“I don’t know what to tell you,” Satan said. “We don’t have the money so you’re just going to have to find a way to function with dirty gas lines.”
“But dat’s the thing we’re second best known for,” Minos said. “Our flickering hellfire. It’s pathetic for a buncha jerks ta come in here and the first thing they see is unlit caverns wid no flickerin’ hellish flames.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Satan said, and then he ducked through a crowd of damned souls and darted into a tunnel before Minos could tell him about more things that were falling apart.
On the way to his office, Satan was accosted at least a dozen times: was more liquefied feces on the way? When was the announcement going out about the “Flogging & Flaying: Important Differences for Field Practitioners” workshop? Could they devise new punishments for the suicide bombers to differentiate them better from traditional suicides? Rats? Why did the rats keep vanishing? Were the goblins eating them again? Or was it the giants, who loved squashing them with rocks? Who was going to tear the flesh of the faithless if they didn’t have any rats?
It took Satan an hour to get to his office and the entire time it was nonstop questions, questions, questions. By the time he dragged himself through his office door, he felt like he was full of lead. He left the lights off, felt his way around his desk and sunk down into his chair. It was peaceful in the dark. It was quiet. It was calm. He thought about massaging his forehead again.
“Yo,” someone said. “What does it take to get some Bronson up in here?”
Satan squealed and fell over backwards. Grabbing at his desk he managed to switch on the lamp and saw something horrible sitting Indian style in the interview chair across from him. It was vaguely human but what human would claim this thing as its child? Its jeans were tight, and clung to its stick-like legs. Around its concave chest was draped a baggy, waist-length cardigan and a v-necked t-shirt with its own face airbrushed onto it. And that face! Hideous beyond measure! Its hair hung in dry, frizzy sheets to its shoulders, and out of it crawled two bushy sideburns that dragged themselves down across its cheeks until they met over this thing’s upper lip. There were piercings in its chin and tongue and from its entire body radiated a sense of unsettling emptiness. It was all style and no substance, a human broadcast antenna for the latest fads, a toxic hole in Creation. It was unclean. It was unreal. It was unholy. Ironically, it threw a gang sign.
Satan screamed.
“Sir, what is - ?” Nero burst in and saw what was in the chair and he froze in horror. “A hipster,” he gasped.
There are some who say that hipsters are young, recently-settled urban middle class adults or older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture. There are others who say they are scum-sucking crybabies from the bowels of Hell. Those who have been to the bowels of Hell know a harder truth: hipsters are the pollution of eternity.
Every particle in Creation has an associated antiparticle with the same mass, but an opposite electrical charge. There are neutrons and antineutrons, protons and antiprotons, matter and antimatter, gravity and antigravity. There are sentient beings and then there are hipsters. Just as matter and antimatter brought into contact will annihilate each other, so too will conscious, rational life and the hipster destroy each other if they are forced to share the same space. Hipsters hate work, passion, duty, honor, loyalty and anything that requires time, dedication or commitment. They embrace crappy beers like Pabst Blue Ribbon, they love crappy bands like Vampire Weekend, crappy sports like kickball and crappy furniture. They tell themselves that their love of these things is ironic, but love is love and how long can you pretend to love something before you debase the very notion of love?
In their passionate embrace of all that is meaningless, in their insistence on inserting irony into every facet of their lives, in their mindless worship of the cheap and shoddy, hipsters negate all that they touch. Worse than that, they have no souls. When a hipster dies their body is taken back to their hometown where they are stripped of their Eighties retro finery by heartbroken parents, their nineteenth century facial hair is shaved off, their labial piercings are removed