Fuckin' hell, it's been a while. Life's been a bit hellish, but isn't it always?

'Hell' is supposed to be a swear word, dirty enough that we tell kids to say 'heck' instead (I just looked it up, and turns out, 'heck' was literally invented in the 1800s as a euphemistic alternative to 'hell').

I used to think that was a little weird, that 'hell' is a bad word. That I shouldn't say 'what the hell'. It doesn't feel that bad to say, you know?

Like, you can't say 'hello' without saying 'hell'.

I get that that's where bad people are supposed to go. A fantasy afterlife prison for the real-life assholes that we can't avenge in this lifetime. I get it. It's nice.

But not many people actually believe that it exists. At least people don't live like they do. They just sort of say: Eh, what the hell. How bad can it be?

Well, let's see how bad it can be.

This week, we swing by hell to say hell-o to:

• A study of hells throughout history
• A story of a very sad human
• A survey of hells around the world

In keeping with the theme, you might find what follows to be a little long, dry, and sad. One might even say, a bit hellish.

Ψ( `-´) (`-´ )Ψ

– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊ ⅋ yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑

Hell of an Idea

What the hell is it?

Hell is, as far as we know, a fictional place.

It is, by definition, the worst place ever. Presumably, its purpose is to scare us so we don't do 'bad' things. Or at least to let us hope that 'bad' people will suffer eventually.

It is, in essence, the absolute amalgamation of all our imagination of how all the bad people should suffer, forever.

So what did we think would be an appropriate punishment for all the assholes? What are our ideas of hell? What would really be the worst place ever?

I did some research.

Hell as physical torture

The Bible (1500 BC ~ 200 AD) and Dante's Inferno (c. 1321)

Let's start in the beginning. One would imagine that hell is all over the Bible. It's primarily a Judeo-Christian thing, after all. Right?

Not really. The Hebrew Bible talks about Sheol, which is often translated in the Old Testament as Hell. But it's described just as a listless place where the souls gather, not really a burning shithole for the assholes.

Surely, Jesus must talk about it then? Not really. In the early writings of the New Testament, Jesus talks about existential comeuppance, the big Judgment Day for the jackasses, but not really about any eternal fiery punishment for them.

Hell only shows up in the later books of the New Testament, written 200 years after Jesus. In the Apocalypse of Peter, Saint Peter checks out Hell and describes an-eye-for-an-eye torture for sinners. Liars hung by their tongues, murderers bitten by snakes, wealthy wearing filthy rags.

A brief history of hell

The history of hell doesn’t begin with the Old Testament. Instead, hell took shape in the 2nd century from Mediterranean cultural exchange.

Big ThinkKevin Dickinson

Dante's Inferno describes hell with a similar quid-pro-quo penal code, but with a cool ranking system. It has 9 circles, grouped into 3 categories, getting worse as you go deeper.

The first category, and the least bad, is incontinence – no, not for peeing, but rather for lacking self control for base urges. People here are: lustful, gluttonous, greedy, and wrathful/sullen. Lustful are blown by winds, befitting their restlessness. Gluttonous mire in filthy sludge. Greedy fight each other. Wrathful and sullen are drowning in a river, consumed by their anger and sadness.

The second is violence, all happening in the 7th circle, which is further divided into 3 types: violence against others, against oneself, and against God/Art/Nature. Respectively, they are in boiling blood, eaten alive by harpies, and burning with fiery sand and rain.

The third and the most evil is fraud. In the 8th circle, there's a bunch of sub-levels here too – liars, seducers, flatterers, sorcerers, thieves, hypocrites – and they're all eaten up, beaten up, cut up, drowning in shit, burning or boiling in a pit. Finally, in the deepest 9th circle are the betrayers – of family, country, guests, and masters – and they're all freezing to death, except, well, they can't die.

