Red Sparkly Glitter

Corruption, pain, death, and pure evil, people love to blame the Devil for letting them loose into the world. He also has been blamed for a myriad of horrors over the eons. The Devil made me do it has been a popular defense a million times over and most of the time, he had nothing do to with any of what he is blamed for. In fairness to humans, they are very capable of creating evil on their own without any help from the divine. It has been said that God and the Devil have a bet regarding claiming souls using influence alone, while they always have many bets going since they love to challenge each other and bet on the outcome. They would never bet human souls since God and Lucifer value freedom and free will extremely highly, so they would never dream of controlling someone’s fate, also souls are a human concept, there is no evidence that they are real. What no one ever talks about is how the Devil is responsible for red sparkly glitter, but I have evidence that he is in fact responsible for that infernal invention. I make this accusation because I know the Devil really well and have solid evidence for my assumption, way more solid evidence then what people have for the other things he is blamed for.

I will do my best to recount my story from the beginning in a linear manner, which is really difficult for creatures like God, the Devil, and myself as we do not experience time as humans do. The whole existence of a person is revealed to us, it is the same as trying to find the beginning of an egg, or the starting point of a circle. When I interact with humans I see the flow of their lives through time, their birth, their death, and all the ups and down in between. Any action I take ripples out in both direction in time. I am a celestial being, same as God, the Devil, Thor, and Zeus, and countless others who have visited Earth at different times, but as they do not really play a role in this story. Our peers call God, Lucifer, and myself the prime movers because we are responsible for the creation of the universe

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” the sentiment attributed to God by Douglas Adams is one that I share for my part in creating the universe and red sparkly glitter. I feel confident in asserting that God shares that sentiment. We are really close friends, and most definitely spend way too much time playing ping pong while drinking bourbon. I do not know why the Devil and I felt, in a drunken stupor, that densely compressing all matter would be a good idea! At this point, God, in her infinite humour, decided to change a little less than half the matter into anti-matter, the resulting explosion had some serious side effects and was eventually named the big bang by humans. The effect in ascending order of importance and hilariousness were the creation of the universe, burning off all my hair, and burning Lucifer in the face until it was a lovely shade of red. This caused all celestial to laugh at him whole heartily and we might have recounted that story enough where humans could hear, causing him to be described as red in many of the stories describing him.

There is no divine plan, no grand design to the universe, and God does not have a plan for you, she probably does not know of your existence, but she does love everyone. I feel that once you start a story about the Devil, everyone asks about God, so I decided to take the time to clear up a few misconceptions and confirm a few facts as well. The observant among you might have noticed that I used the pronoun “she,” that is not a typo, God is a woman. She did not write the bible, did not create the angels, nor did she father Lucifer. Those are fairy tales, fairies are annoyingly real by the way. In contrast to how vengeful she is portrayed, the truth is that she is actually the most forgiving person I know, luckily for the writers of the holy book as they mostly misquoted her. The most egregious case is homophobes attributing this quote to her: “if a man sleeps with another man as if with a woman that is an abomination.” What she actually said was “Sleeping with a man is in my mind an abomination, I’ll stick with sleeping with women.” God is called Greta by her friends and dear by her wife with who she is in a loving relationship. They might not have children, but I am sure they would be amazing mothers since I have only ever seen God angry about parents disowning their children. She seriously thought that we were pulling her leg when we told her that this actually happened on Earth. She was so furious that she created parking tickets and Justin Bieber as a result. Both incredibly vindictive. But before you ask, she did not create Nickleback or Hitler. On the other hand, she did introduce Paul McCartney and John Lennon to each other, but she did that to apologize to Lucifer for starting the goat rumour, unfortunately, he did not find it as funny as we all did. Much later, and never were God could overhear, he did agree that the creation of The Beatles was a worthy apology for the aggravation being called a goat had caused him over the years. We will now return to the tale of the red sparkly glitter and leave further questions about God for a more fitting time.

A bourbon filled evening and the hugest explosion in the loud and explosive history of explosions later, we now have a universe filled with a new type of people, humans. This came a lovely surprise to us celestials, imagine being stuck with the same group of people for eternity. God and Lucifer are great but Anubis is a bore and Mercury is a twat, we keep telling him that finishing first is not always a good thing, especially during sex. The creation of the universe and the creation of red sparkly glitter did not happen on the same night, but both did happen because of bourbon and ping pong. Lucifer is gracious in both victory and defeat, whether it be chess, sports, or pretty much anything else, he will shake your hand and say “good game,” with the exact same feeling of having enjoyed the game, no matter if he won or lost. Yet when we play ping pong, he will crush the ball anytime he misses a single shot. Unfortunately for the human race, he once had an off-night and lots of balls were sacrificed on that particular evening. Incidentally, if you want to please Lucifer, or at least make him laugh, you do not need to sacrifice any animals, just put a ping pong ball on the ground and stomp on it with gusto preferably while screaming profanities.  Knowing his proclivity for crushing balls he had brought enough to supply the Olympics, which was barely enough for one evening of serious playing for him. And since we completely ran out of alcohol before we ran out of balls, which was a closer thing that anyone in their right mind would believe, Lucifer decided that a quest to continue drinking was required, so he teleported to earth in search of booze, a bar, and a good time. Unfortunately, he only found two of those things.

