In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Some mortals question which god, exactly, did the creating. Was it the Christian god? Was it a Hindu god? A Greek god? Who knows? Some quibble with the whole “god” thing entirely, which really mucks up the discussion.

We’ll stick with the Christian god here, since I was raised Catholic and am a firm believer in both guilt and writing what you know. This approach isn’t meant to show favoritism. I just figure any divine being would find pragmatism an admirable trait in a mortal.

So on we go.

On the first day, God said “let there be light,” and there was light. And it was good. I mean, who’s going to argue with light? I assume there were beings in heaven — God’s subordinates, like hype-angels and such — who saw the light summoned and said, “Oh, wow. Yeah, that makes a big difference. Nice job with that, God.”

He continued to create stuff and…oops, I almost forgot. The pronoun thing. Humans early on decided God would be referred to using male pronouns. That was, I assume, fine with God, as He had given humans free will and brains and the ability to ponder things like which pronouns should be attached to an unseen deity. In retrospect, however, it might have been good if He (or She if you prefer, nobody really cares, least of all God — She’s got stuff to do) tweaked the human brain enough to prevent the discovery of pronouns. They wound up becoming a whole thing in the human race’s latter years. It got woefully dumb and caused many humans to babble loudly in a way that suggested their brains had given up and let their mouths take over. It was all a bad look for humans and, if I’m being honest, not a great look for the creator either.

Anyhoo, God kept creating stuff for six days, blah, blah, blah. The Bible makes it out to be some huge deal, but it seems an all-knowing, all-powerful god should be able to create a world in His (or Her, or Their) sleep. Still, let’s give the almighty His flowers. It was a fine planet He whipped up.

And it might have stayed a fine planet if not for us, the humans.

If you follow the Biblical story, our inability to resist apples and follow pretty basic instructions got us booted from the Garden of Eden. Sinful humans were cast out and foisted on the rest of the planet. I assume the garden is still doing fine in our absence. It probably relocated to a world populated by beings better able to control themselves.

If you prefer evolution, our species effectively stemmed from an ape who thought he was the smartest ape in the room. (This coincided with the creation of toxic masculinity.) The human race’s entire creation story, according to evolutionary biologists, involves us making monkeys feel inferior because we were the first ones to figure out we could bang things with rocks and rub sticks together to make fire.

Whether via Eden’s backdoor or by flexing our slightly-above-simian intellect, we humans ascended to the top of the food chain and started showing off our remarkable ability to ruin our surroundings.

Sure, we learned to farm, we came up with tools and language, and we eventually started writing stuff down and creating art and whatnot. But we also learned to dislike one another. We invented war, an exclusively male preoccupation that likely could’ve been avoided if the creator had just made sure all men felt secure in themselves and had the same size penis. (It’s a weird root to a problem, but it was undoubtedly the root to humanity’s woes.) We started figuring out more effective ways to kill each other, a hobby we never abandoned, and an ironic one when you consider how things worked out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Another distinctly human preoccupation, outside of the whole killing each other thing, was finding containers that could hold water. This went on for centuries, and might well have been cut off had therapists been invented sooner. Humans first used animal skins and hollowed-out gourds, but those weren’t reliable. Clay pots worked but were too fragile. Glass eventually came along, but that was too heavy and breakable. For creatures who are about 60% water, it was all pretty frustrating.

God would occasionally look down from heaven and think, “What is with these people and their container obsession? If they’re not busy killing each other, they’re busy worrying about how they’re going to carry water around. My other creations are SO much better than these numbskulls.”

Finally, in the 1950s, plastic bottles hit the scene. Oh, the stuff humans could put in those plastic bottles! Water. Soda. Chemicals and such. We hadn’t been this happy since the halcyon days before men started noticing some men have larger penises than others.

Plastic bottles kept coming, humans kept buying them, and because our brains were so elated with the convenience of it all, we ignored the fact that plastic lasts almost forever and the oceans and landfills were swiftly filling with discarded containers.

Who has time to worry about the future when you’ve finally got a quick and easy way to carry a beverage with you?

Humans kept on keeping on, doing some good stuff, doing a lot of bad stuff, fighting wars, worrying about comparable penis sizes, enjoying plastic bottles.

God, meanwhile, had given up on Earth and its inhabitants, occasionally referring to us as “my little whoopsie” and focusing His energy on planets populated by creatures far too advanced to worry about pronouns or war or plastic containers.

On Earth, in the early 2000s, humans became aware that microplastics — small plastic particles left behind as plastic slowly degrades — were turning up in ecosystems around the world, posing myriad health issues. This development caused a small reduction in the use of plastic bottles and other modern-day plastic conveniences.

Insulated stainless-steel bottles had a bit of a heyday. But by that point, the humans who were mad about pronouns were also mad at anyone who suggested they stop doing something. And the humans busy creating better ways to kill other humans had killing-related stuff to focus on and couldn’t be bothered. So they kept using plastic bottles to stay hydrated while they yelled about pronouns or made killing devices.

And eventually, to the utter dismay of those who devoted their lives to figuring out the most effective ways to kill people, everyone died of microplastics, including all the men. Even the ones with the largest penises.

God, to His credit, felt sorry for humanity and decided, in retrospect, that “free will” wasn’t the best idea. But He and His hype angels had to admit the end of humanity was quite hilarious.

“Those people and their bottles,” God said, as the angels laughed. “Ah, well. You can’t fix stupid.”