It's interesting to try to rank all the bad we can do: our animalistic urges, our beastly violence, and ultimately, our inhumane betrayal. As social animals, it feels right that our animal-like behaviors are bad, but not as bad as our un-human behaviors, like screwing over each other.

Regardless of the sin, though, the punishment is all the same: gruesome physical torture. This must've been terrifying for people who lived in ancient times, when insane tortures were common and very imaginable.

But do you find this scary? Doesn't it feel like a distant fantasy? It probably doesn't resonate that much for modern people, who mostly live in physical comfort. So what would be a good punishment for them?

Hell as social torture

C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce (1944) and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (1945)

These two guys updated hell for the modern folks of the 20th century. One was a devout Christian and the other a raging existentialist, but they both reimagined hell – less as a sadistic torture chamber of fire and blood, and more as, well, regular life.

In The Great Divorce, Lewis describes hell as a 'grey town'. It's just a sad town that's raining all the time. People there just live regular lives, with all of their sinful behaviors from their time on earth. So everyone is kind of being an asshole in their own way. They get sick of each other, and keep moving further and further away, eventually living in solitude and stuck in their ways.

In No Exit, Sartre zooms in even more to the unbearable coexistence with other humans. In the play, three people arrive to hell and are sent to a room. They expect some torture chamber, but it's just a nice room. In it, they constantly judge and annoy the shit out of each other. They are unable to rip off the oppressive labels given by others, to cast away their desire for their approval, and to be fully free – to be unapologetically themselves. By the end of the play, one of them realize that, instead of physical punishment, 'hell is other people'.

One shared feature of these two modern hells is that you can leave at any time. In Lewis' grey town, all you need to do is literally take a bus to heaven, then repent their sins. But the residents are too proud, obsessed, and angry to do that. They would much rather just live as they always did in grey town. In Sartre's hell hotel, one character is surprised to find that the door just opens when he wants to leave – but he can't leave without getting others to tell him that he is not a coward. As Lewis writes: 'the doors of hell are locked on the inside'.

In both, hell is just regular life and regular people, just with the same bad habits of ours and the old judgy eyes of others. We are free to break these habits and break free from others, but as we know all too well, we don't.

Now, that's a little scarier, a bit too close to reality. But because it's so realistic, it also seems doable. We can just live your life in a room in a grey town, with the garden variety of assholes we already know, as we already do.

Hell as psychological torture

The Good Place (2016-2020) and Lucifer (2016-2021)

So hell gets another update for the contemporary world, in a contemporary media of choice: television.

In Lucifer, hell just takes whatever you feel guilty about, and replays it over, and over, and over again. That hurtful thing you did to someone, that shameful thing you feel bad about, repeated, forever. And like Lewis' town and Sartre's room, you can leave as soon as you face your own guilt – but no one ever does.

In The Good Place, hell is 'The Bad Place' going through a new experimental renovation – from a physical torture fest to a soul-sucking psychological one. It's carefully constructed to look like it's a wonderful place with personally matched with soulmates – but it's actually people that annoy you and things that play on your insecurities and weaknesses. It's like the grey town, except it's bright and beautiful – which makes it more subtly insidious. You keep pretending to be good, not to be annoyed, and not to feel guilty. The world looks wonderful on the outside, so you put on a happy face, while it sucks you dry from the inside.

These contemporary visions of hell is, well, just you, right now. That thing that whispers at you when you close your eyes to go to sleep, that thing that you can't bear to tell anyone or even yourself, that façade you put on every day without even knowing. It's the really scary shit, that's so scary that you never even really think about it.

Hell as yourself, here and now

Tracing these hells of our ideas, we see the reflection of our fears.

When we feared God and torture, hell used to be a big group activity. Filled with unimaginable physical pain, condemned by the godly judgment. Then as we began to not worry about God or torture, hell becomes our quotidian coexistence. Looming with suffocating social pressures, condemned by other's judgments. And as life became more comfortable and individual, hell becomes an extremely personal experience. Drowning in our own dark psychological pain, condemned by our very own self.

