Friday, September 09, 2005

Back on the Active Roster

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Have a bracing cup of tea and join us on the merry-go-round of Intelligent Design!

Anne's many fans will be pleased to hear that she's interviewing for a job today. Perhaps you'll remember that her former employer, Amalgamated Goat, Inc. decided to send her job overseas, thanks to web cams and email.

Today Anne interviews for a telemarketing position with a major manufacturer of pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, and genetically engineered plants. Don't worry about the name of the company. Some night at dinnertime, Anne will call you! Then you can place your order.

Who am I, then? Gosh, I have so many names I can change them like underwear.

Satan, Beelzebub, Azrael, Mephistopheles, Lucifer, The Devil, Ol' Mr. Scratch. (That last one doesn't get much use anymore.) For the purposes of this little chat, I like to be called "Mr. Applegate." It's more user-friendly.

If you've read up on me, either I'm a Great Beast (Bible), stuck up to my keister in ice (Dante), or one fascinating, poetic fellow (Milton).

I was banned from this site for awhile, and I was so depressed. To cheer myself up, I went to one of those Monster Fests where multi-pierced geeks in Charles Manson t-shirts stand in line for 2 hours to get an autograph from the guy who played Freddie Kruger.

Talk about throwing gasoline on a fire! Oops, pardon the double entendre.

Do you know what it does to my reputation in the Intergalactic Federation of Gods and Goddesses (IFG&G) to have ignorant hoodlums like that worshipping me? I'll never get another god gig. I'll be lucky to get a position as a Titan somewhere.

I'm sunk, I tell ya. Sunk. Oops, another really bad double entendre, given the recent headlines.

Through all of this, I have one little shred of satisfaction. It ain't much, but it's better than nothing.

You get your heinous murderers, your Mansons and your BTKs, and they always blame me. Like I'm the kind of god that encourages a species to kill its own kind. Yet another blow to the ol' reputation, monsters like BTK pinning their sins on me.

But there's the satisfaction too. Because when the really big storms come along, the giant earthquakes, the hurricanes, the murder-of-millions tsunamis, what do people call them?

Acts of God.

Whew! I don't get blamed for the big ones!

And that's as it should be. I didn't design this planet. I came aboard on contract after the fact, and I'm counting the millennia until I can pack my bags with honor and go to some other galaxy where they won't do a background check.

Next time I'm picking my own name for sure. I'm partial to Obi-Wan Kenobi. What do you think?

See you soon,

MR. APPLEGATE

1 comment:

Athana said...

Hey, Mr. Applegate you lovable old cuss, you don't fool me -- you started out as Lucifer, god of light, and certain religions (which will not be named here) turned you into something far, far less lovable than you really are.