In the beginning was the swamp. Then God said, "Let there be Miami." And there was. Then he said, "Gimme some beaches with bikini-clad models while I'm at it." And there was that too. All was good.
But sometime during the past century, we Miamians went way wrong. Maybe it was the coke or boob implants. Or perhaps we're cursed for unleashing Vanilla Ice onto the world.
Whatever the reason, the Magic City has been hit by bizarre waves of wildlife infestations. Just this month, turbocharged bugs called "Caribbean crazy ants" have been stripping South Florida barer than Pharaoh's Egypt. The devastation is downright Biblical. In fact, by our calculation, we're 90 percent of the way through the Good Book's ten plagues...
You may be asking yourself, "What does a godless alt weekly like New Times know about the Bible?" Well, sir, let me tell you: more than a few of the twisted minds around this office ended up that way via Catholic education.
We know how to read the signs around us, and it ain't looking very good. Maybe Miami's not the Garden of Eden, after all...
1. The first plague was water. Way back when, Moses raised his staff over the Nile and turned its waters red. More recently, BP tapped the ocean floor like a beer keg and five million barrels of oil poured into the sea.
2. Frogs: Once again, South Florida has done God one better. We have long been plagued with softball-size, carnivorous bufo toads. One hundred of the unsightly bastards originally escaped from Miami International Airport half a century ago. They're still around.
3. Mosquitoes: They're like lice with wings. This summer, unprecedented clouds of the blood-sucking bastards drifted over our pastel city.
4. Flies: Make that dragon flies. A swarm bombarded Sun Life Stadium two weeks ago during a University of Miami football game. Although, to be fair, the creatures ran better routes than the hapless Canes.
5. Unhealable boils: Three words -- sexually transmitted diseases.
6. Hail and thunder: One word -- hurricane.
7. Livestock: Miami-Dade is a dangerous place to walk on four legs. If our santeros and illegal slaughterhouses don't kill 'em, our escaped Burmese pythons will.
8. Locusts: They may not fly, but "Caribbean crazy ants" will eat damn near everything. A hairy hoard of them nearly destroyed a chemical plant in Texas, where they were first spotted in the US more than a decade ago. Now they're in Miami-Dade.
9. Darkness: It sure is getting dark pretty early all of a sudden.
No death of the first-born yet. Whatever it is we've done wrong, God, let's skip this one.
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