settled for rolling my eyes when I heard Thoth, “Yes, but even you Set had to appreciate the philosophy, the art, and the weapons of war the Greeks helped usher into the world.”
Set’s grin turns into a smirk when he turns to Thoth and replies, “You want to talk about weapons of mass destruction. Seen some of them they have today?” And they were off.
I could hear the conversation turn to the Poseidon missile, nuclear bombs, forest fires, contamination of water supplies, dam ruptures, blowing up volcanoes, asteroids as weapons of war, and every doomsday scenario that Set and Thoth could come up with in the next five minutes. Sometimes I think they just like to hear themselves speak. Other times, I realized they simply had short attention spans.