The Pastafarian Wurm

My life changed when one afternoon some construction work caused my bus to take a little detour, and I got off on a different stop than usual. It was a sunny day, and I was in no hurry, though I can't for the life of me remember where I was going back then. It doesn't really matter now, of course. You see, I learned that day the mysterious ways in which even the simplest of creature may be used to do the work of Divine Providence.
I saw a Wurm, as long as a car and likely as heavy, coiled up by the sidewalk, with a sort of nest built from cardboard boxes and newspapers, with a tent made from garbage bags, held in place by a bunch of sticks. It had taken some building, but it was obvious she was planning on staying in that nest for a long time, and that meant she was a vagrant.
I was a horrible person then, and thought of avoiding her, in fear that she might rob me. Now of course I knew even then that Wurms are not malicious, but if she asked me for money there was no way I could refuse. A greater force guided my steps though, and I walked by her. I couldn't avoid her, for she was holding a piece of cardboard with some writing on it, and my curiosity was aroused when I saw what it said:
"ThEnd iS NiEr!"
Were it a hobo from the River Styx or some other undesirable, I would have thought it the ravings of a lunatic. But she was a Wurm, and there has not to this day been a documented case of a Wurm with a mental illness - there isn't enough complexity there to leave room for malfunctions. I couldn't help but stare at her. And she stared back.
"Would you like some noodles sir?"
That's what she asked me. Has anything like this ever happened to you?
"Noodles?" I asked, dumbstruck. What a random question, I thought then.
"Yeah, noodles. Would you like some?", and with that she revealed she had several duffel bags in her nest, an opening one up she revealed that they were full of cup noodles. A man could live his entire life without ever experiencing such a scene.
"How much is it?" I asked, thinking I might get away from this madness if I say the price is too steep. Wurms aren't much good at haggling, right?
"Oh, they're free!" she happily replied, handing it to me. "I could heat it up if you want to eat it now!" she said, and sure enough, she had a hotplate. And a generator for it. She was prepared alright.
I checked the cup and it wasn't expired, so I saw no harm in eating it. So I asked her to heat it up. She heated up one for herself as well, and gave me a dirty pillow to sit on, asking me to join her. What was I to do? I joined her in that meal that I hadn't planned on. We ate the stuff with chopsticks - and I knew how to use them because a Kappa I used to date took me to a sushi restaurant - and she smiled rather happily.

"What do you think one should drink with noodles?" she asked me all of a sudden.
Has this question ever occurred to you? It hadn't to me. It seemed inconsequential, so I shrugged and told her as much.
"As good an answer as any. But what does it mean?" she replied.
That was silly.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked, feeling like it was about time I left.
"That's a little too deep, ahaha!"
Nothing to say to that.
"I meant - hehe, meant - to ask that what you think it tells about you? Your answer, I mean"
Meanings everywhere.
"What?"
"I asked you what you think one should drink with noodles. You said it's inconsee-queentii-all, and now I want to know what you think it tells about yourself and the world. It's a metaphor, you know?"
I did not know, and of course I just stared at her confused.
"Uhh, did I say it wrong? I did, didn't I? Oooh, how did it go then... the noodles are life, you know? They're the stuff that, uhh, the sust-ee-nancy, yeah, and the drink is about... sub-stance, yeah. You know?"
She was using difficult words. I did not know. But I couldn't help but ask her.
"Why are you trying to use something like this as a metaphor? And why do you think the world is coming to an end?"
These were to my mind the pertinent questions.

"The end is near" she said, quite seriously, nodding her hand for emphasis. "If you've got the time, I can tell how I found out".
Of course I had the time, but I didn't want to stay. To keep me from leaving her, however, fate intervened and a rain pour began, preventing me from exiting her abode.
"Fine, tell me" I said, and that may well have been the point of no return.
"I was just a wee little thing then... well, I'm a wee little thing NOW, and it was really just the other day, by which I mean that... I just wanted to make it sound more, convincing, you know? Uhh, so! The story. Did you know that all the world's religions are wrong?"
While I had no fedora, I agreed with her. Most religions tended to be wrong in one way or another.
"That's because people and Monsters are not inflatable, not even the Pharaohs!"
I'm sure she meant to say infallible.
"But that doesn't mean that there isn't a loving God! Just like the silly Christmasians eat ham in remembrance of Santa, so do we, the Pastafarians, eat pasta in all it's forms!"
This was both confusing AND not a story.
"I'm getting ahead of myself. I was just excited. *ahem*" she cleared her throat as if to sound more important. She was a silly thing.