Unsurprisingly, a bar is quite an easy thing to find, and booze is, unsurprisingly as well, even easier to find when in a bar. I know, you are flabbergasted! The good time was ruined because of Fred Jones. Fred lacked any figment of imagination, believed everything that he was ever told, and never changed his mind. He learned in Sunday school that God and the Devil were real and the Devil was responsible for all evil in the world. He was only right once. Because of this knowledge, he obviously became a preacher, one who believed that heaven was physically on the clouds in the sky and hell was deep underground. I wonder what he thought happened on a cloudless day. If he had even one iota of imagination he would definitely have been terrified that miners would eventually break into hell by digging to deep. During his training to become a priest, he was told that drinking was a grave sin and the work of the Devil. All these factors gave him the wonderfully terrible idea to preach about the evils of drinking in bars. It obviously did not make him the most popular man on any given night, and on a fateful night, he found himself at the bar were the Devil himself was drinking to forget his loss. In Fred’s infinite wisdom, he shouted at the Devil that he was the cause of evil in the world and that it was his fault that people descended into the bottomless pit of alcoholism. I have it on good authority that the odds of saying these things directly to the Devil were less than getting hit by lighting, surviving, getting hit by lighting a second time, and surviving the whole ordeal. To be fair, that night, Lucifer was buying so many rounds for everyone in the bar that technically Fred was correct that the Devil was enticing people to drink, as any one of us will tend to drink a lot more if we are drinking for free. Being hell bent on stopping everyone’s merry time, Fred succeeded in his mission, just not really in the way that he wanted. He was hoping to stop people from continuing to drink, yet telling the Devil to his face that he was the cause of all evil in the world when he was doing his very best to spread a good time made him sully and caused him to reconsider his venue for the evening, much to the displeasure of everyone else in the bar. He left to find a cheerier place in which to continue his self-imposed mission of destroying his liver. Accidentally, this was the only time in history that the Devil was almost responsible for the lynching of a priest.

There are many places that serve alcohol, but not many had top shelf liquor of the quality the devil would consider drinking, this limited his options considerably. Half the places he visited only had what could be respectably called swill, the ones with respectable alcohol were seriously lacking in good cheer. He stumbled upon the answer to his dilemma, a wedding reception! Probably the last place any one should consider as a good place to drink, especially when not invited, but to be fair to the Devil, weddings, for the most part, tend to be quite happy events. He walked in like he belonged and went directly to the open bar and ordered the best drink in the house. He fully expected that the price of the drink would be to cheer for the lovely fellow and beautiful bride when it was time to toast the couple, a price he was more than willing to pay, a price he paid in the most unexpected manner. As soon as he had his drink in hand he was joined by a lovely young man who also came to find a drink. He asked Lucifer if he was having a good time, and being always up for a fine evening of debauchery and in a cheerful mood for having escaped the judgement of the unimaginative preacher and at an awesome party to boot, he truthfully responded that he was indeed having a great time.

Contrary to popular belief, the most popular question at a wedding is not answered by “I do” but with either the bride or the groom. This young man asked the stranger sitting next to him this most obvious question, and with a disarming grin the Devil assured the groom that he was indeed on the groom’s side and had known him for years. How much terrible luck is required to boldly tell someone that you are his childhood friend? According to powers that will go unnamed, it is two boatloads and a thimble. Why the extra thimble, your guess is as good as mine. To be fair, most grooms would have kicked the poor devil out on his ass right there and then. Perhaps it was because this was the best day of his life, maybe because he was marrying his wonderful bride, or even because he was a really nice guy, hell it probably was all three, but he good-heartily laughed and told the Devil that since he was the groom, he would probably be able to recognise one of his friends. He correctly accused Lucifer of being a wedding crasher. The groom said all this with his usual jovial cheer and bombastically invited his new friend to have this drink in his honor, to enjoy it, but to please leave once his glass was empty. This was a stand-up move and probably the nicest way to handle discovering a crasher at your wedding, and yet, I still believe that Lucifer, for reasons known only to himself, decided to get revenge on the wonderful young man instead of the annoying preacher, which we can all agree would have been a much more fitting target.

Now the Devil would never do something actually diabolical, he is way too nice of a person, but he would do something at the perfect level of annoying where it really annoys the shit out of you, but just not enough to actually do something about it. In this case, the annoying situation being the existence of red sparkly glitter. By chance I met the young groom years down the line sporting a very tired look on his face and some red sparkly glitter in his hair. You see, he had this wonderfully energetic but especially artistic daughter who seemed to derive the purest joy in covering everything in glitter, red sparkly glitter to be precise. I am convinced that the Devil, would create something that would bring the most joy to a person while annoying everyone else and since he knew this man would have an artistic daughter it was the perfect way to have his sweet infuriating revenge. This is similar to when he was angry at his father so he invented the recorder to annoy all fathers for ever. Anyone who had to listen to their child play that awful instrument knows what I mean. So would Lucifer be so incredibly petty to create red sparkly glitter just to annoy a man, I guarantee that he definitely would be. Now, you might choose not believe me, and that is okay. As this is my story and I am sticking to it.