Our darkest failures are our own deepest fears. The worst place ever is where all those failures live – all those things we try to ignore with those numbing substances, those mindless distractions, or even those confessions we make to our friends and therapists. Hell is yourself, here and now, underneath it all.

Now that you've suffered through this long academic anthology of hell, it might be a good time to ask: What does your hell look like?

Reflections from a Life of Fat L’s

A major tone deviation

The biggest loser in the world sits on his deathbed in his house, surrounded by people who marginally care about him. A debt collector, the day’s door to door coffin salesman, and a nurse are present by his side. Broke, depressed, and classically angry; he only knows the foothills of hate. He can’t get up or see beyond them for every earnest step he’s taken on this planet led him towards the empty side of a cliff. During rare moments of inspiration, he lowered his head and ran vigorously into brick walls. Nothing brought him success and inspiration has left his life.

The salesman bends over gently and whispers in a friendly tone, “Would you like to order the faux cherry walnut coffin? If you order it by today, we could get it at a 15% discount.” He tilts his head and examines its color behind glossy paper. Faux cherry walnut is the same material as the headboard the love of his life sleeps under with her husband. He groans, “That would be nice.”

The debt collector watches this transaction with wild, beady eyes. “Big guy, huh? You really think you’re going to buy a nice coffin before you settle your debt? That’s not how this works.” The greasy palmed gentlemen squats down to rest his elbow upon his knee, bringing his face close to the loser’s. Quietly, he whispers, “If you think this debt is going to die with you, think again. While you rot in your faux cherry walnut coffin, I’m gonna take your soul and make a ghost out of it, haunting the suckers you care about until I get my money.” It was hard to think of who he meant. Maybe the chatty cashier at his favorite grocery store? She didn’t have much money. The loser lies mulling over the options as the debt collector huffs and stands to meet the eyes of the nurse, who glares back.

She turns her face to the loser and says sweetly, “I have to go out to check on other patients, but could you write down a message for visitors who might come by the house? Just like a little out-of-office message. I know, no one has made a visit yet, but it’s protocol.” She doesn’t leave a pen or paper. Regardless, he’s in no state to write anything. The light on his face seems to be fading and his body begins to ease, as if he’s losing control of it.

Watched by strange eyes, he begins to drift from the placating security of a next breath. He always knew he would die, but never thought it would be soon. Too scared to hyperventilate, he feels the blood vessels under his skin contract as his heart begins to race. Regret swallows him whole and squeezes the purest form of human emotion into his body. A tincture of concentrated feeling reaches the depths of his bones as he closes his eyes and views his position from an exterior perspective for the first time.

Rising from the pinhole of perception he’s been confined to for so long, a vision of clarity forms in his hollowed soul. He can see everything. A slideshow of wrecked experiences flashing through his mind faster than film rushes through a projector. Ascending skyward, he knows he is approaching the end and points his attention to the mangled sculpture of experience only he himself was responsible for building. Wretched, twisting, rusty at its joints, and screeching from the friction, it hisses at him, “Why did you make me like this?”

Zooming away at the speed of light, he opens his eyes to meet the odd crew at the foot of his bed. He draws a laborious breath and speaks his final words,

“You know what? I learned a lot.”

As if it mattered.

p.s. everyone learns a lot in their life, because they are born with very little knowledge.

p.p.s. what will you say?

What the fuck is happening on I-71 in Ohio?

Road trip from Cincinnati to Columbus

Between Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio is a hair-raising stretch of road which seems to exist for the purpose of putting drivers into oblique headspaces beyond the realm of everything they have felt outside its bounds. Let’s buckle up and take a drive from Cincinnati to Columbus.

