I should have seen the signs.
It began when every beer factory the world over delivered stale shipments. It was quickly described in the news as, “the Great Returns,” as every customer flocked to return their booze. The experts claimed the cause was climate change. Climate change itself would become the last great sign but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The next thing to go were the pirates. Gone were the bandanas sold for 99 cents at every party store and etsy page. Gone were the family cruise workers on crudely-outfitted tour boats made to look like pirate ships. Gone were all the animatronics of Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney World, followed shortly by Johnny Depp and the rest of the Pirates cast (or at least the ones from the first three movies.) Experts claimed it had something to do with the Great Resignation, but even they seemed unsure.
The strippers went next, and that’s when the politicians really got to work. The Let’s Ask People to Dance As Nude Congenial Entertainers Act was signed the next day. This was also explained away as another effect of the Great Resignation.
Then the Night of a Thousand Blades happened, and the explanations stopped.
It was Halloween. The kids were out, bags in hand, hopeful for candy. No one was dressed like a pirate. They were all ninjas. So many ninjas. Like, so many. We all knew the costume was a staple but come on, how many of those kids dressed as Scorpion were allowed to play Mortal Kombat? We all brushed it off as good parents do, but as the kids approached the houses and rang the doorbells with high, squeaky voices calling, “trick or treat!” something happened. Every piece of candy turned into carrots, live groundhogs, and Hare Krishna pamphlets the moment it touched the bag.
The wailing of disappointed children still gives me nightmares. The streets ran with blood as red as marinara that day as every child turned on the nearest adult in sight, brandishing plastic weapons that were no longer plastic. I barely escaped with my life. They still prowl the streets even now, looking for their candy.
But it didn’t stop there. Gravity lessened as we felt the departure of His Noodly Appendages keeping us down. Every stripper made under LAPDANCEA simultaneously caught some type of venereal disease. Colanders vanished from every home, leaving us all with hard pasta shells and crashing the Italian economy.
Finally, with the pirates—His chosen people—gone, the planet began to warm at an exponential rate. The very sea broiled like a bubbling pot, as if the heat would strip us of our very souls, and not in the sexy way.
Which leaves us where we are now—a world full of floating, untethered sinners with heat-stroke drowning our sorrows in stale beer, venereal strippers, and Valtrex.
I pray every day and night that He might spare me, and that one day His thick, girthy noodle and burly meatballs will descend from the clouds and douse us sinners in His holy sauce, so that we may be redeemed. We should have listened. We were wrong.
All hail His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
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