Monday, June 7, 2021

The Hellfire Club

Maybe the thing about hell is that you can have arrived without even knowing you’re there. By any standards 2020 qualified as hell, particularly since its tortures were literally enjoyed by all the people on earth. You can assume that if you’re being singled out that’s not hell, but simply a case of bad luck. For instance, you can lose the lover, job and apartment all on the same day without having arrived in hell. It’s all contingent. You'll eventually end up in a new relationship, job and apartment. Once you get to hell, all bets are off. In fact the only difference between hell and 2020 is that there’s a 2021 in which hopefully the very elements that contributed to hell, Trump and coronavirus are alleviated. If you really go to hell, you’ll find Trump reigning for eternity and while the virus will no longer be deadly (since all the sinners are ostensibly dead), it will have mutated into a form even capable of tormenting the souls who've already arrived. "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." The famous line from Paradise Lost was quoted by Steve Bannon in Errol Morris's American Dharma.  In No Exit Sartre famously intoned, “Hell is other people." If you’ve ever been caught in one of those miserable conversations with a blabber mouth who won’t stop uttering inanities that you have to work overtime not to respond to, you have some idea of "quality of life” issues in hell. Here are some other qualities of hell. Nothing to look forward to, no romance or love (love and hell are oxymorons), and obviously no sex, since hell is full of stiffs who rarely do justice to their name.

Read "When a Stranger Doesn't Call" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

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