A Reddit comment I found from a crushed soul

From https://www.reddit.com/r/MacMiller/s/JaT7T58j6r:

I feel like no matter what I end up doing I will never truly escape the weight of the world. The way we live is so against my soul, down to the core of it. It’s like I have felt so much fear, doubt, anxiety, stress and sadness my whole life that I sort of feel nothing now. It feels like I’ve been suffocating forever but I can never fully die. Instead I just sit in an idle state of apathy and let everything pass me by.

— fryedmonkey

🥹 fryedmonkey this edition is for you dawg 🥹

A Wild Paragraph

This paragraph is not naturally occurring and has no habitat. It is controlled, tame, and insular. For this reason, it is not a wild paragraph. It is thinking about getting a few tattoos and posting thirst traps on Instagram though.

Hell is in Michigan

Now, unsatisfying theories of why it's called Hell:

Hell has been noted on a list of unusual place names.^[7] There are a number of theories for the origin of Hell's name.

The first is that a pair of German travelers stepped out of a stagecoach one sunny afternoon in the 1830s, and one said to the other, "So schön hell!" (translated as, "So beautifully bright!") Their comments were overheard by some locals and the name stuck.^[6]

Oh, 'Hell' means 'Bright' in German? So this could've been Brighton?

Also, what kind of locals hear some foreigners say '....hell!' and decide to name their town after it?

The second theory is tied to the "hell-like" conditions encountered by early explorers including mosquitos, thick forest cover, and extensive wetlands.^[6]

Why the fuck would you settle here then? Did no one say 'This place kind of sucks, we should find somewhere else'?

Also, hell is supposed to be on fire? Not wetlands?

A fourth is that soon after Michigan gained statehood, George Reeves was asked what he thought the town he helped settle should be called and replied "I don't care. You can name it Hell for all I care." The name became official on October 13, 1841.^[6]

A true expression of zero fucks given. I can get behind this.

Hell, Michigan - Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects

Hell is also in Cayman Islands

I wish I could say it's for all the directors of incorporated shell companies.

But it's from the limestone formations in the area.

Hell, Grand Cayman - Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects

Hell is also in Norway

And it has 1,589 residents as of 2018.

But it doesn't really mean hell:

The name Hell stems from the Old Norse word 'hellir', which means "overhang" or "cliff cave". It has a more common homonym in modern Norwegian that means "luck".

What a lucky town.

Hell, Norway - Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects

Santa Claus is a Doomed Soul

I think it's a burden to be Santa Claus. An unrelenting calendar sweeps decades of work onto your doorstep every single year. You have to live in the most isolated, cold, remote place on Earth. Your diet is entirely cookies, and every meal makes you feel swollen and gross.

It is likely that the job of Santa Claus is assigned to a doomed soul upon entry to Hell by Satan himself.

quotes.txt

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

– Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina

Hell is other people.

– Jean-Paul Sartre, in No Exit

The doors of hell are locked from the inside.

– C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

– Proverb

Neither the pure land nor hell exists outside oneself; both lie only within one’s own heart.

– Nichiren, a Japanese Buddhist Philosopher

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil

sound.wav

prompts.bib

• 𝔠𝖔𝔳𝖊𝔯 Satan Claus
  /imaginesanta clause but demon themed santa clause, like a fiery sleigh and demonic reindeer flying through hell
• 𝖆𝔯𝖙𝔦𝖋𝔞𝖈𝔱 1 We all know Hell
  /imagine a woman at a desk is lost in a dream. the dream is displayed as a thought bubble above his head. in his dream, he is burning in hell
• 𝖆𝔯𝖙𝔦𝖋𝔞𝖈𝔱 2 There's no going back
  /imagine a bus pulls up to a bus stop in hell. it's destination is "heaven" which is displayed in its window
• 𝖆𝔯𝖙𝔦𝖋𝔞𝖈𝔱 3 A mangled sculpture of experience
  /imagine A slideshow of wrecked experiences flashes through his mind faster than film rushing through a projector. Ascending skyward, he knows he is approaching the end and points his attention to the mangled sculpture of experience only he himself was responsible for building. --v 6.0