Applegate Takes the Reins

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," now officially sanctioned by the premier bored god site on the WWW, namely http://www.godchecker.com. If you need a god for a specific purpose (saving you from a sinking ship, or catering your next cocktail party, for instance), they have a god for you!

When this dark time of the year arrives, Anne predictably falls into a funk. She even went to Berkeley Springs for a rest cure and was called home early by a family emergency. So I've decided to give her over to fairy protection and write here for awhile.

The fairies know just what to do with Anne. After she plies them with a bottle of wine or two, they let her romp with their darling centaurs. What more could a goat judge want?

Legions and legions of readers have joined this site since last I wrote, so here's the resume in a nutshell:

My name is Lucifer, Azrael, Mephistopheles, Satan, Beelzebub, the devil, Old Scratch, the Dark Angel.

EEeeesh. What an ugly roundup of monikers! Please call me Mr. Applegate. It's user-friendly, and I like that play, "Damn Yankees," even though I'm the bad guy.

When am I ever the good guy? You see the basest fools out there killing kittens and planning murders or terrorist attacks, and they blame it all on me!

Thanks to my employer (who has his own long list of names but is best known as God), my reputation is in ruins. When my contract expires 7,996 years from now, I'll have to go back to school for an advanced degree. Either that or settle for a lesser position, like Titan or Extraterrestrial.

You can't even imagine how expensive tuition is at god school. I've seen it cost three solar systems with active biological planets in order to receive top certification. I haven't got that kind of clout.

Let this be a lesson to you, reader. Always have a lawyer look over a contract for you. Those hidden clauses and vague phrasings will kill ya, even if you're immortal.

Lately I've had a few visits from Pluto. The god Pluto, not the planet or the Disney dog.

Poor Pluto! No one has come his way in 1600 years! He's stuck with the same old faces, the same old stories. He wishes he could trade places with me.

So do I, but his contract runs for a million years. That's a long time to wait for free agency.

Pluto and I come from different pantheons. In his, everyone ended up with him. In mine, most people do.

You might think that's splitting hairs. But there are some important differences.

In my pantheon, people who meet the death penalty, having unburdened themselves of their sins to a proper priest, can go to heaven. In Pluto's pantheon, the wretches have no choice where they go. Nada.

So generally, when you American folks administer those lethal injections, I get poor people, usually minorities, sometimes mentally retarded, sometimes innocent (at least of what they've been killed for), and sometimes so flat-out mean and ornery I have to shut them up in a cave where all they can hear is bland Methodist sermons.

But God gets the ones who repent. Is that fair? The rest of you wretches have to suffer it out on earth, never earning enough to pay your bills, getting sick, growing old, watching your kids screw up, listening to your parents kvetch, worrying and working your fingers to the bone!

While the Ted Bundys wreak havoc, ruin lives, kill wonderful, sweet, innocent people, and then, while strapped to a gurney, ask the Big Guy for forgiveness and get a pleasant release from your accursed vale of tears.

(I had to ask Webster to look up "vale" for me. He's most obliging.)

This whole thing puzzles the daylights out of me and Pluto. We wonder why Americans don't put serial killers into a regime of hard, unrelenting, back-breaking work, and then send them to a cell where they have to listen to other people complain. Let them be the ones who get cancer, AIDS, flesh-eating bacteria.

In the meantime, all those Christians who are so eager not to be Left Behind should just take matters into their own hands and hasten their exits. Why are they sticking around, waiting for cancer or Alzheimers when they can high-tail it to heaven in the prime of life?

Okay, enough philosophy.

Pluto wants all you astronomers out there to know how honored he is that you named a planet after him. He's very angry that you've demoted the planet Sedna to a "post-systemic orbiting object." Pluto likes Sedna, and he's worried about her praise and worship team. More about that tomorrow.

SEE YOU SOON
MR. APPLEGATE