A Briefer, Intelligenter History of Time, Part One

So, I was at the gym–minding my own business, trying to make women in spandex return my eye contact–when one of my friends mentioned a post I wrote about primatologists experimenting with advertisements for monkeys. (WARNING: Bringing up my writing at the gym is dangerous because my resulting pride boner can get caught in weighted moving parts.)

He asked me what was the point of the research, and I said something along the lines that primatologists study behavior and other aspects in apes and monkeys to learn more about our common ancestors and what these mean about humans. Also, to sell these tiny jackets.

I say “along those lines” because I actually kind of fumbled around and mentioned “evolution.” As stated previously, I was caught unaware mid-workout, and all the blood had rushed to my … muscles.

His response? “Oh, I don’t really buy into evolution,” and then laid out evidence of a perfectly-ordered universe that only the Heavily-disputed Champion of Everything could have created.

I’ll be honest. After he laid it all out for me, I kind of want to believe in the god that did “Intelligent Design.” I can only imagine the process that created universal perfection as we know it. For the purposes of Creative Science, please imagine the following events unfolding over 4,000 years.

Jehovah, Age Zero

One the first day, before diapers were invented, the Almighty did issue forth a simultaneous sneeze, hiccup, cough, poop, fart and pee, and the resulting explosion, or Big Baby Bang, did carry his perfect waste across the void. Eventually (a fortnight later), this did congeal into the globs and shit that we now know to be quasars and shit today.

Jehovah, Age One

As he tried to clean up the mess before his father found out (the existence of whom just blew your mind), he attempted to push bits of booger-poop into more manageable clumps. It was no use picking them up because nobody had created Swiffers, yet, so he spread them into spirals to make it look like some benevolent overseer had bedazzled the nothingness. He called them “galaxies” that were composed of “stars,” and both sounded better than pee-barf.

Jehovah, Age Two

So, nobody seemed to mind the mess. Working his way in towards the stars, he discovered smaller globules that he missed around each. One of these was a pretty blue and brown sphere that made the other eight look like clown shit. And, this is where he set up shop. He stuck his finger in his mouth, burped and thus the Urth was named.

Yahweh, Age Five

Nicknamed Yahweh after displaying the emotional range of a minor deity, his motor skills improved, and he began making single-celled blobs. He then learned he could make these eat each other and slowly created more and more multi-celled beasts.

Yahweh, Age Six

For his mother, he created pretty flowers and plants. And when she was not looking, the Urth became Thunderdome. Fish eat plankton. Sharks eat fish. Bigger sharks eat those sharks. Trilobites eat the smaller sharks that those larger sharks pooped out.

Eventually, he grew tired of fish and sent them onto land, at first just to eat flowers because fuck flowers, that’s why. But the creation of legs did enable the next logical step: claws. And lo, did shit get real.

Critics would term this the beginning of “His Dinosaur Years.”

Yahweh, Age Ten

Dinosaurs began as a logical continuation of legged fish with claws and teeth, and then developed into an arms race between the monsters on flower-eating duty and the killing machines that made existence worth writing home about.

At first, he went big, trying to make an Brontosaurus so big that even he, himself could not eat it. Then, being Yahweh, he created a Tyrannosaurus Rex to prove he could. As the killing grew more boring, he created spikes and armor, first for the predators. When this made the killing even faster, he realized it might be more interesting to give these attributes to the flower-eaters. And, out of spite, he gave the Tyrannosaur even shorter arms to draw out battles with Tricerotops.

The critics all agreed that this was a very good plan and decreed that it would make for one good movie, one mediocre sequel and a third part that could still make money oversees from godless foreigners.

God, Age Fifteen

By fifteen, God became The God, his dinosaurs making all those other gods look like one note hacks. Everyone loved those terrible thunder lizards, and God had nothing but new ideas.

When the land was thoroughly dominated, he created Pterodactyls to terrorize from above.

Once the skies were filled with aerial dogfights, he took the battle to the seas, creating swimming dinosaurs to fight with his former heavyweights: giant sharks and crocodiles.

Opening a three-front smörgåsbord thrilled the critics.

God, Age Twenty

Five years of giant, winged Pterodons swooping up fish and Plesiosaurs snatching them straight of the air in front of perfectly rendered sunsets and erupting volcanoes had worn thin. Critics accused God of becoming a satire of himself when they couldn’t see a noticeable difference between Tyrannosaurs and Allosauruses. The Spinosaurus was panned as a cheap stunt, and the duck-billed Hadrosaur zany critics divided over whether its zany antics were merely pandering or also racist.

God attempted to introduce turtles, thinking their shells could be a real game changer, but that only provided critics with evidence of his dwindling imagination, perfect as it may be.

In frustration, God did wipe the canvas clean with a mighty meteor or plague or something Roland Emmerich-esque. Where creation would go next, nobody knew, but they were sure that the Age of God was over.

Next Week: Or Was It?!