"Like I said, I was wee little thing, and my Mom had promised to cook dinner since Dad had to go somewhere and do something, and so Mom had to cook dinner!"
She had said that bit twice in the same sentence, and it was not on purpose.
"So Mom decided to make spaghetti. And I'd never even seen that kind of thing before, because Dad was like, a gourd chef, and there meatballs in it, and when I looked at it, I thought it was really suspicious!"
She was getting excited, and I think she might have meant that her father was a "gourmet" chef.
"So I asked Mom if it was alive. She said it couldn't be, because she'd boiled the pasta and because the meat was already food and because the sauce was made with tomatoes and tomatoes aren't alive, but I didn't believe her! I asked her what the pasta was, because I had seen it and it had been all dry and crunchy and it didn't taste like anything when I ate it, but now it was all wormy and soft and bigger than it had been! So I asked her if it was a Monster and if we were eating Monsters, because I had seen that movie the other day even though I wasn't allowed to, but my friend  had it so we watched it, you know that movie, the fat guy with the moustache says he'll eat up the Elf..."
At this point I was shaking my head. She was even younger than I thought.
"What does any of this have to do with the world coming to an end?"
The Wurm stared at me for a bit.
"Oh. Right, I saw on the internet that global wanking started when pirates began to go out of style, so the less pirates there are, the more wankers there are, and if there's too much wanking and no booty plundering, we will all go extinct because wanking doesn't make babies!"
This was the most nonsensical thing I had heard so far.
"But there are pirates right now, you know? I mean, they don't have peg legs and eye-patches, but they still rob boats and hold people for ransom..."
"The Somalians aren't pirates! They're just bandits! At sea! Being a pirate is ALL about the costumes and the talking and 'argh' and the Parrot Harpies and the plundering and the kidnapping of little boys to keep as cabin boys! Being a pirate is a holy thing, there are rules about how to go about it, otherwise you're a sea-bandit or a corsair or a nerd downloading My Little Centaur illegally!"
This was a curious statement as well, but it had some logic behind it. The romance of piracy was dead in the world, it continued to exist only in fiction. Men and Monsters alike had a yearning for it. She was right about that, even if the rest of what she was saying was... silly, to put it nicely. I told her I agreed with her, just to humour her.
The Wurm smiled at me happily and nodded with enthusiasm.
"But why do you say pirates have anything to do with noodles?" I asked, as I didn't want to bring up 'global wanking' with her anymore.
"Oh! That's because the Flying Spaghetti Monster invented pirates!"
I couldn't help but laugh at her. What an outrageous thing!
"Pastafarianism teaches that everybody deep down likes pirates because they represent the way of life the Flying Spaghetti Monster thinks is good for everybody, being free and having fun with people you like, but in real life people and Monsters persevered it and it turned into something bad, and then so-city started to hate them!"
She got some words wrong again, but the most important thing here was that her narrative was starting to show some consistency.
"So what does all this have to do with your mother cooking spaghetti?" I asked, hoping to get her on track now that she had gotten some of this out of her system.
She stared at me blankly for a bit again.
"Oh. I thought the spaghetti was a Monster, so I got scared of eating it, but Mom didn't want me to be picky, so she told me that the meatballs used to be cows too and that it had never bothered me before, but I told her that cows aren't Monsters and that they smell funny! So she told me that if Dad got home and I hadn't cleaned my plate, I'd get eaten by the Early Bird, but I'm not a little kid anymore and I know that the Early Bird doesn't exist! So she started to eat first, and she was all pouty!"
So even as adults, Wurms kept some of their childishness. Still, the one before me had gotten hyped up again. How do you calm a fussy Dragon down?
"Neither me or Mom ate it. When Dad came home, Mom told on me, and Dad patted both our heads and told us about how pasta was born!"

