Back in the day, an administering angel was good at blue sky thinking, in fact, blue skies had been her idea. She’d thought them up during a planning meeting of the universe steerage committee, Sol One, Solar System Division of the Act of Creation Directorate. It didn’t matter that in the larger scheme of things within the Big Bang Corporation’s development arm, this little solar system was pretty insignificant, the idea had got her noticed and the Seraphim in charge had commended her inventiveness.
“What an imagination!” he’d said, “You’ve got a future,” he’d said, and they’d given the third planet a blue sky.
Of course, angels, even administrative ones, are sexless, which causes them some irritation when they get bored and fancy a bit of a cuddle. Heavy petting stimulates urges that they are unable to fulfil, being ill equipped for the task, and that’s when the occasional meteor gets chucked about. More than one population of Dinosaurs owes its demise to a severe case of sexual frustration.
However, being beings of a patriarchal deosphere, anyone higher up the food chain than you is inevitably referred to with a masculine pronoun, whilst those below you are assumed to be female. This can get really confusing as it naturally follows that everyone, except the big I Am, is both male and female at the same time, although they are completely deprived of the wherewithal to enjoy the potential benefits of this condition. As everything, and I mean everything, exists merely as an idea in the mind of god, when god needs a new angel he just thinks one up. As far as he is concerned he can’t allow angels to get busy breeding uncontrollably amongst themselves.
No, that won’t do at all.
Too many gophers and administrators just gum up the works and everything goes to hell in a handcart. Instead of being occupied with the subcontracted minutia of designing the cellular structure of trees and coming up with new and exotic kinds of fish, they spend eternity wrangling about their pay-grades and squabbling over visiting rights to the executive washroom. Lucifer had been a case in point. Administrative angels have to be constantly reminded of their place within the greater scheme of things, and moved around a lot to prevent them establishing a power base.
This is why the administering angel who was good at blue sky thinking got moved to the waterworks after having been noticed. She was given oceans to do, and naturally, they came out blue too. It was his favourite colour. Given the perceived preferment bestowed upon him, the administrative angel in charge of algae came up with some fairly clashing colours to spoil the effect. She was missing the big picture though. Oceans are much bigger than algae and it was exhausting trying to make enough of the stuff to have a significant impact on the overall design of planetary water distribution. She did manage to ensure that some green blooms (blue and green should never be seen) were large enough to cause localized inconvenience and some of the red ones, although complimentary, caused large scale die-off in the populations of aquatic flora and fauna, which didn’t endear her to the fish and seaweed departments.
They complained and the seraphim in charge had her demoted to atoms, which showed a remarkable lack of foresight on his part because she came up with uranium, which was going to cause no end of trouble later on.
After the Lucifer debacle, god assigned administrators, guaranteed not to get along, to a committee for the task of designing an indigenous population for Australia. The kangaroo was the result of combining designs from the angel who’d invented the gerbil and one who’d given significant input to herbivores like sheep and antelope. It is uncertain where the idea for marsupials came from, but it might have had something to do with the works department, who liked to keep their tools in pouches strapped to their stomachs with belts.
Monotremes, like echidnas and platypuses, are variously constructed from the designs of hedgehog, duck, beaver and otter manufacturers, and are a clear example of the dangers inherent in allowing a committee to plan anything, even if it does prevent war in heaven. One can only assume that the devising of those venomous reptiles and arachnids peculiar to Australia, was given over to a couple of specialists, doubtless sulking over a mild case of sexual frustration and who needed to take it out on someone.
That sexual frustration is prevalent amongst those angels who are in charge of planet earth is amply illustrated by the occurrence of venereal disease. If VD isn’t a huge “Up Yours!” from a cynical and disillusioned administrator, I don’t know what it is. Just imagine what it must be like watching the population of an entire planet rutting away through eternity, when all you can hope for is a platonic kiss. I’m damned sure it would piss me off.
I have given considerable thought to the physical diversity apparent in the human population. Size, colour of skin, shape of eyes etc. etc. The only reason I can come up with is that there was a hope that we would control our own population by being constantly at war with each other. Birds of a father flock together, or so it’s said, and outsiders represent a threat to the natural order of things. Consequently we are designed to despise and hate difference, which is a good excuse for a scrap. Well, this works, up to a point, but I can only assume that the sexless divine completely failed to appreciate the sex drive of the mundanely mortal and the natural perversity of the human race, which has a habit of crying, “vive la difference,” even whilst killing each other.
One is left pondering the conundrum of the universe, desperately trying to find some order, some divine plan amidst the chaos which surrounds us. Some hope. If god and the angels don’t know what’s going on, how the hell can we ever figure it out?
