The Eleventeenth Circle of Hell

I haven’t read the Divine Comedy since I was a kid. That’s why I felt I needed to brush up on it before I improved it some. Don’t laugh. Dante was always cheating off me in Math class, although he was a teacher’s pet in Latin. So I feel like if anyone’s going to fix it, I should.

I guess first we should go over the original circles of Hell, in case you’ve forgotten where your iPhone handbasket travel agent, Steve Jobs, is sending you eventually. Yeah, I’ve seen what you’re scrolling through over your shoulder at the airport. Tsk. Tsk.

But I don’t judge, lest I be judged. And hooboy, I’d rather face the Doges in Venice than any angels who’ve heard what I’ve been muttering to myself lately. So let’s visit the nether regions together, and see how we’re going to fare, if Dante, revised, is to be believed.

Limbo:

No, no. Harry Belafonte is not involved, and no funky dancing, although the bar will still be set pretty low, as they say. There are no umbrellas in the drinks. The first circle of Hell is like the airport lounge when you’re snowed in. You’re not punished exactly, but your flight’s delayed indefinitely, and you have to hang around with allegedly virtuous people who don’t have their Christian Airlines boarding pass. Believe me, though, no matter how confusing the similarity in names might be, Christian Airlines has nothing to do with Spirit Airlines:

That’s not limbo. That’s demonic possession. We’ll explore that another time.

Lust:

The second circle treats its denizens to an unrelenting wind that blows them to and fro. It’s a fitting punishment for anyone who is swept away by excessive sexual desire. I guess the modern version of this would be living in a trailer park with a girl you knocked up when you had your beer goggles on. You’re waiting for God to send a retributive tornado to settle your hash, which by the way came out of a can, and is burning on the little stove you got in your single-wide.

Gluttony:

This is where cable TV chefs end up, I guess. The original description of eternal life in the third circle is lying in filthy, freezing slush while being pelted with icy rain and hail. Occasionally, the neighbor’s vicious dog (Cerberus) tears at your flesh. Since this is an exact rundown of what it’s like to live in western Maine, except the part about getting enough to eat in the first place, there’s no need to update it. Let’s move on.

Greed:

If you’ve been hoarding wealth, or raiding your kid’s piggy bank to go to the racetrack, this will be your zip code, forevermore. Your punishment is rolling heavy weights against one another until the end of time, accompanied by lots of clashing noises and shouting. So basically you get a job in an Amazon warehouse without a timeclock. Don’t drink out of the golden pop  bottles you find lying around.

Wrath:

Remember, it’s not just rage that can plop you in this circle. Silent sulking will punch your ticket as well. I’m a stone cold lock for this circle. I’m an anger polymath, as you well know, so I’m actually able to silently sulk with my left hemisphere while berating counter help at fast food joints with my right hemisphere. The punishment for wrath has two tiers, like airplane tickets. The first class wrathful fight on the surface of the river Styx. If you’re flying sullen coach, you gurgle just beneath the surface, stuck in the mud while the plain angry folks stomp on your heads. Since I qualify both ways, I’ll just wade around, I guess, and get trespassed from Spirit Airlines.

Heresy:

This ring is for denial of the soul’s immortality or other core Christian beliefs, or maybe putting Canadian quarters in the donation basket on Sunday. The punishment is being entombed in flaming graves for eternity. I’m currently in Merida, Mexico, and I’m getting used to the climate. At this point, if I was put in a flaming grave, I’d probably ask Beelzebub if I could go home to get a blanket.

Violence:

This one is way too complicated, Dante. He says there’s three rings inside the seventh ring, but there are only nine rings, total. I told you he was bad at math. We get it, violence is bad. And all kinds of violence is mentioned. According to Dante, if you’re a blaspheming, sodomizing, credit card company executive, you’re going to have a very bad time in the afterlife. It’s not specified exactly what APY qualifies you for eternal damnation, but I think only secured credit card rates qualify you for Limbo, instead.

Fraud:

Oh come on, Dante. There are ten different ditches in the eighth circle. Again with the bad math. The ditches have seducers, flatterers, false prophets, hypocrites, thieves, and several other kinds of politicians in them. I’m not sure if a voter could get in.

Treachery:

Dante was running out of parchment again, so there are four demi-hells in the final circle of Hell.  You’ll be frozen in ice for your sins, so I guess you could wave to the gluttons from your ice cube tray. Right in the center is Satan himself, eternally chewing on Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. Wow, who knew stabbing Caesar was  even worse than nailing the son of God to a tree?

OK, so there’s rings inside of circles with a flaming excavator for a bunch of unpleasant ditches. We get it. But honestly, with the passage of time, these punishments don’t scare anyone anymore. We need some new circles to keep the average person on the straight and narrow. I can thing of a few. How about a circle with really crummy wifi? Not a complete lack of wifi. That would be paradisaical. Just slow. Remember dial-up? Yeah, you’d be up half the night just downloading half a picture of a naked girl. Barely enough to get you into the Lust Circle.

I can think of some others. You know, maybe one circle could be a tattoo parlor in a leper colony. Stuff like that. But I’m often reminded of  a quotation from Mark Twain:

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

In the words of Yogi Berra (maybe), Mark Twain never said half the things he said.  But that sure sounds like him. It’s an understandable comment if you’re a bit of a rogue with an active mind. There certainly is plenty of bad weather in Dante’s circles, to go with the inelegant arithmetic. But on the flip side, Brutus and Cassius would probably be interesting company, even while being devoured. Judas Iscariot would have plenty of coins for the jukebox of the damned. It wouldn’t be that awful.

Maybe we should come up with a new circle of hell that’s an unbelievable torment, and a stone cold groove at the same time. I think I’ve found it. Ladies and germs, I give you a Mexican bowling alley, the Eleventeenth, Funnest Circle of Hell:

I don’t think I’ll insult my Mexican friends by observing that Mexicans are not known for being quiet. They all told me they weren’t, so I didn’t have to figure it out on my own. I’ll also observe that where I live, Augusta, Maine, it’s louder than Mexico. The difference is that in Augusta, everyone is trying to be loud in order to annoy other people. They drive absurd pickup trucks and riced-out Civics with tailpipes the size of Dinty Moore cans and race up and down the streets blattering and backfiring. The motorcycles are Harleys with straight pipes and boombox radios playing heavy metal they can’t hear, but I sure do. As one of my teachers used to observe when a loud car drove by, “That’s all the noise they’re likely to make in this world.” Bothering other people is the only true American art form.

A Mexican bowling alley isn’t like that. Don’t get me wrong, it was louder than ten Sherman tanks with bees and fender washers in their hubcaps. But it was a brand of Happy Loud that the United States no longer celebrates. We put ourselves outside of enough beers to get our decks awash, and everyone in our group got a strike that we observed but couldn’t hear over the Mexican disco torch songs, the clatter of the balls, and the delightful incomprehensible Spanish chatter from the other lanes.

So to quote Twain again, for sure, right out of Huckleberry Finn’s mouth:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.”

I’d settle for going to heaven for the dearth of snow to shovel. I’d be just as happy if I was damned to visit the Altabrisa Consolidated Cacophony and Gutterball Emporium forevermore.