Now we were getting somewhere. Her story did not go any further, unfortunately, because that's when her parents showed up. Her mother was twice her size and lifted her in the air for a tight hug, babbling something all the while and carrying her right off.
The father seemed very embarrassed.
"I apologize for the trouble, sir" he said.
"It's fine" I replied. The girl had given me a lot to think about. "But I'm just curious about something..."
"W-what? Look, she didn't STEAL that pasta or anything, she used all the savings in her Orcy-bank, and she got a discount because she bought it in bulk, so there's nothing illegal happening here..."
"That's not what I meant. She told me all kinds of silly things, you see, and I kind of wanted to get something cleared up..."
He laughed awkwardly.
"I'm sure she has all kinds of stories to tell! She's always been good with her imagination. When she was younger, she once thought she was The Hungry Caterpillar and chewed through a tree. She lost a lot of baby teeth that time, hahaha..."
I laughed with him, politely. Men with Monster daughters couldn't help but talk about them at every opportunity.
"She was about to tell me what you told her the origin of pasta was..."
"Oh? Ahaha... that thing... uhh, it's nothing special, don't worry about it"
"But I'm curious now. Whatever you told her, it sent her here. It must've been something interesting!"
He sighed.
"Fine, I guess there's no harm in it... help me carry these bags and I'll tell you on the way..."
We started to pick up the duffel bags with the pasta in them. Apart from them, the generator and the hot plate, there was nothing here worth picking up. Truly an ascetic adobe.

"I had to get her to eat the stuff, and she refused to believe it wasn't a Monster, because, well, you know how pasta changes when you cook it... anyway, I though I'd try something different and decided to AGREE with her, that it WAS originally a part of a Monster. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I don't remember where I heard about it first, but I remember hearing about it once. I think it was a metaphor or something. But I told her that the Flying Spaghetti Monster lived in outer space and had seen the state of the world long ago, back when things were really bad - and I didn't have to tell her any horror stories here, she fills in the blanks on her own - and that it didn't want people or Monsters to suffer, and so it invented things like pirates - you know, kids love pirates, so I thought she'd be won over - and that it had created pasta as a way to share goodness with others. I know that doesn't really make any sense, I mean I was thinking about the communion of the Catholics when I said it, but how do you explain to a kid something like 'eat this, for it is my body', I mean that's just messed up, uhh, no offence if you're a... well anyway, I told her that pasta was a way to share the good feelings you had in you with others, just like the Flying Spaghetti Monster had done long ago. That did the trick. She ate it happily and apologized to her mother and everything"
An anticlimax if there ever was one. This had been a weird encounter, and once all the stuff had been packed in their minibus - big enough for two Wurms AND cargo! - they thanked me, apologized again, and drove on their way. I was free again. The rain had stopped at some point, and I hadn't even noticed.
Having completely forgotten what I had been out to do, I began to ponder this event. A silly thing she had been, to be certain. But despite her being a silly little Wurm, she had taken this... mess of a narrative, this story of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its ambiguous teachings, and she had gone out to the streets to help people out, with warnings and free pasta to share good feelings with them. She didn't expect to gain anything from it, she didn't even think she was doing anything exceptional. She just took what little information she had obtained, and then acted upon it, doing her best to do good, not for the sake of doing good in an of itself, but doing good nonetheless. Things like ethics did not enter her mind at any point. She acted on instinct.
So that's when it hit me. If she could come up with something like this without any help, how much more wisdom could she have inside her, waiting to come out, if someone tried to coax it a little? I know that the idea of a Wurm as a moral teacher might sound... well, downright stupid, but think about it. What is more important, a wealth of knowledge, great intellect and the wisdom to use it, or a pure mind and an innocent heart? Of course the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist, it's a silly idea. But what does it matter? Man and Monster alike need to believe in something greater than themselves sometimes, and having a deity adds more weight to our teachings. But some have seen past that kind of thing, and for them the FSM is a joke to enjoy, as it is a silly thing to believe in. For those who believe in it, it's silliness is just a representation of the divine mysteries. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is not what's important here. What is important is the creation of a... movement. A religion and philosophy to end all religions, a way to achieve the maximum amount of happiness for the maximum amount of people. THAT is what we are about.
This must be a lot to chew, I know, but would you like some noodles?